If Christology is so important because of the centrality of Jesus to Christianity, the importance of pneumatology is in many ways more fundamental still. Within the Judaeo-Christian tradition "spirit" has long been the word that denotes our religious sense of wonder, fear, and reverence, the word that signifies the power within and behind creation, and the name for that power's reverberations within the human soul.
The New Testament, however, points us to a more specific understanding of the Spirit - one that expresses the Spirit in trinitarian terms, intimately related to the life of the church. The subject of pneumatology, then, is of particular importance for Christians everywhere, as witnessed by the extent to which interpretations of the Spirit continue to shape today's denominations.
This volume contains twenty-three of James D. G. Dunn's best shorter essays on different aspects of New Testament pneumatology. Drawn from a host of periodicals, books, and other scholarly publications, these essays - like those found in the companion volume on Christology - will provide stimulating and challenging reading for scholars and students of theology and New Testament studies.
