Play and Freedom: Patterns of Life in the Spirit

: This article explores the pneumatological theme of the freedom of the Spirit from the perspective of experience. It deploys a recently developed methodology of attending to affective and experiential dynamics in pneumatology to identify two significant patterns or modalities of Christian life in the Spirit that are indexed to the Spirit’s freedom: a pattern of divine resistance to human attempts to control God, characterized on the human side by experiences of disruption as well as dynamic creativity; and a pattern of life free from the tyranny of the law, characterized by a modality of play or playfulness, as explored in the work of Nimi Wariboko. In identifying and illuminating these patterns, this article extends a project of seeking to make explicit the connections between Christian doctrinal concepts and Christian experience into a new domain, and responds to a long-standing concern that theologies of sanctification emphasizing freedom have little to say about the positive shape of Christian life in the Spirit. This article explores the pneumatological theme of the freedom of the Spirit from the perspective of experience. It puts to use a methodological approach I developed in a recent book on the Holy Spirit, applying it to an important aspect of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit that is not addressed in that book. This approach has two features that are relevant to the present analysis. First, it takes as a working assumption that activities that Scripture describes as operations of the Spirit in the world should be expected to have effects and consequences that are at least in part “practically recognizable” in Christian experience, and that it is therefore likely to be theologically fruitful to analyze a given pneumatological trope (such as the freedom of the Spirit) in terms of its experiential implications and effects. 1 Second, because the operations of the Trinity ad extra are indivisible,