CHAPTER 2

FILIOQUE AND THE
ORDER OF THE
DIVINE MISSIONS

ADONIS VIDU

THE QUESTION OF THE ORDER of the divine missions is of great dogmatic significance.¹ The order between the missions bears on the very nature of the missions themselves. It is not merely an idle question, of priority for the sake of priority. In the context of Protestant theology, the theology of the divine missions has often fallen into the background. One may speculate about the cause, given the obvious deference shown in Protestant dogmatics to classical Trinitarianism. It may have something to do with the concentration of soteriological debates upon the binary of forensic/ontological nature of salvation. An approach to soteriology through the doctrine of the divine missions segues much too easily to an ontological approach to salvation. But we should not be detained with these questions at this point.

It is beyond doubt, however, that the doctrine of the divine missions is directly related to how one conceives the saving activity of the Trinity. The missions reveal a Trinitarian origin and end to the divine action, which is the flip side of its unified character correctly specified by the axiom opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa. Not only is the Trinitarian substructure of the divine operation indicated, but the manner of humanity’s return to the Trinity is equally specified.² That is, both objective and subjective soteriology will bear the fruit of these theological decisions. Legge puts it adequately: “As the divine missions make present in a new way and reveal the Trinitarian processions, they are likewise the vectors of our return to the Triune God.”³

Some of these implications will become evident as this paper progresses, but the task of the paper is to focus on the purely Trinitarian question of the order of the christological and pneumatological missions. I intend to argue in favor of a traditional Western account of the two missions in response to recent critiques from within and without the filioque tradition. I will present three objections (organized into two classes) to this christological priority. In response to one class of objections, I will invoke the distinction between divine operations and missions. Finally, in response to the second class of objections, and by utilizing the same distinction, I will demonstrate how the mission of the Spirit is an outcome of the Son’s mission. The Spirit’s mission to humanity results from the logically prior incorporation of the human nature of Jesus Christ into the Trinitarian processions.

All of us are likely familiar with the traditional account of this ordering. The first mission is that of the Son, in the fullness of time (Gal 4:4). The Son is sent by the Father. The Father is not sent; he sends the Son and the Spirit. Upon the completion of his mission, more specifically upon his ascension, Christ sends his Spirit (from the Father), or the Father sends his Spirit (in the name of Jesus). Whether the Father or the Son together with the Father is sending the Spirit, the Pentecostal outpouring appears to presuppose the completion of the Son’s mission (John 7:39: “The Spirit was not yet given because Jesus wasn’t yet glorified”).

This classical Trinitarian ordering of the missions has come under criticism in contemporary theology. The typical worry of Eastern Christians has been that the filioque is turning the Spirit into a mere afterthought, undermining his dignity as the only divine person that has no fruition. Yet it needs to be observed that, as a whole, the Eastern position also favors prioritizing the mission of the Son. So it is possible in principle to reject the filioque and retain the priority of the Son’s mission. Orthodox theologians will refuse, however, to draw conclusions about the processions from the manner of the Spirit’s mission.⁴

The more recent objections, however, challenge the very ordering of the missions. Thus it is no longer an undisputed fact that the mission of the Son is prior to the mission of the Spirit. Remarkably, some of these objections come from within the filioque tradition.

OBJECTIONS

Three kinds of objections to the priority of the Son’s mission may be enumerated: (a) objections from the work of the Spirit in Old Testament saints; (b) objections from the work of the Spirit in non-Christian religions; (c) objections from the work of the Spirit in the life of Jesus.

For the purposes of this paper we can lump the first two groups together. Not that they are entirely the same, yet both of these groups of people seem to show evidence of a work of the Spirit in a way that does not appear to be mediated (or accompanied) by an explicit faith in Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament saints surely possessed the Holy Spirit insofar as they were empowered by him. We need not dwell in detail over the cases of the judges (Judg 6:34; 14:6), Saul (1 Sam 11:6), David (1 Sam 16:13), prophets (2 Chron 15:1), and indeed others (Exod 31:3). But this work of the Spirit clearly comes prior to the mission of the Son, even if in the arc of redemptive history it anticipates the latter.

With regards to non-Christian religions, we can see an increasing willingness to speak about a “universal gift of the Spirit” given to other religions. In Roman Catholic theology Vatican II inaugurates such a trajectory, culminating in Pope Francis II claiming that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”⁵ In Evangelical theology, Amos Yong’s pneumatological theology of other religions has suggested that there is a work of the Spirit in and through other religions.⁶

There is much to discuss in relation to the controversial suggestion about a work of the Spirit in other religions. I propose to focus on a single issue. If there is a mission of the Spirit that does not presuppose faith in Jesus Christ, this seems to conflict with both Catholic dogma and the Reformational sola fide. In what way is such a work of the Spirit related to Christ? In what way are we to understand the Spirit as the Spirit of Christ?

Karl Rahner’s explanation is most elegant. We need to think of the Christ event not as an efficient cause of the Spirit but as a final cause. In “Jesus Christ in the Non-Christian Religions,” Rahner writes, “Christ is present and efficacious in the non-Christian believer (and therefore in the non-Christian religions) through his Spirit.”⁷ He assumes the Pauline language that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ (e.g., Gal 4:6) and explains that what Christ does in his mission cannot be an efficient cause of the sending of the Spirit since that would make one of the divine missions dependent upon some created aspect.⁸ God does not need to enable himself to send the Spirit through the human work of Christ.

He goes on to say, “This Spirit is always, everywhere, and from the outset the entelechy, the determining principle, of the history of revelation and salvation; and its communication and acceptance, by its very nature, never takes place in a merely abstract, transcendental form,” and “The universal efficacy of the Spirit is directed from the very beginning to the zenith of its historical mediation, which the Christ event.”⁹

There is much more than needs to be said about Rahner’s broader stance, in particular his understanding of nature and grace and his transcendental anthropology, among others, to do full justice to his position. Quite simply, he sees the Spirit as the cause of the incarnation and the cross. The incarnation is not something taking place from above, but rather it can be understood as an emergence from the very openness of humanity toward transcendence, under the supervenient guidance of the Spirit. This leads to a different understanding of saving faith as “the seeking memoria of the absolute bringer of salvation,”¹⁰ which is compatible with other “savior figures” when understood as anticipations of the one true Savior, Jesus Christ.

Rahner’s proposal raises many questions. Perhaps chief among these is the one concerning the benefit of an explicit faith in Jesus Christ. If the universal gift of the Holy Spirit is already inclusive of other religions, how should we understand the missionary mandate of the church? This brings to the fore the integral relation between the two missions. If, as he states in a paper dealing explicitly with this question (“Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church”), grace “has been present all along and belongs to the enduring existential modalities of man,” it appears that Christian conversion is merely the extension of this implicit existential modality into explicit recognition, leading to a “more radical dimension of responsibility” and “a greater chance of this Christianity interiorly bestowed by grace being brought to its fullness in all dimensions.”¹¹

Christianity, then, must be understood simply as the fruition of an implicit potentiality already present in creation—through grace, to be sure—but this means that the content of the Christ event has a merely epistemological value and has no ontological implications for the state of the believer. If, that is, the non-Christian believer already has a saving “searching memory” of Christ, her coming to know and profess an explicit faith in Christ makes no difference ontologically to her condition, for she already has the Spirit. This is not to deny the significance of this explicit recognition of an internal movement toward Christ, but it seems seriously to deflate the New Testament’s description of the benefits of being “in Christ” (e.g., Rom 8:1).

The final objection against the priority of the mission of the Son invokes the reality of a mission of the Spirit in the life of Jesus. Several theologians, including Rahner, have called attention to the fact that the incarnation of the Son takes place through the Holy Spirit. The events leading up to the birth of Christ betray the Spirit’s prevenience: John the Baptist is full of the Spirit from his birth; Mary conceives from the Holy Spirit (Matt 1:18). Additionally, the beginning of Jesus’s ministry is under the tutelage of the Spirit, from his baptism, to his wilderness temptations, to the commencement of his ministry itself (Luke 4:18), and so on.

Kathryn Tanner surmises that the two missions are therefore interweaving and intermingled. “Rather than a simple one-way relationship from the Son to the Spirit in other words, the complex back and forth of their mutual interdependency is drawn out” by the narratives.¹² She stresses the gradual deification of Christ’s humanity, such that only at the end of Christ’s life is he “genuinely full of the Spirit.”¹³ The Spirit establishes Jesus’s sonship; he unites the Son and Father “in bringing about and sustaining the conformity of wills between the one and the other.”¹⁴ This means that the more the Spirit is evident in Christ, the more his divine sonship is evident, such that they become “increasingly manifest together.”¹⁵

In this intermingling, the Son only gives to the Spirit his “shape,” Tanner argues; he does not provide the power in the same way that the Spirit provides it for the Son. “The Son sends the Spirit to us from the Father, but not as the Father does. The Spirit has already been sent from the Father as a condition of the Son’s own incarnation and mission; and therefore the Son cannot be sending the Spirit in the way the Father does.”¹⁶

There is a clear priority of the Spirit’s mission for Tanner since the Spirit must already be sent in order to form the humanity of Christ and to constitute his sonship. While she wants to preserve the mutual dependence of the two missions, the priority clearly belongs to the Spirit’s mission, and the contribution of the Son’s mission to that of the Spirit is minimally regarded as one of “shaping.”

The idea that the Spirit is already at work in the conception of Christ is certainly important. Yet to say that the Spirit constitutes the very sonship of Christ is problematic. One reason for this is that no traditional account of the processions distributes the Spirit as active in the procession of the Son.¹⁷ On the other hand, to say that the Spirit is the one through whom Christ realizes or expresses his sonship in human form is totally different. The former claim is problematic because it undermines the sole possession of the human nature by the Son. It is because humanity is assumed by the Son that we can speak about the Son of God in human form. Tanner’s assertion seems to imply the incarnation of two persons: the Son and the Spirit in one human nature.

The reason is that in order for the Spirit to have a mission, a created effect must either already exist (as in the case of the indwelling) or be created simultaneously with the mission. The first option, however, has Nestorian implications for Christology unless the human nature already subsists in the Son, in which case the Son’s mission would retain priority. The second option implies the incarnation of the Spirit, since the created effect is brought about by its union with the Holy Spirit as well. Once we recognize that the human nature of Christ only subsists from its union with the Son, the priority of the Son’s mission follows. Whatever must be ascribed to the Spirit will then be in the order of operation (and therefore only by appropriation¹⁸). That is to say, the participation of the Spirit to the various stages of the incarnate life of the Son will be in the form of operations whose agency belongs to the whole Trinity, including the Son.

If the Spirit sanctifies and empowers the humanity of Christ, it does so not from a position of hypostatic union with it. Only the Son receives the human nature into hypostatic union with himself. The Spirit does not give himself to us hypostatically, except, as Lossky, Staniloae, and other orthodox theologians recognize, in the hypostasis of the Son.¹⁹

It would thus seem that each of the two classes of objections leads to problematic positions: the first (from the work of the Spirit in Old Testament saints and non-Christian religions) undermines the uniqueness and significance of the person and work of Christ in bringing about a supernatural relation with the Holy Spirit, or deification; the second class of objection (from the work of the Spirit in Christ) appears to imply a double incarnation—of the Spirit and of the Son in the same human nature.

Here is the key question then: Can we do justice to the presence and work of the Spirit in the life of Jesus without undermining the unique and real subject of the incarnation, the Son?

DISTINGUISHING OPERATIONS FROM MISSIONS

What has emerged from the foregoing presentation is that greater precision is needed about the ways the Spirit might be present or at work, such that it is possible to speak about a real contribution the Spirit makes to the incarnation of the Son without weakening the subsistence of the human nature in the Son alone. If such a distinction is possible, then perhaps one can also distinguish between a presence of the Spirit in the Old Testament saints and the Spirit’s presence in Christian believers, or between the presence and work of the Spirit in non-Christian religions and the presence of the Spirit in the church.

As it happens, classical Trinitarianism already employs such a distinction. It is the distinction between operation and mission. I submit that this distinction can serve a number of related purposes: first, it can allow an operation of the Spirit in non-Christian religions, including Old Testament anticipations of Christ, whilst reserving an ontologically distinct indwelling of the Spirit in those who profess explicit faith in Christ; further, it can account for the Pauline language of “Spirit of Christ,” which indicates a Christoformation of the Pentecostal Spirit.

Briefly stated, an operation can be defined as the production of an (created) effect in the world; a mission can be defined as a union between a divine person and such a created effect.²⁰ A mission entails an operation; an operation does not imply a mission. Aquinas understands a mission to involve the extension of a procession to a created effect.²¹ This is a more developed view of a mission compared to that of Augustine, but fundamentally continuous with it. It should be pointed out that a mission bears two fundamental dimensions: epistemological and ontological. On the one hand, the missions reveal the persons distinctly. On the other hand, they bring about a relation of union between God and the creature, which is a relation that is real in the creature yet logical in God.

Most missions comport both dimensions, but the so-called symbolic missions do not.²² The baptismal dove, for example, epistemically reveals, or rather indicates, the Spirit, and yet the Spirit is not ontologically united or incarnate in the dove. No attempt has been made to theologically conceive of the dove as the pneumatic equivalent of the hypostatic union. For this reason, this mission has been regarded as symbolic: the dove symbolizes the Spirit; it is not the Spirit.

One must speak of a proper sense of a mission, where both dimensions are present, epistemological and ontological, and which captures the reality that in such a mission the eternal procession truly extends to a creature in a relation of union with it. As Gilles Emery explains, “The Spirit is not given if he is only known symbolically, without the reception of the grace that sanctifies.”²³ In a mission, one part of the created world is drawn by the Trinity to be united specifically with one of the divine persons. In the mission of the Son, the created effect is the human nature of Christ; in the case of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, it is human persons themselves.

This distinction explains the uniqueness of the relation between God and humanity inaugurated through Jesus Christ and the Pentecostal Spirit. The indwelling of the Spirit is qualitatively different from the operation of the Spirit upon Old Testament saints and, by implication, upon non-Christians. The radical novelty of this relation to the Spirit is anticipated by the prophets (Ezek 11:19; 36:25–28; 37:1–14; Jer 31:31–34; Joel 3:1–5).

It should also be noted that in the tradition of classical Trinitarianism, the operations and missions do not indicate a change in God, but in the creature.²⁴ In a mission a real union takes place with the divine person, according to the nature of the receiving effect. Incidentally, it is precisely because such a union takes place (symbolic missions notwithstanding) that a manifestation of the triune person is possible. Otherwise, in an operation the persons are indistinguishable from one another, given that they are a single cause. Augustine was right to understand a mission in terms of the manifestation of a particular person.²⁵

This means that all the divine persons are involved in Old Testament history. But since no created effect had been united (either hypostatically, or by grace) with one of the divine persons, the persons have not been properly manifested and are not said to have missions. The persons produce the effects together, but these effects, not being united to any particular person, do not manifest it hypostatically.²⁶ It does not mean that the persons were not active, only that they do not manifest themselves as such by union with a particular created reality. Only in light of their full revelation (because of their missions) can we retroactively “spot” the persons in the Old Testament.

Together with the Augustinian tradition, I would claim that there are no divine missions prior to the coming of Christ, while there are certainly inseparable triune operations in which the Spirit can be glimpsed retroactively. This answers objection (a). The work of the Spirit in the conception of Jesus Christ is one work attributed to the Spirit by appropriation. Since created reality is united not to the Spirit as such but to the Son, there is no mission of the third person in the conception of Christ. The mission is the Son’s. Yet the Son’s mission does not take place without the operation of the whole Trinity (proper mission presupposes inseparable operation), including, by a special appropriation, the Holy Spirit. This answers objection (c). As for the second objection, about a mission of the Spirit in other religions, we will turn to our final section.

THE SPIRIT HAD NOT BEEN GIVEN BECAUSE JESUS WAS NOT YET GLORIFIED

By distinguishing between missions and operations, the logical correlation between the two missions can be more clearly discerned. It is an undisputed fact that the outpouring of the Spirit is connected to the completion of the Son’s mission. Until Christ was glorified, he could not be sent. The completion of Christ’s missions entails certain operations: going to the cross, overcoming temptation, obeying the Father, and so on.

But Christ completes these actions through a human nature that already subsists in the person of the Word. The union between the human nature and the word is the presupposition, not the conclusion, of these acts of obedience. These acts presuppose the reality of a mission of the Son. The eternal Son manifests his love of the Father on the human plane. This manifestation is the consequence of the fact that he is eternally the Son, in loving communion with the Father.

It is precisely this love of Christ for the Father, completed and perfected in his human obedience in the face of ultimate suffering, that mirrors on the human plane the shared love between the Son and the Father, which (in this Augustinian-Thomistic tradition) is the Holy Spirit. The third person emerges on a human plane from within the very humanity of Christ,²⁷ which loves all and obeys all. It is the river of living water which spills out e latere Christi (from the side of Christ). The Spirit is not simply bestowed upon Christ as an extrinsic reward for his obedience, a favorite theme of some Reformed theologians. Rather, he flows from Christ, having overfilled him. Thus the ultimate benefit of Christ’s mission is the formation (on the human plane) of the Pentecostal Spirit.

It must be said, then, that Christ does not receive the Spirit in the same manner believers do. This is one of those aspects of Christology where imitability by the Christians is not a desideratum. In virtue of the unique relation of hypostatic union, from which the humanity of Christ subsists in the Son, and in virtue of the perichoresis of the divine persons, the human nature of Christ already possesses the fullness of the Spirit. Thus the Spirit cannot be said to be bestowed upon it extrinsically. Axiomatically, this undercuts many attempts at Spirit Christology. The Spirit’s relation to Christ and to other human beings is asymmetrical in important ways. Christ has the Spirit because his humanity exists as possessed by the Word.

But by the same logic could we not say that the Father is equally present in Christ? Here too, however, the relationship between the persons is asymmetrical, in a filioque paradigm, for the Spirit comes from the Son and the Father while the Father does not come from the Son. The point is that when the human nature is received into the Trinitarian relations in the person of the Son, it automatically finds itself oriented in specific ways to the other two persons: to the Father as receptivity and to the Spirit as productivity—yet only in virtue of the first orientation to the Father.²⁸ The human nature is oriented to the Spirit as productivity, only because logically it is first oriented as receptivity to the Father.²⁹ Christ’s human nature is slotted into a particular Trinitarian taxis where it is attached to the Son. But in this particular Western paradigm, the Son does not receive the Spirit immanently. Neither, then, does the Son receive the Spirit economically.

And yet the life of the incarnate Son is full of the Spirit, one might even say increasingly full. Such a plenitude of the Spirit is achieved in the life of Jesus not by way of an extrinsic pouring, as is the Christian experience of the Spirit, but by an intrinsic upwelling, from the depths of the being of Christ. The Spirit is intrinsic to Christ in virtue of the hypostatic union, yet much like his beatific vision, it is in the depths of his personality and needs to work itself out in Christ’s concrete existence. Granted that the Spirit can be understood as the shared love between the Father and the Son, Christ already possesses that love at an ontological level. David Coffey has called this Christ’s basic or transcendental love of God.³⁰ It is a love that does not immediately manifest itself volitionally and concretely. It is like the attachment a baby has to his mother prior to consciousness, knowledge, and concrete actions. Christ’s growth in wisdom and stature can then be understood as the actualization through human knowledge of his beatific vision. Similarly, his learning obedience can be understood as the actualization—as man—of his immanent receptivity (being from another). Conversely, his growing love for the Father can be understood as the actualization on a human plane of his natural, ontological shared love with the Father. Immanently he already shares in this love and thus spirates the Spirit with the Father. Economically, this eternal love, while present in the depths of his being, will be in the process of manifestation and actualization precisely as man.

The filioque is mirrored on the human plane in the fact that Christ has to return his love to the Father. The return that requires no time in the immanent Trinity is played out on the scene of human history, in the midst of the drama of human sin and godforsakenness. By thus mirroring the filioque, humanity is drawn to participate in the divine processions. It acquires the mode of existence of the Son (hypostatic union), and it spirates the Holy Spirit.

If we understand the Pentecostal Spirit as the human love of the Son for the Father, the experience of the earliest Christians of the Spirit precisely as the Spirit of the Son (Rom 8:9; Gal 4:6; Phil 1:19) makes sense. It is because the outpoured Spirit has been Christoformed—the Spirit of Christ, or the Spirit of the Son.

Tanner’s point that Christ shapes the Spirit for us and yet does not provide the power for the Spirit in the same way the Spirit provides the power for Christ (by being active in his conception) must be rejected here. To say that the Spirit provides the power for Christ economically indicates that the Spirit provides the power for Christ immanently.³¹ Economically, Christ does not send the Spirit, according to Tanner, because the Spirit has already been sent as the power for the Son’s mission. This indicates a merely occasionalist correlation of the work of Christ and the work of the Spirit. The Spirit is shaped by Christ in the sense that it is only in and through the Christ event that we receive the Spirit, and yet that Christ event in itself makes no constitutive contribution to the Spirit we receive.

Tanner appeals to Stăniloae’s point that just as immanently the Spirit rests on Christ, so economically the Spirit is only given to us through the one on whom he rests. Stăniloae and Lossky are careful to distinguish the incarnation, whereby the Son provides his person to human nature, from the mission of the Spirit, whereby the latter provides his divinity to human persons.³² This is a laudable distinction between the respective missions. It is consonant with an account of salvation as deification, with which I am largely sympathetic. Yet there are some fundamental difficulties that such an account will have to address.

When Eastern Orthodoxy speaks of the Spirit’s communication of his divinity to human persons in deification, it fails to account for the fact that the believer does not merely receive “divinity,” or the divine energies, but also the person of the Spirit. In the believer, a mission of the Spirit (and the Son) indicates a union between the believer and the distinct persons of the Trinity, not simply a union to the inseparable, natural, and uncreated energies of God. Ironically, this tradition, which insists so much on the distinct personality and equality of the Spirit, ends up providing a largely impersonal account of the Spirit’s mission in terms of the divine energies.

This raises the question even more: In what way is the deifying energy that the believer truly receives connected specifically to a person? If it is merely “shaped” by Christ in the sense that Christ is the locus of this energy, it is not clear how it is related to the person of the Spirit since immanently the Spirit’s personhood is given independently of Christ’s personhood. If, on the other hand, the Spirit’s personhood is constituted by Christ’s personhood ad intra, then to identify the Pentecostal Spirit with the human love of Christ for the Father supplies us with a notion of the Spirit’s mission that does not yield merely natural energies.

It may be retorted that such an account of the Spirit’s identity as the shared love between the Father and the Son is precisely impersonal, since the Spirit is defined in nonpersonal categories of love in contrast to the personal names Father and Son. In response it will suffice to point out that the latter names themselves indicate “subsistent relations” within the unity of the divine essence. It is misguided to play off the impersonal designation love against the personal names of Father and Son since what is personal in God indicates (at least in this tradition) relations that subsist within the unity of the divine essence.

The fact that in the immanent Trinity the Spirit is tethered to Christ grounds the economic relation between the Spirit and Christ. Further, it consolidates the personal character of the Spirit’s mission—as opposed to mere common divine energies. The Spirit is not merely the love between the incarnate Son and the Father any more than the Son is merely the self-knowledge of the Father. The Spirit is Christoformed economically just as he is filioformed immanently.

This indicates the natural correlation between the two missions. The aim of the missions is to draw humanity to participate in the Trinitarian communion. But this sharing is specifically to be realized in Christ. In Christ the Son we occupy our place in the life of the Trinity as sons and daughters of God. The Holy Spirit, who indwells us, is precisely the Spirit who first filled and now overflows from Christ. For this reason it is impossible to understand the work of the Spirit in other religions as a mission in this weightier sense, for we then have to suppose another entry point into the Trinitarian life, one which does not pass through the Logos. In that case there would exist an alternative blossoming of humanity not mediated through the humanity of the second Adam.

We must distinguish between the operation by which the Trinity draws us to Christ, the operation by which we are baptized into Christ, and the relation of union by which the Spirit indwells us. The first two are operations; the third is a mission. The missions, it might be said, are the fruition of the operations. The mission of the Son is consequent upon the operation by which the Trinity shapes a human nature for him; the mission of the Spirit is consequent upon the operation by which the Son shapes the Spirit for us, namely his obedience and love. The Old Testament faithful experienced operations of the Spirit (or appropriated to the Spirit, to be more precise); in common grace, non-Christian believers may indeed have a “searching memory” of Christ. But once we understand these as operations, not as proper missions, we can then do justice to the utterly unique and supernatural reality, inaugurated and made possible by God in Christ, of the indwelling of his Holy Spirit—indeed, the Spirit of Christ.

The most natural grounding for this order of the divine missions is the filioque. Eastern Orthodoxy rightly admits that the Spirit comes from Christ, but only because it immanently rests on the Son. But this fails to capture the authentic Christoformation of the Spirit; or at least it leaves it without an immanent correlate, in which case it jeopardizes our understanding of salvation as participation in the life of God himself.

NOTES

1. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions received, especially from Joanna Leidenhag, Lucy Peppiatt, Luke Stamps, Adam Johnson, James Arcadi, and others.

2. I am assuming as legitimate the procedure of grounding the return of creatures to God (reditus) in the divine processions. According to this model, salvation is in its deepest meaning and terminus an incorporation into the divine existence. David Coffey has objected to this approach on account of its understanding of the Spirit as the divine love (“A Proper Mission of the Holy Spirit,” Theological Studies 47 [1986]: 227–50; Grace: The Gift of the Holy Spirit [Sydney: Faith and Culture, 1979]). Since this model starts in the unity of essence and not in the distinction of persons (as does the Orthodox critique as well), it is incapable of grounding the return of human persons to God through a distinct mission of the Holy Spirit. To be sure, Coffey’s “bestowal model” continues to tether the Spirit to Christ, as the love that Christ returns to the Father. The Crowe/Lonergan argument should also be mentioned, viz., the reversal of the order of the processions by the order of the missions: what is last in processions is first in missions. Cf. Frederick E. Crowe, “Son of God, Holy Spirit, and World Religions,” in Frederick E. Crowe, Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. Michael Vertin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). Crowe cites Lonergan as the inspiration for this reversal in the order of the divine missions, referring to the latter’s Method in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1972). For a more detailed discussion, see Robert M. Doran, The Trinity in History: A Theology of the Divine Missions, vol. 1, Missions and Processions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), esp. chapter 4.

3. Dominic Legge, The Trinitarian Christology of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 120.

4. Other considerations are in play here from an Orthodox perspective, perhaps chief among which being the idea that the Spirit has not given himself to us hypostatically. For that reason the Orthodox tradition hesitates to infer a procession from the mission of the Spirit. Gregory of Cyprus, for instance, concedes that the grace of the Holy Spirit comes through Christ, but what is thereby given is not the hypostasis of the Spirit or a created gift but rather the exterior manifestation of the Spirit, his energies (Tome of 1285). Palamas also admits that, as energy, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ and comes from Christ (Apodictic Treatise 1.9, ed. B. Bobrinskoy, in Palama Syngrammata, ed. P. Chrēstou [Thessalonikē, 1962]).

5. Pope Francis and Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, “A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” February 4, 2019, http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/travels/2019/outside/documents/papa-francesco_20190204_documento-fratellanza-umana.html.

6. Cf. Yong, Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian Theology of Religions (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Yong, Beyond the Impasse: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Religions (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014).

7. Karl Rahner, “Jesus Christ in the Non-Christian Religions,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 17, Jesus, Man and the Church, trans. Margaret Kohl (London : Darton, Longman and Todd, 1981), 43.

8. Rahner’s logic is echoed by Bernard Lonergan’s clarification about the role played by the created effects in a mission, which are exclusively consequent, as opposed to antecedent. While I agree with this assumption, the operation of Christ’s humanity need not be construed as enabling God to send the Spirit but rather as the desired modality through which he freely chooses to dispense him. Cf. Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 443.

9. Rahner, “Jesus Christ in the Non-Christian Religions,” 46.

10. Rahner, “Jesus Christ in the Non-Christian Religions,” 46.

11. Rahner, “Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, Confrontations, trans. David Bourke (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 170, 177.

12. Kathryn Tanner, Christ Is Key (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 163.

13. Tanner, Christ Is Key, 171.

14. Tanner, Christ Is Key, 166.

15. Tanner, Christ Is Key, 169.

16. Tanner, Christ Is Key, 174.

17. One contemporary version of this Spirituque can be found in Thomas Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship: Reconceiving the Trinity (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1995). For a very instructive discussion, the reader may be referred to Jerome Van Kuiken and Joshua M. McNall’s chapter in the present volume.

18. The procedure of appropriation stipulates that a particular attribute or operation belongs to the Trinity as a whole, yet it can be taken to indicate or manifest one of the persons in particular. For additional material on appropriation, see Emery, The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2011), 161–68; Neil Ormerod, The Trinity: Retrieving the Western Tradition (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005), 99–124; for a critical account, see Catherine M. LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York: Harper One, 1993), 99–100, 164–67.

19. Dumitru Stăniloae, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and His Relation to the Son, as the Basis of Our Deification and Adoption,” in Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, ed. Lukas Vischer (London: SPCK; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1981); Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 159.

20. The metaphysical description of this union cannot be attempted here. While appeals to the notion of cause are inevitable, it is not clear which kind of causality is entailed. Aquinas, for example, denies that God can enter composition with creatures, and therefore formal and material causes (which are intrinsic to the effect) are ruled out. Other theologians have complained that an appeal to efficient and final causation leaves the terms of the union extrinsic to each other. There is a tradition—from Petavius, through Scheeben, and Rahner—of speaking of the union in terms of a quasi-formal causality (Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity [New York: Herder and Herder, 2006], 167ff; Rahner, “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst, OP [Baltimore, MD: Helicon, 1961]), which has met significant opposition from, e.g., W. Hill, “Uncreated Grace-A Critique of Karl Rahner,” The Thomist 27 (1963): 333–56.

21. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), I, q. 43, a. 2, ad. 3.

22. Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 43, a. 7, ad. 4.

23. Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 393.

24. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 43, a. 2, ad. 2.

25. Augustine, The Trinity (New York: New City Press, 1991), IV.28, 30.

26. By hypostatic manifestation I mean a revelation of a person in their hypostatic character, and not simply an indication of their reality.

27. On this topic, see my “Ascension and Pentecost: A View from the Divine Missions,” in Being Saved: Explorations in Human Salvation, ed. Marc Cortez, Joshua Farris, S. Mark Hamilton (London: SCM, 2018).

28. For more on this see Legge, Trinitarian Christology, 112ff.

29. It should be noted that Christ is not said to obey the Spirit, even as he is led (ἤγετο) by the Spirit (Mark 1:12, Matt 4:1).

30. Coffey, “ ‘Incarnation’ of the Holy Spirit,” Theological Studies 45 (1984): 476.

31. This is not because everything economic must have an immanent correlate, but the missions must be understood as our inclusion in the actual processions. Remember that the persons do not change, only the created effect does. A divine person is only said to have a mission of a created reality enters into a relation with a procession. So if the effect is not modified according to the immanent existence of the persons, these may not be said to be sent.

32. Lossky, Mystical Theology, 167.