This article attempts to take some ideas from process theology which may enlighten and help us to develop a deeper understanding of pneumatology. Pneumatology is the theological area where fresh thinking and new presentation is most justified because, as Berdyaev remarked, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the most undeveloped part of Christian doctrine. It may be impossible to provide an exact precise formulation. We might frame ‘an open-ended’ doctrine, yet there is need to clarify our beliefs and our knowledge of the operation of the Spirit more fully. It has been remarked that even back in the New Testament St. Paul put forward ‘ideas which do not fully harmonise’. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing in the fifth century, said that people were very confused about the Spirit. He also said we live in an age of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. Can ‘process theology’ help?

Contemporary scholarship in Calvin studies has generally concluded in agreement that Calvin's various religious teachings present no strictly systematic or exclusivistic pattern of presentation when his written corpus is viewed as a whole. This has been found equally true when one analyses his explication of the Lord's Supper no matter what period or portion of such thought is delimited.

In 1914 Karl Barth made a decisive break with his liberal theological past in circumstances that demonstrated the very close relationship between ethics and dogmatics that was to remain a feature of his theological work:

In 1961 H. Wendland delivered a lecture expressing the opinion that the lack of theological discussion has meant that we have had to go without a thorough inquiry into the problems of diakonia seen as a whole. Since then, four larger contributions have been made to the debate. The first to appear was a Roman Catholic collection of essays edited by K. Rahner and H. Vorgrimmler under the title Diakonia in Christo. The thirtynine contributions cover a wide range of material in three main sections: the deacon in history and at present; the theology of the diaconate with regard to its renewal; efforts, practical possibilities and stimuli towards renewal of the diaconate. The chapter of immediate interest is that by J. Colson, Der Diakonat im Neuen Testament. He looks at the subject from four angles: