CHAPTER 6
WHO’S ON THIRD?
(Re)Locating the Spirit in the Triune Taxis
JEROME VAN KUIKEN AND JOSHUA M. MCNALL
FAMOUS COMEDY ROUTINES do not normally provide the reverential fodder for constructive treatments of the Trinity. Among the most famous comedic sketches of all time is the 1930s bit entitled “Who’s on First?” by Abbott and Costello. The gist of the routine is to illustrate the hilarious confusion that results from a baseball game in which the baserunners have some strange names: “Who” is on first; “What” is on second; “I Don’t Know” is on third. (For what it’s worth, “I Don’t Care!” is the shortstop.)
In turning from comedy to Trinity, the language of first, second, and third also has precedent. Theologians have traditionally assigned the Spirit third place in the triune taxis both economically and immanently—though not, of course, in temporal sequence, ontic hierarchy, or authoritative subordination. Some recent scholarship, however, has challenged this placement by virtue of what we will refer to as the Spirituque: the idea that the much-debated filioque of intra-Trinitarian relations should be complemented by the notion that the Spirit participates with the Father in the Son’s eternal generation so that it may be correct to say (at least in some sense) that the Son’s eternal generation involves both the Father and the Spirit. The result of this Spirituque speculation is a question that sounds vaguely similar to those of Abbott and Costello: Who is “on third” (or second or even first!) within the triune taxis? And on what basis may we answer that question?
In this chapter, we evaluate three modern Spirituque proposals as they come to us from three historic “clubhouses” of the Christian tradition (to continue the baseball metaphor): first, from Anglican Protestant Sarah Coakley, a Spirit-leading approach; second, from Catholic Thomas Weinandy, a Spirit-mediating perspective; third, from Eastern Orthodox Sergei Bulgakov, a Spirit-completing proposal.
In addition to examining the biblical coherence and theological fruitfulness of these three proposals, we must address the largest objection to any version of the Spirituque: the “umpire” of church tradition has almost universally called an “out” on this theological proposal. Without giving away all our conclusions, our favored version of the Spirituque must be biblically rather than politically or aesthetically driven; it must avoid the radicalizing of Rahner’s Rule; and it must prevent the blurring of distinctions among Trinitarian persons. To accomplish this goal, we will lean not only on our three representatives but also upon Augustine’s vision of the Spirit as the vinculum amoris between the Father and the Son. Now for our first representative.
“I DON’T KNOW” IS ON FIRST: SARAH COAKLEY’S SPIRIT-LEADING TRINITARIANISM
In the closing paragraphs to the first installment of her systematic theology, Sarah Coakley reaches a “radical ontological conclusion.” There can be “no Sonship which is not eternally ‘sourced’ by ‘Father’ in the Spirit (in such a way, in fact, as to query even the exclusive meanings of Fatherly ‘source’ . . .).”1 Herein lies the first example of what we have referred to as the Spirituque: the suggestion that the Son is eternally generated by the Father “and the Spirit” so that traditional assignments of “source” and “place” within the triune taxis (first Father, then Son, then Spirit) are called into question.
Coakley’s interdisciplinary project (a théologie totale) is rooted in a heady blend of Pauline, Platonic, pictographic, practical, patristic, and (anti-)patriarchal concerns.2 Though a treatment of this alliteration cannot detain us,3 the goal is clear: it is to counter a “linear” and hierarchal version of the Trinity that prioritizes the masculine dyad of the Father and the Son while reducing the Spirit to what appears, in iconography at least, like an ever-shrinking “pigeon”—“small, shadowy,” and functionally redundant.4 In contrast, Coakley proposes an “incorporative” model of the Trinity in which the Spirit leads us into an experience of the triune life of God by enflaming and purging our desires, often in deep forms of prayer.5
The crucial biblical text for Coakley is Romans 8:9–30, where the Spirit brings our adoption and “bears witness” within us so we cry out, “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15–16). Coakley’s claim is that the Spirit is herein granted a “priority” both “logically and experientially.”6 But this priority is not the only takeaway from Paul’s passage. This mystical experience of prayer provides, for Coakley, the “only valid experientially based pressure towards hypostatizing the Spirit,” allowing us to say “three” with regard to divine persons.7 Further, since the Spirit’s speech is likened to groaning (as opposed to ordered words) the experience transcends the logocentric realm of hierarchy and reason in “a strange subversion of all certainties.”8 And since the groaning is compared to “birth pangs,” the gendered metaphors for God and believers9 are blurred by a “ray of darkness.”10 In all of this, the Spirit’s priority is made apparent, as are certain connections between God, sexuality, and the self.
Church tradition moved, allegedly, to quash this Spirit-leading Trinitarianism because of the early threat of Montanism and the propensity for a charismatic “loss of control” to be confused with a sexual one.11 “Book and bishop” therefore supplanted “Brooding Dove” as guiding forces in the church, and the “linear” model of the Trinity all but obliterated the “incorporative” approach so that Coakley must forage in the “margins” in order to retrieve it. This retrieval, however, is made all the more important, Coakley claims, since the church is again facing a “crisis” regarding sexuality and gender.12
While more should be said of Coakley’s fascinating project, we have now done enough to note why her apophatic and experiential version of the Spirituque can be described—with a nod to Abbott and Costello—as “ ‘I Don’t Know’ is on first.” To be in mystical relationship with an invisible God is to engage in what Coakley refers to as “a love affair with a blank.”13 The divine life, like Sinai’s peak, is cloaked in “thick darkness” (Deut 5:22; Ps 97:2). Thus Coakley’s conclusion is not that the Father’s place as “source” should be rejected but that it should be “quer[ied].”14 “ ‘I Don’t Know’ who is first,” she might be heard to say, since to claim this privileged knowledge would be to peer too deeply into the “dazzling darkness”15 and replace one form of hierarchal false certainty with another. Hers is an apophatic Spirituque.
In response to Coakley’s pneumatology, several strengths stand out. First, her reading of Romans 8 is insightful, and ample biblical support exists for the contention that the Spirit is, in some sense, “first” in our experience of God and salvation. No one says “ ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3). The Spirit convicts of sin (e.g., John 16:8), bears witness in our hearts, and enables the prayer by which we call to God as “Abba, Father” (e.g., Rom 8). To speak of the Spirit as “first” in these capacities is appropriate since for those “dead” in sin the first breath of life comes by the prevenient work of the Spirit.16
Second, Coakley’s gesture toward the Spirit’s particularizing power is also helpful. In her view, the Spirit enables us to say, “three persons,” while simultaneously affirming, “one God.” And this particularizing point could even be strengthened with reference to the post-Pentecost way in which the Spirit brings oneness in the church not by bland homogeneity but by redeemed particularity: “hands” and “feet,” Jews and gentiles, slave and free, men and women in a unity that is not uniformity.17
Third, a measured apophaticism is praiseworthy, especially with regard to the Trinity. Coakley is attuned to the overconfident projectionism that attended the so-called twentieth-century renaissance of Trinitarian theology.18 And her apophaticism helps avoid the radicalizing of Rahner’s Rule, in which any claim about the persons in the economy is taken as an absolutist assumption about the Trinity in se.19
But these strengths are accompanied by potential problems for the Coakleyan Spirituque. First, the biblical basis for her proposal is rather thin. The vast majority of exegetical support is based on just a few verses from Romans 8, and even this work is confined to around four pages in a lengthy monograph. Earlier portions of Paul’s letter are ignored, perhaps because they (along with the gospel of John and Acts, according to Coakley) might seem to highlight a “linear” and “patriarchal” model of God that is focused on the Father and the Son.20
Second, Coakley’s tendency toward apophatic excess runs the risk of replacing the clarity of biblical revelation with the “I Don’t Know” of a “love affair with a blank.” To be sure, there is mystery in God and mystical experience, yet the Scriptures (and Paul in particular) hold together the “dazzling darkness” that clouds our fallen perceptions (1 Cor 13:12) with the “light” that enlightens us (2 Cor 4:6), so that our worship does not devolve into an Athenian apophaticism that pays homage “to an unknown god.” Such reverential ignorance was condemned in Paul’s encounter with the actual (as opposed to the “Pseudo-”) Dionysius (Acts 17:23, 34).21 And rightly so, since one may project onto a “blank” God even more easily than with a graven image, and since one may “find in that blank a carte blanche to fund one’s sociopolitical interests.”22
Finally, and most directly to the Spirituque, Coakley’s methodological move from the economic to the immanent Trinity is also shot through with “rays of darkness.” The rationale for the precise correspondence between temporal prayer and the eternal processions is underdetermined. It needs to be asked: Why must Spirit-leading prayer result in the “radical ontological conclusion” that the Spirit also “sources” the Son’s eternal generation? Coakley provides no answer, except to admit that her proposal remains in the realm of “speculation.”23 For this reason, Christopher Holmes notes rightly that the “force” of her pneumatology remains largely “on the economic level.”24 To merely “query” the meaning of “first” and “source” is ill-fitted with a simultaneous dogmatism that there can be “no Sonship” apart from the Spirituque.25
“WHAT” IS ON SECOND: THOMAS WEINANDY’S SPIRIT-MEDIATING TRINITARIANISM
Coakley’s affirmation of the Spirituque includes her qualified endorsement of Thomas Weinandy’s treatise on the subject, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship.26 While Coakley starts with the Spirit in first place, Weinandy focuses on the Spirit as the second or mediating term between the Father and Son. His thesis is that “the Father begets the Son in or by the Holy Spirit, who proceeds then from the Father as the one in whom the Son is begotten.”27 The generation of the Son is not logically prior to the procession of the Spirit.28 Rather, in generating the Son, the Father gifts his life, love, truth, wisdom, power, and glory—in sum, the divine nature—to the Son, yet that gift is not the divine nature generically or abstractly but is concretely the Spirit of Life, Love, Truth, and so on. To his Son, the Father communicates his holy, spiritual nature as particularized by the Holy Spirit.29 In being thus communicated, the Spirit particularizes or “persons” the Father as Father and the Son as Son.30 This personalizing activity signals that the Spirit is an agent, hence truly a person,31 not the “shrinking pigeon” of Coakley’s critique or a passive “birdie” served between Father and Son in a heavenly badminton match.
Weinandy commends his model as producing a more perfect correspondence between the immanent and economic Trinity without collapsing the former into the latter.32 He spends two chapters tracing the biblical data regarding the Son’s dependence on the Spirit in his conception and baptism, passion and resurrection, along with Christians’ dependence on the Spirit for regeneration, adoption, and sanctification.33 Thus Christian experience follows the pattern of Christ’s experience in the economy of salvation, which in turn suggests an eternal pattern within the immanent Trinity.
The major challenge to Weinandy’s proposal, he knows, is its lack of traction in church tradition. Historically, both Eastern and Western theologians have concluded that the Spirit’s procession is logically posterior to and so derivative from the Father-Son relationship. Weinandy blames this conclusion on theologians’ projection onto the Godhead of unbaptized philosophical notions such as Platonic emanationism and Aristotelian epistemology. Emanationism yields a unilateral sequence in which the Spirit originates from the Father (and, in the West, from the Son, too, albeit as from a single source) and so cannot act causally upon either. Aristotelian epistemology informs Thomas Aquinas’s psychological model of the Trinity in his principle that rational knowledge must precede volitional love, and so the Son, who is God’s Logos, must precede (logically, not chronologically) the Spirit, who is God’s Love.34 Weinandy agrees with the tradition that the Father is the primary source of the other two divine persons; still, he stresses the reciprocity of Trinitarian relations of origin, a key expression of which is the Spirit’s involvement in the Son’s begetting.35
Weinandy’s work has won qualified sympathy even from some scholars predisposed to traditional pneumatology.36 His understanding of the Spirituque as per Spiritum or in Spiritu should soothe worries of the Spirit’s becoming another Father in the Trinity.37 His extensive exegesis grounds his proposal in biblical data rather than egalitarian sociopolitical ideology38 or an aesthetic of tidy Trinitarian symmetry.39 His nested analogies of the Spirit’s role in Christian experience, the economic Trinity, and the immanent Trinity trace praxis and revelation to their headwaters in ultimate reality while in turn mapping that reality’s practical, historical outflow.40
Nonetheless, the most substantial objection to Spirituque arguments comes from the tradition. Thus we must take a slight detour from our three interlocutors to face this critique head on. In what follows, we will revisit the complaint of theological novelty and supplement Weinandy’s rebuttal. We also will weigh Karl Barth’s unfavorable evaluation of the Spirituque. Lastly, we will lodge our own caveat concerning Weinandy’s handling of the Spirit’s whatness so as to guard the personhood of the Spirit when occupying second place in the triune taxis.
EXCURSUS: THE OBJECTION FROM TRADITION
We start by returning to tradition. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas raised the hypothetical possibility that “the Son is from the Holy Ghost . . .” only to dispatch it: “. . . which no one says.”41 Already in the fifth century Augustine had dismissed the same hypothesis as “absurd.”42 What made the Spirituque inconceivable? Whatever one makes of Weinandy’s claim that these theologians’ philosophical presuppositions blinded them, other factors suggest themselves: To begin with, already in the second century the church faced the heresies of adoptionism and Montanism. Adoptionists interpreted Christ’s earthly reliance on the Spirit as a case of a mere man anointed with the divine Spirit. Montanists relativized the authority of the bishops and their Bible in the name of the prophets and their Paraclete. The church responded to both heresies by subordinating the Spirit to Christ and his apostles (as represented by their inspired writings and ordained successors). This economic subordination made it unthinkable that the Son should depend on the Spirit in eternity.43
The Trinitarian terms themselves are another factor in the traditional rejection of the Spirituque. The name Father implies both antecedence and a Son as its consequence; the name Holy Spirit bears no clear relation to either of the other names, so it was relegated to last place as the odd leftover term.44 A further factor was the Trinitarian sequence of Father first, Son second, and Holy Spirit third in the church’s dominant baptismal formula. This formula became the framework for the creeds,45 so that when the Arian crisis forced the church to make official pronouncements about the Trinity ad intra, it seemed only natural to read the creedal order as the order of processions (Son logically prior to Spirit).46 Related to this factor was the early universal acceptance and influence of Matthew’s gospel, which contained the familiar baptismal formula.47 By contrast, in the Eastern churches John’s Apocalypse remained canonically and liturgically marginalized for centuries,48 along with its Father-Spirit-Son sequencing (Rev 1:4–5; chs. 4–5) and its portrayal of Christ’s divine omniscience and omnipotence as due to the Spirit’s presence upon him (Rev 5:6).49
A RESPONSE TO THE REBUTTAL FROM TRADITION
Our claim is that these factors do not decisively rule out the Spirituque. Sergei Bulgakov has noted that the patristic period did not thresh out a thorough, ecumenically accepted pneumatology as it did with Christology, instead deferring that task to the contemporary church.50 What Aquinas heard nobody saying is now proposed by significant Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant theologians.51 What Augustine thought absurd seems more plausible to those impacted by the charismatic movement;52 modern biblical studies’ recovery of the reciprocity of Son and Spirit in the scriptural data;53 and intellectual climate changes toward nonlinearity as found in, for instance, personalism, complexity theory, and quantum mechanics—a climate in which the title Being as Communion is equally apt for a book on Trinitarian theology and another on the philosophy of science.54 We do not claim that because of these factors the Spirituque is right, only that it is ripe for reconsideration.
That ripeness becomes even more apparent when we give church tradition a second look. Once the presumption of the Son’s logical priority over the Spirit is bracketed, the Christian East is especially rich in precedents for the Spirituque. Gregory of Nyssa played on the double entendres in Greek of the Trinitarian titles Logos (reason, word) and Pneuma (spirit, breath) to explain that God’s Reason comes to verbal expression through God’s Breath/Spirit.55 This analogy hints at not only the dependence of the outwardly spoken word upon the breath by which it is uttered but also the reliance of one’s inward reasoning upon one’s innermost being or mind, that is, one’s spirit. This outward/inward distinction corresponds to the economic and immanent Trinity. Gregory of Nazianzus and John of Damascus both illustrated the Trinity by means of Adam (God the Father), Eve, who proceeds from him (God the Holy Spirit), and Abel or Seth, whom he begets (God the Son). Regardless of the illustration’s merit, Yves Congar has pointed out that since Adam begot his son by means of Eve, pressing this illustration produces the Spirituque.56 Lastly, Eastern Orthodox tradition permits the transposition of Christ’s temporal dependence on the Spirit into eternity by speaking of the Spirit’s resting on or abiding in the Son within the immanent Trinity.57 All that remains is similarly to read the Spirit’s formative role in Christ’s earthly begetting back into his heavenly generation.
THE BARTHIAN BLOCK TO SPIRITUQUE
Precisely here Karl Barth balked, despite recognizing that the Spirituque would seem to follow from his theological method of basing the doctrine of the Trinity strictly on its revelation in the economy of grace. He objected that the Son’s eternal generation is solely from the Father’s essence. But in the Spirit-wrought begetting of Christ in his birth, baptism, and resurrection, as well as in the analogous case of Christians’ regeneration, what transpires is a change in an already-existing human essence. In regeneration a human acquires a new manner of being, not being itself. In Christ’s birth and baptism, “it is this man Jesus of Nazareth, not the Son of God, who becomes the Son of God by the descent of the Spirit.” His resurrection, too, merely changes Christ’s manner of being. The Holy Spirit is not the father of either the Son’s humanity or his deity, Barth insisted.58
Let us first take up Barth’s last point. As we have seen, Weinandy’s understanding of the Spirituque as per Spiritum or in Spiritu removes any danger of the Spirit’s encroaching on the Father’s uniqueness. Secondly, Barth’s statement that “this man Jesus of Nazareth, not the Son of God, . . . becomes the Son of God by the descent of the Spirit” seems to distinguish a divine Son from a human Son in Christ—a distinction associated with the heresies of Nestorianism and Spanish adoptionism.59 Barth’s language is at least incautious. It also means that the Spirit’s son-making activity in relation to both Jesus’s humanity and ours has no roots in God’s inner life, thus widening once more the breach Barth was seeking to close.
Finally, Barth’s claim that the Spirit only brings sonship to preexisting persons ignores biblical counterexamples. Isaac did not exist before his conception.60 Paul’s Galatian letter attributes Isaac’s origin to the Spirit as a foreshadowing of Christians’ Spirit-enabled sonship (4:28–29), which in turn echoes Christ’s Sonship (4:4–7).61 Likewise, Adam did not exist before God formed him from virgin soil and breathed into him the breath or spirit or Spirit of life (Gen 2:4–7). Luke’s gospel labels Adam “the son of God” (3:38) and links him to Christ immediately following Jesus’s adult reception of the Holy Spirit and designation as God’s Son (3:21–38), an event that recalls Christ’s Spirit-enabled conception (1:31–37).62 Likewise, John’s gospel blends allusion to Adam’s origin in Genesis 2 with Ezekiel 37’s vision of the valley of dry bones in describing Christ’s resurrection and breathing on his disciples so that they may receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:1–22),63 making them God’s children after the pattern of the monogenēs Son (John 1:12–14; 3:3–8, 16).64 Barth was metaphysically correct that the person of God the Son antedated his incarnation and that sinners are persons (albeit dysfunctional) before regeneration. But if Scripture uses Adam’s and Isaac’s Spirit-wrought sonship ex nihilo as a heuristic device for Christ’s and Christians’ sonship, then this suggests that indeed, as Coakley and Weinandy claim, all sonship is the Spirit’s doing—even within the eternal Trinity.
Underlying Barth’s rejection of the Spirituque was his determination to keep the Spirit firmly subordinate to Christ, lest liberalism, mysticism, and Nazism run amok.65 This fear animated his full-throated defense of the filioque in its strongest form—no half-measured “through the Son” would do!—against Eastern Orthodoxy.66 It also surfaced in his idiosyncratic reading of Genesis 1:1–3. The Bible’s opening verses could lend support to the Spirituque,67 for the sequence is first God (1:1), secondly the Spirit (1:2), and thirdly the Word (1:3) that John’s gospel identifies with Christ (John 1:1–4, 14). But Barth advocated a sharp contrast between verses 2 and 3. He scorned verse 2 as a mythological picture of the Spirit brooding impotently over chaos. This is a possible world to which God says no. Verse 3 begins the account of the world to which God says yes: an orderly realm in which mythos yields to Logos.68 Unlike Barth’s zero-sum game of verse 3 over verse 2, pro-filioque West over anti-filioque East, and Christ over Spirit, we prefer a harmonizing approach open to the Spirituque.
If neither church tradition nor modern objections from so influential a theologian as Barth offer insuperable obstacles to Weinandy’s proposal, then what is to hinder it? The answer is that it is just the “What” that hinders it. Weinandy thinks his Spirituque clearly makes the Spirit a “Who” by giving the Spirit something to do in the immanent Trinity. But the activity of personalizing the Father and Son does not ensure the Spirit’s personhood. One could conceptualize the Holy Spirit as simply a holy field of force, a principle of personalization, the dynamism of the divine nature—a what, not a who.69 This ambiguity springs from Scripture itself. From Genesis 1 to Jesus’s ministry, the Spirit as the second or middle term between God and God’s sons (Adam, Israel, the Davidic kings, Jesus) appears to be merely God’s power or disposition. As we shall see, the Spirit’s whoness only becomes obvious when coming third in the triune taxis.
“WHO’S” ON THIRD: SERGEI BULGAKOV’S SPIRIT-COMPLETING TRINITARIANISM
When Lewis Ayres reviewed Weinandy’s book The Father’s Spirit of Sonship, he noted the precedent set for Weinandy’s proposal by Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov.70 Bulgakov’s magisterial The Comforter concludes that the Old Testament attests the Spirit’s activity everywhere but the Spirit’s personhood nowhere. Not until Jesus’s Upper Room Discourse (John 13–16) and the post-Pentecost church is a full-fledged person revealed: the Paraclete, of whom personal pronouns are used (John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7, 13–14); the one who speaks (Acts 13:2) and grieves (Eph 4:30), prays and groans (Rom 8:26), knows and seeks (1 Cor 2:10–11), and wills to distribute differing gifts (1 Cor 12:11).71 Thus, in the economy of salvation, the Holy Spirit’s hypostatic identity emerges only after the Father’s and the Son’s. The question of the ontological freight this fact carries has divided the church for centuries. Under Augustine’s influence, the West radicalized the Spirit’s status as the third person by teaching that the Spirit owes origination to both the first and the second persons of the Trinity as from a single principle: in the language of the Nicene Creed’s Western recension, the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son [ filioque].” As the Spirit of both Father and Son, the Spirit serves as the “bond” (vinculum) of their mutual love.72 Byzantine Patriarch Photius reacted against the filioque by issuing a one-sided statement of monopatrism: the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, with no indication of any eternal relationship to the Son. Both these positions read only part of the data of the Trinitarian economy back into the immanent Trinity. Augustinian filioquism left the Son’s dependence on the Spirit at the economic level, while Photian monopatrism seemed to do likewise with the Spirit’s dependence on the Son.73 Yet a more sophisticated Eastern stance has allowed for the Spirit to eternally rest upon the Son and manifest through him, thus transposing their mutual interdependence in the economy into the immanent Trinity.74
Bulgakov inherited this nuanced Eastern perspective and developed it creatively in dialogue with the West. From Augustine he took the model of the Trinity as Lover (Father), Beloved (Son), and their shared Love (the Spirit), adding that the Spirit is likewise their mutual Joy (cf. Luke 10:21). The Father eternally delights in his Son in the outgoing Spirit, who then passes through the Son and returns as the reciprocal delight of the Son in his Father to complete the “ring of love.”75 Within this model is room for the filioque “in a certain sense,” without the Western single-principle-of-origination theory:76 the Spirit who proceeds from the Father passes through the Son and so is hypostatically conditioned by him. Bulgakov coupled this modified filioque with a complementary Spirituque, for the Spirit also conditions the Son by reposing upon him.77
For a visual illustration (though not one used by Bulgakov), one might consider the famous lithograph entitled Drawing Hands by Dutch artist M. C. Escher.78 Like the two hands in the drawing, the Son and Holy Spirit each condition the other’s identity, while the Father is like Escher himself, who serves as the unseen “source” of both. Like any Trinitarian analogy, this one fails if pressed too far.79 It does, though, possess a certain patristic pedigree. Irenaeus spoke famously of the Son and Spirit as the two “hands” of God at work within the world.80
For Bulgakov, the Spirit’s active conditioning of the Son in eternity preserves the Spirit from being a “barren hypostasis” as in the Western schema, in which the Spirit’s intra-Trinitarian passivity seems subordinationistic, if not depersonalizing.81 Thus within the immanent Trinity the Spirit is not merely the bond but the binder—less vinculum than vinculator. This hypostatic activity in eternity sets the precedent for the Spirit’s economic agency as counselor, gift-giver, and (as Coakley has emphasized) intercessor.
The Spirit, then, completes the Trinity by binding Father and Son into communion, while they both in turn complete the Spirit’s hypostatic profile as their common Spirit. Moreover, the Holy Spirit completes the personalization of the Godhead by hypostasizing the holy, spiritual nature shared lovingly and joyously between the other two persons. There is no divine residue that remains impersonal.82 This giving and receiving of completeness within the Trinity warrants the Spirit’s association with thirdness, the number that completes the triune life. But Bulgakov grants that the Spirituque relativizes this enumeration. From the standpoint of the Son’s eternal reception of the Spirit, the Father is first, Spirit second, and Son third. While the Father’s primacy stays stable, the ordinals of the other two persons vary with one’s angle of approach.83 Here too the analogy of Drawing Hands is instructive. For though Escher remains “first” as the source of his drawing, the question of which drawn hand is second or third depends on how one “reads” the picture (e.g., from left to right or from right to left).
CONCLUSION
Having surveyed our three proponents of the Spirituque as well as the major objection from tradition, we are now prepared to render some conclusions on how our three interlocutors might mutually inform one another so as to commend a more biblically driven and theologically coherent version of the Spirituque.
Bulgakov’s pneumatology clearly overlaps significantly with Weinandy’s proposal while complementing it by providing both an exegetical basis for the Spirit’s personhood and an Eastern adaptation of the filioque.84 For his part, Weinandy outstrips Bulgakov by crediting the Spirit with conditioning not only the Son but the Father as well, yet without denying the Father’s priority as the Beginning or Archē of the Trinity.85 To return a final time to our Drawing Hands illustration: as with God the Father, the drawn hands also condition Escher since he receives his identity as the artist of Drawing Hands precisely by drawing these two hands that mutually condition one another. On such an understanding, the Spirit’s hypostatic agency appears not only in binding but also in loosing—as Love, the Spirit unifies Father and Son, but the Spirit is also the Liberty (2 Cor 3:17) that preserves each one’s unique personhood.86 Finally, we have noted the utility of Coakley’s biblical argument (selective though it is) for acknowledging the Spirit-leading nature of Christian experience, as well as the particularizing power of the Spirit within the post-Pentecost church.
By way of analogy, though not of any Rahnerian absolutism, one might infer that the Spirit fulfills a particularizing role within the Trinity itself. If that is so, then it is appropriate to entertain the idea that the Spirit participates with the Father in the Son’s eternal generation, even as the Father is conditioned precisely as the eternal Abba by a Son who cries perfect, everlasting love in the power of the Spirit. In this qualified sense, the Spirituque remains a live option for Christian theology.
NOTES
1. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 332. Italics hers.
2. In God, Sexuality, and the Self, these themes break down as follows: Platonic, through the use of (neo)Platonic insights from Origen to Pseudo-Dionysius (ch. 6); pictographic, in a survey of the Trinity as depicted in Christian iconography (ch. 5); practical, in the attempt to ground theology in “fieldwork” done in local Charismatic churches (ch. 4); patristic, by a retrieval of the “neglected patristic tradition” of “Praying the Trinity” (ch. 3); patriarchal, by the use of feminist resources to critique hierarchal and male-dominated emphases (ch. 2); Pauline, by reference to Romans 8 (ch. 1).
3. See Joshua McNall, “Shrinking Pigeon, Brooding Dove: The Holy Spirit in Recent Works by Sarah Coakley and N. T. Wright,” Scottish Journal of Theology 69, no. 3 (2016): 295–308; E. Jerome Van Kuiken, “ ‘Ye Worship Ye Know Not What’? The Apophatic Turn and the Trinity,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 19, no. 4 (2017): 401–20.
4. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 212. Coakley credits Meg Twycross for the evocative description of a “diminished” Spirit that looks more like a tiny pigeon than a brooding dove.
5. See Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, ch. 3.
6. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 112. Italics hers.
7. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 113. Italics hers. See also Sarah Coakley, “Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 29–56.
8. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 342.
9. With regard to believers, Coakley cites Paul’s flip-flopping between “sonship” and “children of God” (tekna) language in Rom 8 as a sign that the Spirit “takes up and transforms the usual societal implications of gender, and renders them both labile and cosmic” (cf. Gal 3:28). God, Sexuality, and the Self, 115.
10. This phrase is that of Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 1; cited in Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 323.
11. See Sarah Coakley, “Prayer, Politics and the Trinity: Vying Models of Authority in 3rd–4th Century Debates on Prayer and ‘Orthodoxy,’ ” Scottish Journal of Theology 66 (2013): 379–99.
12. This is the first sentence in Coakley’s volume, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 1.
13. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 342. Coakley notes that this “wonderful” phrase is that of Dom Sebastian Moore, “Some Principles for an Adequate Theism,” Downside Review 95 (1977): 201–13.
14. See Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 332.
15. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 96.
16. For the recasting of “prevenient grace” as the “prevenient work of the Spirit,” see Joshua M. McNall, The Mosaic of Atonement: An Integrated Approach to Christ’s Work (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019), 303–5.
17. See McNall, Mosaic of Atonement, 305–8. This point builds on the work of doctor particularis Colin Gunton.
18. See God, Sexuality, and the Self, xiv, 270, 272, 309, 321n22.
19. “Even though we stand by the insistence that ‘the economic Trinity is the immanent (or ‘ontological’) Trinity,’ the latter (the ‘ontological’) clearly cannot simply be reduced to God’s manifestation to us. And hence the speculation that follows here.” Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 332n33. Italics hers.
20. See Van Kuiken, “ ‘Ye Worship Ye Know Not What,’ ” 408.
21. See McNall, “Shrinking Pigeon,” 305. Quote from Acts 17:23 uncapitalized.
22. Van Kuiken, “Ye Worship Ye Know Not What,” 415–17. See the similar point by John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 44.
23. See Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 332n33.
24. Christopher R. J. Holmes, The Holy Spirit, New Studies in Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 42.
25. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 332.
26. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 332–33.
27. Thomas G. Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship: Reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), ix.
28. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 71–72.
29. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 46–49, 72; cf. 8–9n16.
30. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 73–74, 97.
31. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 8.
32. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 4–5, 22.
33. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, chs. 2–3.
34. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 9–14, 20–22. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 332n34, demurs from Weinandy’s “latter-day ‘Harnackian’ suspicion of ‘Platonism’ (or Thomist ‘Aristotelianism’).”
35. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 71–74, 78–83, 97.
36. Lewis Ayres, review of Father’s Spirit of Sonship, Journal of Theological Studies 50, no. 1 (1999): 429–32; Holmes, The Holy Spirit, 123–24, 126, 129.
37. A concern expressed by Photius, Myst. 3, 9–10, and, as noted below, Barth. Does Weinandy’s proposal make the Spirit a heavenly Mother? Weinandy himself never uses such language, though Father’s Spirit of Sonship (81n44) includes a quotation on “the maternal-virginal womb of the Holy Spirit” from Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (New York: Orbis, 1988), 147. The notion of Spirit as Mother fits ill with Weinandy’s presentation of the Spirit as the hypostasized forth-flowing of the Father’s power in begetting the Son, not as the recipient of that action. Biblically, only two familial terms condition the Spirit: Fatherhood and Sonship, for the Spirit is the Spirit of both.
38. See Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81 (2000): 432–45.
39. In the question-and-answer session following Fred Sanders, “Eternal Procession and the Complicated Name of the Spirit” (unpublished paper, annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Denver, November 13, 2018), he rightly warned against theological innovation for the sake of a more symmetrical diagram of the Trinity. Of course, one may employ a diagram simply to illustrate a theological proposal rather than establish it.
40. For a similar two-way movement between the Trinity and ecclesiology, see E. Jerome Van Kuiken, “Transpositions: The Notes of the Church in Trinitarian and Wesleyan Keys,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 53, no. 1 (2018): 79–91.
41. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.36.2, quoted in Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 21.
42. Augustine, De Trinitate 15.37, quoted in Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 20.
43. Gary D. Badcock, Light of Truth and Fire of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 38–41, 160–61; cf. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 115–26; John A. McGuckin, “The Book of Revelation and Orthodox Eschatology: The Theodrama of Judgment,” in The Last Things: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Eschatology, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 113–14, 122–23; Michael F. Bird, Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), ch. 5.
44. Herwig Aldenhoven, “The Question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit and Its Connection with the Life of the Church,” in Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, ed. Lukas Vischer, Faith and Order Paper 103 (London: SPCK; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1981), 123–26; Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 36, 51, 54, 56–57. Both Aldenhoven and Bulgakov trenchantly critique this factor.
45. Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 376–83.
46. This despite the fact that the Nicene Creed makes no mention of Pentecost but only of the Spirit’s preparatory work for Christ in Mary’s womb and Israel’s prophets! Cf. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 39–40.
47. Manlio Simonetti, ed., Matthew 1–13, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), xxxvii–xxxviii; cf. Pelikan, Credo, 376–77. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 73, cautions, “With reference to the taxis this formula does not have absolute significance; it is one of its possible expressions.”
48. McGuckin, “The Book of Revelation,” 114–15, 120–34.
49. Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 109–13, notes that the seven eyes, horns, and spirits of Rev 5:6 symbolize the Holy Spirit and allude to Zech 4:1–14. But he interprets them as simply symbolizing the Spirit’s universal application of the Lamb’s work. In Bauckham, pace, Zech 4 promises the Spirit’s power to Zerubbabel (Zech 4:6–10), Jesus’s ancestor (Matt 1:12–16; Luke 3:23–27) and the seven spirits also allude to Isa 11:1–3, in which the ideal Davidic king is anointed with the sevenfold Spirit of wisdom and power. Thus in Rev 5 the Spirit not only applies Christ’s work but empowers Christ with omni-attributes.
50. Bulgakov, Comforter, 40, 50–51, 144–45.
51. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 18–19, lists as Spirituque proponents Catholics F. X. Durrwell, Leonardo Boff, and Edward Yarnold; Orthodox Olivier Clément and Paul Evdokimov; and Protestants Jürgen Moltmann and the Church of England Doctrinal Commission.
52. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, x, 4.
53. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 2; Badcock, Light of Truth, 229–30.
54. John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985); William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
55. Gregory of Nyssa, Cat. Or. 1–2; behind this analogy lies Ps 33:6.
56. Yves M. J. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (trans. David Smith; New York: Seabury, 1983), 33, 158, citing Nazianzen, Or. 30.32 (using Seth) and Damascene, De duabus Christi 18.30 (using Abel), respectively. See, however, our caveat above about viewing the Spirit as a heavenly Mother.
57. This tradition stretches from John of Damascus through Photius, Gregory of Cyprus, and Gregory Palamas to contemporary Orthodox theologians. See the chapters by Markos A. Orphanos, Boris Bobrinskoy, and Dumitru Staniloae in Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ, 21–45, 133–48, 174–86, respectively; Andreas Andreopoulos, “The Holy Spirit in the ecclesiology of Photios of Constantinople,” in The Holy Spirit in the Fathers of the Church: The Proceedings of the Seventh International Patristic Conference, Maynooth, 2008, ed. D. Vincent Twomey and Janet E. Rutherford (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), 151–63.
58. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1:485–86 (quotation from former page).
59. For cogent sketches of these heresies, see “Adoptionism” and “Nestorianism” in Justo L. González, Essential Theological Terms (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 2, 120–21, respectively. For an exegetical case that Mark’s gospel does not present Jesus’s baptism as the point at which he became God’s Son, see Bird, Jesus the Eternal Son, ch. 4. Bird’s arguments apply a fortiori to the other three Gospels.
60. Unless one assumes with Origen and the early (and perhaps later?) Augustine the preexistence of souls. See Dominic Keech, The Anti-Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396–430 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
61. Lest “sonship” be read gender-exclusively, note that Paul explicitly extends this status to women (Gal 3:26–4:7).
62. These Adam-Christ parallels draw from Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.21.10; 3.22.3.
63. Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003), 2: 1204–5; Brian Neil Peterson, John’s Use of Ezekiel: Understanding the Unique Perspective of the Fourth Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 167–76.
64. For an argument that John 1:12–13 refers not to believers’ regeneration but to Christ’s virginal conception, see Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Milton Keynes: Paternoster; Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2008), 89–92.
65. For critical analyses, see Badcock, Light of Truth, 160, 217–19 (who finds Barth’s rejection of the Spirituque inconsistent with his mature doctrine of election); Gregory Collins, “Three Modern ‘Fathers’ on the Filioque: Good, Bad or Indifferent?,” in Twomey and Rutherford, Holy Spirit in the Fathers of the Church, 173–76 (who finds Barth’s allegations against nonfilioquist praxis unsubstantiated).
66. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1:477–84, 486–87.
67. As Bulgakov, Comforter, 72, acknowledges and embraces.
68. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/1:106–8.
69. See Theodore James Whapham, “Spirit as field of force,” Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 1 (2014): 15–32 on Wolf hart Pannenberg’s use of field theory in pneumatology. As the article explicitly notes, Pannenberg affirms the Spirit’s personhood (22). But one could easily modify his proposal in a binitarian direction. Badcock, Light of Truth, 68–73, 78, detects this danger in Augustine.
70. Ayres, review of Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 431.
71. Bulgakov, The Comforter, ch. 3. Cf. Anthony C. Thiselton, The Holy Spirit—In Biblical Teaching, through the Centuries, and Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 3–160, with two qualifiers: First, pace p. 20, God’s grieved spirit in Isa 63:10–14 is not early evidence of the Spirit’s personhood; here “spirit” suggests God’s inner disposition (cf. Ps 73:21), not a distinct divine hypostasis. Second, Thiselton neglects the implications for the Spirit’s personhood of Acts 5:3; 13:2; 15:28.
72. Augustine, De Trin. 6.5.7; cf. 15.27.50. As David T. Williams, Vinculum Amoris: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2004), 15–16, notes, the exact phrase vinculum amoris does not appear in Augustine’s De Trinitate but only in his Liber de Spiritu et anima (PL 40:820).
73. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 95–149, reviews the entire filioque controversy and condemns both sides as missing the truth about the Spirit due to pursuing it in a situation of schism, hence apart from the very Spirit of love about whom they quarreled.
74. Holders of this more sophisticated stance include Photius himself in his less lopsided comments. See Andreopolis, “The Holy Spirit in the ecclesiology of Photios of Constantinople,” 158–60.
75. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 66–67, 70, 88, 142 (quotation from p. 67).
76. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 66–67, 142 (quotation from p. 66).
77. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 70–73, 142, 150.
78. Before reading further, we urge readers to view this lithograph. An image is easily accessible by performing an online search using the phrase “Escher drawing hands.”
79. E.g., (1) Escher’s lithograph is not homoousial with him as the Son and Spirit are with the Father. (2) His two hands’ agency in Drawing Hands is merely illusory (only Escher does any actual drawing), while within the Godhead all three persons are really active in the undivided divine agency. (3) In Escher’s piece, the two hands are identical, differing only by position, whereas in the Trinity the Spirit and Son are more particularized (with the incarnate Son especially being more “fleshed out”).
80. See Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 4.20.1.
81. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 68.
82. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 64–67, 156.
83. Bulgakov, The Comforter, 70–73.
84. Space constraints forbid further grasping of the filioque nettle. For recent ecumenical reflections, see Myk Habets, ed., Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the Twenty-first Century (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014).
85. Weinandy, Father’s Spirit of Sonship, 73–74, 97.
86. See Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190; likewise, McNall, Mosaic of Atonement, 305–08.