The Lord Is the Spirit. John A. Studebaker
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the Church came to be seen less as the communion of saints in heaven and more as the community of sinners on earth. Rationalism itself was an expression of the believing in the incarnation of divine mysteries in human concepts and theories. God was seen to be not only transcendent but also immanent. . . . It was not transcendence as such, and not immanence as such, that was linked with the rationalization and systematization of law and legality in the West, but rather incarnation, which was understood as the process by which the transcendent becomes immanent. It is no accident that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all three of which postulate both a radical separation and a radical interconnection between God and man, also postulate that God is a judge and lawgiver and that man is governed by divine laws. Nevertheless, the distinctive features of the Western concepts of human law that emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—as contrasted not only with Judaic and Islamic concepts but also with those of Eastern Christianity—are related to the greater Western emphasis on incarnation as the central reality of the universe. This released an enormous energy for the redemption of the world; yet it split the legal from the spiritual, the political from the ideological.88
Though the data provided by cultural and legal improvements as witnessed in the West do not provide conclusive evidence with respect to the Filioque debate, we may safely infer from Berman’s analysis that such improvements may well be linked to the Spirit’s unique role in Western theology—not as one that places a specific focus upon the Spirit himself, but because in the Filioque the Spirit has been recognized as one who possesses “executorial authority” to magnify Christ and to dispense Christ’s salvation. The Spirit is seen as the one who executes Christ’s authority (including Christ’s legal authority) in time and space in order to bring glory to Christ. Filioque Christology thus displays the heart of medieval theology—that Christ is to be honored in all respects: theology, law, culture, art, politics, et cetera. Berman’s argument is that almost all modern liberties, as promoted through the legal and civic institutions of the West, and our modern understanding of “local autonomy” are related to what happened during this time (though many of its benefits will not be completely seen until the Protestant Reformation and after). From this we can safely infer that, because of the imperial authority possessed by the State, such liberties could not have developed in the East.
In evaluating the theological strengths and weaknesses of these two positions, it seems that the logic of Augustinian thought regarding procession (and particularly with respect to Augustine’s conception of “relational opposition”) is fairly convincing. Applying such logic to the doctrine of the Spirit’s authority with respect to the divine economy in the Church age, we can deduce that the authority of the Son and the authority of the Spirit can only be distinguished (and understood to be non-conflictory) if the Spirit is “under” the authority of Christ.
This outstanding strength, however, is coupled with a considerable weakness. Colin Gunton has noticed a common complaint among many contemporary theologians that Augustine’s persona of the Spirit—identified as God’s love and gift to the world—does not adequately distinguish the Spirit from the Son, who “might equally, perhaps with more justification, be described as the Father’s love and gift to the world.”89 Such a lack of distinction is understandable when we remember that Augustine owes much to Platonic thought, as evidenced in his analogy of the immanent Trinity to the threefold structure of the human mind, with the Spirit being compared to the will. As with Plato, who said that knowledge consists in the recollection of the Forms known before one’s temporal existence, Augustine views the will as that which relates memory to knowledge by bringing the contents of memory into conscious reasoning. Likewise, the function of the Spirit in the Trinity is to bring the Father and the Son unto relationship—a unitive function that neglects many other features of the Spirit’s actions and can easily lead to a subordination of the Spirit to the Son, even within the immanent Trinity.90 The effect may well be a neglect of the Spirit’s nature as a divine Person in his own right. This is essentially ratified in Augustine’s description of the Father as auctoritas and the Spirit as communitas. The Spirit seems to possess an executorial role in the economic Trinity but not the personal authority to carry it out.
Jenson holds that Augustine’s three “persons” are functionally indistinguishable. “Augustine could no longer conceptualize the saving relation between God and creatures by saying that the Father and the Son are transformingly present in the Spirit, as the Greek originators of trinitarianism had done.”91 Thus, the work of the Spirit can be easily thought of as an impersonal process whereby God acts upon us. Since (as we have seen) authority always resides in persons, this conception of the Spirit diminishes or eliminates the Spirit’s authority and implies that the Spirit is simply a function of Christ. Inch, a Western theologian who remains strongly in favor of Filioque, summarizes the effect of this weakness upon the Western Church:
Herein lies one of the fundamental errors in the Western Church, according to their Eastern counterpart: it presumes to know the secret working of the Spirit in others. It does not respect the sanctity of life expressed in the diversity of the Spirit’s work. Thus, this understanding of the way of the Spirit proves too narrow. But the problem lies more deeply in that the West presumes to understand what escapes us all. By attempting to bring divine truths down to human forms, it loses the mystical quality of faith and the transcendent character of the Spirit as being present within us.92
Such criticisms, while valid, do not pose a death sentence upon Filioque or the notion of the Spirit’s executorial authority. We must realize that the Eastern view has gaping weaknesses as well (and that in discerning the Spirit’s authority to act we must take contributions from both views into consideration). Gunton charges that, like the charismatic movement, Eastern Orthodox theology tends to develop an insufficient relationship between Christ and the Spirit. As Barth has stated, this suggests a mystical assent to the Father without the mediation of the Son.93 Such a lack of theological development gives the impression that the Church can stand under the authority of the Spirit alone. This can be sensed in Hryniewicz’ description of the Spirit’s “authority” with respect to Orthodox Church bishops.
In light of the orthodox tradition, the function of the bishops does not emerge out of the personal legal delegation, which is given to him individually through Christ; it is instead the work of the Holy Spirit in the entire community. . . . The general consensus of all bishops became the expression of the highest authority in the Church as the indication of the presence and the work of the Holy Spirit.94
Kasper points out another weakness in Greek pneumatology. Not only is the Eastern tradition, in its dogmatic creedal formulas, almost completely silent about the relation of the Spirit to the Son, but there is also no relation drawn between the economy of salvation (the economic Trinity) and the inner life of the Trinity (the immanent Trinity). According to Kasper, if the Son has a share in the sending of the Spirit in the history of salvation (which he obviously does), then he cannot fail to have a share into the intra-trinitarian procession of the Spirit.95
Protestant Theology
The Catholic-Protestant controversy battled in two arenas—the nature of authority and the basic doctrines of the faith—that became interwoven through the notion that “correct” doctrine is ultimately determined by the authority one accepts regarding the interpretation of Scripture. Such an “interpretative authority” was presumed by both parties to be possessed primarily by the author of the text. In this section, we will examine the nature of “interpretive authority”96 as well as the Holy Spirit’s possession or delegation of such an authority. Western Medieval theology,