The Holy Spirit and the Community of Faith

John Polkinghorne reminds us of the Spirit's participation in creating community in his book - The Faith of A Physicist. He points out the following:

• The Holy Spirit is Deus absconditus - that is the hidden God, because his working is from within; his is the divine presence ever-active in the unfolding process of the created world and never wholly disentangleable from that process
• The Holy Spirit is the third party whose unseen presence is the enhancer of our meetings...we are not directly aware of the Spirit, since in any experience of meeting and recognition his is always the go-between who creates awareness...and in the economy of our spiritual life, the Spirit is the one in whom we pray (Rom.8.26), through the Son to the Father
• The Holy Spirit is God with us in the particularities of our lives and also with the necessary discretion of a love which does not overwhelm us. "God's absence in his presence is not merely an estrangement. It is liberation too." Moltmann
• Christ becomes the sole image appropriate to the common nature of humanity - the Holy Spirit grants to each person created in the image of God the possibility of fulfilling the likeness of that common nature...the one is the inclusive destiny of us all; the other is the enabler of our individuality within that destiny (sounds like differentiation to me!)
• The Holy Spirit is a person, and not just an impersonal force or power - he deals individually with different people - distributing a variety of gifts accordingly, and dealing individually with everyone.
  
• The Holy Spirit is not simply general but also particular and as the creator of the community of the Church must be personal, that is able to meet people both in their individualiaty and in their relatedness.
• The Holy Spirit participates not only in action but also in passion, with the creation groaning and ourselves groaning with it and the Spirit interecding with "sighs to deep for words" (Rom. 8.22-23,26, Eph.4.30)
• The Holy Spirit is the unseen enabler of the truly personal, it could not be otherwise in the costliness of true personal encounter, with the Holy Spirit able to turn an It into a Thou. The Holy Spirit is the hypen in the I-Thou relationship.
• The Holy Spirit does not have his divine image within the Trinity, he is at work creating that image through the transformation of humanity.
• The Holy Spirit is the agent of sanctification and only the fully divine can fully save and transform, and the multitude of the saints will be in his image.
• The Holy Spirit is a Person, a Self in relation, creating individuality and relatedness.
• The Holy Spirit has too often been used as an unfocused expression of a general divine presence, without sufficient consideration of what that might mean. The Holy Spirit is more than a religious cipher for the scientifically discerned "optimistic arrow of time', leading from simplicity to complexity. He must be truly at work within the unfolding fruitfulness, drawing the universe on to purposed levels of fulfillment.
• The precarious fertility of the cosmic history of all life, is not just the outcome of a drive towards complexity, but on its inside is the passion and action of the personal Holy Spirit. And the hidden working makes that statement an assertion of faith, yet one that is motivated by the recognition that the coming-to-be of created personality is the most significant event of cosmic history.
• The working of the Holy Spirit in continuing creation may not be totally disentangleable from the unfolding physical process, but it is not simply to be identified with it....and the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives may not be totally disentangleable from our personal decision, but it is the paradox of grace that the two are again not simply to be identified. (This is not a panentheistic account - which partially assimilates the divine and the cosmic to each other. On the contrary, it is vital to maintain a clear distinction between the Creator and his creation.)
• In historical Christianity, only the Son is incarnate, taking the form of a creature by becoming truly man, the Holy Spirit is not incarnated in the cosmos...and to blur the distinction between Creator and creation in a panentheistic way is to fail to do justice to the experience of God's irreducible otherness, to intensify the problem of evil and to jeopardize the concept of Christian hope, replacing it by an illusory evolutionary optimism.
• The Holy Spirit's work is concealed within the flow of present process, but his power derives from the presence of God's future within that process. Were the Holy Spirit now also transcendent, his immanence might be no more than Spinoza's identification of God and nature....as it is the Holy Spirit is the pledge (arrabon) of future fulfillment, "given us...as a guarantee." (2 Cor. 5.5)