CHAPTER 5

Spirit

As in the last chapter, on Christology, I begin this one by pointing out that historical criticism is especially inept at deriving an orthodox theology of the holy spirit from the Bible.1 As much as the Hebrew Bible talks about a divine “breath,” “wind,” or “spirit” (ruach), we must not imagine that any of the human authors of those texts intended to refer to the “Holy Spirit,” the third person of the trinity. But even with the New Testament, problems of interpretation arise. As I demonstrate in this chapter, sometimes the authors use pneuma (πνεῦμα) as a reference to a human and universal substance, a form of “stuff.”² Sometimes they seem to be using the word to refer to a part of the human self, of the body, mind, or “spirit.” Sometimes they are clearly referring to some property of God or Jesus: the pneuma of Jesus or the divine pneuma in general. Sometimes they seem to be thinking of an impersonal substance or property, though in rarer cases they seem to be thinking of pneuma as a “person” or at least something that can serve as an “actor” in a narrative. Only in the most rare cases may we read their comments to imply a “holy spirit” as the third name in a social group of three. And even in those cases we would be rash to read into those passages a full-blown reference to the trinity as defined in later Christian orthodoxy or creeds. If we limit ourselves to responsible historical criticism, we simply can’t derive satisfactory trinitarian orthodoxy from the Bible. That said, in this chapter I will experiment with both historical criticism but also more creative theological interpretation to “read” the New Testament for a theology of the spirit.

The Material Spirit

In the chapter on Christology I briefly noted that the Greek word usually translated “spirit” is πνεῦμα, a word that in ancient Greek concepts almost never referred to “immaterial substance.” I introduced the topic because I was advocating an interpretation of 1 Cor 15 in which the resurrected body of Jesus—and therefore also the expected resurrected bodies of believers—was assumed by Paul to be a “physical” or “material” body, one made up not of “flesh and blood” but of pneuma. Because this chapter concentrates on the spirit—the spirit of Jesus, of God, of human beings, of the cosmos, and the holy spirit—we need to look more expansively at the nature of ancient pneuma. And a good place to begin is to return to Paul’s discussion in 1 Cor 15.

Recall that the issue in Corinth was probably not a denial by Corinthian believers of any afterlife at all.3 What some members of the church were doubting was probably more specifically the Jewish notion of the resurrection of the body, as Paul had no doubt passed along to them in his own teaching. Especially believers with a bit of Greek education would have assumed that the body was composed of material substances that could not survive death into the afterlife. They were probably not questioning the possibility that the “soul” or “spirit” could survive death but the body could. And they probably equated the body with the “flesh and blood” of its earthly composition. Thus Paul may well be echoing their own questions when he says, “How will dead corpses be raised? With what kind of body will this occur?” (1 Cor 15:35). In fact, we could read the last question as something like, With what kind of body would this be physically possible? The remainder of Paul’s argument therefore concentrates precisely on the nature, indeed, the physical nature, of the resurrected body.

He first uses the analogy of seeds and plants. Everyone knows there is continuity between the seed and the plant, separated as they are in time but not in their essence. But, Paul insists, both the seed and the plant are “bodies.” God gives one kind of body to the seed and another kind to the plant. The plant may look nothing like the seed, but it is a result of the seed. Paul in this first analogy even uses the word “flesh” to characterize the earthly bodies of seeds, plants, and human beings.

In the next verse, however, Paul changes his terminology. He leaves behind for the moment talk about “flesh” and reintroduces terminology of the “body” (σῶμα), precisely because he is now speaking not about “earthly” bodies but about “heavenly” bodies, and he assumes that heavenly bodies are not composed of flesh: “There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. But the ‘glory’ of the heavenly bodies is different from the ‘glory’ of earthly bodies” (15:40). Paul uses the term often translated as “glory” (δόξα), but we must remember that in the Greek this term was a reference to something’s appearance. It connoted a shining, radiant, luminous physicality. So Paul is still speaking of the physical nature of these different bodies. Then he provides another list, which is also probably hierarchically arranged, as I explained in the previous chapter (15:41).4

Paul assumes, along with most people of the ancient Greco-Roman world, that pneuma, though a very thin, usually invisible, rarified substance, is still some kind of “stuff.” In fact, the ancient notions of pneuma pervade ancient science, medicine, and even, apparently, common sense.

The greatest elaboration of the meaning and role of pneuma in the cosmos is found in the philosophy of the Stoics.⁵ According to the Stoics, the entire universe is a hierarchy of materialism, with pneuma as the highest, most pure and refined, most mobile, most powerful substance. Sometimes it is named “aether,” as in Cicero’s Latin account. Pneuma results from the combination of the finest versions of fire and air. The sun, moon, and stars are all pneumatic bodies. Pneuma is also the material that enables perception and thinking. So even the heavenly bodies are living, intelligent beings, in fact, gods. Pneuma extends throughout the universe, though its natural home is upward. Life, sensation, thinking all could not exist without the activity of pneuma in nature and human and animal bodies. All of nature is structured and held together by pneuma. Pneuma is what makes the mind work. In fact, we can say that if we separate the mind from the brain, the mind is pneuma itself and the brain is the organ that houses and refines pneuma from air. Throughout, however, we must remember that the Stoics nonetheless believed that pneuma was a material substance. It was “physical,” if we may use that now somewhat problematic word.6

But the Stoics had no monopoly on pneuma. Indeed, it seems that the Stoics simply took over previous ideas about air, wind, and pneuma, some of these ideas coming from “science,” medicine, or philosophy, and others simply common ideas. The Stoics took general ideas of pneuma and systematized them into philosophical physics and cosmology. We find, for example, teachings about both cosmic and human pneuma in Hippocratic texts, some of which may date from before the rise of Stoicism.⁷ In the Hippocratic text On Breaths (περὶ φυσῶν), pneuma is discussed as one form of “air” or “breath.”⁸ After noting, “[Pneuma] is the most powerful of all and in all,” the author ascribes storms and violent seas to the power of pneuma: “Such then is the power that it has in these things, but it is invisible to sight, though visible to reason. For what can take place without it? In what is it not present? What does it not accompany? For everything between earth and heaven is full of pneuma.”⁹

The second-century CE medical writer Galen certainly did not consider himself a Stoic, though he obviously knew Stoic ideas, philosophy, and writings.10 Yet he also has an elaborate theory of pneuma in his medical system.¹¹ For Galen, the human body takes in pneuma with the air it breathes. The lung has the largest role in refining pneuma from air, though the heart elaborates that pneuma a bit more, mixes it with specially refined blood, and sends that mixture to the lung for its nourishment.¹² Part of that heart-refined pneuma is then sent to what Galen believes is a netlike, complicated system of tiny arteries residing just at the base of the brain.¹³

This netlike complex refines the “psychic pneuma,” that is, the form of pneuma necessary for basic living, into an extremely subtle, quick, powerful form of pneuma that resides mainly in the brain. That form of pneuma enables thought, sensation, and movement in the human body. It is sent throughout the body through the arteries (the veins carry most of the blood). Pneuma moves unbelievably rapidly through the nerves, telling the parts of the body to move and carrying back sensations from the body to the brain. The most elaborated, refined, powerful form of pneuma Galen labels the “logical” or “rational” pneuma (πνεῦμα λογικόν).¹⁴ Galen takes mainly from Stoic theory these ideas of the cosmic and human centrality of pneuma; he combines them with Platonic notions also. But he shares with many others in the ancient world the idea that pneuma is a most important material substance of the universe, one that even links human beings to the gods.

We need not limit such ideas to the rarified environs of philosophical schools and medical theorists. And Paul need not have gone much further afield to appropriate these ideas than common sense—or Jewish scripture, for that matter. The second verse of the Bible already introduces pneuma (in the Greek translation) as a powerful wind and perhaps even divine breath. The term used for the wind that blows over the chaos before creation is pneuma, indeed the “pneuma of God” (Gen 1:2). Pneuma refers to wind elsewhere in the Greek Bible, often as an especially powerful or violent wind (see Gen 8:1). It is the blast of God’s breath, named alongside other forces of nature, such as lightning and sea floods (2 Kingdoms [2 Sam] 22:16; see also Ps 17 [LXX 18]: 15). Pneuma is the wind that, along with dark clouds, brings rain (3 Kingdoms [1 Kings] 18:45; see also 19:11–12). Throughout the Greek Bible “pneuma” refers to wind, breath, God’s breath or spirit, good or evil “spirits,” or the human pneuma or spirit. It is no surprise, therefore, that Paul uses pneuma in these ways also, and just as we would be rash to deny the materiality of pneuma in much of the Greek Bible, we shouldn’t do so for Paul or the New Testament, at least most of it. Most people in the ancient world assumed pneuma referred to a kind of stuff, available in many forms and levels of refinement.

But how do we imagine they pictured the “stuffness” of pneuma? Ancient writers admit that generally it is invisible, but they also sometimes speak as if one can see it in some forms, like a particularly powerful, hot, bright fire. And though Paul believed the body of the resurrected Jesus was made of pneuma, he nonetheless claims to have seen that body. What did it look like? I think we may take the story of the transfiguration as giving some clue: Jesus’s transfigured body shines like the brightest light (Mark 9:2–8; and par). We may imagine lightning shooting from it. Maybe it put off heat. However we allow our imaginations to be informed by ancient imaginations to construct for ourselves physical pneuma, we are much more at home in Paul’s ancient cultural context if we read his use of pneuma as assuming material substance.

Which Pneuma?

“Pneuma” is used in the New Testament for what appear to us to be different entities, and it is not always clear what the intended reference is. I will argue, however, that our interpretations may take this ambiguity as a theological opportunity. We may use the very confusions of the text to teach us different doctrines of the holy spirit, the cosmic pneuma, and our own pneuma.

“Pneuma” is often used to refer to what we may call the natural pneuma of a human being. People have bodies, composed of flesh, and they have pneuma, which allows their bodies to move, perceive, and think. So authors and characters may refer to “my pneuma” (none of these lists is in any way exhaustive, but see Mark 2:8; Rom 1:9; 1 Cor 14:14; 16:18; Acts 7:59).

This natural pneuma is what the author of James means when he says that a body without pneuma is dead (James 2:26). A dead woman becomes alive again when her pneuma “returns” (Luke 8:55). Psychological anxiety or anger may be attributed to someone’s pneuma being (physically!) “stirred up” or troubled in some way, which can happen even to Jesus (Mark 8:12; John 11:33; 13:21; see also Acts 17:16; 2 Cor 2:13). It is possible that one’s pneuma, just like one’s body, may be polluted, that is, “infected” (2 Cor 7:1). People can be “poor in [their own] pneuma” (Matt 5:3).15 Conversely, the pneuma may be willing even if the flesh is weak (Mark 14:38; Matt 26:41). Paul may be absent in body but present in pneuma, though it is none too clear how he managed that (1 Cor 5:3; see also 5:4). As we have seen to be the case in non-Christian texts, the pneuma in the New Testament as well is the material in a person that thinks or knows, that is, one’s internal thoughts or conditions (Mark 2:8; 1 Cor 2:11).

The individual person’s pneuma may be what is meant when used by an author in a benediction: “The Lord be with your pneuma” (2 Tim 4:22). Here we may take it that the reference is to Timothy’s own pneuma. But Paul has a similar benediction that combines “pneuma” in the singular with “you” in the plural. He closes his tempestuous letter to the Galatians with this: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your [pl] pneuma [sg], brothers” (6:18). In the letter to Philemon, which careful reading shows was really intended to be heard by the entire house church, he has the same: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your [pl] pneuma [sg]” (25).¹⁶ It seems unlikely that the meaning here is the shared holy spirit, the pneuma of God, or the pneuma of Jesus, which believers are also supposed to share. But how does Paul conceive of the different individuals of a church all sharing one pneuma unless that be a shared pneuma of God, Jesus, or the holy spirit? The usage, in any case, should spark our minds to imagine how an entire body of people could share even their “natural” pneuma collectively. Like breathing the same air? Sharing the same static electricity? Being influenced all by the same magnetic field? This is just one instance of how our ideas about the spirit may be stretched when we put ourselves more decidedly back into the ancient cosmos of the New Testament writers.

It is harder to discern in the New Testament when “pneuma” is supposed to refer to the cosmic pneuma, the universal pneuma that permeates the entire world and gives it unity and structure. It may be that the divine pneuma or the holy pneuma has to some extent taken over that meaning in Christian texts. Early Christian authors certainly would have known about the pneuma that hovers over the world before and during creation. They would most likely have taken that to be the cosmic pneuma. But there are rare glimpses of the cosmic pneuma in the New Testament, that is, a form of pneuma that cannot be simply identified with the holy pneuma in particular or limited to the pneuma possessed by individual bodies particularly. Thus, when Paul says he and other believers did not get their knowledge of God’s gifts from “the pneuma of the cosmos” (1 Cor 2:12), I doubt he is thereby denying that the cosmos has pneuma entirely. I think he is assuming that there is a “cosmic pneuma” but that it differs from what he calls, in the same verse, “the pneuma that is from God.” He seems to assume that both of these pneumata have something to do with knowledge. Even ordinary human knowledge, in ancient pneumatic theory, would not be possible without some form of pneuma.

The same notion may lie behind the words attributed to Paul in the Areopagus speech in Acts 17. As I mentioned briefly in the chapter “Knowledge” above, in that speech, the most “philosophical” one in Acts, Paul admits that even unbelieving Greeks have had some knowledge of the existence of God, quoting one philosopher and one poet to further his point (17:28). Thus when Paul says that God gives to everyone and every living being “life, breath, and everything” (17:25), the word for “breath” here (πνοή) may well invoke the cosmic pneuma that must be the source of any kind of knowledge, even a preliminary and therefore, in the end, insufficient knowledge of God’s existence.

The “evil” or “unclean” pneumata that occur in many New Testament texts must have their origin somewhere also. These occur many times in the Synoptic Gospels (though not, surprisingly, in John: see also Acts 8:7; 19:12, 13, 15, 16). We may imagine that the “pythian pneuma” that enables the woman to prophesy and that Paul rebukes and silences (Acts 16:16) would have been taken by early believers to be a form of the kind of pneuma known to enable women to prophesy at Delphi, the classical site of the prophesying Pythia. As Plutarch and other authors assumed that some kind of natural vapor or wind could be responsible for the Delphic phenomenon, early Christians might assume that some form of the cosmic pneuma could inspire non-Christian prophets.17 So the evil or corrupt pneumata recognized by most early Christians as realities could have been assumed to be one form of the “pneuma of this cosmos.”

Then there is the pneuma of God the Father proper, or what we may think of as simply the “divine pneuma” in general. This need not be a reference to the holy spirit in anything like the later Christian sense. It would be evidence that early Christians thought of God as a person who possessed a special form of pneuma (see Acts 2:17–18; 1 Cor 2:11, 14; 3:16; 6:11; 12:3; 2 Cor 3:3; Phil 3:3). We have seen that Christians assumed that Jesus, as a human being, had his own personal pneuma, which he had to “give up” at his death if he experienced a real “death” at all. But even after his death Jesus can be attributed his own pneuma, which may be not exactly the same pneuma as that of the Father (see Acts 16:7; Gal 4:6; Phil 1:19). Indeed, it is difficult to discern when “pneuma” is a general reference or a reference to the pneuma of God or of Jesus proper.

Even when “pneuma” is accompanied by the adjective “holy,” it is not always clear what exactly is being referred to or how we may imagine the ancient authors imagining this “holy pneuma.” Often the texts speak of this pneuma not as a person but as a substance, something that can be “poured out” on people or that “fills” their bodies (Acts 2:4; 4:8, 31; 6:3, 5; 7:55; 12:24; 13:9, 52). The holy pneuma “falls” on Peter’s audience (Acts 10:44; 11:15).

Acts is not consistent about how the pneuma comes upon people. In Luke, the pneuma had descended upon the baptized Jesus bodily in the form of a dove (Luke 3:22). The pneuma, famously, descends on the disciples at Pentecost spontaneously and in the visible and physical form of fire. It may be that this spontaneous descent of the pneuma occurs again in the case of the household of Cornelius precisely to make the point that gentiles must be treated the same as Jewish believers (Acts 10:44; 11:15). These “first” gentile converts, therefore, experience a spontaneous pouring out of the pneuma in order to make their situation parallel to that of Acts 2. But even then, according to Acts 2:38, the pneuma is promised simply to accompany the baptism of other converts. On the other hand, in Acts 8, Philip is apparently unable to endow those he has baptized with the holy pneuma, so Peter and John go to Samaria. In this context it seems assumed that baptism alone is not sufficient, but the laying on of apostles’ hands is necessary for the gift of the pneuma (Acts 8:17).

Paul’s question to “certain disciples” in Ephesus initially implies that he would have expected them to receive the pneuma upon believing in the gospel: “Did you receive the holy pneuma when you believed?” (Acts 19:2). But when they show they know nothing of a holy pneuma, Paul’s next question implies that he expects the pneuma to be given automatically at baptism: “Into what then were you baptized?” (19:3). Learning that they had experienced only the “baptism of John,” Paul first baptizes them “into the name of the Lord Jesus,” but even then it seems that Paul has to lay his hands on them for them finally to receive the pneuma. Why can Paul deliver the pneuma through the laying on of hands while Philip apparently could not? Surely not because Paul is ranked as an “apostle” in the sense “the twelve” are. It is well known that the author of Acts apparently believes an “apostle” must be someone who had been with Jesus from the baptism of John onward (Acts 1:21–22), and the author knows Paul was not. True, the author seems to slip up once and call Barnabas and Paul apostles (Acts 14:14), but that lapse seems to go against his more general tendency to reserve the term “apostle” for the twelve. It could also be evidence that the author is taking that scene from a prior written source, as we know he does for much of Luke and Acts. Taking all these narrative details into account, we must insist that the author of Acts is simply not consistent in how he assumed the holy pneuma was initially “poured out” on various believers. At any rate, in all the cases I’ve mentioned thus far the holy pneuma comes across not as a “person” but as a material substance that can be poured onto someone or fill bodies.

The Acts of the Apostles, however, goes further than most other New Testament texts toward depicting the holy pneuma as personal. God “speaks through” the holy pneuma (4:25). The pneuma “tells” Philip to approach the chariot in 8:29 (it is the “pneuma of the Lord” that later “snatches” Philip away after the baptism: 8:39). The holy pneuma speaks to Peter (10:19; 11:12). And in what I believe is the only such case in the New Testament, the holy pneuma speaks in the first person in Acts 13:2: “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul” (emphasis added). This is the clearest depiction of the holy pneuma as a person, that is, as an actual character in a narrative, unless the “me” in this case is supposed to be God or Jesus, which is also possible; see also Acts 5:3; 15:28; 20:22–23.

There is still confusion, however, even if we confine ourselves merely to Acts. The author tells us that it was the holy pneuma that forbade Paul from preaching in the province of Asia (16:6). Yet the very next verse says it is the “pneuma of Jesus” that prohibits them from entering Bithynia (16:7). Later, the disciples reflect that it was “God” who was directing them through these signs (16:10). Are we to think of these as three different characters, who can act together and even through one another? Or should we take “holy pneuma” simply to be the pneuma of Jesus, which he shares with the pneuma of God? It is true, as Luke Timothy Johnson has put it, that “by establishing a narrative role for the Holy Spirit, Luke has taken a significant step towards the eventual theological recognition of the Holy Spirit as a ‘person.’”18 But the seeming inevitability of that step may be more easily seen in hindsight than simply in the text of Luke and Acts. The precise nature of the “holy pneuma” in Acts is actually confused and confusing.

The other New Testament book that seems clearly to speak of the holy pneuma as a person, at least in a couple of passages, is the Gospel of John when speaking of the Paraclete, the advocate, intercessor, or helper promised to the disciples after Jesus’s departure, as we have already seen. Certainly the Paraclete is supposed to be a separate person from Jesus, since Jesus calls it “another advocate,” apparently meaning “other than Jesus himself” (John 14:16). That this advocate is probably the “holy pneuma” is made clear in the next verse, when Jesus calls it “the pneuma of truth” (14:17), and it is called explicitly “the holy pneuma” in 14:26 (see also 15:26 and 16:13). It is given by “the Father” and so seems differentiated from both the Father and Jesus. This is perhaps the closest we get to a narrative depiction of the later trinity: Father, son, and holy spirit as Paraclete, another “advocate” on par with Jesus himself.

But things aren’t so simple in the Gospel of John, as it turns out. Although the author tells us that the pneuma was “not yet” present to the disciples during the ministry of Jesus, not until Jesus was “glorified” (7:39), we first see the pneuma when the Baptist testified that he saw it descend “as a dove” from heaven and “remain” on Jesus (1:32, 33). Are we to assume, then, that the pneuma was present during Jesus’s ministry but available only to Jesus and not yet to others? The pneuma is elsewhere spoken of as a substance, like wind or water (3:5, 6, 8). It is something God “does not give by measure” (3:34). People can worship God only by doing so “in pneuma and truth” (4:23–24). Are the disciples really never worshipping God or Jesus during his ministry? Toward the end of the Gospel, Jesus seems to dispense the pneuma to the disciples by breathing on them (20:21–22). This makes the pneuma sound like a kind of stuff, a stuff that comes from Jesus’s (now “glorified”) body. Does pneuma sometimes mean one sort of thing, and otherwise, even in the same Gospel, mean something different, such as a personal agent? The texts of the New Testament are never completely clear or consistent.

Finally, there are the very rare cases in which the text does sound “trinitarian.” The Gospel of Matthew famously ends with Jesus “commissioning” his closest disciples to “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the father and of the son and of the holy pneuma” (Matt 28:19). Even if it would be a mistake from a historical-critical point of view to read a fully orthodox doctrine of the trinity into this text, this is at least one of the oldest surviving examples of trinitarian language, probably from one of the earliest liturgies of baptism. Another possible example is from Heb 9:14, where the author says that Jesus offered himself to “God,” “through the eternal pneuma.” Though “pneuma” perhaps should be taken here in an “impersonal” rather than “personal” sense, we do have the three in one context and interrelated to one another.

We should not force the biblical texts, however, into a false consistency. Too many unclear passages remain. When we are told that Paul “decided in the pneuma” (Acts 19:21), do we suppose it is Paul’s pneuma or the holy pneuma? Was Apollos “boiling” with or in “his” pneuma or the pneuma of God (Acts 18:25)? At his death does Jesus give up his pneuma, as any dying person would, or does this imply that Jesus is being deprived of the “holy pneuma” (Matt 27:50; Luke 23:46; John 13:21)? Did John the Baptist “become strong” in his pneuma or is this a rather odd way of saying that the Baptist, though not a “Christian,” nonetheless possessed the “holy pneuma” (Luke 1:80)? When Sapphira lied to the “pneuma of the Lord,” is this God’s or Jesus’s pneuma (Acts 5:9)? My goal is to drive home the overwhelming impression that texts of the New Testament are remarkably unclear about the nature of pneuma and of the pneuma.

A great example of this lack of clarity is Paul’s account of pneuma in the rich passage provided by the eighth chapter of Romans. The word “pneuma” occurs throughout the chapter but apparently has several meanings, functions, or references, and it is none too clear when it refers to what. Paul begins by insisting, “The law of the pneuma of life in Christ Jesus has freed you from the law of sin and death” (8:2). Pneuma is here like a principle, a system, a rationality, a structure, a way of being that can be contrasted to some “law of sin and death,” another system or rationality. In the next several verses Paul continues this dichotomy by contrasting living κατὰ σάρκα (according to the flesh) with living κατὰ πνεῦμα (according to, by the lights of, pneuma; 8:4). Paul here reintroduces the idea that pneuma is the material with which human beings think and perceive, but apparently “sarx” is also a material with which one may think and perceive. “Those who exist kata sarka think ‘sarkic’ thoughts; those [who exist] kata pneuma, think ‘pneumatic’ thoughts” (8:5), with contrasting results: “The thinking of the sarx is death, but the thinking of the pneuma is life and peace” (8:6). This is complicated epistemology. Paul, though describing what he takes to be physiological facts, is also exhorting, “Think pneumatically! Think pneumatic thoughts!” Thus, although chapter 8 began with pneuma looking like an abstract principle (it has a “law”), Paul quickly moves into the significance of pneuma as the medium of thought and mind.

We must update Paul’s language and our imaginations to come up with ways to make Paul’s language and thinking relevant to us. Pneuma is, to Paul, something like what a combination of oxygen and electricity might be for us. Pneuma is the electricity-oxygen stuff-force of the body and the cosmos. It is a cosmic stuff of life, energy, movement, and thought. It can be experienced individually and shared, both with the persons of God and Jesus but also among ourselves with one another.

We encounter more confusion in 8:9: “You are not in sarx but in pneuma, since the pneuma of God lives in you. If anyone does not have the pneuma of Christ, that one is not of him.” Note what may be different referents of pneuma, all woven together in one tight verse: a principle opposed to sarx; that which lives in people and gives life; that of God; that of Christ. And the next verse (8:10) is likewise ambiguous: “If the pneuma of Christ is in you, the body may be dead [a corpse] because of sin, but the pneuma alive because of justice [or righteousness].” Is it that our personal pneuma is enlivened, or do we possess “live” pneuma because it is Christ’s pneuma that has replaced our merely human pneuma? It is impossible to answer these questions simply from the verse itself.

Then Paul brings God’s pneuma back into the discussion: “If the pneuma of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will make alive also your mortal bodies, through his pneuma that lives in you” (8:11). God’s pneuma seems now to be living in the believers. Is it the same as Christ’s pneuma? Has it replaced our mere human pneuma? Or is it just an addition, though a mightily important one? We do see here, as will be expanded in verses 12–14, the central function and activity of pneuma as what makes alive. There is no life without pneuma. So even unbelievers must have some kind of pneuma, and even that pneuma must ultimately have come from God, the source of all life and good things, even the life and good things enjoyed by unbelievers. I will return to this point below.

But there is a bad kind of pneuma in the cosmos also: “For you did not receive a pneuma of slavery again to fear, but you received the pneuma of sonship [adoption] in which we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’” This could be considered again a form of the pneuma/sarx dichotomy. Paul uses the familiar (to them, if not to us) picture of the fearful slave cringing and cowering before a ruthless master; to that, he presents the contrasting image of adopted sons.

The questions with this chapter, though, keep coming: “This pneuma [which? God’s?, recalling 8:14?] bears witness with our [pl.] pneuma [sg.] that we are offspring of God” (8:16). There must be two different “forms” or “kinds” of pneuma, but it is not clear what the relationship between them is or even which is the first pneuma mentioned (“this pneuma”). Finally, do we have hints of an independent pneuma, a pneuma distinguishable from our pneuma or the pneuma of God or Christ? “As also the pneuma helps in our weakness. For we do not even know what we should pray for. But that very pneuma intercedes with wordless groans” (8:26). This gives Paul the opportunity to reintroduce the epistemological function of pneuma: “The one who searches hearts knows what the thinking of the pneuma is, because it approaches for the holy ones according to God” (8:27).

We could have read just about all of Romans 8 up until this point without introducing the later Christian concept of the Holy Spirit. Finally here, though, we at least approach the concept of an independent agential pneuma, the “holy spirit.” It is not exactly identified with us since it intercedes for us. Nor is it entirely identified with God because it intercedes with God. Yet taken in context it is still difficult to read this as a reference to the holy spirit as the third person of the trinity. The references are, admittedly, confusing. And they continue to be ambiguous. When Paul says in 9:1 that his conscience bears witness with (or to?) him in the “holy pneuma,” what does that mean? What pneuma is meant? When he speaks of believers as “boiling in pneuma” (12:11), what does that mean? Is this the “holy pneuma”? Or do they “boil” in their own pneuma?

Romans 8 is indeed a rich resource, in spite of its many ambiguities, for thinking about the nature and function of pneuma. Pneuma is a principle of living, the material of thinking. It gives life to human bodies, even in their mortal state. It functions as a sign of possession of persons by Christ. It bears witness to our being adopted as children of God. It helps us pray and even prays for us when we cannot. It intercedes for us with the Father. It provides the epistemological link of our minds with God’s. Above all, it is “the giver of life,” the source and substance of life itself.

But is it trinitarian? The theologian Robert Jenson has called Romans 8 “the most remarkable trinitarian passage in the New Testament.”19 That is true only if it is read from a later, Christian, orthodox point of view. As we have seen, one can easily read the entire chapter without necessarily introducing the idea that the pneuma here presented was considered, by Paul or his historical audience, a “person” at all, much less in the robust sense of “the third person of the trinity.”²⁰ Being familiar with much of Jenson’s work, I imagine he believes he is just reading the text for its original meaning, that is, the meaning historical critics would also likely see there. This confirms my argument that if one finds references to the holy spirit of later orthodoxy or to the trinity throughout the New Testament, one may well be practicing good theology, but it is bad historiography. Romans 8 can be read as a remarkable trinitarian text, but it is better to do so realizing that we are thereby practicing theological interpretation, not just “reading the text” for its “original” or authorial meaning (that of the human author). Indeed, Romans 8 is such a fruitful text for thinking about the spirit precisely because it provides plenty of opportunities for different meanings of pneuma and therefore for different interpretations of spirit and “the holy spirit.”

The Universal Pneuma

We’ve seen that one common use of “pneuma” in the ancient world, including early Christianity, is as a reference to the universal, cosmic pneuma believed to infuse the universe physically and materially, pervading the cosmos and giving it structure. The pneuma even provides the universe with its “meaning.” Several recent theologies have urged a more robust Christian notion of pneuma in this universal and even material sense. Scriptural depictions of the pneuma certainly encourage this imagination of pneumatic materiality. The spirit is a bird hovering over a person or the universe, the oil of anointing, the water of baptism, the fire of Pentecost, the seed in the womb.21 As the theologian Mark Wallace points out, in Genesis the spirit is wind, in the Gospels a dove, in Acts fire.²² As Veli-Matti Kärkkäinon notes, John of the Cross called the spirit “spiced wine.”²³ The Gospel of John famously depicts the pneuma as the “wind” or “breath” of God that “blows where it wills” (John 3:8), an image accepted by recent theologians with a material imagination.²⁴ As the theologian Eugene Rogers insists, “To think about the Spirit it will not do to think ‘spiritually’: to think about the Spirit you have to think materially.”²⁵

Thinking about the spirit as pneuma throughout the universe brings us back again to epistemology and how we “know” God. Elizabeth Johnson describes how we may imagine God acting in the world and in its and our histories: “Speaking about the Spirit signifies the presence of the living God active in this historical world. The Spirit is God who actually arrives in every moment, God drawing near and passing by in vivifying power in the midst of historical struggle.”²⁶ Wallace insists that since the spirit pervades all nature, we must get beyond (as I have argued in the chapter above on epistemology) the twentieth-century debate over “natural theology” versus “revealed doctrine.” Wallace joins Jürgen Moltmann in rejecting an earlier (Barthian?) opposition of “revealed” to “natural” sources of divine knowledge. Wallace writes,

Note that a Spirit-centered theology of nature is not equivalent to a natural theology. I do not claim that one can have positive, independent knowledge of God apart from revelation, but rather that through the work of the Spirit in creation one can receive disclosures of the divine presence in communion with the earth and its inhabitants. . . . But if the Spirit indwells all life, including the life of the mind within the body, then there can be no “pure” natural theology because all knowledge of God is mediated by the Spirit’s omnipresence. From this perspective, the neoorthodox criticism that theologies of nature are fundamentally flawed because they are categorically distinct from, and thereby inferior to, so-called revealed theology trades on a false alternative.27

Referring approvingly to the same work by Moltmann, Kärkkäinon agrees: “Moltmann reminds us that in biblical understanding the word spirit does not denote something antithetical to matter and body; rather ‘spirit’ in the Bible refers to life-giving force and energy.”²⁸

Besides bringing in the historical and material, other theologians use these notions of spirit to emphasize the “everyday-ness” of God’s communication with us, in “the ordinary.” Mary Ann Fatula says, “Though we may not always realize it, we experience the Holy Spirit’s closeness when we are near our loved ones and our life feels good and sweet to us. We feel the Spirit’s joy, too, as we savor the perfumes of springtime, when nature all around us bursts into bloom.”²⁹ As Clark Pinnock writes, “The Spirit meets people not only in religious spheres but everywhere—in the natural world, in the give-and-take of relationships, in the systems that structure human life. No nook or cranny is untouched by the finger of God. His warm breath streams toward humanity with energy and life.”³⁰ William Atkinson argues that we must see the spirit not as contrary to nature but infusing it.³¹

Elizabeth Johnson gathers together several metaphors for or images of the spirit from the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, making the point that many such metaphors and images are needed so that we do not get trapped with the possible errors of any one:

The Spirit, she writes, is the life of the life of all creatures; the way in which everything is penetrated with connectedness and relatedness; a burning fire who sparks, ignites, inflames, kindles hearts; a guide in the fog; a balm for wounds; a shining serenity; an overflowing fountain that spreads to all sides. She is life, movement, color radiance, restorative stillness in the din. Her power makes all withered sticks and souls green again with the juice of life. She purifies, absolves, strengthens, heals, gathers the perplexed, seeks the lost. She pours the juice of contrition into hardened hearts. She plays music in the soul, being herself the melody of praise and joy. She awakens mighty hope, blowing every where the winds of renewal in creation.32

The point is that the spirit infuses all creation and is its life force.

Theologians have, moreover, shown how such ideas about God and the material world make perfect sense in light of traditional sacramental theology. Johnson recalls teachings by Thomas Aquinas to make the point: “Catholic sacramental theology has always taught that simple material things—bread and wine, water, oil, the sexual union of marriage—can be visible bearers of the invisible healing grace of divine love. This is so, it once again becomes clear, because to begin with the whole physical world itself is the locale of the Spirit’s gracious indwelling, a primordial sacrament of divine presence.”³³ Wallace agrees, coming at the point also from a Protestant perspective: “Christian thought has always maintained that nature and grace, world and God, while not the same reality, are inseparably inter related. The eucharistic doctrine, for example, that Christ’s body and blood are really present in the Lord’s Supper underscores the mutual indwelling of the Divine in and with everyday foodstuffs. Put simply, if God can become a loaf of bread or a cup of wine, then why can God not become a bird or a beast or a tree or a mountain or a river?”³⁴

Wallace goes so far as to suggest that when we ponder the ongoing destruction of our natural environment we think of it not only as “ecocide” but even as “deicide.”³⁵ For me, that may be going too far. After all, if we really can kill God ourselves, as we are undoubtedly killing our livable environment, to whom or what can we look for salvation—salvation, that is, from ourselves? Rogers recognizes the problem. Even though he has avowed that “the Spirit makes sense only when paired with bodies: the bodies of individuals, communities, sacraments,” he nonetheless urges theological balance.36 Though we must “think materially” when thinking about the spirit, we must never completely identify the spirit with the universe. “To reduce the Spirit to matter,” Rogers writes, “breaks the rule of Christian speech that God is not to be identified with the world; to divorce the Spirit from matter breaks the rule of Christian speech that God is not to be identified by simple contrast with the world.”³⁷

Before leaving the topic of the universal pneuma, I want to note how some theologians have related the doctrine not only to materiality and epistemology but also to soteriology, or universal salvation. Some theologians quote from Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), a document from the Second Vatican Council: “All this holds true not only for Christians, but for all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way. For, since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery.”³⁸ Another document from Vatican II teaches something similar: “Those also can attain to everlasting salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or his church yet sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.”³⁹ John Paul II later confirmed the sentiment: “The universality of salvation means that it is granted not only to those who explicitly believe in Christ and have entered the Church. Since salvation is offered to all, it must be made concretely available to all. . . . For such people [those without the opportunity to ‘know or accept the Gospel’] salvation in Christ is accessible by the virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relationship to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation” (Redemptoris Missio 10).

In spite of the fact that most of the New Testament documents were produced by and within rather sectarian early Christian communities—that is, groups that saw themselves as a minority of “the elect” in a world that mostly did not know God and was probably destined for damnation and destruction—one can find resources even there for a more universal vision of knowledge of God and even salvation.40 Many scholars, for instance, have come to read Paul’s words in Rom 11:26, “And thus all Israel will be saved,” as indicating that Paul believed or at least eventually came to believe that God would somehow, even miraculously, bring about the salvation of all Jews.⁴¹

Even an evangelical theologian such as Pinnock can read certain passages as allowing us at least to hope that God will save all people. He cites 1 Tim 4:10, for example: “For this we work and struggle, because we have hoped in the living God, who is the savior of all human beings, especially those of faith.” God is here especially the savior of believers but ultimately the savior of “all human beings.” Pinnock likewise reads 1 John 4:7 to teach that knowledge and love of God are not limited to the church: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” Note that the text does not say, “everyone who loves God” but simply “everyone who loves.” When human beings experience and express love, even in an ordinary, everyday sense, they do so only because of divine inspiration, divine “inbreathing.” Their actions betray knowledge of God because of their love.

I view this as a theologically valuable reading of 1 John even though I would dispute that it is the meaning “intended” by the human author. Taking the whole of the First Letter of John, we should admit that the author and likely his original audience had a rather sectarian view of the church as being opposed to the world. The author seems to see most people outside his church as sinners in a dark and godless world that is destined for destruction. Pinnock was no postmodernist; he seemed to assume that texts have rather fixed meanings, and I suppose that he, as a self-described evangelical, believed that meaning should be ascertained by attempting to discern the “original,” “author’s” meaning.⁴² I rather doubt that the author of 1 John or of 1 Timothy believed God was going about saving all humanity. But I don’t believe we should be bound by the human author’s intention, and texts such as these, taken in conjunction with the doctrine of the universality of the holy spirit, may allow Christians to hope and pray for and believe in the salvation of all humanity. As Ian Markham puts it, taking inspiration from John 16: 12–15, where Jesus says that the Paraclete will reveal things Jesus himself had not revealed, “It is because we believe in the Holy Spirit that we are required to be attentive to the witness of other faith traditions. The Holy Spirit seeks to guide the Church into a deeper knowledge of the truth. Given God is active in all human cultures, we should expect to learn of God from other religious cultures.”43

There is no good without God. The holy spirit is the person of the trinity that especially pervades the universe in all its materiality. How do we imagine this universal and material spirit? The pneuma is the energy and life of the universe. All thought, including but not limited to “revelation,” is pneumatic. We may imagine pneuma to furnish the stuff of everyday life—light, energy, magnetism, gravity—as well as those mystical things scientists tell us exist and impact our reality even though we can’t understand them: dark matter, dark energy, stardust, invisible but powerful particles of matter. We may imagine pneuma to be the basis of information, DNA, genetic codes. Just as the ancients used materials of their world like wind, breath, light, fire, water, aether to imagine pneuma, we should use others that are closer to our imaginary worlds of modernity and postmodernity. It is no accident that the creeds speak of the spirit as the quintessentially “life-giving” person of the trinity: vivificantem. What are those things in our world that we see as especially life-giving? What in our world are the bases and origins of life?

Finally, we may look to the universal pneuma to bring knowledge of God and salvation also to those outside the church. This may need to remain an eschatological hope and mystery. We don’t need to know how and when God will save the world. We may believe in hope. Indeed, a doctrine of the pneuma is a good place to combine three theological topics or “stances”: epistemology, soteriology, and eschatology. The pneuma is the revealer of the divine to us and to all people. Since pneuma is universal, pervading all nature and the universe, we may hope that there is some knowledge of God throughout the universe and therefore some possibility for universal salvation. Yet we maintain this hope in eschatological reservation. The mystery of God’s complete goodness will never be entirely graspable by us human beings, even in some beatific vision we may expect in some future world. But we wait for our salvation and the salvation of the world in hope.

The Third Person of the Trinity

As I have said, we must move beyond the constraints of historical criticism to read the New Testament, and even more so the entire Bible, as teaching about the holy spirit as the third person of the trinity. There is no reason we should not do that. As we have seen to be the case in discussing to what extent it is theologically valuable (or dangerous) to consider the “personhood” of God, so we must not naively assume that the concept of person is without potential problems. God is not a “person” in the same sense we think of ourselves and our neighbors as persons. All this is true even more obviously for the spirit. In fact, as I will expand upon below, the spirit is the least “personable” person of the trinity. Yet there is a completely worthwhile way of speaking of God as person and the holy spirit as the third person of the trinity. As Rogers put it, if by “person” we mean something that can function as an actor or character in a narrative, the holy spirit certainly does that in at least some parts of the New Testament, and we may justifiably expand those places to read the person of the spirit “into” or “out of” the entire Bible.44

The Gospel of John contains one of the few references to the spirit that comes across clearly as personal, as we have seen, when Jesus refers to the spirit as the Paraclete, the “other advocate” (John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7). These passages also raise the issue of the gender of the pneuma. Whereas most of the time in the New Testament the pneuma is referred to grammatically as neuter, because the Greek word pneuma is neuter, once Jesus in John gives the pneuma the label “Paraclete,” that entity can then take a masculine pronoun. Thus, whereas most of the New Testament refers to the spirit as “it,” when the word paraklêtos is assumed as the antecedent, it can be referred to as “he” (see John 14:26: ἐκεῖνος; see also 15:26; 16:7, which use masculine terms rather than neuter to refer to the Paraclete). In fact, in these various passages from John the author shifts back and forth: when the antecedent is pneuma, he uses neuter terms, and when it is Paraclete, he switches to masculine, sometimes in the same sentence. This is not at all surprising. As is well known, linguistic gender is seldom tied firmly to the gender of the entity itself but is simply an aspect of linguistics. As English speakers who don’t usually have to deal with the gender of particular things or words, it is interesting to note when New Testament texts regularly refer to the spirit using neuter pronouns and the rare cases when those texts refer to the spirit, in the form of the Paraclete, as masculine. At any rate, the Paraclete does come across in the Gospel of John as a person more than pneuma does throughout the New Testament.

Yet the Gospel of John’s pneumatology poses a problem, as we have seen, about the dual presence of Jesus and the pneuma. Although Denis Edwards may be making a theologically true claim when he says, “We should not think of the Spirit as coming only after the death and resurrection of Jesus,” that is exactly how John narrates it.45 We have here another case in which good exegesis may lead to bad theology. As shown in the previous chapter, “Christ,” according to John’s Gospel, it is true that the spirit comes, at least onto the disciples, only after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The spirit in John is a substitute for the absent Jesus, or at least for the Jesus who is absent in body.

The same is true of the Acts of the Apostles. The spirit makes many appearances in Luke: making Mary pregnant (1:35), “filling” Elizabeth (1:41) and Zachariah (1:67), coming “onto” prophets (2:25). The spirit certainly interacts regularly with Jesus (4:1, 14; 10:21). But in the beginning of Acts, Jesus tells his disciples, after his resurrection, to remain in Jerusalem until the holy spirit comes upon them, which does take place several days later (Acts 1:5; 2:1–4). As we have seen, the spirit becomes virtually the main actor in Acts.

Scholars have noted, for instance, that the Acts of the Apostles is mistitled. For one thing, it isn’t really about all the apostles but mainly, in the beginning, about Peter. Paul is the star character for the majority of the document, but Paul doesn’t fit the criteria for being an “apostle” as set out by the author of Acts.⁴⁶ Thus scholars have often made the point that a more accurate title for the work would be the Acts of the Holy Spirit. Luke–Acts, like John, makes the spirit a major character in the book of Acts, taking the place of the now-absent Jesus. In most of Acts Jesus speaks only here and there and as if from “offstage.” Or, to use a slightly different analogy, we may read the spirit in Acts as something like an offstage director of the onstage action. At any rate, it is notable that though we would be making a theological mistake if we emphasized too much that the spirit comes only after the death and resurrection of Jesus, that is precisely how both John and Acts present the story. I will return to this point below in an attempt to use it theologically.

We may indeed use the emphasis in the previous section on the materiality of pneuma as a theological resource for fresh ways of thinking about the holy spirit. According to my interpretation of the resurrected body of 1 Cor 15, as the body of Jesus during his earthly lifetime was flesh and blood, his resurrected body is one not of flesh and blood but of pneuma, the material spirit. Notice what this may mean for the holy spirit. The pneuma is what “embodies” transformed, saved bodies, including that of Jesus. Pneuma is in fact the quintessential corporeality. If Jesus is God Incarnate, God in the flesh, the holy spirit is God “corporeal,” divinity embodied. As ironic as it may seem to say so, we may indeed note that the holy spirit is the most corporeal of the persons of the trinity, just as Jesus was the most fleshly person of the trinity. By means of the three persons of the trinity we see divinity completely transcending materiality (the father), divinity manifested in the flesh (Jesus), and divinity incorporated in body (the holy spirit).

Although many of us Christians are used to thinking of the holy spirit as the most hidden or mysterious or even absent person of the trinity—it takes up much less space in our creeds than either the father or Jesus, as I point out below—we may use these ancient notions of the universal and material pneuma to spark different imaginings of the third person of the trinity. The holy spirit is the most universal, physical, and material person of the trinity. Pneuma is what breathed over the universe at creation. Pneuma is what physically inspired the prophets. Pneuma is what physically settled on Jesus at his baptism. Pneuma is what “filled” Jesus in his ministry. Pneuma is what came down on the disciples at Pentecost as fire. Pneuma is the most natural and physical of the persons of the trinity: breath, dove, water, fire.

Yet we have not been wrong to think of the holy spirit also as the most mysterious or impersonal person of the trinity. While some Christians and theologians have bemoaned this common perception of the spirit, others more recently have turned the idea—the absence of the “personal” spirit—to theological advantage as a way of reflecting on how Christians do commonly experience the spirit. Bernard Sesboüé, for example, says, “The Spirit never seems to be a clear-cut individual over against us or someone whom we can address directly and intimately like the Father and the Son, who are, as it were, our partners in prayer. Instead, the Spirit might be said to be located at the heart of our personal subjectivity. . . . This tendency is so uniform that we might well ask whether the New Testament shows us the Holy Spirit as a personal subject, or merely as a kind of objective force derived from God.”47 We do tend to personalize the holy spirit less than the father and the son. The term “holy spirit” is, after all, not an actual name. “Holy” is not the spirit’s first name but one description of its nature. Although many Christians speak of the spirit as “he,” doctrinally speaking it is perfectly acceptable to use the pronoun “it.” This is part of the mystery of this most nonpersonable person of the trinity.

The mystery of the spirit may have been both a contributor to and a result of the way the spirit is spoken of in the major creeds. In the Apostles’ Creed, the holy spirit gets one line: “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” The Father gets two substantial lines, and Jesus gets a whopping ten lines.⁴⁸ In the Nicene Creed, God the father gets four lines for himself, though he is mentioned in other places in the creed. Jesus gets twenty-one lines. The holy spirit gets four:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

Even here, where the holy spirit gets as many lines as the father, both the father and son are mentioned in two of those lines. The spirit just doesn’t get comparable attention.

It may not be quite fair to bring in Chalcedon here since its purpose was clearly to define the nature of Christ and the relation of Christ to the father and to human beings, but this important early “definition” (451 CE) doesn’t mention the holy spirit at all. It even talks of Mary as the “mother of God” and the prophets’ prophecies about Jesus, in either of which contexts one might expect a mention of the spirit. After all, in the Bible and much church teaching and tradition the holy spirit was the person of the trinity par excellence who brought about both Mary’s pregnancy and the prophecies of scripture. Yet Chalcedon remains silent on the spirit.

This impersonal, nameless aspect of the spirit leads William Atkinson, following Tom Smail before him, to speak of the spirit as a “person without a face.”49 Sergius Bulgakov points to the New Testament as one reason for this characteristic of the spirit: “We cannot fail to be amazed by the fact that, with a single exception [Acts 13:2], nowhere does the Bible speak of the Third hypostasis in the first person. Rather, it always speaks of the Third hypostasis in the third person, i.e., impersonally. The person of the Holy Spirit remains enshrouded in mystery; He is unknown, unrevealed.”⁵⁰ The seventeenth-century Anglican theologian John Owen said that “the immediate actings of the Spirit are the most hidden, curious, and mysterious, as those which contain the perfecting part of the works of God.”⁵¹

We have seen how passages of the New Testament can reveal mystery or absence. As I noted in the chapter titled “Christ,” in the Gospel of John the Paraclete as the holy spirit comes to the disciples only once Jesus is absent or at least just about to be absent. The Gospel of John emphasizes more than the other Gospels the absence of Jesus from the church. We may take inspiration from John so that when we experience the absence of Jesus we must remind ourselves of the presence of the spirit, taking Jesus’s place and continuing to reveal truths to the church that Jesus, in his lifetime on earth, did not reveal (John 16:12–15).

Such musings have occurred to me when the use of older liturgical forms takes us back to talking not about the holy spirit but about the holy ghost. I remember as a child having Sunday school teachers discourage us from using the term “ghost” for the spirit. I suppose they were afraid we children would think of ghost stories or other frightening or superstitious things, and they didn’t want us thinking that way about the holy spirit. But as I have recited the creeds in the older forms, I have found a bit of inspiration in the term “ghost.” There is something mysterious, perhaps even spooky, about the third person of the trinity. I say we embrace that interpretation of the spirit. In fact, we can think of the holy spirit as Jesus’s “ghost,” being present for us in his bodily absence. We are reminded that ghosts connect living people to dead people. And it is through the holy ghost that we are in communion in the body of Christ with all believers who have ever existed. We who still live, through the ministry of the holy ghost, remain connected to all the saints, meaning that term in the broadest sense: all members of the body of Christ who have ever existed even if they are now dead. We can’t see the ghost, but we can feel it. This must be a good ghost. But we’ve seen, in literature, film, and television shows, plenty of helpful, friendly ghosts. That doesn’t mean, though, that they are necessarily less spooky. And that may be a good thing.

How, though, did we get from the “most embodied” person of the trinity to thinking of it as an invisible ghost? It shouldn’t be taken to be a weakness of my points here that I was arguing above that the spirit is the most “corporeal” and “material” of the persons of the trinity. Throughout this book I am trying to illustrate that the truth of a theological statement lies not in some property inherent in the statement itself but in how it is interpreted. There are no theological statements that are true in all and every sense. Only “in a sense.” And good theology may well hold together, side by side, theological images or claims that seem even mutually contradictory. In fact, I believe the only good Christian theologies are those that regularly say things that seem the opposite of one another. Good theology contains contradictions or at least statements that seem contradictory on their face. We would do well to imagine the holy spirit as, in one sense, the most corporeal and material of the persons of the trinity but at the same time as the most impersonal, hidden, and mysterious. This is to take the mysteries, ambiguities, and even contradictions of the New Testament itself as theological fodder.

Spirit in Trinity and Church

As we have seen, the spirit in the New Testament is often interwoven with God and Jesus, even to the extent that we can’t really be sure when the reference of pneuma is to the holy spirit proper, the pneuma of God in general, or the pneuma of Jesus in particular. The pneuma seldom plays a role all its own in the New Testament apart from God or Jesus playing some role in the same context. Remarkably, this is not so true of either God or Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus occupies center stage for much of the Gospels, though God is usually not far off. But Jesus is so much the center of attention in especially some parts of the Gospels that readers sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the Gospels are more about Jesus than God. Theologically speaking, the Gospels present Jesus only to lead readers to the kingdom of God and God’s own self, not to end with Jesus alone. But much of Christianity, especially in the West, has suffered from a sort of “Christomonism” or “Christologism.”52 When it comes down to it, a truly “Christocentric” theology should be held in some suspicion. Jesus is God incarnate but not all that needs to be said about God. We confess the trinity for a reason, and no one person of the trinity should be the “center.”

Some New Testament texts may be used to make the point. The entire Letter of James may be read without giving much thought to Jesus at all. Jesus is mentioned only twice in the letter, once in the greeting (“James, a slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ”) and again at 2:1 (“our glorious Lord Jesus Christ”).⁵³ On the other hand, “God” occurs seventeen times, and “father” as a reference to God three times.⁵⁴ My point is that New Testament texts may focus mainly on Jesus as the central player or on God, but they seldom focus on the spirit alone, apart from the activities of God or Jesus, as the central figure.

I’ve already touched on some of these passages when talking about pneuma as one person of the trinity. Heb 9:14 speaks of “the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without spot to God.” In the Gospels, the spirit is regularly “on” or “with” or “leading” Jesus (Mark 1:10, 12 and par.). And, as we saw above, pneuma works its way in and out of the text of Rom 8 thoroughly, though, as I argued above, it is not always clear if Paul is thinking of a “person” of “the holy spirit” at all: “But you are not in flesh but in the spirit, since the spirit of God lives in you. If one does not have the spirit of Christ, he is not of him” (Rom 8:9); “If the spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Jesus from the dead will make alive also your mortal bodies through his spirit living in you” (Rom 8:11). Again, we need not take this ambiguity and confusion as to the precise reference of “pneuma” as a problem. It is, rather, an opportunity.

The intermingling of holy pneuma, pneuma of God, or father, or son has led many theologians, from early patristic authors to theologians throughout the centuries, to teach that the spirit is the person of the trinity who especially “binds together” the trinity. The Latin term often encountered is vinculum trinitatis, often translated as the “bond” or “union” of the trinity. The Latin vinculum may refer to anything that binds or ties things together. But tourists to Rome may remember that one attractive pilgrimage site is the beautiful church San Pietro in Vincoli, which is usually translated as “Saint Peter in Chains.” If we retain the connotations of firmness and permanence but avoid those of slavery or imprisonment, we could think of the term as “the chains of the trinity.” The spirit is that which holds together the trinity.

Rogers, introducing an essay by Hans Urs von Balthasar on Christ’s “descent into hell,” notes that in the descent Christ is furthest from the father but still connected to the father by means of the spirit: “It is the Spirit that stretches to accommodate the distance of the Son from the Father when one is in hell and the other in heaven—and brings them back, a divine rubber band, at the Resurrection.”55 Picturing the holy spirit as a cosmic rubber band is concrete indeed, and it vividly portrays the spirit as what holds together the trinity.

This union, by grace, includes us human beings also. In introducing a text from St. John of the Cross, Rogers explains, “The Holy Spirit teaches the soul to breathe the divine atmosphere shared by the Father and the Son, which is itself the Holy Spirit.” As John of the Cross put it, “That breathing is the Holy Spirit Himself.”⁵⁶ The spirit is the “name,” one might say, of the love that binds together the three persons of the trinity and is able to broaden and deepen to welcome us human beings to the communion as well.

Perhaps to avoid any implication that this “bondage” is involuntary or unfortunate, a common way of speaking of it is as vinculum caritatis, the bonds of love.⁵⁷ Even in our popular songs we can speak of the “chains of love,” and that is the preferred way of referring to the function of the spirit in the trinity: the love that binds together the union of the three. Wallace, in his book Fragments of the Spirit, cites both terms, vinculum trinitatis and vinculum caritatis, but he uses the latter much more than the former. And he argues that all of creation, all materiality and nature, is included in that love because of the universality of the spirit.⁵⁸

Of the church fathers, Augustine is most often cited as the main source of the idea that the spirit is “the communion of divine mutual love between the Father and the Son.”59 For Thomas Aquinas, as noted by Kärkkäinon, one of the “key designations” of the holy spirit is “love.”⁶⁰ Female mystics and theologians sometimes especially emphasize love within the trinity and as the characteristic especially of the spirit.⁶¹ According to Catherine of Siena, the holy spirit is the love that binds the persons of the trinity and the human soul to that community.⁶² Richard of St. Victor focuses on love to describe the relation of the persons of the trinity to one another.⁶³ The trinity is, to quote a summation by Pinnock, “a circulation of love in the social context of the Trinity and the understanding of God as loving society.”⁶⁴

But the spirit is also the vinculum caritatis that binds members of the church together and the church to the trinity. As Paul says, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the holy spirit which has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). The spirit confirms our new identity and salvation: “This spirit bears witness to our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:16). Though the church lives in and because of God the father and Jesus Christ, the spirit is the person of the trinity most associated with the indwelling and ongoing presence of God in the church, in every local congregation and the church universal.

Though everything the spirit does in and for the church cannot be rehearsed, precisely because that would include every good thing entirely, I will note a few benefits the spirit provides the church that are particularly notable. The spirit is especially active, for instance, in prayer. Indeed, we cannot pray at all without the spirit. As Jude says, we pray “in the holy spirit” (Jude 20). It is indeed the spirit that prays “in us.” As Paul says, we don’t even know how to pray or what to pray for: “But this same spirit intercedes with wordless groans . . . because it appeals to God for the saints” (Rom 8:26–27). When there are words, it has been the spirit that supplied the words: “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery again to fear, but you received the spirit of sonship in which we cry out, ‘Abba, Father!’” According to Jesus’s words in John 4:23–24, it is the spirit that enables us to worship at all.

We have seen how the spirit is especially associated with baptism. The spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism in the first three Gospels, and in the Gospel of John, the Baptist testifies to having seen the spirit descend on Jesus, though no actual baptism is narrated (John 1:32–34). I have also noted above the many ways in which the spirit participates in baptism in Acts. In some cases the spirit is promised with baptism, in others the spirit comes after baptism, and in still others the spirit is the medium of baptism itself. “You will be baptized in the holy spirit” (Acts 1:5). In fact, for John, Jesus is the one who “baptizes in the holy spirit” (John 1:33). The precise role of the spirit in baptism in 1 Cor 12:13 depends on the translation. The Greek is ambiguous. Are we baptized “in” the spirit or “by” the spirit? In the same verse, the spirit is what we “drink.” According to the NRSV, “In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” The KJV interprets a bit differently: “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.”65

The ambiguity, here as in other topics, I argue, is fortuitous. The spirit is the medium in which we are baptized. The spirit is the agent who baptizes us into the body of Christ. The spirit is what we drink up. This effusion of or immersion in the spirit is what we often experience, therefore, when we witness a baptism. We often have a bit of a rush of joy, of hope. A chill often goes around a congregation and the space when a baptism is taking place. People smile during a baptism. That is the spirit enabling and binding together the church with God and Jesus, especially but certainly not only in baptism.

Another central role played by the spirit in Christian theology is as the one who inspired scripture. The spirit spoke through the prophets, both in the past (Acts 28:25) and in the living church (Acts 21:4; 1 Tim 4:1). Although the holy spirit sometimes used past human agents to speak truth, it is really the spirit speaking “through” the human being (Acts 1:16). Human agents spoke God’s word not through their own will or agency, according to 2 Peter, but by “being carried along by the holy spirit” (2 Pet 1:20). I translate the Greek to emphasize its image of prophets being physically carried off by the spirit. Thus when we read the text of scripture correctly we are hearing not just the human author but the spirit speaking (Heb 3:7; 10:15; 1 Pet 1:11). The holy spirit is not named explicitly in 2 Tim 3:16 but is surely in the neighborhood when the author insists that “all scripture is god-breathed” (θεόπνευστος). The author of scripture and prophecy is the holy spirit.

The inclination of historical critics to concentrate almost exclusively on the “intentions” of the human author as providing the foundationalist basis for the meaning of the text, therefore, is far from both premodern Christian tradition, doctrine, and practice and also ironically far from the “literal” meaning of the texts themselves, which would surely be “normally” taken to make not the human author but the holy spirit or God the ultimate author of scripture.66 If meaning has anything to do with “intention” (and it need not), the intention that ultimately matters is that of God or the holy spirit, not the “historical” intentions of the supposed human author constructed by means of modern historical criticism.

The spirit, however, did not leave behind its responsibilities for scripture when it inspired and wrote scripture. The holy spirit is also thoroughly necessary for Christian interpretation of scripture to take place in a faithful and fruitful way. There is no Christian interpretation of scripture apart from the inspiration and guidance of the holy spirit. Another wonderfully ambiguous text, as I briefly noted above, is 2 Pet 1:20–21, which I translate initially as, “Knowing this first, that every prophecy of scripture is not of private interpretation, for no prophecy was brought by the will of a human being, but being carried by the holy spirit, human beings spoke from God.” I have taken the Greek word ἐπίλυσις to mean “interpretation” and have intentionally left open the possibility that this may be referring not to the “interpretation” of “things as they are” or “God’s will” or “truth” by the prophet but to the interpretation of the prophecy by readers. Is the verse speaking only about the inspiration of the prophecy or does it include reference to the interpretation by readers?

The ambiguity can be seen in how different translations render 1 Pet 1:20. To compare only a few:

KJV: “no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation”;

NIV: “no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things”; English Standard Version: “no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation”;

NRSV: “no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation.”

A couple of these translations seem to attempt to clarify the wording so that the “interpretation” must be that of the prophet him or herself (NIV; English Standard Version). The other two (KJV and NRSV) leave things a bit more ambiguous. They could be read as implying that the interpretation of the text must also not be a matter of “private” interpretation.

Some theologians argue that just as we believe in the spirit’s inspiration in the origin of scripture, so we must depend on the spirit’s inspiration in the proper reading of scripture. Stephen Fowl, for example, insists on the necessity of the spirit in interpreting the Bible and therefore on the necessity of also “interpret[ing] the Spirit”: “If Christians are to interpret with the Spirit, they will also need to learn how to interpret the Spirit.”67 Fowl argues that this dependence on the spirit for proper interpretation of scripture extends also to how we interpret other people’s lives as actions of the spirit, that is, “the Spirit’s work in the life of another.” The spirit for Christians is not only the origin of meaning. The spirit, when we are interpreting in a Christian way, is also the interpreter of scripture and of all our world. The holy spirit is both author and exegete for the church.

Finally, in this section on the role of the spirit in the church, I want to point out that though the holy spirit is often the most hidden and mysterious person of the trinity and though I will argue below that we should, at least at times, think of the spirit as feminine rather than masculine or nongendered, we should not be misled into thinking of the spirit as passive, weak, or subordinate. Christianity has sometimes given the false impression that lowliness and self-sacrifice are values in themselves. That is not true. An attitude of required and resigned humility or self-sacrifice for their own sake will usually be damaging, especially if taken on by girls or women because they perceive that is what society demands of them. But also for men, assuming a persona of forced humility or submitting oneself to a constant practice of sacrificing the self will too often entail a personality disorder and is certainly not good for one’s social skills. When the gospel, rightly understood, demands humility and self-sacrifice, it is only in certain circumstances and for a greater good. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, “Christ,” when Paul and other authors in the New Testament urge self-lowering, it is for the final goal of sharing in the glory of Christ.68 Humiliation of self should not be celebrated as some abstract principle of value in Christianity.

The spirit is the power that enables Christians to enjoy glory and power. And this spirit is ours: “For God has given us not a spirit of fear, but of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim 1:7). The spirit is our electricity, our oxygen, our magnetism, our gravity, our force, our muscle. But all, as we must constantly remind ourselves, only in the service of love and to the good of our fellow human beings and the planet.

Filioque

Before moving far from the issue of the role of the spirit in the trinity, I feel I must at least briefly address the controversy known by the term “filioque” in the Nicene Creed, though I do not want to dwell long on the problem. For one thing, the issue is not central to my own theology, one way or another. But I bring up the controversy because I believe it will allow me to illustrate a central theme of my theology: that the truth—or danger—of a theological statement lies not in the words themselves but in how they are interpreted and used.

When we Christians in the West recite the Nicene Creed, we say that the holy spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” The English “and the Son” is a translation of the Latin filioque, and thus a disagreement about the wording of the creed that has divided Western churches from Eastern Orthodox churches is known as the Filioque Controversy.

Most scholars are agreed that the ancient versions of the Nicene Creed had the spirit “proceeding” from the Father but not from the Son. No one knows when Christians in the West first began confessing that the spirit proceeded also “from the Son.”⁶⁹ It may have been as early as the fifth century in Spain, with the addition spreading to France and Germany later. At any rate, scholars attached to the court of Charlemagne, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire beginning in 800, accused Greek Christians of heresy for adhering to the older form of the creed and not adding “and the Son” to their version of the creed. The disagreement came to something of a head when each side excommunicated church leaders on the other side in 1054.

The split between Western and Eastern churches was actually caused by many issues over many centuries. The attempt by the bishop of Rome to assert himself as pope and head of the entire Christian church, East and West, and the resistance to his absolute authority by leaders in the East was a bone of contention. And what we may today think of as completely political issues were also central, as both Constantinople and Rome vied for primacy as the ruling city of the Roman Empire. The Filioque Controversy, therefore, may be seen as a doctrinal symptom of a much larger, more complicated struggle between East and West encompassing language, politics, and military affairs as well as liturgical and doctrinal differences. At any rate, the churches of West and East are still divided by the acceptance of filioque in the West and the rejection of it in the East.

I believe it is difficult for those of us in the West to understand what about the wording so troubles Eastern Orthodox Christians, but there have been arguments advanced even by Western—and Protestant—theologians that point out theological problems with filioque. Some of them agree with the long-standing Eastern argument that having the spirit proceed from both the Father and the Son tends to separate the spirit too much from the “paired partnership” of Father and Son: the spirit ends up on one side of the action, and Father and Son together on the other. Moreover, many scholars agree with long-standing Eastern arguments that the filioque tends to subordinate the spirit to both the Father and the Son.70 Arguments have also been made that emphasizing Christ over the spirit, as Eastern theologians accuse filioque of doing, has led to a certain “Christomonism” of Western Christianity and an overemphasis on “Christocentrism” in theology in the West, a tendency I recognize in much Western theology and practice.

Pinnock bemoans the way the Western Church attempted to force the change on the East, calling the insertion by the church in the West “a misuse of power.” And he agrees that it tends to subordinate the spirit to Christ. Moreover, Pinnock argues that the “universality” of the spirit’s activities (as I described above) is threatened by linking the spirit too much to Christ and therefore to the church. He insists it would be a great act of ecumenism for the Western churches, especially the Vatican, to remove filioque from the creed.⁷¹

On the other hand, advocates of filioque can point to some biblical support. True, in the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples that “the Father” will send “the Paraclete” in Jesus’s “name” (John 14:26). But in the very next chapter Jesus brings the “Paraclete” up again, but this time adds, “whom I will send to you from the Father” (15:26). In the next chapter Jesus again refers to the spirit and says, “I will send him to you” (John 16:7). And then there is the scene after the resurrection, where Jesus, in the presence of his disciples, “breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the holy spirit’” (20:21–22). Both sides of this old debate can therefore cite biblical and patristic support for themselves.72

I agree that the history of the Filioque Controversy has been an unfortunate, even tragic one. I agree that the insertion of filioque into the creed by church leaders in the West was done in an arrogant and unloving way, often constituting hardly more than a doctrinal tool in a power struggle. I believe that Western churches should repent for those actions and ask forgiveness.

But I would be loath to remove the words from the creed entirely. I’m not in favor of tampering with the content of the scriptures or the major creeds. Even though the version of the creed containing filioque has been around for fewer centuries than the older version, it is a form of the creed Christians in many parts of the world have been confessing for centuries.

The Filioque Controversy, though, can offer an opportunity to reassert a recurring theme of this book: the indispensability of interpretation. The filioque may lead to subordination of the spirit to Christ, but it does not do so automatically, as proven by the fact that many of us who confess filioque reject the subordination of the spirit. As I have argued throughout, the words of doctrines and theologies are important, but they do not in themselves provide their meaning. The filioque may have led to “Christomonism” among many theologians in the West and in the assumptions and practices of many Christians, but that is not a necessary result of the confession—because there are no necessary results of any confession or theological statement. Its truth or not is decided by its use. The filioque is an illustration of how the mere wording of doctrines is not as important as the interpretation of them. So also with all things related to the holy spirit: we Christians must be diligent so that we interpret the reality of the spirit and our relation to it in proper, orthodox, loving, Christian ways—just as we must with anything we say we believe.

The Gender of the Spirit

Toward the end of the chapter “God” I addressed the issue of the gender of God. I will do much the same in the chapter below titled “Church.” The gender of the spirit is even more open, if we may imagine it, to various interpretations. As I have shown, the Greek word most often used for the spirit is pneuma. Since it is grammatically neuter, the spirit is most often referred to in the New Testament as “it” or with other neuter-gendered terminology. (When “that” or “this” is used in Greek, for instance, those words are gendered to reflect the gender of the antecedent.) The exception, as noted above, is when the Gospel of John speaks of the spirit as “the Paraclete” or advocate. In those few cases the Paraclete is referred to in masculine terms. The potential gendering of the spirit that may be imagined on the basis of the grammatical gender used is usually hidden in English translations. Often translators use a masculine pronoun or term to translate a neuter term because of their own theological bias toward referring to the holy spirit as “he” rather than “it.” For example, Acts 5:32 is rendered by the NRSV as “And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.” The Greek word translated here as “whom” is the neuter relative pronoun that normally would be translated as “that” or “which.” The vast majority of versions, however, use the more personal word “whom,” reflecting their assumption of the personal nature of the spirit (“he”) rather than impersonal (“it”).73 As Pinnock notes, however, the use of masculine pronouns for the spirit comes from tradition, not from the Bible itself.⁷⁴

Yet the Bible and some Christians have regularly used feminine images and language for the spirit, as we have seen in the citation of female mystical writers like Catherine of Siena. The Hebrew word for “spirit” most often found in the Hebrew Bible is ruach, which is feminine in gender most of the time.⁷⁵ The ruach hovering over the waters of Gen 1:2 is a feminine being or force sweeping over the chaos of the primeval universe. Thus Basil of Caesarea compared the spirit of God hovering over the water to a mother bird covering her eggs.76 Basil admits that the interpretation is not original with him. He takes it from “a Syrian.” Because of the Syriac words associated with the spirit and their feminine gender in Syriac, such images become especially vivid, as Basil recognized.

The feminine word for “spirit” in Syriac allowed Syriac Christians more opportunity for using feminine language and imagery for the spirit. In fact, in some early texts from Syriac Christianity, the holy spirit is called “Mother,” leading to a trinity of “Father, Mother, and Son.”⁷⁷ Even leaving aside a few early Christian texts whose orthodoxy may be questioned, other quite orthodox Syriac authors speak of the spirit as being feminine, reflecting the grammar of the Syriac references.⁷⁸ The Syriac word for “hovering” prompts Syriac authors to take the “hovering” spirit of Gen 1:2 as a mother bird.⁷⁹ As Susan Ashbrook Harvey notes, the Odes of Solomon, probably from the second century, use both masculine and feminine references for the spirit, though those that depict the spirit as a loving mother are perhaps the most striking to us. A bit later, probably from the early third century, the Syriac church father Aphrarat speaks of people putting “her” on in baptism. For the celibate man, who has therefore left behind any earthly “family,” God is his “father” and the holy spirit his “mother.”⁸⁰ Ephrem regularly uses many female images for the spirit, such as weaving cloth, as God’s womb, etc., and this even though he is writing at a time when Syriac authors are increasingly insisting that the spirit is masculine, in spite of the confusion that makes of their grammar.81 The early Syriac traditions, therefore, as Harvey has urged, provide many resources for adjusting our imaginations about the gender of the holy spirit.

In the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew feminine ruach would be usually rendered by the neuter pneuma. But with the Greek, and especially in Jewish scripture from later dates, we encounter the feminine sophia, “wisdom.” And sophia is often linked with spirit. Wisdom, Sophia, is depicted as “mothering” and “nursing.”⁸² As Marie-Theres Wacker points out, God’s ruach becomes associated with sophia in the later Jewish text Wisdom of Solomon.⁸³ Wisdom (in the Greek, Sophia) sits beside God’s throne (9:4). “Solomon” (the attribution is a pseudonym) addresses God: “With you is wisdom, she who knows your works . . . she understands what is pleasing in your sight. . . . Send her forth from the holy heavens . . . that she may labor at my side” (9:9–10). Throughout chapters 9 and 10 Wisdom is portrayed as a female consort of God, a special mediator between God and human beings. Later Christians read these as references to the holy spirit.

It should not be surprising, therefore, to find later Christian writers thinking of the spirit in terms of feminine imagery. Catherine calls the spirit the soul’s “mother who nurses her at the breast of divine charity.”⁸⁴ As Stanley Burgess emphasizes, “This imagery of the Holy Spirit as mother is repeated frequently in Catherine’s writings.”⁸⁵

The spirit in the Bible and Christian tradition has therefore been feminine, neuter, and masculine. Indeed, we may use our imaginations to take the grammatical gender of the different words as expressing mystical realities of the spirit. As the Hebrew is ruach, so the spirit is feminine. As the Greek is pneuma, so the spirit is neuter. As the Latin is spiritus, so the spirit is masculine.⁸⁶

Rogers notes the variety but does little with it. He says, “I follow Jerome’s remark that this variety shows that God is beyond gender.”87 Addressing the fact that Father and Son language is “irredeemably male,” Markham insists that we should be open to other labels. “God is beyond gender; the alternative language draws attention to that fact.”⁸⁸ If by insisting that God is “beyond gender” such theologians are saying that God or any person of the trinity can be “defined” by gender, I am in agreement, though I have tried to point out that God cannot be “defined” at all, if by that we mean “delimited” or “delineated.” But if by saying, “God is beyond gender” we imply that God has nothing to do with gender or doesn’t care about the meaning of gender for us, that is wrong. As always, the theological claim, if true, is also untrue.

I prefer to use the multiple gender identities of God to incite our imaginations about God and our own gender identities. The spirit as mother, feminine, nurturer is helpful. But we may go further, taking feminist imagination into queer imagination. The classical doctrine of perichoresis (περιχώρησις) teaches that “each member of the Trinity participates in the work of the other members of the Trinity.”⁸⁹ Markham uses the term “mutual interpenetration” as one description of perichoresis.⁹⁰ We may use classical theologies of perichore sis to inspire our imaginations about the interactions of the persons of the trinity with one another and with ourselves.

Christians have at least since medieval times thought about the interaction of the persons of the trinity in erotic terms. I suggest we take that further into queer terms. The persons of the trinity may be imagined as penetrating one another in a sublime and erotic love for one another. The holy spirit, then, may be seen as the “bond of love” that is always active in the mutual interpenetration of the persons of the trinity. The spirit also is the power that invites us to join in the love. For those who think this debases the persons of the trinity or is somehow “dirty” or “vulgar,” I would answer that they must then have an unfortunately dirty or vulgar idea of sexuality and sex. Imagining the eroticism of God in the activities of the persons of the trinity does not debase God. It rather elevates sexuality.

And while I’m at it, we should not limit ourselves to two genders or even three (feminine, masculine, neuter). We should use the multiple genders of God to make sacred the multiple genders people experience. Not only male and female but also transgendered, transsexual, intersexed, and simultaneously multiple gendered roles or identities. The multiple gender of the spirit celebrates the multiple genders Christians find themselves being. Ambrose speaks of the spirit as that which filled the womb of Mary: “The fruit of the womb is the work of the Spirit.”91 So we may think of a feminine spirit filling the womb of Mary and indeed filling every womb. Janet Martin Soskice, citing ancient texts and medieval female mystics, speaks of “the baffling of gender literalism,” as “the single most productive strategy for moving beyond overly masculinised conceptions.”⁹² Kathryn Tanner takes advantage of queer theology: “The potential here for a gender-bending use of gendered imagery—a Father with a womb—might very well present the best hope for avoiding theological reinforcement of male privilege.”⁹³

I have argued that we may imagine the spirit as the most material of the persons of the trinity, as the most universal, as the most corporeal, as the most hidden and mystical, as the most “ghostlike.” We now arrive at the realization that the spirit may be the most queer of the persons of the trinity, the one that disrupts and baffles and then reinvigorates gender in multiple forms. At any rate, we should not ignore gender but baptize it and theologize it. There is nothing remotely heterodox in speaking of the holy spirit as “it” or “she.” What definitely offends orthodoxy is insisting that the holy spirit or any of the persons of the trinity must be referred to exclusively in masculine terms. As in all other matters theological, we must continually open our minds and hearts to new understandings, trusting the holy spirit to guide us into truth and keep us from error.

Notes

1. If readers need reminding of my reasons for using lowercase letters for the “holy spirit,” see the introduction above.

2. In much of this chapter, instead of using the English translation “spirit,” I use a transliterated “pneuma,” even without italics in order to anglicize the term. Because my point is to insist that the Greek word almost always referred to a material substance, the technical term “pneuma” is more useful than constantly reminding readers that the ancient notion of “spirit” was not usually one of the modern Christian idea of spirit as “immaterial substance.”

3. For a fuller explication and defense of my interpretation here, see Martin, Corinthian Body, 104–36.

4. The hierarchical nature of the list is a bit confusing since most ancient science would have put the moon on the lowest level, the sun above it, and the stars highest of all. But Paul may be assuming a different hierarchy for his cosmos. I think both lists, in any case, are meant to reflect a hierarchy of the cosmos because physical hierarchy is precisely a driving concern of Paul’s arguments in 1 Cor 15.

5. See Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology, 19–22, for one summary, concentrating on the version provided by Cicero in his De Natura Deorum, book 2, composed around 50 BCE. In fact, my own title for this section was inspired by the subtitle of Engberg-Pedersen’s book. For a similar treatment of Stoic pneuma theory, but in this case in an interpretation of the Gospel of John, see Buch-Hansen, “It Is the Spirit.”

6. I say “problematic” only because with the current state of science and physics in particular—with string theory; particles able to occupy more than one location at the same time, and even far, far apart; with ideas such as “dark matter” or the Higg’s boson; with matter itself seeming to melt into energy; and all the other unbelievable ideas scientists keep telling us—it is none too clear any longer how we are to think of “matter” or “the physical.” For some attempts by scientists to explain the current state of scientific thinking about “matter,” see Davies and Gribbin, Matter Myth; Tegmark, Mathematical Universe.

7. I first pointed to medical and other ancient texts to demonstrate the materiality of pneuma in the ancient world and to argue for this reading in Paul also, in Corinthian Body, see 6–15 et passim (see the index under pneuma). Besides Engberg-Pedersen’s book mentioned above, see also, especially for Hippocratic and other medical references besides Galen, Troy Martin, “Paul’s Pneumatological Statements.”

8. The editor of the LCL edition, W. H. S. Jones, dates the work to as early as the fifth century BCE, well before the Stoics.

9. Translation of W. H. S. Jones (Hippocrates, LCL, vol. 2), slightly modified: I have kept “pneuma” where he translates “wind.”

10. Galen insisted that he was not a member of any school, either of philosophy or medicine. This seems, though, to be one expression of his rather egotistical tendency to make himself always the most correct, insightful, and wise “school of one.” Though Galen harshly criticized Stoic writers, he never takes on Plato or Hippocrates in any negative way. Even if he disagrees with something we find in Plato or a Hippocratic text, he usually just explains that others have misinterpreted them. Galen is indeed more a Platonist than a follower of any other known philosophical school of thought. See Martin, Inventing Superstition, 109–24.

11. For one important treatment of pneuma in Galen’s system, see Siegel, Galen on Sense Perception. See also Jaeger, “Pneuma im Lykeion”; the note by A. L. Peck in Aristotle, Generation of Animals (Loeb), appendix B, pp. 576–93; and for more on pre-Galenic theories of pneuma, Peck, “Connate Pneuma.” For a meticulous exposé of some of the confusions and apparent contradictions in Galen’s theories about pneuma, see Prioreschi, History of Medicine, 3:368–75.

12. Use of Breathing 3.8–9 (K 4.490–492); 4.6 (K 4.500); 5.5 (K 4.507); 5.8 (K 4.510). For a comparison of Galen’s views with others, see Galen on Respiration, esp. the essay by Furley, “Theories of Respiration before Galen,” 3–39. See also Debru, Le corps respirant.

13. Modern scholars explain that this “retiform plexus” or “rete mirabile” does not actually exist in human beings, suggesting that Galen must have seen such organs in animals and only supposed they existed also in human heads.

14. For elaboration of some of these ideas, see On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 3.19–36 (K 5.606–611). See also Woollam, “Concepts of the Brain,” esp. 17.

15. That this must refer to their own pneuma, and not the holy pneuma, seems clear because Jesus says they are “blessed” when found in this condition, and presumably they wouldn’t be “blessed” if they had a lack of the holy spirit.

16. I perhaps should point out that I am here “playing around” with the Greek for the purposes of playful theology. This combination of singular and plural is not at all unusual in classical Greek, though we English speakers do often take note of it. For an argument that the letter was intended to be read aloud to the entire house church, see Martin, New Testament, 213–17. It is possible that some scribes thought the second person plural pronoun at the end of the Letter to Philemon was a bit out of place. In a few rare cases the plural pronoun has been omitted or changed to “our.” And in at least one manuscript of the Latin Vulgate, the plural pronoun is changed to singular.

17. See, for example, Plutarch, On the Obsolescence of the Oracles (Moralia 432D-E); Martin, Corinthian Body, 238–42.

18. Johnson, Acts of the Apostles, 15; see also Edwards, Breath, 72.

19. Jenson, Triune Identity, 44; see also Rogers, Jr., After the Spirit, 77, citing Jenson.

20. See Stowers, “Matter and Spirit”; originally published in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities. Speaking of pneuma in Romans 8: “The divine pneuma is clearly not a ‘person’ as it becomes in later Christian Trinitarian theology. Paul agreed with the prevailing culture, including philosophers and medical doctors, that pneuma was the vital component of the living person and that there were various kinds and qualities of pneuma in the workings of the world.” Rogers, Holy Spirit, 99.

21. Rogers, After the Spirit, 54. For the spirit as seed filling the womb, see also the citation of Ambrose in Edwards, Breath, 43.

22. Wallace, Fragments, 4.

23. Kärkkäinen, Holy Spirit, 55; see Spiritual Canticle 25.7, in Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 571–72.

24. See, for instance, Edwards, Breath, esp. 126.

25. Rogers, After the Spirit, 56.

26. Johnson, Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit, 41–42.

27. Wallace, Fragments, 138. See Moltmann, Spirit of Life, at, for example, 6.

28. Holy Spirit, 87; pointing particularly to Moltmann, Spirit of Life, 40.

29. Fatula, Holy Spirit, 2.

30. Pinnock, Flame, 187. So also Pinnock: “The world reflects God’s glory; therefore anything can mediate the sacred, where there are eyes to see and ears to hear. Since the Spirit pervades the universe, any event or experience can bring God to mind and mediate his presence” (120).

31. Atkinson, Trinity After Pentecost, 56.

32. Johnson, She Who Is, 127–28. For the English translation of Hildegard used by Johnson, see Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias.

33. Johnson, “Creator Spirit,” 28.

34. Wallace, Fragments, 143–44.

35. Ibid., 143.

36. The quotation is from Rogers, Holy Spirit, 3.

37. Rogers, After the Spirit, 58. See also Tanner, God and Creation, 46–48. In speaking of “rules of Christian speech,” Rogers is alluding to a book by one of his teachers, George Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine.

38. Gaudium et Spes 22. Quoted in Kärkkäinen, Holy Spirit, 81.

39. Lumen Gentium 16.

40. For early studies of the sectarian nature of much of early Christianity (“early” within the genre of social-historical or social-scientific scholarship), see Meeks, “Stranger from Heaven”; Meeks, First Urban Christians, esp. 84–105; Elliott, Home.

41. See, for example, Sanders, “Paul Between Judaism and Hellenism”; see also, from the same collection, Martin, “Promise of Teleology,” 100–103.

42. See his comments on postmodernism and textual meaning at 230.

43. Markham, Understanding, 111. See D’Costa, “Christ.” For another argument that the Holy Spirit is not confined to the church, see Sesboüé, “Spirit in the Church”: “Finally, I remember that God’s Spirit, which inhabits the entire universe, is present in [non-Christians] in the form of an invitation, an incitement to open themselves up to selflessness, to self-giving, to the acknowledgement of God in one form or another” (74–75).

44. Rogers, After the Spirit, 53.

45. Edwards, Breath, 27.

46. See Martin, New Testament, 8.

47. Sesboüé, “Spirit in the Church,” 69–70. Sesboüé may be speaking here more particularly of the way we read the spirit in the Acts of the Apostles, but his point is more broadly applicable to much Christian experience.

48. My quotations of and line counts come from the current version of the Book of Common Prayer (1979).

49. Atkinson, Trinity, 61, quoting Tom Smail, who appropriates the phrase from Yves Congar and uses it as the title of his second chapter: Giving Gift, 30; Congar, I Believe, 3.5.

50. Bulgakov, Comforter (original Russian: 1936), 174.

51. Owen, ΠΝΕΥΜΑΤΟΛΟΓΙΑ (originally published 1676), 98.

52. This is a criticism of Western theologies usually made by Eastern theologians based on objections to the filioque. See, for example, Dumitri Staniloae, excerpt from “Trinitarian Relations and the Life of the Church,” in Holy Spirit, ed. Rogers, 247–57, esp. 250; see the discussion of the controversy from an ecumenical perspective in Shults and Hollingsworth, Holy Spirit, 75–76.

53. The term “Lord” does occur, but usually, I think, as a reference to God the Father or simply “God.” The one use of “Lord” that I think may be a reference to Jesus is in the term “the name of the Lord” in 5:14.

54. Pneuma occurs twice in James (2:26; 4:5), but in both cases it seems to be a reference to the pneuma of human beings, not the “holy spirit.”

55. Rogers, ed., Holy Spirit, 205.

56. From Spiritual Canticle, anthologized and translated in Rogers, ed., Holy Spirit, 278–80; these words are on 278.

57. Williams, Vinculum Amoris, esp. 16 for Augustine’s use of the term. See also Kariatlis, “‘What Then?” See esp. 9, where Gregory speaks of “the golden chain of salvation.” See also the discussion of the appropriation by Nicholas of Cusa of Augustine’s notion of nexus amoris, “bond of love,” in Hoff, Analogical Turn, 196.

58. Wallace, Fragments, see esp. 6 but also passim.

59. Burgess, Holy Spirit: Medieval, 5. Bulgakov says that Augustine was the first to suggest that the trinity is “love,” a notion Bulgakov says was “foreign to Eastern theology.” See Comforter, 42 (he cites De trin. 8.10.14; 9.11; 15.19)

60. Kärkkäinen, Holy Spirit, 41; see also for citations of Anselm of Canterbury.

61. See the examples given by Burgess, Holy Spirit: Medieval, 5.

62. The theme of spirit as loving mother occurs many times in Catherine’s writings, but for an example, see Dialogue 74: Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, 136–37.

63. See Fortman, The Triune God, 193–94.

64. Pinnock, Flame, 33; see also Hill, Three-Personed God, 78–79, 225–32.

65. Robert of Deutz provides a wonderful example of premodern exegesis when he takes the spirit “hovering over the waters” of Gen 1:2 to be a reference to the Holy Spirit and / in baptism. See the excerpt and translation in Rogers, ed., Holy Spirit, 178–79. Latin: Rupert of Deutz, De divinis officiis.

66. As Barth put it, for premodern Christians (and should be for us also), God or the holy spirit is scripture’s “autor primarius”: Church Dogmatics I/2, p. 523.

67. This quotation from the anthologized version of Fowl’s essay “How the Spirit Reads,” in Holy Spirit, ed. Rogers, 301–15, at 308. The essay is excerpted from Fowl, Engaging Scripture, 97–99, 113–27.

68. This is one of the main themes of my books Slavery as Salvation and The Corinthian Body.

69. My historical description is dependent on those provided by Burgess, Holy Spirit: Eastern, 12–15; and Burgess, Holy Spirit: Medieval, 6–8.

70. Kärkkäinen, Holy Spirit, 89, attributing this view to Moltmann and Pannenberg.

71. Pinnock, Flame, 196–97.

72. See the lengthy history and analysis of the subject in Bulgakov, Comforter, 75–151. Bulgakov provides many patristic citations but insists that the patristic evidence is inconclusive because the fathers just were not thinking of the problem the way the later controversy framed the questions. He does show, however, that later polemicists could call on different fathers for both their own positions because of the lack of clear expression of the formulae in their writings.

73. The exception I’ve found, though I’ve not conducted an exhaustive search, is the translation by J. B. Phillips, which uses “which.”

74. Pinnock, Flame, 15.

75. Gender in Hebrew is sometimes a bit more complicated. According to Manfred Dreytza, most of the 376 uses of ruach in the Hebrew Bible are feminine, about 63 are masculine, and the remaining ones are indeterminate by syntax: Der theologische Gebrauch, 182–88.

76. Hexaemeron 2.6 (SC 26:168–70).

77. See Brock, “Holy Spirit as Feminine,” 79. See also Winkler, Studies in Early Christian Liturgy, 66–80; Burgess, Holy Spirit: Eastern Christian Traditions, 172–73.

78. As for those of questionable orthodoxy, in the Gospel of Philip, the author disputes the idea that Mary conceived “of the holy spirit.” The author rejects the idea, asking “when did a female every conceive by a female?” The author is no doubt assuming the feminine gender of the word probably from Syriac or Aramaic influence. Gospel of Philip 55.23; trans. of logion 14 in Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures, 331–32. Origen quotes a fragment from the Gospel of the Hebrews that takes the spirit to be “mother”: “My mother, the Holy Spirit, took me just now by one of my hairs and carried me off to the great Mount Tabor.” Fragment 2 in Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, 9.

79. This and several of these references to Syriac texts are taken from Harvey, “Feminine Imagery.”

80. Ibid., 116–17.

81. Ibid, 133–39.

82. Especially noteworthy here is Johnson, She Who Is, 124–46; but see also Kärkkäinen, Holy Spirit, 95–96.

83. Wacker, “Spirit of God,” 38.

84. Catherine, Dialogue 141 (p. 292 in Noffke).

85. Burgess, Holy Spirit: Medieval, 118n19.

86. Jerome noted the three different gendered terms for the spirit in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek but simply concluded that this proved that “God is without gender.” In Isa. XI; on Isa 40:9–11, p. 459. For similar statements that God is “without” or “beyond” gender, see Gregory of Nazianzus, “God is not male although he is called Father,” “Fifth Theological Oration—On the Spirit,” Christology of the Later Fathers, 3:198; and Gregory of Nyssa, Cant. Cant. Hom. VII, 6:212–13; for English: McCambley, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 145–46.

87. Rogers, After the Spirit, 21n9.

88. Markham, Understanding, 84.

89. Ibid., 77; Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 396. See also Volf, After Our Likeness, 208–13.

90. Markham, Understanding, 77.

91. Ambrose, On the Holy Spirit, 2.5.38; see discussion in Edwards, Breath, 43.

92. Soskice, “Trinity and Feminism,” 146.

93. Tanner, Christ the Key, 215.