Christian theology has placed great focus on theology in general, Christology, anthropology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and even eschatology. There tends to be one domain which is rarely thus highlighted: pneumatology.

The 2020 Los Angeles Theology Conference worked to address matters of pneumatology, and the papers involved therein can be found in The Third Person of the Trinity: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics.

The contributions vary yet all seek to better define and understand, to the best of our ability, the work and person of the Holy Spirit. Some focus on procession and the relationship between the Spirit and the Father and the Son. Some grapple with the filioque of the Nicene Creed and the enduring arguments attempting to sort out the procession of the Spirit from the Son. Attempts are made at better understanding how Christians should come to spiritual understanding by means of the Spirit, how the Spirit works within creation, how our understanding of the Spirit should be shaped by our understanding of the Son, the role of the Spirit in liberation and the Black American experience, and how the Spirit is the basis of the unity of the people of God in Christ and what that might mean for us.

This was a clarifying, helpful, and useful exploration into matters of the Spirit and pneumatology. Many of the contributors are of Pentecostal or charismatic traditions, but the theological reflections remain consonant with the greater "orthodox”, confessional tradition.

I very much appreciated one contributor’s quotation about the Spirit and the church - the Spirit is the sine qua non of the church, but the church is not the sine qua non of the Spirit. That concept resonated for me more in terms of the Word/Scriptures, since so many in my tradition have limited their understanding to false binaries and grossly distorted the relationship between the Spirit and the Word. The Spirit is the sine qua non of the Word: without the Spirit, there is no revealed message. But the revealed message is not the sine qua non of the Spirit: the Spirit is involved in much more than revealing information, as the New Testament itself abundantly attests, and our Restorationist forebears in their hyper-rationality very much departed from healthy teachings and faith when they sought to restrict the work of the Spirit to the revealed message.

If you fully understood all the words in this review, then this book might well prove helpful for you in your pneumatological understanding as well. If most of this has confused you, then this book will also be quite confusing; it would be helpful to consider more introductory works to Christian theology first. I do not say this with any attempt to be haughty or high-minded; one can be a faithful Christian without plumbing the deep depths of theological discourse. But this book does require some familiarity with that theological discourse to be well and profitably understood. ( )