INTRODUCTION

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 worshiped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

—NICENE CREED (AD 381)

“THIRD ARTICLE THEOLOGY” refers to the theological content of the third article of the Nicene Creed, the symbol of the great ecumenical council of AD 381. The fathers of the Second Ecumenical Council, held at the imperial city of Constantinople in AD 381, amended and expanded the symbol of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 so as to bequeath to the church, among other things, a clear presentation of the dogma of the Holy Trinity. From the point of view of subsequent church history, one of the chief additions to this later symbol was the expanded article on the Holy Spirit. He is confessed as the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, and who is worshiped and glorified with the Father and Son: three divine persons, one indivisible Godhead. He is also the one who inspired the prophets of old. As is well known, later ecumenical disputes about the third article of the creed were a contributing factor in the great division of Christendom into East and West in the Great Schism of AD 1054. The Western church unilaterally added to the creedal statement about the procession of the Spirit the clause, “and the Son” (in Latin, filioque). Although this was supposed to be a way of clarifying the different ways in which the divine persons proceed so as to safeguard the distinction of divine persons, the Eastern churches took it as an imposition that was never agreed upon ecumenically. The rest, as they say, is history. The filioque controversy, as it has become known, is still with us today, and books, essays, and articles—as well as constructive proposals for the resolution of this ecumenical running sore!—are still rolling off the presses. Although the vitriol that this dispute engendered has been neutralised over the centuries, and although there has been real ecumenical progress in discussion of this thorny issue, it remains one of the great unresolved theological sources of division in the church.

This collection of essays from the Eighth Los Angeles Theology Conference, held under the auspices of Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, focuses on third article theology. We had wanted to have a conference on this theme for some years. But we lacked a clear unifying theme that would help bring together different theological contributions in a way that did not end up with a rather scattered set of reflections and interrogations of what is one of the most divisive of Christian dogmas. How were we to achieve the goal of a conference that did not add to this division? One thing was clear to us: another collection of essays focused entirely on the filioque controversy was probably not what was needed. So how could the conference keep the irenic temper of previous LA Theology Conferences, which were ecumenical in tone and yet sought to resource and fructify contemporary systematic theology through consideration of the vital dogmatic topic? The answer we landed upon was to focus on the Holy Spirit as the third person of the divine Trinity. Once this much was clear, the rest followed. Third article theology should be about the identification and articulation of the procession of the third person of the Godhead, whom we confess to be the Lord and giver of life, the one who proceeds from the Father, who is glorified with the Father and the Son, who inspires the prophets. Surely a collection of essays exploring facets of this great article of the creed would be a welcome addition to the literature that focuses on the divinity and personhood of the Holy Spirit in the Godhead rather than on the division that confessing the third article has sometimes brought about in the life of the church. The results of this process of deliberation, as well as the conference that was consequent upon them, are now in your hands.

The discussion kicks off with Fred Sanders in the first chapter. Beginning with the Bible’s way of naming the third person, he explores the perennial challenges of articulating a pneumatology that takes into account all the things that need to be held together. He argues that the foundation of pneumatology lies in the twin doctrines of the eternal processions (within the Godhead) and the temporal missions (in the world). When a theology of the revealed divine names is developed in constant conceptual dependence on a theology of missions and processions, pneumatology finds its proper place within Christian theology.

In chapter 2, Adonis Vidu takes up the question of how the missions of the Son and Spirit are ordered to each other. Epistemically, he moves from the missions to the processions. Historically, this has been the strongest argument for the filioque clause of the Nicene Creed, since (it is said) the Spirit is sent by the Son, from the Father. However, he reasons that this view has been based on an understanding of the mission of the Spirit as starting at Pentecost. But if there is a mission of the Spirit already at the conception of Jesus, then the Son is sent through the Holy Spirit, not the Spirit through the Son. Vidu argues that operations, which are common and appropriated, must be more carefully distinguished from missions, which are proper to the person sent. Thus, while there is an operation of the Spirit at the conception of Christ, he maintains that it is not strictly speaking a mission. The mission of the Spirit follows after the completion of the Son’s mission, just as the procession of the Spirit follows after the procession of the Son. Confounding the missions would lead to confounding the processions and thus the persons. Positively, if the mission of the Spirit presupposes the completed mission of the Son, it follows (he maintains) that the former is effected through the humanity of Christ specifically, as the “Spirit of Christ” or the “Spirit of the Son.”

In chapter 3, Kimberley Kroll and Joanna Leidenhag consider the problem of thirdness in pneumatology. They argue that this problem sometimes leads to the peculiar and liminal place allotted to the Holy Spirit in theology proper. The first two sections of the chapter outline how this problem of thirdness tends to either depersonalise and abstract pneumatology or assimilate it to other doctrines. To avoid these consequences, they propose that a theologically grounded notion of what and who the Spirit is, is found only when properly constrained by a third question: How? This question of how in relation to the Spirit is often gestured toward by way of the prepositions through, in, and by. Since it is through, in, and by the Spirit that creatures come to participate in Christ and know the Father, Kroll and Leidenhag argue that it is imperative for theologians to wrestle with this how question. In the final section of the chapter, they argue that the self-revelation of the Holy Spirit (i.e., how the Holy Spirit reveals himself) should inform our understanding of who and what the triune God is.

In chapter 4, “The Mystery of the Immanent Trinity and the Procession of the Spirit,” Sameer Yadav explores the filioque by arguing for a particular way of identifying the evidential base and inferential structure required for determining the question of single versus dual procession of the Spirit. He also considers the theological stakes of favoring one model over the other. Yadav advocates a form of mysterianism about the immanent Trinity, in dialogue with some recent, prominent advocates of mysterianism. On his view, even a minimalist approach to the inferential structure of Trinitarian belief must include a commitment to logical coherence. The primary ground and purpose of Trinitarian belief consists in its “grammatical” relation to the Christian experience of salvation and practice of worship. How much is at stake in the doctrinal decision about whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son? Yadav argues that decisions made here matter for determining the proper shape of worship as well as for making decisions about the hypostasis of the Spirit.

Chapter 5 takes an epistemic turn, as Daniel Castelo steps back from the content of pneumatology to consider the necessarily pneumatological orientation of Christian God-knowledge. Castelo is concerned not only to locate theological discourse within a responsibly public setting (such as the modern university) but also to approach pneumatology as spiritual illumination, which reveals some of the ways God-knowledge is a particular kind of knowledge. “It is a kind of knowledge made possible by the Spirit pouring out God’s love upon our hearts, that very center and core of who we are . . . not so much seized but received, not so much generated but participated in” (p. 81). By attending to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in a few key scriptural categories, Castelo traces the implications of consistently recognizing the pneumatic character of all Christian God-knowledge.

Chapter 6, coauthored by Jerome Van Kuiken and Joshua M. McNall, asks about the place of the Holy Spirit in Trinitarian theology by canvassing recent proposals to confess a Spirituque doctrine. They define Spirituque as “the idea that the much-debated filioque of intra-Trinitarian relations should be complemented by the notion that the Spirit participates with the Father in the Son’s eternal generation so that it may be correct to say (at least in some sense) that the Son’s eternal generation involves both the Father and the Spirit” (p. 88). Theologians from a variety of confessional traditions have explored Spirituque as a way of locating the Holy Spirit’s person and work in order to overcome a perennial temptation to subordinate pneumatology to Christology. While noting the diverse motivations and goals of the various Spirituque proposals that have circulated, Van Kuiken and McNall offer a cautious but constructive affirmation of the move.

In chapter 7, “Holy Pedagogue, Perfecting Guide: The Holy Spirit’s Presence in Creation,” Daniel Lee Hill builds a bridge between areas of pneumatology that are not often connected: the Holy Spirit’s particular mode of presence to created reality and the work of the Holy Spirit in salvation. Drawing on resources from Basil of Caesarea to Robert Jenson, Hill argues for an understanding of the Spirit’s presence as “inscribing creation with its telos, training creation in wisdom, and guiding creation toward its ultimate end: reconciliation in Christ” (p. 106). While acknowledging that cosmological categories like space need to be conceptually purified and refined for theological use, Hill presses them into service in an argument that illuminates the consistently recognizable character of the Holy Spirit’s work in a way that distinguishes the orders of creation and redemption without bifurcating them.

In chapter 8, Esther Acolatse explores “The Relational Nature of the Spirit in God and Humans.” Her concern is to recognize God’s transcendence by tracing the way the Holy Spirit exists in relation to the Father and the Son within the divine life. Acknowledging this inner-divine relationality does not result in distancing God from humans and their spiritual lives; on the contrary, it enables us to recognize that the divine incursions into human spirituality are more than just a naturalized mysticism commonly available to all human subjects. Encounters with the divine Spirit are not merely experiences of our created spirituality but are the kind of things witnessed to by Pentecostal and majority world Christians: a meeting with God the Spirit. In critical dialogue with the work of John Levison, Acolatse extends this analysis to connect the spiritual life of God to the spiritual life of creatures, without collapsing them into each other.

Lucy Peppiatt has previously written on the complex subject of Spirit Christology; in chapter 9 she turns to questions of Christomorphic pneumatology. Although the main point of her essay is to give proper attention to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, Peppiatt argues forcefully that pneumatology must be developed alongside Christology and never in isolation from it. In fact, from one angle, all the work of the Holy Spirit stands out as the work of the Spirit of Christ, bearing witness to Jesus Christ. To explore how these two doctrines mutually implicate each other, Peppiatt interrogates the kenosis tradition in Christology, showing how theologies of christological kenosis would benefit from the inclusion of pneumatological plerosis: “So on the one hand we have the story of the assumption of humanity by the Son that entails a kenosis. On the other we have the filling of humanity by the divine in the Son in the hypostatic union and importantly for us, by the Spirit at Pentecost, where the Spirit is poured out on all flesh” (p. 158). The result of letting pneumatology be shaped by Christology is not just a clarification and concretizing of the shape of Christology but a better scope and balance for Trinitarian theology overall.

In chapter 10, Joshua Cockayne notes how the Nicene Creed groups belief in the Holy Spirit with belief in the church. To draw out the meaning of this creedal linking of Spirit and church, he draws on recent philosophical work on social ontology. Cockayne finds possible models for thinking about the work of the Spirit in constituting and uniting the church in proposals about group agency. The church is in certain ways like other human groups; though constituted by many individual human agents, it is capable of acting as one group agent. Cockayne notes that the church differs from the examples of social wholes discussed in the literature on social agency though, because its unity comes not from human structure and organisation but from the continued work of Holy Spirit uniting and sustaining it.

Chapter 11, “The Holy Spirit as Liberator: An Exploration of a Black American Pneumatology of Freedom,” is a close look at one particular, unique tradition within modern Christian history with the intention of drawing out universally instructive theological insights. Leon Harris examines the work of the Holy Spirit as the deliverer of black Christians from a disruption of their imago Dei, who makes possible the (re)creation of their status in Christ. Engaging with select voices from the black American theological tradition, Harris indicates the difference that could be made by a constructive pneumatology within the contemporary black church. Such a pneumatology would help hold together some things that often come apart in theological traditions that are not similarly shaped by the holistic deliverance of the black church: in particular, the deep coherence of spiritual and material liberation is something to which this tradition’s pneumatology bears eloquent witness.

Chapter 12 is an extended meditation by Ephraim Radner on the claim that the Holy Spirit teaches us to die faithfully. Radner has diagnosed a consistent modern preoccupation with pressing the category of pneumatology into service as a way of escape from creatureliness, making the Spirit serve as a contrast to the world of created existence and struggle. It is against this background that he insists on the Spirit as teaching faithful death rather than enabling an escapist transcending of death. The latter would in fact be a refusal to be creatures who learn from their maker how to exist in “our unsolicited births and our inescapable deaths” (p. 207). Radner introduces as a case study the life and work of the little-known Jewish Christian theologian Ulrich Simon (1913–97). Simon wrote about tragedy and history, but Radner is more interested in showing the way this theological writing arose from his life of contingent vulnerability. Simon’s theological life enables the insight that “the Holy Spirit is the very divine condition for a reality that places death and faith as the limit of creaturely existence,” Radner says (p. 198). This final chapter, “Running Away from Sorrow: Pneumatology and Some Modern Discontents,” is an evocative and inconclusive conclusion for a volume on the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

With our Orthodox and Roman Catholic sisters and brothers we confess the third article in its ecumenical form. With our sisters and brothers in the churches of the Reformation, we echo the creed as it is refracted down the centuries in the particular confessions of these different communions. With our Anabaptist, Baptist, and Free Church sisters and brothers, we confess the Lordship of the Holy Spirit. With our charismatic, Pentecostal, and third-wave sisters and brothers we confess to hearing the voice of the Spirit in the churches today, the same Spirit who inspired the prophets of old. With all those who confess the name of Christ and who hope for the gracious susurrations of the Holy Spirit, we offer these essays as a contribution to the ongoing dogmatic conversation about third article theology and about the presence of the person and work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the body of Christ today. May these essays extend discussion of the doctrine of the person and work of the Holy Spirit today, ad maiorem dei gloriam.

Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders, April 2020