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ce of Christ. Scholars maintain that the letter to the Romans was written to address the specific needs of the churches in Rome. This may also have related to Paul’s own experiences and circumstances but the general consensus is that the main purpose of Romans (which has the most references to peumatology) was to edify the Roman church. At that time there were threats to the unity of the Church due to problems between the Jewish Christians and the Gentiles. Hahn (2000) maintains that Paul’s plea for the Church to live in the Spirit rather than according to the flesh was necessary in a Church that whose unit was under threat.
 
Paul speaks to the Church of being in the flesh or in sin, being a slave to sin. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, is what sets a believer free from sin and gives a person life. Bultmann (1972) says:
 
Man, called to selfhood, tries to live out of his own strength and thus loses his self-his life-and rushes into death. This is the domination of sin. All man’s doing is directed against his true intention-viz, to achieve life (Bultmann, 1972:246).
 
 It is the person who has faith who receives life, here again we see the connection between Paul’s pneumatology and his own personal experience of being given new life at the moment of conversion. This is when a person turns from death to life through the ministry of the Spirit. Paul speaks to both Jew and Gentile when he says that human beings are confronted by righteousness through the Law but are unable to achieve it. Only God, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit can make a person righteous so that they can stand before God as a righteous person (Bultmann, 1972). With the righteousness of faith comes the freedom of the Spirit as expressed in the first letter to the Corinthians.
 
For all things are yours…whether the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours
 
The Spirit takes on a number of different roles in Paul’s writings and is closely connected to the concepts of eschatology and of soteriology or salvation history. Paul’s pneumatology is a pneumatology of freedom. In Paul’s thinking the Christian is set free from the cares of the world to enter the service of God as he himself had done. Through baptism and the gift of the Spirit a person is freed from sin and death and Galatians (5.25) is encouraged to walk in the Spirit If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit (Bultmann, 1972). It would seem that the whole of Paul’s experience and thus the theology that is found in the Pauline corpus is permeated by his pneumatology. The whole of the Christian life is based on Paul’s idea of freedom in the Spirit thus 2 Corinthians 3.17 tells us that where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom. The believer is freed from the Law. The legalism of some of the Jews had made them slaves to the Law-when it was supposed to do the opposite.
 
It is through faith and the gift of the spirit that the believer is adopted as a child of God a process Pauls calls the Spirit of adoption to Sonship. As adopted children of God we choose to walk in the Spirit rather than the flesh. It is the gift of sonship that frees believers from slavish adherence to the Law. Bultmann (1972) writes:
 
Christian freedom is freedom from all
 
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