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The Full Stature of the Holy Spirit

Holy Trinity, Year B : 3 June 2012 : Romans 8: 14-17 , Matthew 28: 16-20

Helmut Schmidt, Federal Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, was a tough, pragmatic politician who got things done. His most famous saying about political idealists was, "people with a vision should go see a doctor." He considered himself to be a true Christian, and served for some time as a synod member of the Lutheran Church. This gave him licence he felt to comment with his characteristic incautious honesty about key doctrinal issues. So it was that he told the weekly newspaper Die Zeit that the mystery of the Trinity was completely inaccessible to him and to others as well.

This so stirred up the theologian Eberhard Jungel that he wrote a series of prayers, one of which appears on the front cover of the Pebble this morning, designed to earth the doctrine of the Trinity in the experience of Christians. He was keen to overcome the gap between theological reflection and Christian living. So am I!

People who think that the story of the Christian Church in the 20th century is all doom and gloom might like to reflect on the revival of Trinitarian theology, that has been going on behind the scenes, as one of the quiet success stories of our time. In the 19th century the doctrine of the Trinity had gone into eclipse, and was little referred to by many theologians. Now it is right up there as one of the most interesting and rewarding areas of theological investigation, and one that is seen as having power to renew the Church. We might like to start by reflecting on which person of the Godhead we habitually call on when we pray. It is the Father I call out to spontaneously as situations crop up in my life that invite God’s attention. I have been very much influenced by the way Jesus habitually called God by a family intimacy nickname, "Abba" or "Daddy" as we might say. He was trying to express that instinctive sense of trust and close abiding he felt with his loving heavenly Father. But just lately I have been calling on the Holy Spirit also, particularly when I am about to enter potentially tricky pastoral situations. It is my understanding that the Holy Spirit has a particular concern for the peace and tranquillity of the Church, for its good ordering, and for the ability of Christians with their different abilities, mentalities and vulnerabilities to be able to get on in a harmonious concert of respectful and effective relationships, which is of course the way the Divine persons do within the Trinity.

That the Holy Spirit has this respected place in our understanding of the Godhead we owe in large measure to St Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. The Cappadocian Fathers, as they were called, were keen to see the Holy Spirit given equal status with Jesus the Son. Controversialists in the Patristic Church were great name callers, and the Cappadocian Fathers called their opponents the pneumamatachoi, the "spirit fighters."

When the second great oecumenical Council met at Constantinople in 381 to sort all this out Gregory of Nazianzus’ brilliance persuaded many to give greater attention to the Holy Spirit in the creed, and he was put in charge of the Council to drive the changes through. But as is often the way at Church Synods compromises were struck to appease the losing side of the "Spirit fighters," and so it was that the creed which we say Sunday by Sunday limits itself to describing what the Holy Spirit does, rather than what and who it is. Gregory of Nazianzus thought this was a great mistake, which would make trouble for the Church in future ages, a prediction which became eerily true.

It would have been very helpful if the creed had gone on to say that the Holy Spirit was consubstantial, equal in status with the Son, and had spelt out how the Holy Spirit relates to Christ the Son. Some hundreds of years later the western part of the Church decided to have a go at sorting all this out, and inserted the filioque clause into the creed, stating that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, what is called the double procession of the Spirit. Why and how this came about I will leave to this morning’s parish forum to spell out. For now I am going to concentrate on the consequences of this decision.

The insertion of the filioque clause became one of the major reasons for the tragic division between the western and the eastern part of the Church. The Eastern Orthodox, as they came to be called, pointed out quite rightly that one part of the Church had no business changing an important part of the creed without consulting with the other part of the Church, and calling an oecumenical Council to decide about it. In fact they felt that you shouldn’t go tinkering with the creed at all.

They also thought that this innovation slighted what they called the monarchy of the Father. Outraged feminists need to take on board the fact that when we call the first person of the Trinity "Father’ we are not making any analogical comparison with any earthly Father we have ever known, we are talking about his originating function as the cause of the other Divine persons. The Eastern Orthodox thought that the Son had now been made a second cause of the Holy Spirit, and that this made the Holy Trinity over weighted and unbalanced with an excessive emphasis on the Son. This is what is known as Christomonism, and we may have met Christians who have overdone their devotion to Jesus to the point of Jesuolatory.

But more crucially they felt that the Holy Spirit had been downgraded in his role and significance to being a support player to the Son, a kind of Butler role within the life of the Triune persons. This they felt would have serious consequences in Christian living.

The Eastern Orthodox are very, very keen on the Holy Spirit in many aspects of the Church’s life. To give an example, at the words of institution during the Eucharistic prayer we make it clear that a dramatic highlight has arrived in the Service by elevating the Eucharistic gifts, by ringing the Church bell, and by censing the gifts. The Orthodox believe that the dramatic highlight comes when the Holy Spirit is invoked on the gifts, this is the most important part of the prayer, and what is more there ought to be a double invocation of the Spirit to call it down on the people as well. The western liturgical movement more or less agrees with this, and our 1989 Prayer book put the epiclesis back into the Eucharistic Prayer, though in a rather timid manner, because our Evangelical brethren don’t believe the Holy Spirit can enter matter, it can only enter people.

St Augustine of Hippo, the most powerful theological mind in the western Church, is probably more responsible for the filioque clause than anyone else. He wanted to stress the unity of the Divine persons, the centrality of Jesus in the faith of Christians, and to make it clear that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Son - they always work together. He used the image of the bond of love to talk about what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit is the circulating current of love that unites the Father and the Son, and who reaches out to connect us into their Triune life. There is an important truth here. We are Christians because the Holy Spirit connected us up with the life of God, drawing us into explicit Christian faith, and maintaining that bond of faith and love through a lifetime’s faithful following of Christ.

His successors today, who defend the filioque clause, want to make sure that no Christian tries to have a mystical relationship with the Holy Spirit that ignores Jesus, and his central mediatory role. They point out that Jesus bequeathed the Spirit to the Church after his resurrection. And they think that the Orthodox haven’t made it clear how the Spirit and the Son relate to each other.

St Basil and the two Gregory’s stressed the unique role that each of the Divine persons has in their three different ways of being God. Their successors are keen to restore the full stature of the Holy Spirit, to give him his due, and to allow him a full and fruitful role in the life of the Church.

The great thing about this era of Christian existence is that theologians of East and West have stopped shouting at each other, or ignoring one another, and are trying to listen respectfully to one another to see what the other is driving at. There have been some encouraging developments by western theologians who are trying to respond to the Eastern Orthodox challenge to name what the Holy Spirit does, and to acknowledge all that he does.

Walter Kasper, until recently the Vatican’s public face to the other Christian Churches, argues that the Holy Spirit is the anti-introversion element within the Trinity, who impels the Divine persons outward to create the world of creatures, and to be deeply involved and interested in us. He makes sure that God doesn’t rest content with his own plenitude of being, his own fullness of life, but seeks to share it with us, and to delight in us.

And the American Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has made the intriguing suggestion that the Holy Spirit is the architect of the future, that the Father so trusts and loves him that he has told him to go off and construct the future of the creation in such a way that it will be a surprise to him, as well as to us. In this way of looking at things Jesus holds open the poles between the Father and the Son, keeping open the creative tension between them. Jenson is very taken with the Cappadocian Father’s notion that the Father is the past our salvation, that Jesus is the present dimension of it, and that the Holy Spirit is the perfector and the finisher of it. I find it very helpful to think of the Holy Spirit as the future of our world, the completer of the human story.

In 1979 the World Council of Churches brought theologians together from across the divide to make recommendations about what to do about the filioque. The Klingenthal Memorandum made a number of recommendations about a better wording to replace the filioque clause. The best two were to either say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, which is what we used to say at Avonside, or even better, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and shines out through the Son. That makes clear the inseparability of the Son and the Spirit, it defines their relationship to each other, it issues a job description for the Holy Spirit, and it preserves the originating monarchy of the Father.