CHAPTER 1
THE SPIRIT WHO
IS FROM GOD
The Pneumatology of
Procession and Mission
FRED SANDERS
THIS CHAPTER IS AN ESSAY in triangulation, locating the doctrine of the Holy Spirit by inference from other doctrines and with reference to those other doctrinal loci. Such an indirect strategy is necessary because of some peculiarities of pneumatology. While the doctrine of the Spirit is not obscure in itself, its exposition is beset with certain ambiguities that resist a more straightforward method. These pneumatological ambiguities become theologically troublesome especially in relation to the doctrines that border it: the Trinity, Christology, and the relation of God to creation. These contiguous doctrines generally have clearer boundaries. They have histories in which they have been more elaborately formulated. As a result, they can draw attention away from pneumatology. Instead, this chapter attempts to borrow clarity from these surrounding doctrines for the consolidation of pneumatology. It takes three steps toward placing pneumatology within a comprehensive doctrine of God. First, it analyzes the pattern of biblical naming of the Holy Spirit; second, it relates pneumatology to the doctrine of divine processions and missions, which is fundamental for classical Trinitarian theology; and third, it explores the fruitfulness of using the less biblically obvious category of gift as a description of the third person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is God and is from God; by triangulation, this chapter undertakes to specify the meaning of both sides of this statement.
NAMING THE THIRD PERSON OF THE TRINITY
To speak about the third person of the Trinity is not yet to invoke any name. The phrase “third person of the Trinity” is not so much a name, nor even an identifying description, as it is a kind of doctrinal map locating this one by triangulation from other plottable doctrinal points: it directs us to find the Spirit in the Trinitarian taxis at location three. It says something like, “Go to the Father, follow the way of procession, and when you get to the Son, you are not quite there yet; make a left turn and proceed to the terminus of Pneumatology Lane.” The phrase “third person of the Trinity” is also fairly obviously an invocation of a set of theologoumena honored by long usage but not found in the words of Scripture. The key words Trinity, person, and even third are not given to us in the very words of scriptural revelation. These words are offered as conceptual paraphrases that give an account of the overall meaning of what Scripture says on these topics. One disadvantage of using this elaborate theological terminology of “third person of the Trinity” is that it could lead to abstraction and distraction. In order to avoid these pitfalls, we need to make careful use of the phrase and handle it intentionally, as a schematic way of saying what Scripture says, while regularly taking recourse to the way Scripture actually speaks. But using this elaborate terminology also has distinct advantages. One advantage is that it conjures for our minds the overall doctrinal matrix within which we are speaking of this person, while also picking out precisely the Spirit in distinction from the Father and the Son. One of the constant duties of pneumatology is picking out the Holy Spirit within the Trinity without lifting the Holy Spirit from that Trinitarian matrix. We want to be able to ponder this one in particular, but not this one in isolation. The phrase third person of the Trinity does this rather abstractly and schematically, but it does locate the Spirit.
Let us now follow Scripture in actually naming the third person of the Trinity. Scripture names the third person of the Trinity in many ways, and Christian theology has the task of responding appropriately to this biblical pattern of naming in a way that is both responsive to God’s word, confessing the identity of the Spirit, and responsible to theology’s office of teaching, following “the pattern of the sound words” (2 Tim 1:13) that we have heard from the apostles and prophets.1 Serving the Lord and serving the church in this way, the theological work of pneumatology is a particular mode of conceptually guarding “the good deposit” entrusted to us, which Paul tells Timothy is something that must itself be done “by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us” (2 Tim 1:14). There is something reflexive or self-involving if we apply this phrase by the Holy Spirit to pneumatological study. All theology, as a catechetical guarding of the good deposit by a disciplined following of the pattern of sound teaching, must take place “by the Holy Spirit who dwells in us,” but the doctrinal locus of pneumatology is uniquely a field of doctrinal work simultaneously by the Spirit and about the Spirit. At its most instructive, Christian pneumatology serves as a foregrounding of what has always already been going on as the pervasive background of all theology and can catalyze the deepest moments of insight and awareness. But great care is required because exercises in pneumatology, at their least instructive, can become doctrinally diffuse, saying nothing much in particular; or vacuous, holding open a place to receive some content at a later time; or distracting, inviting the mind to pursue any number of other subjects in quest of the long-awaited definitive treatment. Theologians confront this danger when they direct attention to the Holy Spirit; they might come away with a lot of good ideas, each of which is interesting, promising, and in itself perfectly correct, but move in so many directions that it no longer feels like one doctrine. In other words, one of the desiderata for responsible pneumatology is that once it is done, it should stay done. A well-ordered and well-functioning doctrine of the Holy Spirit should secure a solid and permanent basis for all the things we need to say in the full scope of the doctrine. The Spirit blows where it wills, but pneumatology ought to stay put.
The biblical pattern of naming, I suggest, provides a foundation for a stable pneumatology. That pattern establishes a relation between God and God’s Spirit, which is precisely what was selected for further development by the central traditions of Christian theology. Viewed thus as an expansion of a biblical pattern of naming, the ancient patristic notion of the procession of the Spirit protects against pneumatological chaos. The pneumatology of the early church developed and articulated these concepts in part with this goal of stability in mind; especially the line of Alexandrian thinkers from Origen through Didymus the Blind, Athanasius, and Cyril were attentive to the way the doctrine of eternal procession served as a grounding or integrating concept for the vast and disparate array of ways the Scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit. This first phase of the argument will not be carried out in the mode of commentary on patristic arguments, though. Instead, it will be a brief demonstration on the grounds of the matter itself, which is the pattern of words used by Holy Scripture in naming the Spirit.
In one sense, the difficulty we encounter in expressing pneumatology could be called the Bible’s fault. The Holy Spirit’s self-revelation and self-naming in inspired Scripture is diverse. In the Old Testament we meet references to the Spirit of God, but already there is diversity and plurality in the divine names used: we hear of the Spirit of Elohim and the Spirit of Yahweh, even the Spirit of Adonai and of the Most High. By Isaiah 11, this Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. Elsewhere, the pattern of naming splits off even more, so that no sooner do we learn that the Spirit indwells the temple than we have to learn that the glory also indwells, and that spirit and glory are, if not synonyms, at least acceptable parallelisms. And so begins the proliferation of new nouns that can serve as ciphers of the Spirit: holiness, glory, power, cloud, presence. In poetic parallelisms, all of these can point to the Spirit without invoking the expected name. In the thicket of these many Old Testament names, the most constant element sometimes seems to be the word of. In fact, there lies the real biblical root of the doctrine of procession. The fundamental pattern in the Spirit’s self-naming is ofness. The ofness is also complex, of course: sometimes it signifies identity (the Spirit of God is God); sometimes it signifies distinction (not just God, but the Spirit of God). Other divine self-descriptions follow this logic, including a range of self-descriptions that we have no reason to think of as especially pneumatological: both the face of God and the name of God are used with the same tension, signifying God yet also signifying something from God. We might say, in these instances, that God is on both sides of the of: God of God, to use the Nicene idiom. In a phrase like Spirit of God, the word Spirit sometimes functions adjectivally, meaning “divine Spirit.” “Spirit of holiness,” on this construal, signifies “Holy Spirit,” a name not prominent in the Old Testament and not especially hypostatized when it does occur.2 Of can function generatively (what comes from God) or genitively (belonging to God, characterizing God). However we interpret of, the ofness is a primal element of the biblical revelation.
What the New Testament adds is a certain consolidation, but not a straightforward linguistic one. It is true that the New Testament writings promote the term Holy Spirit to the dignity and function of a proper name, above all in the baptismal formula “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19). Here is an apostolic, or even a dominical, way of thinking and speaking of what goes by so many names in the Old Testament. But while there is a definite consolidation of pneumatological reference, it is not exactly a consolidation of names. In fact, the New Testament actually expands our catalog of names, and does so more or less predictably, on the threefold lines suggested by the baptismal formula: Spirit of the Father, Spirit of the Son, Spirit of Jesus, Spirit of Christ, Spirit of adoption, and so on. The New Testament consolidation, in other words, is not a consolidation of names but of sending, because central to New Testament pneumatology is the fact that the Spirit is sent.
We are about to turn our attention from revealed names to the revelation of the Spirit’s sending. Before we do so, let us clarify why our way forward through a theology of names is, if not exactly blocked, at least not a clear enough road to proceed straightforwardly. As we have seen, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is in every way imaginable a venerable formula, and the way it assigns a name to the third person of the Trinity is eminently useful for clear theological discourse. Nevertheless, this form of words does not provide everything we might wish for as we take up the project of pneumatology. Consider these three observations about what the name Holy Spirit in the baptismal triad does and does not provide. First, Holy Spirit as the name of the third person in a doctrinal formula is not distinct. Holy is common to the divine being, and so is spirit. But combined, somehow they become the name that picks out the third person. Second, Holy Spirit is not a relational name. Father implies Son and vice versa, but Holy Spirit does not imply any correlative terms. Father and Son are relational realities with relational names; Holy Spirit is a relational reality without a relational name. Father and Son are family words, but Holy Spirit is not. Greek and Latin traditions, as we will see, have offered two different ways of making the Spirit’s name serve these relational ends: in Greek, speaking of Spirit as breath, and in Latin speaking of Spirit as gift. Third, Holy Spirit is not a necessarily personal name; it is not obviously about somebody rather than something. The whole matrix of New Testament language about the Spirit seems to pick up on this aspect of the name and speaks of the Spirit as poured out or given.
None of the difficulties listed here are insurmountable; they merely require both a careful handling of the Bible’s manifold ways of speaking and a willingness for theologians to specify what is meant by the variety of occurrences of the name Holy Spirit. One good example of a theologian who gladly takes on this task is Herman Witsius, whose exposition of the Apostles’ Creed alerted readers to the variety of ways to construe the word Spirit as it occurs in Scripture:
The term Spirit, when used with respect to God, is taken either essentially, or personally, or metonymically. It is taken essentially, when it is ascribed to God, in reference to the essence common to all the persons;—personally, when it is attributed to some one person, whether the second or the third;—metonymically, when it denotes certain effects or gifts.3
The guidance Witsius provides does not come from digging deeper into the historical or grammatical context of each appearance of the word Spirit. It comes rather from his commitment to bring the overall context of Scripture, read cumulatively and canonically, to bear on any individual occurrence of the word. He moves from whole to part, considering the full witness of Scripture to the revelation of the triune God and then offering a rough taxonomy of possible meanings of any occurrence of the word under investigation. In doing so, he takes in more than just the analysis of revealed names. He also takes in the salvation-historical matrix of divine actions within which these names are given. That is to say, the main reason he is unconfused by the ambiguity of the word Spirit is that he has already taken his bearings from the economy of salvation, in particular from the epochal event of the Father and Son sending the Spirit.
A theology of revealed names must arise from—or ride along on the momentum of—economic-soteriological analysis. The central tradition of pneumatology has widely recognized this but has rarely made it explicit, partly because it has always pursued pneumatology comprehensively and organically in a way that does not bifurcate names and sending. Especially if we attend to patristic exegetical writings, we find extensive development of the recognition that the Spirit is sent from God and a confident tracing of this sending back into the eternal being of God by recognition of an eternal procession. In short confessional formulas, the theology of names often comes to the fore, and especially in pneumatology the narrative about the Spirit’s sending is somewhat backgrounded and implicit. But read sympathetically, the Nicene fathers and those in their tradition work out their name theology and even their precise terminology on the basis of a mission- and-procession theology. This explains why, in the Fifth Theological Oration (Oration 31, “On the Holy Spirit”), Gregory Nazianzus was able to rest the whole doctrinal and hermeneutical complex of pneumatology on a single statement of Jesus containing a single key word from John 15:26: proceeds. The Holy Spirit is “the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father.”4 In conflict with opponents who deny the deity of the Spirit, Gregory elevates the word who proceeds (Gk. ekporeuetai) to the status of a technical term for the eternal relation of origin by which the Spirit eternally is from God. Nazianzus recognizes that this saying of Jesus includes two elements. Jesus refers to the time “when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father.” Nazianzus installs the distinction between missions and processions at the comma between “I will send to you from the Father” and “the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father.” He offers this as an interpretation of Scripture, in a hermeneutical synthesis of the full biblical witness to the Spirit. This is how classical Trinitarian theology wove together the theology of revealed names and the theology of divine missions.
MISSION AND PROCESSION
With consideration of the mission of the Spirit, pneumatology falls into line with Christology because Christ and the Spirit are co-sent in the New Testament. The two sendings are brought into relation in the argument of Galatians 4:4–6: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son . . . and sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba, Father!’ ” The logic that establishes eternal generation applies in parallel fashion to the eternal procession of the Spirit. The God who sent a Son must have always had a Son, and the God who sent a Spirit must have always had a Spirit. These two temporal missions reveal eternal processions, indicating an eternal fromness in the life and being of God. These processions in the divine life can be called the internal works of God that simply are God. They are goings-forth that are first of all internally realized, and as such, fully realized, fully perfect, and satisfied in all their dynamics. By grace they open up to temporal sendings. This is the classic doctrine of the Trinitarian processions and missions, and it is the most important conceptual tool for confessing the identity of the Spirit as God. But before pursuing its pneumatological implications further, we should attend to the way it demarcates the eternal, always-already-perfectly-accomplished life of God proper and the free, gracious actions into which God enters. Very loosely, the distinction being recognized here is between the inner life and the outer actions of God. We can expound it more fully by refusing for a moment to expound the dynamic in terms of missions and processions, instead speaking initially in a slightly more abstract way. We can speak of the actions of God, internal and external. Employing the concept of action to talk about what God does, we will say that God is the source of all sorts of things in the world. But then if we turn around and ask about what God is doing when considered apart from these doings in the world, we have a choice to make. One option is to say that in the divine life there is no action, only being. We could then describe being as something very alive, as something greater than action, while carefully avoiding the word action because we want to save it for what God does with the world. You can go pretty far with this option. Question: What’s God doing when he’s not doing anything? Answer: Being, but in a divine way. Apophatic silence descends, perhaps a bit prematurely, before the flash of insight that is supposed to give us a glimpse of what we are talking about by choosing this language.
But another, less standoffish option is to apply the category of action to the divine life in itself and then to specify what those actions in the life of God are. And this is the path that mainstream Trinitarian theology in fact pursued. Building on what Augustine called opera and the Cappadocians called energeia, Latin-language theology developed a distinction between the inward acts of the Trinity and the outward acts. What are the inward acts of the Trinity? They are generation and procession, concepts that had long been fundamental to Trinitarianism but that now came under the general conceptual framework of actions in God. Theologians in the classic tradition of Trinitarian doctrine have found it easy to confess that the external actions of the Trinity are undivided. One reason is that they started from a clear confession that the internal actions of the Trinity were not undivided. Or, to put it less double-negatively, the internal actions of the Trinity are distinct and distinguishable as real relations that stand in relative opposition to each other. This relative opposition is crucial because the key thing about these actions is that each of them has a person of the Trinity at each end. The Father begets or generates the Son, which puts Father and Son at opposite ends of the relation. The Spirit proceeds from the Father (“at least from the Father,” we can ecumenically agree, prescinding for now from filioque questions), putting Spirit and Father over against each other within the divine life. This polarity, or opposing relation, is why the inward works are not called undivided: they mark the distinctions among the persons. The formula used by the Council of Florence in 1439 is what has become the classic statement of the principle: In Deo omnia sunt unum, ubi non obviat relationis opposition, “In God all things are one except where there is opposition of relation.”5
In the second volume of Wolf hart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology, he advocates using the category of action. He uses it, in fact, to distinguish between internal and external actions of God. One advantage he points out is that it helps conceptualize divine aseity: the notion of internal actions is “a great gain for the actual understanding of God that God should be thought of as active.” Pannenberg asks,
Does there not have to be a world of creatures, or a relation to it, if God is to be thought of as active? Christian doctrine denies this by describing the trinitarian relations between Father, Son, and Spirit as themselves actions. To these divine actions in the creation of the world are added as actions of a different kind, as outward actions.6
Pannenberg calls for a high wall of distinction between internal and external actions:
The acts of the trinitarian persons in their mutual relations must be sharply differentiated from their common outward actions. This differentiation finds support in the rule that posits and antithesis between the inseparable unity of the trinitarian persons in their outward action relative to the world and the distinctiveness of their inner activities relative to one another, which is the basis of the personal distinctions of Father, Son, and Spirit.7
In other words, external acts of the Trinity are undivided because the internal acts of the Trinity are distinct relative to one another. Because this is true, we can recognize that “God does not need the world in order to be active. He is in himself the living God in the mutual relations of Father, Son, and Spirit. He is, of course, active in a new way in the creation of the world.”8 The internal actions of the Trinity thus help us conceive of God in himself as the living and active God, not a God waiting for a created, historical stage on which to be living and active. They enable a confession of dynamism as part of the divine life, as a form that aseity takes. And they do this in an orderly way without illegitimately manufacturing any new content for Trinitarian theology. The content provided by the category of action continues to be what it has always been: the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit. Anchoring the livingness and activity of God in eternal generation and eternal spiration, the older theology had the conceptual space to declare the external works of the Trinity undivided.
By contrast, any theology that denies or downplays the eternal generation of the Son is likely to need the historical manifestation of the incarnate Son to carry all the meaning and significance; and any theology which downplays the eternal procession of the Spirit is likely to require the historical manifestation of the Spirit to function as an exhaustive and fully satisfying pneumatology. A theologian with a weak grasp of the internal actions of the Trinity is a theologian who will need to make too much of the separateness of the external actions. Such theology is bound to exploit the external actions for more than they can contain and is under considerable pressure to read them as the actions of three different agents doing three distinct things. In extreme cases, for example Moltmann at his most drastic,9 the events in the history of salvation may turn out to be the actual ground of the distinctions among the persons of the Trinity. There is an understandable desire to recognize the cross of Christ as the place where all the action is. But to fail to recognize that the action was in the being of God before it was among us is to give away too much. As Karl Barth asked Moltmann in a 1964 letter, “Would it not be wise to accept the doctrine of the immanent trinity of God?”10
For pneumatology in particular, exclusive preoccupation with external actions at the expense of internal actions has a disfiguring effect. The underlying reason for this has to do, once again, with the biblical revelation, which does not identify a single, central way of working for the Spirit but instead offers a baffling diversity of works of the Spirit. Theologians and exegetes have long recognized this. Consider this telling sentence from Basil of Caesarea’s fourth-century treatise On the Holy Spirit:
Through the Holy Spirit comes our restoration to Paradise, our ascension to the Kingdom of heaven, our adoption as God’s sons, our freedom to call God our Father, our becoming partakers of the grace of Christ, being called children of light, sharing in eternal glory, and in a word, our inheritance of the fullness of blessing, both in this world and the world to come.11
It is a magnificent collocation of what the Holy Spirit does for believers and is redolent of the whole sweep of the biblical witness. Some of Basil’s phrases are obviously from a single passage of Scripture, while others evoke a journey of biblical theology from Genesis (“Paradise”) to Revelation (“the world to come”). In context, the sentence is part of Basil’s book-length argument for the deity of the Holy Spirit, and it is a key passage for that argument. These great benefits of receiving the Spirit are of such a character that they could not be given to us by any person who was not God. That is implicit in the fact that Basil links the Spirit’s work to the Trinitarian work of salvation. “Through the Holy Spirit comes our . . . adoption as God’s sons, our freedom to call God our Father, our becoming partakers of the grace of Christ.” The Spirit makes good to us the work of the Father and the Son; therefore he too is God.
But formally, the main thing to notice about this list is that it is a list. There is something about the work of the Holy Spirit that makes theologians start making lists. There is a manifoldness, an overflowing fullness, a profusion of specificities, and a diffusion of bounties that makes pneumatology take the form of lists. At the systematic level, often the real constructive challenge for pneumatology is not so much filling out the list of the many works of the Spirit but finding a way to comprehend them all under one organizing and summarizing category or notion. Many of the most edifying discussions of pneumatology are strong on the listing and weak on the gathering.12 Think of what a contrast that is with the work of Christ: though there are infinite facets to the work of Christ, and his work can be contemplated under various illuminating headings (office, status, moment, object, etc.), it is always obvious that these are various ways of getting at the one work of Christ. Not so with the Spirit. Accounts of his work tend more toward sprawl and diffuseness. This phenomenon probably accounts for some of the unsettledness we experience in pneumatology, the way every book on the Holy Spirit seems in some ways to be starting the project all over from the beginning again. The character of the revelation tends toward wonderful, glorious listhood.
When we speak of missions revealing processions, we are not speaking of any sending. Not all sendings reveal eternal processions. God sends prophets, apostles, servants, angels, and all manner of other emissaries. But when God the Father sends the Son and the Spirit, we meet God in sendings that have infinite depth behind them: self-sendings in which God sends God; sendings in which God is God with us. This is the economic Trinity, in which we see that the of in the locution “Spirit of God” goes all the way back into the depths of God. For a doctrine of God to be in earnest, it must take this step, seeing the processions behind the missions or, in modern idiom, confessing in the economic Trinity the revelation and presence of the immanent Trinity.
GIVING OF THE GIFT
We have observed the fact that much of the biblical revelation of the Spirit tends toward a diffuseness but needs to be understood against a more unified background, the background of its eternal depth in the one procession of the Spirit within the eternal life of God. The history of theology is a history of trying to find faithful ways of foregrounding this deep scriptural background, making the scriptural background functional or operational for confessing the theology of the Holy Spirit. In the history of the doctrine, a few proposals have been especially influential. Chief among these is Augustine’s strategy of pressing the biblical notion of gift into service as a useable name for the third person of the Trinity. Augustine is keenly aware of the terminological ambiguity we have been examining: Spirit is a word for God but somehow also the word for the third person of the triune God. He puzzles over this repeatedly, including in the fifth book of his De Trinitate. When Jesus affirms to the Samaritan woman in John 4:24 that “God is Spirit,” Augustine notes that it seems to be a reference to the Father (who seeks worshipers), to the Holy Spirit (symbolized by the water Jesus will provide), and to God as a whole, that is, to the divine nature or the Holy Trinity.13 By what standard can the theological reader make these distinctions? Augustine’s solution moves on two lines simultaneously. First, he draws in an argument from the nature of the Holy Spirit’s place in the economy of salvation, broadly considered: the Spirit is given by the Father and the Son. And second, on the basis of this giving, Augustine lifts up the word gift and presses it into service as a name, a name that is inherently relational.
In an essay on pneumatology, Robert Louis Wilken expounded the logic of this Augustinian move by noting how pneumatological naming is shaped by the unique role of the Holy Spirit in the economy of salvation. The distinctiveness of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit depends on the way it arises from recognition of the Spirit’s work in salvation history. Wilken’s orienting question is whether Pentecost can be considered a peer of Easter, noting that “in some ways the history of the feast of Pentecost can serve as a metaphor for the development of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit.”14 That development, as we have already mentioned, is different from Christology. The doctrines about Christ practically jumped off the pages of Scripture and into orthodox theological confession as compared with the way the biblical witness about the Holy Spirit gradually emerged without often being the focus of conciliar attention. Comparatively speaking, the history of Christology is the striking appearance of the solar disc of sunrise pushing back the darkness, while pneumatology is the slow dawning of an overcast day that imperceptibly turns the night into morning. Putting the contrast differently, christological progress always turned on confronting a heretical teaching in order to refute it and defend the truth, a truth which became clearer in the course of conflict. Progress in pneumatology, on the other hand, was always marked by a process of culling Scriptures and exploring relationships among passages. In pneumatology, Wilken says, “the Fathers are less engaged in defending something than in searching for something. Only gradually and after they peered intently at the murkiness before them, does the goal of their quest come clear.”15
Within this gradual process, one of the key clarifying moments was when a particular Latin theological tradition pressed the word gift into pneumatological usage. Wilken points to Hilary of Poitiers as the first theologian to speak confidently about the Holy Spirit in terms of the many biblical passages in which it is “the distinctive characteristic of the Spirit, that he is given, received, and possessed.” Drawing on this pattern, Hilary calls him the donum fidelium, the “gift to the faithful.”16 Gift, in other words, is shorthand for being given, received, and possessed. Hilary noticed something distinctive about the biblical language for the Holy Spirit, namely, that a field of biblical terms associated with the Spirit depict being given and poured out, on the one hand, and being received or indwelling, on the other. That is, the gift is seen not only from the perspective of the giver but also from that of the recipient. The gift enters the life of the recipient and becomes his own, which in turn relates the recipient to the giver. Gift, as presented in the Scriptures, has built into it overtones of reciprocity and mutuality.17
Though the gradual progress continued, the next leap forward seems to be Augustine’s decision to trace the characteristic giftness of the Spirit back from the church’s experience into the immanent being of God. It is Augustine who, agreeing that the Spirit is the gift to mankind in the history of salvation, thinks to ask the question, “Was he already gift before there was anyone to give him to?” (De Trinitate 5.15.6). As Wilken paraphrases the question, “Does the term ‘gift’ as a designation of the Holy Spirit only apply to the economy?”18 The pneumatological move here is parallel to the christological. If Christ is the Son of God for us, he must have been the eternal Son of God; and if the Spirit is gift to us, he must have always had the character of gift. But whose gift to whom? In the absence of creatures, the exchange would have to be between the Father and the Son. Yet it is just here, at the move to the eternal inner life of the Trinity, that gift seems too impersonal a term to serve well.
At this point, it begins to matter that Hilary did not simply use proof texts to identify Spirit with gift but worked with the thrust and logic of a wide range of texts to derive an account of the Spirit’s characteristic role as marked by reciprocity and mutuality. Augustine took this approach one step further by annexing to this gift-reciprocity-mutuality cluster the word love. In order to distinguish the proprium, the distinctive character of the third person as manifested in the economy, we must think in terms of a gift of self-involving love that creates communion. “Augustine wants to say not only that the gift of the Holy Spirit creates a communion between God and the believer but also that the Spirit is the ‘communion’ between Father and Son.”19 And that, finally, is why the third person is specially called Holy Spirit, even though the other two persons are holy and spirits, and God in general (the one triune God) is holy and spirit. As Augustine says, “He is properly called the Holy Spirit . . . with good reason. Because he is common to them both, he is called properly what they are called in common.”20
This particular Latin pneumatological tradition that reached its ripe formulation in Augustine is a powerful integrative proposal. It is perceptive in its recognition of the giving, mutuality, and reciprocity effected by the third person of the Trinity in the economy of salvation. It is also perceptive in taking the next step of asking what divine reality lies behind the history of salvation: a who question about a person of the Trinity cannot be fully answered without taking recourse to the eternal Trinity, to God in himself without any necessary reference to us and our salvation. As for the decisive step of transposing this insight about the gift into the eternal being of God, it functions properly for pneumatology as long as we keep in mind that it is intended as a heuristic help for making sense of what Scripture says, and that it is carefully designed to solve certain problems we would encounter if we tried to do pneumatology by working exclusively with the data of the revealed names. It leverages the Spirit’s mission to make the most of the insights delivered by the names. Yet other developments from other theological trajectories are also possible. In fact, a prominent development in the tradition of Greek-language theology addresses many of the same problems and finds strikingly parallel solutions. The tradition that stretches from Irenaeus to John of Damascus plays on the Greek word pneuma and emphasizes its underlying breath imagery. Just as word and breath both come out of the one who speaks, the Son and Spirit have their eternal origin in the Father, and both carry out among us a characteristic extension of their way of being in the eternal life of God. This Greek tradition has different opportunities and shortcomings than the Latin tradition. But both traditions take up biblical material and invest it with deeper significance than is evident in Scripture itself; both press key biblical terms into use for purposes that they do not serve in any explicit biblical argument. Above all, they are alternative strategies for doing exactly the same thing: anchoring the theology of the revealed names to a mission-procession theology and making explicit the inherent relationality of the Spirit who is God and who is in God. In both cases, and perhaps in other less influential threads of Christian tradition, the presupposition is that the biblical revelation is perfect, but we need to develop it carefully if we are to speak responsibly in the doctrine of the Spirit. A broadly Nicene pneumatology, one that understands itself to be not improving on the form of words given in Scripture but rather offering conceptual paraphrases that equip us to grasp what we are reading, is a pneumatology that establishes the big picture and keeps the most important things in the foreground.
THIRDNESS AND THE SPIRIT WHO WAS ALWAYS ALREADY THERE
In concluding this discussion of the third person of the Trinity, we can offer a brief justification for treating the third person third; a defense, really, and in that sense an apology, of getting around to the Spirit last. It seems to me that speaking third of the Spirit is not a problem; it is, in fact, a long and healthy tradition in Christian theology. It is a tradition in which the main lines of the Christian confession are established first without a focus on the Holy Spirit. But when, in a later move, reflection on the Spirit is added to those main lines, a world of greater depth opens up, and the full glory of Trinitarian soteriology shines forth. Nothing changes, but everything is better when pneumatology is explicated at last. A few key examples demonstrate this.
Consider the Creed of Nicaea, which in 325 labored to say the right thing about the relation of the Son to the Father. At the end of the creed, having elaborately affirmed that they believe in the Son, the fathers of Nicaea added the unimpressive phrase, “and in the Holy Spirit.” Fifty-six turbulent years later when this creed was retrieved and expanded at Constantinople 381, this paltry third article blossomed forth into the confession we recite in the Nicene Creed today: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who is worshiped and glorified together with the Father and the Son, who spoke through the prophets. What happened when the Creed of Nicaea, with minimal explicit pneumatology, added the rich pneumatology of 381? Trinitarianism came into its own. The whole statement of faith became richer, fuller, and deeper. It is worth noting that the creed of 325 did not omit all mention of the Spirit. It said little rather than much, but it did say something. The tradition we are considering is one that initially says little about the Spirit but then later says much.
Second, a parallel development can be seen in one of the greatest pro-Nicene fathers, Athanasius of Alexandria. Most of his theology is a relentless hammering home of the Nicene recognition of the full deity of the Son, consubstantial with the Father. He only occasionally mentions the Holy Spirit, and never as a focus of attention in his own right. Athanasius had message discipline, and the message was, Arianism is false. But then, at the request of Serapion of Thmuis, Athanasius wrote a series of letters explaining the person and work of the Holy Spirit, which amount to a brief treatise so powerful and integrated that it is hard to believe Athanasius had held all that understanding about the Spirit subliminally in his mind throughout the Arian crisis. What happens when the christological Athanasius extends his attention to explicit discussion of the Holy Spirit? His work achieves a rounded Trinitarian contour that is a wonder to behold. Perhaps contour is the wrong metaphor; the shape and form of Athanasian theology do not change, but drawing out the pneumatological depths transfigures everything he says.
Third, the structure of Calvin’s Institutes shows a similar dynamic. For various reasons, Calvin postpones much discussion of the Spirit until book 3, when he asks how the salvation that the Father has worked out in Christ can become ours. His answer is faith, but then he climbs high into the mysterious workings of the Spirit and expounds a practical pneumatology of magisterial power.
Rather than tracing out this tradition in later examples, I want to reach back to the sources and suggest, reverently, that Holy Scripture follows a similar pattern in several places. The gospel of Matthew reaches a first climax in chapter 11, when Jesus says that nobody knows the Father except the Son and vice versa, and then reaches a rounded conclusion in chapter 28, when the risen Christ extends that formula to include the third person, the Holy Spirit, whose work he left implicit in chapter 11. John’s gospel likewise expends considerable energy on the dyadic relation of the Word to God and then of the Father to the Son before turning sustained attention to the Holy Spirit around chapter 14 and especially 16. In Romans, Paul works out the righteousness of God and the propitiation in Christ before turning his attention fully to the Spirit in chapter 8, in which Romans reaches a doxological and kerygmatic highpoint. To end with the broadest possible gesture at the structure of the entire economy of salvation, the Spirit, who is never absent but often anonymous in the early phases of God’s work, is conspicuous precisely at the fulfillment of God’s promises, when his name and character and distinctive work come into their own and become a matter of proclamation and teaching.
The point is that while it is wrong to neglect the Holy Spirit, it is also wrong to belabor pneumatology in a distracting way or to attempt to lay a pneumatological foundation in the first moves of systematic theology. There is a wise tradition of establishing the main lines of theology before drawing out the implicit pneumatological realities that have undeniably been at work all along. At least in the order of instruction, this seems to be a prudent way of working for pilgrim theologians instructing the church. Late in Thomas Goodwin’s book The Knowledge of God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, he admits that the whole project has a dyadic, if not to say binitarian, ring: “There is a third person in the Godhead, the Spirit of God the Father, and of Christ; who in my handling the point will fall in, and appear to be that only true God, as well as these other two named.”21 As it turned out, the Spirit did in fact “fall in” to Goodwin’s later handling, not only in that book but especially when, in a later book, he developed an extended pneumatology. If the Spirit had not fallen in, we would judge Goodwin’s dyadic start differently in retrospect. But Goodwin was able to make his implicit pneumatology explicit. We should recognize that this sort of move, from an undeveloped pneumatology to a strong and elaborate one in a subsequent movement, happens all the time in Christian theology, and it is commendable.
The only reason it works at all, however, is that the Spirit who we recognize third was also there from the beginning as the very condition of confessing truth about the Father and the Son. In 1 Corinthians 2:12 Paul says, “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.” Here Paul recognizes the constitutive role the Holy Spirit is always already playing in theology and points to the divine initiative in the Spirit playing that role: we have received the Spirit so that we can understand what God has given. God has given something and has also given the understanding of it. He has given that understanding as an abiding principle of our spiritual understanding.
In a beautiful passage, John Henry Newman appealed to this pneumatological emergence to account for the strange way that Christian theologians talk. They have before them a reality to which they are attempting to do justice, and their propositions, proofs, decisions, and arguments must be understood as attempts to account for that reality. Newman puts it this way:
Though the Christian mind reasons out a series of dogmatic statements, one from another, this it has ever done, and always must do, not from those statements taken in themselves, as logical propositions, but as illustrated and (as I may say) inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all. Such sentences as “the Word was God” or “the Only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father,” or “the Word was made flesh,” or “the Holy Ghost which proceedeth from the Father,” are not a mere letter which we may handle by the rules of art at our own will, but august tokens of most simple, ineffable, adorable facts, embraced, enshrined, according to its measure, in the believing mind. For though the development of an idea is a deduction of proposition from proposition, these propositions are ever formed in and round the idea itself (so to speak), and are in fact one and all only aspects of it. Moreover, this will account both for the mode of arguing from particular texts or single words of Scripture, practised by the early Fathers, and for their fearless decision in practising it; for the great Object of Faith on which they lived both enabled them to appropriate to itself particular passages of Scripture, and became a safeguard against heretical deductions from them. Also, it will account for the charge of weak reasoning, commonly brought against those Fathers; for never do we seem so illogical to others, as when we are arguing under the continual influence of impressions to which they are insensible.22
This is the Christian mind, the angle of approach from which pneumatology makes sense, and makes sense of Scripture. In pneumatology, the mind “inhabited by that sacred impression . . . which acts as a regulating principle, ever present” is both the presupposition of all statements and the object of them.
And this is why Paul prays, in Ephesians 1:17, that God would give to Christians “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” (NRSV), that is, that they would be subject to the work of the Spirit. Pneumatology is the doctrine in which the prayer for illumination becomes the subject.
We could call this gift of “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” an invisible mission of the Holy Spirit, a sending of the Spirit to illumine our understandings to know the deep things of God, which only the Spirit knows properly and by nature. John Webster calls this divine operation the work of illumination and glosses the language of Ephesians 1:17 in his description of it: “What sets in motion creaturely apprehension of the gospel is God himself: the inner glory of God in its outward splendor, the inner wisdom of the Spirit who knows God’s depths and is in himself infinitely wise, and who communicates this to creatures.”23 He describes the same pneumatological illumination in these terms: “God so orders rational creatures that there is a creaturely coordinate to this omnipotent and omnipresent divine radiance. We are not simply bathed in light; it does not simply shine over us or upon us. Rather, it illuminates and so creates in creatures an active intelligent relation to itself.”24 That is the condition and goal of the doctrine about the third person of the Trinity: even today may our Christian minds receive this Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God.
NOTES
1. Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture quotations in this chapter come from the ESV.
2. In the Old Testament, the adjective holy and the noun spirit are only combined in Ps 51:11 and Isa 63:10.
3. Herman Witsius, Sacred Dissertations on What Is Commonly Called the Apostles’ Creed (Edinburgh: Fullarton, 1823), 2:304. An even more detailed account can be found earlier in this Protestant Scholastic tradition in Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2019), 571–72.
4. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31, in On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. Lionel Wickham (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 122.
5. Eastern Orthodox readers may understandably be suspicious of the declarations of the filioquist Council of Florence, but the principle of relations of opposition can also be traced in older, Greek sources like Gregory of Nazianzus and John of Damascus.
6. Wolf hart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 1.
7. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:3.
8. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:5.
9. “The economic Trinity not only reveals the immanent Trinity; it also has a retroactive effect on it.” Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 160.
10. Karl Barth, Letters 1961–1968, ed. Jurgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt, trans. and ed. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 175.
11. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 59.
12. This applies, I think, even to Abraham Kuyper’s great treatise The Work of the Holy Spirit (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1900).
13. Augustine, On the Trinity, 5.11.12.
14. Robert Louis Wilken, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter? Scripture, Liturgy, and the Proprium of the Holy Spirit,” in Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 158–77, at 150–60. Wilken’s chapter title draws on the clever phrasing and theological proposals of Robert Jenson.
15. Wilken, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter?,” 163.
16. Wilken, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter?,” 165.
17. Wilken, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter?,” 166.
18. Augustine, De Trinitate, 5.15.6, cited in Wilken, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter?,” 167.
19. Wilken, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter?,” 172.
20. Augustine, De Trinitate, 15.19.37, cited in Wilken, “Is Pentecost a Peer of Easter?,” 172.
21. Goodwin, The Knowledge of God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, vol. 4 of The Words of Thomas Goodwin (Edinburgh: Nichol, 1862), 351.
22. See Andrew Louth’s odd little book Discerning the Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 146–47. Louth’s footnote places this quote in Newman’s Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, Preached Before the University of Oxford (London: Parker, 1843), 335–36.
23. John Webster, “Illumination,” in The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 61.
24. Webster, “Illumination,” 57.