CHAPTER 3
ON THE REVELATION OF
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE
PROBLEM OF THIRDNESS
KIMBERLEY KROLL AND JOANNA LEIDENHAG
“GOD IS SPIRIT” (JOHN 4:24), and yet one person of the Godhead is given the amorphous designator Holy Spirit.1 Unlike the recognizable designators Father and Son, as well as the familiar relation that holds between them, this Holy Spirit in his person and relation to other persons (divine and human) creates what we call the problem of thirdness. The first two sections of this paper will outline how the problem of thirdness leads the theologian adrift into (1) the Charybdis of impersonal abstractions or (2) the mouth of the Scylla where it is swallowed by other (more tangible) doctrine. Whereas (1) attempts to answer the question “What is spirit?” (2) is preoccupied by “Where is the Holy Spirit?” Note that the questions of what and where do not arise in the same way or with the same urgency when considering the first and second persons of the Trinity. The names Father and Son, analogous to a well-known human relation, provide some relief here. The Father and the Son are clearly persons whose identities are understood in an ordered yet equal and loving relation to one another. By contrast, the third person who bears the name Holy Spirit provides no such relief, and so the theologian is thrown back onto the questions “What is spirit?” and “Where is spirit?” or, put another way, “How do we fit a third person, the Holy Spirit, into our understanding of the Godhead?”
The two perennial questions of pneumatology, “What and where is the Holy Spirit?” are questions that biblical scholars and systematic theologians must address, but these questions should not exhaust the scope of pneumatology. In this paper we make no attempt to answer the what and where questions of spirit. Instead, we seek merely to highlight how the conclusions one draws regarding the what and where questions function as determinates for one’s pneumatology delineating particular restraints, permissions, and contexts for which the doctrine is realised. In this paper, we will argue a theologically grounded notion of what and where the Holy Spirit is can only be found when properly constrained by another question: How? The question of how the Holy Spirit acts is often gestured toward by the prepositions through, in, and by. Since it is through, in, and by the Spirit that creatures come to participate in Christ and know the Father, it is imperative that theologians wrestle with this how question. Thus, in the final section of the paper, we argue that properly navigating the pneumatological sea requires a route delineated by an oft ignored question: How does the mode of revelation of the Holy Spirit inform our understanding of what and who the triune God is?
This is not an attempt to argue for a third article theology as we understand this to be a privileging of pneumatology over, though not necessarily against, traditional dogmatics. Any prioritization of a given doctrine over another can lead to the malformation of one’s theological system, such as in overrealised Christologies and eschatologies. Though we seek to address complexities related to the third person and, in a way, grant him more ground on the theological playing field, we also seek to avoid what might be considered an overrealised pneumatology.2 Instead, the sort of ground we are looking to grant the Spirit is ground most theologians already grant him without second thought; and maybe it is just this lack of second thought that is part of the problem. The Holy Spirit is the one through whom we are united to God and being transformed into the image of his Son. But how? Should we think of the Spirit as akin to glue,3 as a conductor of divine electricity, or something like this? Is he stuck to us or running through us like a current, or is he the current itself? This is a fundamental problem—if not the fundamental problem—of pneumatology: we have no clear picture of what spirit itself is, much less how the concept of spirit should inform and demarcate the uniqueness of the third person of the Godhead. Therefore, the problem of thirdness plus confusion regarding the concept of spirit tends to entail the positing of what we will refer to as “the black box(es) of the Holy Spirit” in lieu of constructive pneumatological doctrine.
A black box is a type of system, device, object, or in this case, divine person that is understood merely through what can be observed via inputs and outputs. That is, the internal workings of a black box (i.e., its characteristics and nature) remain unknown, and thus one infers from the external relations what one might be able to know about the black box itself. Interestingly, the black box of the Holy Spirit seems to be that which holds much—dare we say all—of theology together. This is why when theologians are unsure as to how to think of God in relation to x, y, and z, we proclaim victoriously, “It is through the Spirit that x” or “The Spirit in me testifies to y” or “It is by the Spirit that z.” These prepositions seem interchangeable, and often two or three are used in a single sentence. Why? Because we have no idea what we mean when we assert these (and other) prepositions when related to spirit. It is this ambiguity around the term spirit that steers the theologian to ask the first question: What is spirit?
WHAT IS SPIRIT?
If we start with the immanent Trinity, the ordering of persons in the divine life of the Godhead, then the so-called problem of thirdness is quickly apparent. The Father is the source of the divine life from which the Son and the Spirit eternally proceed. The Son proceeds from the Father such that the Father’s name and personhood is constituted as the one who eternally generates the Son, whose person reciprocally is constituted as the one who is generated. These two, then, have their differentiated personhood in relation to one another completed. And yet the personhood of the Spirit cannot be articulated in the same fashion and must be grounded in a different way. Regardless of whether one prefers the Latin or social model of the Trinity and what one thinks of the filioque debate (which we shall come to later), the problem of thirdness persists.
Augustine’s description of the third person as the Love, the Bond, or the Gift, following from the preexisting and implicitly superior relation between the Father and the Son, exemplifies this problem. For whilst Augustine insists that “there is not subordination of the Gift and no domination of the givers,” it remains that the Spirit as Gift and Love is qualitatively and functionally different to the givers and the lovers.4 As the Father generates the Son, the Holy Spirit is also generated—almost by default—as that which the Father gifts to the Son, namely, the Spirit of the Father. Loving the Father in return, the Holy Spirit then becomes the Spirit of the Son returned to the Father.5 The thirdness of the Holy Spirit is not beside the Father and the Son as in a threefold repetition but is of the Father and the Son, derivative of them and abstracted from them into a transferable or shareable substance.6 Augustine derives this argument from New Testament passages that describe the love within the Trinity (1 John 4:7–16) and the Spirit as love poured out in our hearts (Rom 5:5). Yet there is no discussion of how the love of God is poured into our hearts or how the Spirit reveals or communicates this love. Because the how question has been ignored, the Spirit becomes the relation and the love in both the economy of salvation and the intra-Trinitarian life.
In the legacy of Augustinian thought, the Holy Spirit is not conceived of as a divine person in the same way as the Father and Son, but the Holy Spirit is that which two divine hypostases share and which eternally binds and differentiates their personhood. This Holy Spirit, then, is personalizing, but how are we to affirm that he is a person? This problem does not arise because of a presupposed definition of the term person taken from the created world and misguidedly applied to God; there is no definition of person working behind the scenes in this problem. The problem is that “What is a divine person?” is answered differently for the Holy Spirit than for the other two members of the Godhead. The Father and the Son are those which have loving familial relations. However, the Holy Spirit is the love that two divine hypostases share. Here we see that love does not constitute the Father or the Son but is the particular relation between the Father and the Son. This implies that unlike the Father and Son, who are defined by their relations, the Holy Spirit simply is their relation and therefore cannot be the same kind of thing as the Father and the Son.7 On this schema, the Holy Spirit neither gives nor receives, neither loves nor is loved, neither reveals nor can be revelation. Instead, the Holy Spirit is playing a different, unique, and seemingly lesser role of the Gift, Love, or the Revealedness,8 which must always be predicated of something greater.
It is telling that in the grammar of Christian theology the Holy Spirit is most closely associated with prepositions such as in, by, with, and through, as mentioned earlier. The grammatical function of a preposition is as a connecter of the subject and predicate and then within the predicate as connecter of the action and direct object; prepositions are used to express spatial or temporal relations within a semantic construction. This is analogous to how Holy Spirit is often instrumentalised in much of Christian theology.9 Syntactically, the preposition holds everything together in linguistic space just as “the black box of the Spirit” functions as the place-holder for all the mysterious theological moves one makes when working out God in relation to Godself and God in relation to his creation. When the Holy Spirit is made to be merely the “connection” that maintains proper theological structures, the Holy Spirit as black box is understood as (1) the relation between the Father and the Son (the so-called divine input) or derivatively as (2) all the relations between the Godhead (the input) and God’s acts in the world (the so-called external outputs). Thus, whenever God is said to be “in relation” or something creaturely is said to be “in relation” to God, one could just insert the term spirit for the relation and avoid thinking about how the Holy Spirit, being God, is in relation. And so, typically, one seeks to understand the Holy Spirit just as one mechanically approaches understanding the black box, that is, one asks “What is the black box (or spirit)?” and “Where is the black box within the metasystem (or where is the Spirit located within God’s relation to the world and the world’s relation to God)?” And yet all we look to are the (theologically constructed) internal and (phenomenologically observable) external outputs, attributing these to be his person. Without trying to understand how he is revealed, which assumes a distinction between the person and mode or act of revelation, the Spirit is reduced to a type of stuff that is “activity” or is “relation”—love, grace, form, power, space, and so on. That is, the Holy Spirit is minimised to mediator between divine persons, or between divine and created persons, and is neither personal nor fully divine. He is mere abstraction.
One might, in attempt to avoid the abstraction of spirit through speculation of the inner life of the Trinity, take a different approach in answering the question “What is spirit?” via an exegetical investigation of the biblical text. However, the biblical text alone does little to elucidate what spirit is because the concept spirit is obscure and can refer to a variety of realities (e.g., an attitude, intention, disposition, desire, energy, the will, a whole person, etc). Further, the terms חַוּר and/or πνεῦμα are often used as synecdoche for a subject who is thought to have or express the above noted features. The biblical text refers to spirit as breath and wind, suggesting a life-giving force, movement, and an invisible and transcendent power seen only through its effects,10 and yet it also refers to spirit as water, possibly hinting that spirit should be thought of as a material substance. In John’s gospel, spirit is attributed with what looks like agency when spirit is said to teach, lead, and guide. And in Paul, spirit adopts. Given the multiple uses and referents of the term spirit, are biblical scholars able to make spirit pellucid and offer a more concrete answer to the question “What is spirit?”
Essentially, conversations surrounding the nature of the spirit in biblical scholarship are deeply tied to what a given scholar takes to be the biblical author’s cosmological framework.11 The initial presupposition regarding an author’s working cosmology often entails an initial answer to the what question of spirit.12 However, parsing what one takes to be the right ancient cosmology of a biblical author cannot elucidate the concept of spirit simpliciter. The former merely provides an answer regarding what type of stuff spirit is. Yet many of the what questions linger, such as: Is spirit merely a phenomenal experience, an epistemic epiphany or delusion, or an ontological entity? Is there a difference between spirit as the animation of humans and spirit as divine? Is spirit transcendent or immanent? How might spirit, given the sort of stuff it is, effect or be affected by that which is not spirit? Is spirit personal, nonpersonal, or both?
Curiously, we can really only conceptualise a possible ontology of spirit, whether as an ancient author or a modern exegete, in one of three ways—material, supramaterial, or immaterial—because these ways appear to be the only available options given our metaphysical space. Given the diversity of cosmologies present in the biblical text and the plethora of interpretations in contemporary scholarship, attempts to answer the question “What kind of stuff is spirit?” leads scholars to construct highly abstract models in an attempt to explain the inner nature of the black box of spirit.
WHERE IS THE SPIRIT?
Due to the problem of thirdness, the question “Who is the Holy Spirit?” is often made synonymous with the question “Where is the Holy Spirit?” This occurs because who the Holy Spirit is, is derived commonly by way of his relating to the other members of the Godhead or to nondivine persons. Thus who the Spirit is becomes linked to where the Spirit is seen to work, (i.e., in the human person, by Jesus of Nazareth, or through the sacramental actions of the church).13 Again, the Holy Spirit’s personhood becomes secondary as he is the Spirit of more concrete phenomena: the spirit of humanity, the spirit of Christ, or the spirit of the church. Theologians are inclined to take the identity of the Holy Spirit, as third person of the Godhead, for granted by affirming that the Holy Spirit is God. This is so obviously the correct answer to the who question that one moves on immediately to consider the location of the Spirit in the economy of salvation. When this move is made without attention to the uniqueness of his personhood or the mode of his presence, then any possibility of the Spirit’s unique characteristics or distinct contribution to theology is ruled out. The Holy Spirit becomes a general divine presence, a power source to be plugged in at some point, and pneumatology is subsumed under more concrete doctrine or equated with his works (outputs).14 Because the primary goal of this paper is to highlight where pneumatology has gone adrift, we will follow the tide and limit our discussion to “Where is Spirit?”
By “more concrete doctrine,” we are referring to doctrines that are clearer regarding the what question presented in the prior section and thereby make it easier to locate where spirit is. That is, if you ask, “What is incarnation?” or “What is church?” or “What is human?” or “What is creation?” then one can point to the thing itself (inadequate as that is for ontology) and answer, “There it is.” This is not the case with spirit; even if spirit is defined as something material, it is never understood as being material in the way that we understand the physical, and thus we never know where to locate it. We cannot get out of this by simply denying that spirit has location or objecting that spirit cannot be bound within space-time. Prolific through the biblical text and theological tradition is the association between spirit and divine presence. The third person of the Trinity is the one who “draws near” and who the psalmist pleads not to be taken from him (Ps 51:11). Such presence or absence comes with implications for authority or anointing as well as ethical value or holiness. Therefore, in this section, we will look at ways theologians (affirming some account of the Trinity) answer the question “Where is the Holy Spirit?” that have led to either a stunted or overrealised pneumatology. Although the doctrine of inseparable operations demands that the Spirit must be involved in all of these areas, He can’t be contained, nor should his particularity within the triune Godhead be defined primarily as in relation to these doctrines. When pneumatology is subsumed by other doctrines, the distinctive, essential contribution that the Spirit makes to the Christian gospel is, in our systematic articulations, lost and forgotten.
SPIRIT AS AGGREGATE OF CHRIST
FILIOQUE
The spark that lit the Great Schism of 1054, separating the Greek-speaking Eastern church from the Latin-speaking Western church, was the question of how to express the relation between the Son and the Spirit in the triune life; this schism continues to stir up embers of dissent even today. Above we described how the place of the third person within the Trinity has been somewhat ambiguous and difficult to conceptualize after the opposed and reciprocal relations between the Father and the Son were first established. The Father is unoriginate; the Son is eternally originating from the Father. This, as is well known, leaves open two possibilities for the Holy Spirit: Does the Holy Spirit, like the Son, originate from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son? If one opts for the latter and accepts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and the Son (or from the Father and through the Son), then, as Jürgen Moltmann argued, it would seem that “the Holy Spirit is once and for all put in third place in the Trinity, subordinated to the Son.”15 This subordination, which needs not be an implication of the filioque within the immanent life of God, is made manifest in the retrospective justification for this additional clause as representative of the divine economy. Such arguments typically emphasize passages where the Holy Spirit is sent by Jesus, under his command and disposal, and give little consideration to passages where the Holy Spirit births, drives, guides, or empowers Jesus’s ministry. One might alternatively shift the meaning of the filioque clause so that the Holy Spirit comes from the “common origin,” or shared essence between the Father and the Son, and this route is clearly more promising.16 However, one must proceed with caution so as not to imply that there is another component to the Godhead, a shared essence that is identifiable apart from the persons. However, if one rejects the filioque and claims that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, how can we distinguish between the Son and the Holy Spirit, who might appear to have the same relation of origin and thus be indistinguishable? These are the traditional horns of the filioque dilemma, and, humbly, we offer no resolution or answer to this dilemma.
Historically, the fear that motivated the addition of the filioque clause is not only a collapse between the Son and the Spirit but also the subordination of the Son in the form of Arianism. In this way, the unecumenical introduction of the filioque into the creed was to firm up the homoouison between the Father and the Son.17 Put most simply, the filioque was never really about the Holy Spirit but about the divinity of the Son. Moreover, historians have noted that one cannot understand this change to the Latin creed apart from the ecclesiastical politics of the time, and still today the primary goal for many working on the filioque debate is ecumenical humility and reconciliation rather than dogmatic accuracy.18 More recently, Moltmann (rather polemically) argued that the filioque persists out of a jealous “clericalism” because “if God is represented by Christ, Christ by the Pope, and the Pope by the bishops and priests, then—by way of the Filioque in the primordial relationships—the Holy Spirit, with all his charismata and energies in salvation history, is tied down to the operative acts of the priesthood.”19 Whilst Moltmann may overreach here, what is important to note is that these are debates in ecclesiology, both ecumenical and structural. None of the above is concerned with or attentive to the distinctive personhood or revelation of the Holy Spirit.
SPIRIT CHRISTOLOGY
One form of reaction to the felt subordination of the Holy Spirit to Christ in the divine economy, as mentioned above, is the adoption of a Spirit Christology. There are many variations of Spirit Christology ranging from what could be identified as forms of adoptionism to forms of panthenthesism, though this is not a necessary entailment of the position. What we consider to be a minimalist Spirit Christology stems from a robust, possibly overrealised, pneumatology. On this minimalist account, it is “the Spirit who is the point of contact between the divine hypostasis and the humanity of Jesus.”20 Since the person of the Son must act in accord with his human nature without a change in his divine nature, the Spirit is introduced to mediate between the human and divine natures in Jesus Christ. As such, any act of divinity witnessed in Jesus Christ should, in some sense, be attributed to the Holy Spirit’s acting through Christ’s humanity and not solely to the action of the Son. This mediation of the Spirit acts as a sort of safeguard not only in upholding the divinity of the Son but also, more importantly for most advocating this view, maintaining Jesus’s humanity. On this account, the Son is only indirectly related to his humanity, and the man Jesus is only indirectly related to the Godhead.21 The Spirit plays a significant role in mediating and sustaining the humanity (nature, mind, etc.) of Christ in its relation to the divine person of the Son. It is a bit unclear why one should think that the Spirit does play or would need to play this sort of double mediatory role between (1) the humanity and divinity in the person of Jesus and (2) the person of the incarnate Son and the person of the Father. How does adding another divine person into the mix provide mediation between natures (within Christ) or persons (within the Godhead)?
Ultimately, we are not concerned with whether Spirit Christology is the best way to work out what is going on in the incarnation of the Son. What we are concerned with is how this understanding of Christology facilitates a collapse of pneumatology into Christology (and, oddly enough, might further facilitate a tangential collapse of pneumatology and Christology into anthropology). The beginnings of a collapse that this view implies is concerning in at least three ways:22 (1) there is a lack of clarity regarding how to understand the union of humanity and divinity in Jesus Christ as the single person of the Son, (2) the complexities of pneumatological doctrine are constrained in that the primary mode of revelation of the Spirit relates to merely the humanity of Christ and not Godself, and (3) Spirit Christology seems to presuppose a competitiveness between the divine and human natures such that mediation is required even in the person of Christ.23 Curiously, this has the effect of making Christ less than fully God while simultaneously making Christ something other than fully human.24 So how does all this relate to pneumatology proper? On this model, it is the Holy Spirit who facilitates the communication/union of natures and persons within the single person of Christ, within the immanent Trinity (as discussed above), and in God’s relation to human persons.
The question “Where is the Spirit?” is answered by advocates of this Spirit Christology view as fundamentally grounded and located “in the humanity of Christ.” The way the Spirit acts in Christ’s humanity (mediating humanity to Christ and mediating the divinity of the Father to Christ) becomes a model for how the Spirit indwells the human person, except now it is the human Jesus that is mediated to the Christian believer and not the Godhead.25 We wonder if the Spirit’s mediation can be thought to make the relation between something divine and something human really indirect. The Spirit himself is divine! Why then, or how then, does it work that the Spirit is able to be the mediating one? The only reason we can conceive for why it is that the Spirit is able to do this work (and on a Spirit Christology must do this work) is that spirit (inexplicitly) is conceptualised as some semicreated or uncreated stuff.26 We have, it seems, returned back to the what question, this time via the where question. The Spirit has become either a quasi-divine stuff located in the humanity of Christ or a relation that holds between divine and created stuff, belonging fully to neither category. In a sense, the “black box” of the Holy Spirit is moved and located in Christ’s humanity minimizing both the divine and personal qualities of the Holy Spirit.
SPIRIT AS AGGREGATE OF THE HUMAN PERSON
At first glance, equating the Holy Spirit with a human spirit might appear to answer the what question of spirit (i.e., spirit just is human spirit, whatever human spirit is).27 Yet this move locates the spirit within a human and so is also an attempt to answer the question “Where is spirit?” That is, saying that spirit is human spirit does not actually address the question “What is spirit?” Instead, it avoids the what question by locating spirit in something else with concrete spaciotemporal location, that is, human beings. This move ultimately equates a part of a human being with God, the human spirit with divine spirit. Let’s call this concept “Spirit anthropology.”
The main problem with understanding spirit as merely referring to the human spirit or life-breath of human beings is that it makes either (1) the Holy Spirit something other than divine (denying Trinitarian conceptions of God) or (2) humans in some sense naturally divine (divinizing humans), because (3) the distinction between the human and divine natures is collapsed. Most will not (explicitly) affirm (1), though there might be biblical fodder for this (especially in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple literature).28 We do not think proponents of the Holy Spirit as “life-breath” want to confer that Holy Spirit just is human spirit because this seems to lead to the immediate collapse of the Creator-creature distinction. Instead, proponents of this view would have to say something like: “Humans have human spirits, and humans are also in a special ‘life-breath’ relation29 to the Holy Spirit such that the Holy Spirit can be said to have been breathed into and added to all humans such that all human beings have spirit that is also divine Spirit.”30 Oddly, what we have, then, are humans who always have access to the mind of God due to the already present Spirit of God within them; a kind of Schleiermachian “God-consciousness.” If this is the case, then the fall from grace has not really had much effect. There is no difference between those in Christ and in the church and those outside of Christ and his church because all have immediate access to God via this divine Spirit—the Holy Spirit is thereby somehow constitutive of all humanity at creation.31
Similar to Spirit Christology, Spirit anthropology is a form of overrealised pneumatology that both diminishes the divine and turns the human into something other than human. This tendency toward a so-called Spirit anthropology can be seen most often in those that (1) lean toward (or commit to) universalism and (2) understand conversion to be merely epistemic. Regarding (1), Spirit anthropology acts to “fill the gap” between those who come to faith and those who do not. If all humans will enter the loving presence of God and are being moved to eschatological bliss, and if all humans have had the salvation of Christ applied to them, then all humans have immediate access to the divine via the presence of the divine Spirit. Regarding (2), salvation is a coming to know what is already the case rather than a metaphysical change of the person in relation to God. And in the same vein, it is a coming to know through looking within for the God who is already present within (i.e., God is not only closer than one can imagine but seems familiar and unremarkable rather than being a radically transcendent God who “disrupts” through in-breaking). Both of these renderings, to their credit, avoid major theological puzzles (e.g., How is it that the work of Christ is only made manifest in some humans? How is it that we do not have an ontological change of status on conversion through the giving of the Spirit?). But at what cost?
SPIRIT AS AGGREGATE OF CREATION
Once the Holy Spirit becomes constitutive of a human person, one is only a stone-throw away from understanding Spirit as constitutive of creation. In this way the Holy Spirit is not only collapsed into the human soul or life-force but becomes a “world-soul” or cosmic life force. This trajectory can be seen in the work of Jürgen Moltmann and Wolf hart Pannenberg. As leading proponents of the rediscovery of Trinitarianism in twentieth-century theology, Moltmann and Pannenberg have both given substantial attention to the place of pneumatology in systematic theology. Both theologians also reject what they see as the Hellenising influence on pneumatology that associated pneuma with nous, a rational mind and subsequent Spirit anthropology, more than with ruach, a cosmic and transcendent force. Their goal was to use pneumatology to bridge unacceptable divides between creation and redemption, as well as between natural science and Christian thought, by emphasising the Spirit’s role as the power and integrating “connector” throughout the cosmos. For all the many differences between them, both Moltmann and Pannenberg sought to articulate a theology of the person and work of the Holy Spirit through engagement with modern science and so came to define the Spirit as a “vitalizing field of energy.”32 It is ironic that, whilst both Moltmann and Pannenberg decried the influence of Hellenistic philosophy upon Christian pneumatology, the development of spirit as a rational but only quasi-personal force pervading the cosmos remains very close to Philo’s Christianized interpretation of the spirit as the Stoic or Platonic “world-soul.”33
Moltmann’s pneumatology starts with the “elemental” experience of spirit as the “divine element”34 (comparable to water, fire, or air/breath) and consists largely in a description of the Spirit’s effects; the outputs of the black box. For Moltmann, the where and who questions of pneumatology are determined by human experience: the experience of being alive, the experience of an empowered or liberated life, the experience of inner peace, and perhaps most importantly, “the space we live in” and “that broad place where there is no more cramping.”35 From this, Moltmann deduces that Mother is an appropriate name for the Holy Spirit as the space and lifeforce in which a child in whom the individual human and the entire cosmos lives and grows.36 The subsumption of pneumatology into the doctrine of creation occurs as much because creation is Moltmann’s answer to the question “What is spirit?” as it is his answer to the question “Where is the Holy Spirit?”; the Spirit is found throughout creation as a divine force field of creation. The Spirit, for Moltmann, is “by no means merely a matter of revelation. It [The Holy Spirit] has to do with life and its source and so is in everything and known through every experience.”37
By contrast, Pannenberg denied the direct experience of God in finite existence and believed that God could only be experienced indirectly through the totality of universal history. Pannenberg tries to articulate this through the language of electromagnetic field theory, whereby the Spirit becomes a universal field of forces manifested in particular corpuscular constellations. This metaphor with field theory is also a modern answer to the what question. It is telling, and often missed, that the primary focus for Pannenberg’s discussion of fields of force is the “spirit” as the substance of the Godhead, not the name for the third person of the Trinity. Pannenberg’s field of force is the life of the triune God manifest as the pervasive, indirect revelation of the totality of history.38 Pannenberg’s answer to the what question dictates his answer to the where question; the divine force field (spirit) is everywhere, in all history, and so the Holy Spirit is also nowhere in particular. There is no way on such a schema to even start pneumatology, to inquire further into the Holy Spirit as a person, or to probe the distinctive revelation of the Holy Spirit.
For both Moltmann and Pannenberg, the diffusion of pneumatology into all experience and the totality of cosmic history means that pneumatology can have no boundaries, edges, or clear definition. Spirit is defined as supramaterial bodily experiences had by all humanity, indeed all flesh and the entire cosmos. The question of how this spirit of creation can also be Holy, an uncreated person of the Trinity, remains unanswered. In the attempt to free pneumatology from the anthropological spirits of modern liberal Protestantism, Moltmann, Pannenberg, and numerous other scholars in the recent fields of science-and-religion and ecotheology have collapsed pneumatology into the doctrine of creation.39
HOW DOES THE HOLY SPIRIT REVEAL?
The above analysis has been something of a ground-clearing exercise. It provides a critical cartography of the field of pneumatology, arguing that, for the most part, theologians have been preoccupied with not necessarily the wrong questions but unhelpful questions regarding the third person of the Trinity. Preoccupation with the questions “What is Spirit?” and “Where is the Holy Spirit?” has led to either (1) stumbling over thirdness into a pit of abstraction or (2) inserting the black box of spirit into another doctrine that in turn defines the Spirit; both of these diminish or forgo his divine personhood. If this is a fair assessment of the pneumatological landscape, one might wonder how any claims can be made about the Holy Spirit. If we can’t answer the questions of what (without abstraction) or where (without collapse), then what is a theologian interested in pneumatology to do? This is exactly what makes it so dang hard to work out particularities of pneumatology simpliciter! That is, the Holy Spirit is never found alone or in isolation in a way that allows for neat and clear demarcation regarding what or where he is (but, honestly, this is a truth of the whole Trinity). Thus, we propose that one must look first to the primary mode in which the Holy Spirit acts in revelation.
How is it that we should understand the mode of the Spirit’s revelation? The Holy Spirit is always pointing to and revealing Christ. For this reason, theologians have come to speak of a “self-effacing,” “elusive,” or “shy” personality of the Spirit. Curiously, we do not likewise refer to Christ as self-effacing in his pointing and revealing the Father and the promised Spirit. Further, in so far as the Holy Spirit is the Paraclete who has come to be present in believers, one might argue that he is currently both more present and more intimate with his redeemed creatures than either the Father or the Son. The characterisation of the Holy Spirit’s nature as “self-effacing,” whilst it may contain a grain of truth, seems to function largely as an excuse for the subsumption of pneumatology into more concrete doctrine, as discussed above. Given the difficulties in pneumatology, such a judgement can only be seen as premature. Until we examine the distinct revelation of the Holy Spirit and the manner of this revelation, we cannot know if the Holy Spirit is more timid than the other members of the Trinity—or indeed more assertive!
One cannot imagine or deduce from prior revelation Christology (the revelation of the Son) without incarnation—the mode of his revelation. There are certain attributes of the Son that are only revealed or fleshed out through God’s unique mode of revelation for the Son (e.g., the humility and condescension of God, that divinity and humanity are not in a competitive relation, etc.). Similarly, one cannot attain to a proper pneumatology (the revelation of the Holy Spirit) by looking (only or primarily) to the revelation of the Son, to theological anthropology, or to the doctrine of creation. To begin one’s theological investigation into pneumatology, one must be attentive to God’s unique mode of revelation for the Holy Spirit—indwelling. Whilst indwelling is not the only mode of the Spirit’s revelation in creation, it is a good place to start for theologians working post-Pentecost. It is via this mode of revelation—intimate and internal indwelling relation between two personal relata (the Holy Spirit and redeemed human persons)—that the Holy Spirit is revealed to and present in creation as the third person of the Godhead. Note that here the Holy Spirit is in relation and is neither a relation nor merely a relator (one who simply facilitates others’ relationships).
Indwelling, as a dynamic act in a particular mode of revelation, could inform our understanding of the uniqueness of the Holy Spirit’s personhood (avoiding the instrumentalization of the Spirit) and then can also inform our thinking of the Trinitarian God more generally. For it is only now, post-ascension of Christ and post-instantiating the new indwelling relation of the Spirit (i.e., post-Pentecost), that we can even begin to fathom Trinity. More specifically, it is via the Holy Spirit’s being in indwelling relation to redeemed human persons that human minds are illumined and receive revelation regarding the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead (and are able to investigate the biblical witness retrospectively in light of Christ and Pentecost). The Holy Spirit is not merely a means of revelation, not merely a “black box” connector. And revelation is not merely accomplished by, with, and through the Spirit. He himself is being revealed as Holy Spirit, the third person of the Godhead! As such, God the Holy Spirit is also the object of revelation along with the Father and the Son and not merely the instrument of revelation. If we examine and seek to understand the uniqueness of this indwelling relation,40 and we do not act as if the third person of the Trinity is merely a relation, then we might just properly navigate the pneumatological sea toward a robust understanding of the divine person of the Holy Spirit.
NOTES
1. Lewis Ayres astutely points out that Holy Spirit “is a combination of terms that surely must also be true of Father and Son,” so even this may not be a unique title for the third person of the Trinity. Ayres, “Augustine on the Trinity,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, ed. Matthew Levering and Gilles Emery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 129.
2. All that is meant by an overrealised pneumatology is something akin to what might be thought of as an overrealised Christology held by some Barthians. That is, the former answer all questions with “through the Spirit” and the latter “through Christ.” Both these statements are true in that the Trinitarian operations are inseparable and all things are worked out “in the Spirit” and “in Christ” (and in the Father). Yet this flippancy rids the biblical text of its witness and the distinctions between the divine hypostases revealed through God’s acts in creation.
3. Oliver Crisp notes, in holding all things together, the Spirit should be thought of as more than glue. But for lack of a better term, this is the one he employs. Crisp, The Word Enfleshed: Exploring the Person and Work of Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 161.
4. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), 15.19.36.
5. Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 9.
6. The idea that the divine eternal unity is found in a “threefold repetition” that rules out subordination of any one person to the other two is language taken from Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, The Doctrine of the Word of God, part 1, trans. G.W. Bromiley, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 350ff.
7. This problem of thirdness (the inconsistent logic of how the divine persons are established in our models of the Trinity) persists even when we remember Aquinas’s definition of all the Trinitarian persons (and the divine essence) as “subsistent relations.” This definition arises from the doctrine of simplicity and functions as an important bulwark against anthropomorphism. However, this doubling up of the language of relation in Trinitarian theology leads to an equivocation. On the one hand, all the Trinitarian persons are relations (or are something nonidentical to human persons). And yet the third person is the relation (bond, fellowship, or love) between the Father and Son in a special or unique way. Whereas the first and second persons stand in a reciprocal, constitutive, and complete relation of Father and Son, the relational status of the third person is something quite different. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, cura et studio Instituti Studiorum Medieavalium Ottaviensis, tomus primus (Ottawa: Collége Domincian d’Ottawa, 1941), 1.29.4; 1.30.2; and 1.39.1. Thank you to Adonis Vidu for raising this issue and to Matthew Joss for helping us to clean up some of our overly obtuse language here.
8. This is taken from Karl Barth’s efforts to ground the doctrine of the Trinity in the concept of revelation, where the Father is the Revealer, the Son the objective Revelation, and the Spirit the subjective imparter of Revelation, or Revealedness. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1:332f.
9. An example of this is John V. Taylor’s pneumatology, which focuses on the Holy Spirit’s role as the “invisible go-between,” the “in-between-ness,” who “sets up the current of communication” between two subjects, I and Thou. Taylor, The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit & The Christian Mission (London: SCM, 1972), 17.
10. Anthony C. Thiselton, The Holy Spirit: In Biblical Teaching, through the Centuries, and Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 18.
11. For example: Volker Rabens, The Holy Spirit and Ethics: Transformation and Empowering for Religious-Ethical Life, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016); Troels Edgberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and the Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Jörg Frey and John Levison, “The Origins of Early Christian Pneumatology: On the Rediscovery and Reshaping of the History of Religions,” in The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jörg Frey and John Levison (Boston: de Gruyter, 2014), 1–38.
12. We use the term presupposition not because biblical scholars assume a cosmology without some sort of supporting historical argument, but simply because commitment to a particular cosmology functions hermeneutically as an exegetical lens for how biblical scholars work with and from the text. Further, it is worth noting that biblical scholars, especially those working within religionsgeschichtliche Schule, concede that Paul (at least) is doing something new with spirit which cannot easily fit within any of the available ancient cosmologies. As such, the historical context does not do much to illumine the theological moves Paul (and other biblical writers) are making when utilising the term spirit. For further explication on this point, see Volker Rabens, “Physical and Mystical Dimensions of Human Transformation in Philo and Paul,” paper presented at Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS) meeting in Athens, Greece, 2018; and Kimberley Kroll, “The Condescension of God: The Nature of the Relation of the Indwelling Holy Spirit” (PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, forthcoming).
13. This can also be seen in Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy when the Spirit is given a ‘face’ via Mariology and the concept of Hagia Sophia, respectively.
14. It is worth taking note that this same problem (i.e., a depersonalisation of one of the members of the Godhead due to that member being overly identified with his works) has been identified as a problem in Christology. That is, due to a concern that Christ was being instrumentalized, seen as merely his works (e.g., atonement) and their efficaciousness, without attention being paid to the fullness of His being the second person of the Trinity, theology has seen a shift in trajectory and taken care to be attentive to the person of the Son and not collapse the person of the Son into the works of the Son. This same tendency of collapse is found in pneumatology, though it is (possibly) more complex due the fact that it is not only works but mere concreta that Holy Spirit is swallowed up by. For instance, Graham A. Cole makes the comparison to Christology when he enjoins theologians to focus on who rather than what the Holy Spirit is. However, since he makes elusiveness, self-effacement, and divine selflessness the fundamental methodological principles of doing pneumatology, the who question can only be answered by discussing the outputs or works of the Spirit, which thereby collapses pneumatology into other doctrine (in this case, creation, covenant, Christology, and ecclesiology). Cole, He Who Gives Life: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 42, 281, 284.
15. Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 2009), 293.
16. Although he strongly denied the implication highlighted here, this was Karl Barth’s tactic for finding a middle path in this millennium-old controversy. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, The Doctrine of the Word of God, part.1, trans. G. W. Bromiley, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 486–87. Cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 1:342ff.
17. Avery Dulles sources this concern back to Basil of Caesarea’s unfortunate use of the word cause in reference to the Son’s procession of the Father. Dulles, “The Filioque: What is At Stake?,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 59 (January–April 1995): 32.
18. For example, Yves Congar proposed that the Western church should suppress the filioque cause because this “would be a gesture of humility and brotherhood on the part of the Roman Catholic Church which might have wide-reaching ecumenical implications.” Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 3 vols., trans. D. Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 204, 206.
19. Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 294.
20. Myk Habets, “Spirit Christology: The Future of Christology,” in Third Article Theology: A Pneumatological Dogmatics, ed. Myk Habets (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 229.
21. Habets, “Spirit Christology,” 223.
22. There is a fourth way: because of the close association between the Spirit and Christ in incarnation, the Spirit (most explicitly) post-ascension functions theologically as a form of Christ lacking his own personhood. As John W. Nevin writes, “The Spirit then constitutes the form of Christ’s presence and activity in the Church, and the medium by which he communicates himself to his people.” Nevin, Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: FB&C, 2015), 226. See also David Coffey, “The Method of Third Article Theology,” in Third Article Theology: A Pneumatological Dogmatics, ed. Myk Habets (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 21–38.
23. Thank you to Jared Michelson for helping us to articulate the problematic presupposition in this way.
24. For a more extensive articulation of this argument, see Kimberley Kroll, “Indwelling without the Indwelling Holy Spirit: A Critique of Ray Yeo’s Modified Account,” Journal of Analytic Theology 7 (2019): 124–41.
25. Ray S. Yeo, “Towards a Model of the Indwelling: A Conversation with Jonathan Edwards and William Alston,” Journal of Analytic Theology 2 (2014): 210–37.
26. Interestingly, this not-so-live option, if it were an option, imitates the three answers to the ‘what’ question, i.e. material (created), immaterial (divine), and supra-material (created-divine composite).
27. This identification of the human spirit with the Holy Spirit often results from the apparent textual ambiguity on this point in some biblical passages, particularly in wisdom literature. The additional presence of the Holy Spirit indwelling the Christian believer, or as the breath of life “on loan to man during his earthly life” (Wis. 15:16), does not help. However, textual ambiguity is not excuse for metaphysical confusion or collapse. George Montague, The Holy Spirit: The Growth of a Biblical Tradition (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1976), 102.
28. For an introduction into the biblical conversation regarding human spirit as holy spirit, see John R. Levison, Filled with the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). Levison understands life-breath as divine spirit and “filling” (“to the nth degree”) as a special endowment upon conversion. For Levison, there is no distinction between the חַוּר that animates human persons and the πνεῦμα that is experienced in fullness by the faithful. Whatever pneuma is understood to be, it is already present in, and at least partially constitutive of, the human person upon creation.
29. Because humanity is the only creation that receives this “life-breath,” spirit is kept back from collapse into all of creation, allowing humanity to maintain a heightened status over the creation.
30. One of us has previously suggested that the imago Dei might be understood as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which implies that all human beings are indwelt by the Spirit as part of their creation. I now think that if one argues for a pneumatological basis for the imago Dei, which has significant advantages over other standard models, then it should be on the unique potential for human beings to be indwelt by the Spirit rather than on the full realisation of this indwelling in all people. See Joanna Leidenhag, “Uniqueness and the Presence of the Image: Towards a Pneumatological Foundation for Human Uniqueness and the Image of God,” in Issues in Science and Theology: Are We Special? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, ed. Michael Fuller, Dirk Ever, Anna Runehov, and Knut-Willy Sæther (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 255–70.
31. God obviously acts toward and throughout creation given his omnipresence. However, we see no good reason to consider omnipresence, indwelling, and specialized “local” presence as synonyms or identical notions of God’s presence in the world. Indeed, such collapse between different ways God is present to creatures and in creation only leads to deep theological confusion.
32. Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 2009), 55.
33. John R. Levison, The Spirit in First-Century Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 148ff.
34. Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 2009), 12.
35. Moltmann, The Source of Life, 11, 31, 68. See also Moltmann’s critique of the split between experience and revelation in the dialectics of Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, and Gogarten, and his preference to experience as revelation (Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 5–6).
36. This is a move from what the Spirit is (the experience of space and life) to who the Holy Spirit is (Mother). Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 270–74; Moltmann, The Source of Life, 27, 35–37.
37. Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 7.
38. Christoph Schwöbel, “Wolf hart Pannenberg,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. David Ford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 278; Wolf hart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 401ff; 414ff.
39. John Polkinghorne talks of the work of the Spirit in terms of “the input of pure information” into creation. John Polkinghorne, “The Hidden Spirit and the Cosmos,’ in The Work of the Spirit: Pneumatology and Pentecostalism, ed. Michael Welker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 169–82. A more recently popular model has been to associate the Holy Spirit with emergence theory as the “emergence of spirit” and the “spirit of emergence.” See Philip Clayton, “The Emergence of Spirit,” CTNS Bulletin 20, no. 4 (2000): 3–20; Denis Edwards, Breath of Life: A Theology of the Creator Spirit (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); Amos Yong, “Ruach, the Primordial Chaos, and the Breath of Life: Emergence Theory and the Creation Narratives in Pneumatological Perspective,” in The Work of the Spirit: Pneumatology and Pentecostalism, ed. Michael Welker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 183–204. For a critique of this movement in the science-religion dialogue, see Joanna Leidenhag, “A Critique of Emergent Theologies,” Zygon: Journal for Science and Religion 51, no. 4 (2016): 867–82; Joanna Leidenhag and Mikael Leidenhag, “Spirit and Science: A Critical Examination of Amos Yong’s Pneumatological Theology of Emergence,” Open Theology 1, no. 1 (2015): 425–35; Joanna Leidenhag and Mikael Leidenhag, “The Unsuitability of Emergence Theory for Pentecostal Theology: A Response to Bradnick and McCall,” Zygon: International Journal in Science and Religion 53, no. 1 (2018): 258–73. Donald Bloesch raises this objection against the pneumatology of Clark Pinnock, which “tends to begin with the Spirit’s work in creation,” resulting in a “natural theology of the Spirit” that struggles to say anything distinctively Christian about the Holy Spirit and instead offers a global religion of the Spirit. Donald Bloesch, The Holy Spirit: Works & Gifts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 25–26.
40. For a further extensive and constructive account of the indwelling relation of the Holy Spirit, see Kroll, “The Condescension of God.”