Time&Eternity

106 chapter 2
The Eternal Spirit
For Pannenberg, a major concern is the emphasis on the relationality of
the persons of the Trinity. In the development of his thinking, he borrows
the concept of field from physics 340 in order to describe the triune God as a
dynamic force field. Distancing himself from the Platonic-Origenic tradition
of interpreting the divine spirit as nous, Pannenberg opts for interpreting
“God is spirit” (John 4:24) as a field that can be conceived as occurring
equally in all three persons of the Trinity. 341 “The divine persons, then, are
.l.l. individual aspects of the dynamic field of the eternal Godhead.” 342 The
Spirit is hereby given a double meaning, as the shared essence of God and as
its own hypostasis in the Trinity. 343 It is therefore understandable that the
role of the Spirit changes depending upon whether the Spirit is understood
as an expression of the divinity as a whole or as an entity that is differentiated
from Father and Son. This creates some confusion regarding the profile
of the Spirit. According to Pannenberg, God’s relation to time in the preservation
of creation and in world rule is ultimately based on “the self-differentiation
of God in his Trinitarian life” as “the self-differentiation of the Son
from the Father. The Son’s moving out of the unity of the divine life makes
independent creaturely existence possible.” 344 Here, the Spirit seems to have
run out of work, whereas in other places the participation of the Spirit in
every act of God, from creation to the eschatological consummation of salvation,
is emphasized. 345 The consummation of both the individual and the
community is the work of the Spirit. As the eschatological gift, the Spirit is
not only involved in the future still to come; it precedes itself and, by overcoming
sin and death, already determines the present of the believers. 346
According to Pannenberg, “[O]n the one side the Spirit is the principle
of the creative presence of the transcendent God with his creatures; on the
other side he is the medium of the creatures in the divine life, and therefore
in life as such.” 347 The dynamic nature of the work of the Spirit consists,
both within the Trinity and in creation, of positive relatedness in the sense
of a communion of the differentiated; however, in time it expresses itself
differently than within the eternal, inner-Trinitarian communion. 348 Even
though Pannenberg himself speaks only of a doubling of the salvific work of
the Spirit in the tension between the future and the present of the eternal, 349
it appears that the temporal relationship of the Spirit intended here is probably
quite consistent with the multi-temporality that Dalferth ascribes to
the Spirit.
Pannenberg relates the multi-temporality of the Spirit to the independence
of the creatures. In the differentiation and relatedness of the Spirit
with respect to the present and the future (what has happened here to the