This third volume of Explorations in Theology circles around the theme of the “Holy Spirit”. . . . The Holy Spirit is certainly, on the one hand, the Spirit who holds sway between Christ and the Church . . . but he is also the Creator Spirit who goes forth from the unity of Christ and the Church (as from the eternal unity of Father and Son) and is thereby the opening-up of the unity in love between bride and bridegroom to something new, to the child, to the world of creation, and today this means also (indeed, precisely) to the non-Christian secular world. We experience every day the fact that such an opening-up can also signify danger for men who are sheltered within the Church, if they are suddenly to be confronted, without sufficient preparation, with all the secularity that bursts in broad floods through the opened dams into the Church; and this danger is certainly not decreasing. This is why some of the studies in the present volume have a new character; they seek to concentrate the Christian message, to indicate the center that cannot be abandoned, to make it secure and to give an introduction to it from all sides and from all the points on the periphery, in the school of the Spirit who does not carry out his task in the dispensation of salvation in any other way than by proceeding to interpret the message about the One who became man, was crucified and rose to ever-new generations in a creatively new form, and by schooling these generations in this message.

From the author’s Preface