The Holy Spirit: Recent Discussions
The Holy Spirit: Recent Discussions
The Holy Spirit has been the subject of considerable theological discussion in the modern period, especially as a result of the charismatic renewal movement, which began in the early twentieth century. The origins of Pentecostalism are usually traced to Bethel Bible College, in Topeka, Kansas. This institution had been founded in the holiness tradition by Charles Fox Parham (1873–1929), a former pastor in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Parham asked his students to investigate the New Testament evidence for the continued activity of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. The theological wisdom of the day took the form of “cessationism,” widely taught by the Protestant theological establishment, which held that the active gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as “speaking in tongues,” belonged to the age of the New Testament itself and were no longer available or operational.
Parham was not so sure. Within his own holiness tradition, reports were circulating of what seemed to be charismatic phenomena. During a prayer vigil on December 31, 1900, a student at the college had such an experience. Others soon followed. Parham and his students began to tell others about this apparent recovery of the “gift of tongues.” One of those who heard Parham speak in 1905 was the African-American preacher William J. Seymour (1870–1922), who opened the Apostolic Faith Mission in Azusa Street, Los Angeles, in April 1906.
Over the next two years, a major revival broke out at Azusa Street, characterized by “speaking in tongues.” The term “Pentecostalism” began to be applied to the movement, taking its name from the Day of Pentecost – the occasion, according to the New Testament, when the phenomenon was first experienced by the early Christian disciples (Acts 2: 1–4). Pentecostalism rapidly transcended its American roots and became a global faith. Pentecostalism and other charismatic groups have established a significant presence in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The emergence of the charismatic movement led to a new interest in the theology of the Holy Spirit, and particularly to the retrieval of more experiential approaches to religious thought and life. Although many would argue that there are distinct charismatic theological emphases – such as the activity of the Spirit in the world – the dominant trend now appears to be the influence of charismatic ideas within Catholicism and mainstream Protestant denominations.
In this section, we shall consider some important discussions of the Spirit during this period, beginning with an important contribution to the discussion of the Christological role of the Holy Spirit from the leading American theologian of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards.
The Great Awakening: Jonathan Edwards (1703–58)
Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded as one of America's most significant theologians. Edwards played a leading role in the “Great Awakening” in New England during the 1740s, and regarded the spiritual renewal of that period as the work of the Holy Spirit. He published a number of works defending this view, including A Faithful Narrative (1737) and Religious Affections (1746). The experiential aspects of the “Great Awakening” convinced Edwards that his own Reformed religious tradition had neglected the theology of the Spirit.
Like Augustine, Edwards conceived the Holy Spirit as the personal divine love within the Godhead, binding the Father and Son together in a union of affection. This affection can be communicated to the hearts of created beings in such a way that they too can be united to God.
Communion of the creatures with God or with one another in God, seems to be by the Holy Ghost. 'Tis by this that believers have communion with Christ, and I suppose 'tis by this that the man Christ Jesus has communion with the eternal Logos. The Spirit of God is the bond of perfectness by which God, Jesus Christ, and the church are united together.
Edwards's theology includes elements of “deification” which reflect this emphasis on the transformative role of the Holy Spirit. However, he more typically framed this transformation in terms of “regeneration,” understood as “that great change that is wrought in man by the mighty power of God, at his conversion from sin to God,” in which he is “changed from a wicked to a holy man.” Edwards sees this transition as the work of the Spirit.
Yet Edwards's most interesting reflections on the Holy Spirit relate to his Christology. For Edwards, the Holy Spirit plays a decisive role in the hypostatic union, serving as the basis of the union of humanity and divinity within the single person of Jesus Christ. It is “by the Spirit that divine knowledge and consciousness is given to the man Jesus.” The Holy Spirit unites the human nature of Christ to the divine nature. In doing so, the Spirit does not act as an additional divine being within the person of Christ, but is rather the means by which the unity and the integrity of both natures are maintained.
The Second Vatican Council on the Holy Spirit
One of the major achievements of the Second Vatican Council was to develop a coherent theology of the Holy Spirit, indicating not merely its roots in the Bible and tradition but also its relevance to the life of the church. In preparing for the Second Vatican Council, John XXIII (1881–1963) suggested that the church needed to take the charismatic movement seriously yet be critical. This can be seen from his prayer of 1962: “Renew Your Wonders in This Our Day, as by a New Pentecost.”
The Catholic church had responded warily to the rise of Pentecostalism and other charismatic movements, which it regarded as excessively dependent on the presence and manifestation of spiritual gifts, believed to be bestowed by the Holy Spirit on individuals and the church. However, with the passing of time, views began to change. Charismatic renewal retrieved and renewed the experiential aspects of faith, and could be incorporated within the life and structures of the church. Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI, born 1927), for example, pointed out that “a dogmatic faith unsupported by personal experience remains empty; mere personal experience unrelated to the faith of the Church remains blind.”
Figure 12.4 The Second Vatican Council (1962–5).
Source: David Lees/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.
Lumen Gentium (“The Light of the Nations”), the Council's “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” reaffirmed the importance of the Holy Spirit for the life and witness of the church.
When the work which the Father gave the Son to do on earth was accomplished, the Holy Spirit was sent on the day of Pentecost in order that He might continually sanctify the Church, and thus, all those who believe would have access through Christ in one Spirit to the Father. [...] The Spirit dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful, as in a temple.
So how does this work out in the mission of the church? This is best seen from the decree Ad Gentes (“To the People”), on the mission of the church. This document emphasizes the importance of the incarnation and notes the centrality of the salvation resulting from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to the mission of the church. But how is this to be effected?
To accomplish this, Christ sent from the Father His Holy Spirit, who was to carry on inwardly His saving work and prompt the Church to spread out. Doubtless, the Holy Spirit was already at work in the world before Christ was glorified. Yet on the day of Pentecost, He came down upon the disciples to remain with them forever (cf. John 14: 16).
The Holy Spirit serves multiple functions. It is through the Spirit that people are enabled to grasp the basic themes of faith, and respond to it, in a new life of discipleship. Yet this is not a solitary life. The Spirit gathers believers “into the one People of God.” It is from this communal context that the mission of the church takes place, reaching out beyond the boundaries of the church as an institution.
The Second Vatican Council retained an institutional understanding of the church, including its missionary organizations and structures. Yet it affirmed the importance of allowing the Holy Spirit to work in and through them, not being restricted by them. New ministerial functions or organizations might emerge, through the prompting of the Holy Spirit, as a sign of the “complete dedication” of the church to “the evangelization of the world.”
In one sense, the Council's views on the Holy Spirit are not particularly innovative. They represent a retrieval of some classic themes of Christian theology of the Holy Spirit, given a new relevance through the rise of the charismatic movement on the one hand and the growing importance of the missionary task on the other. Yet the Council also recognized the importance of the Holy Spirit in the transformation of society. Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”) speaks of the Holy Spirit guiding the social order toward a fuller and deeper realization of justice and freedom by “animating, purifying, and strengthening [human] noble longings” to achieve human dignity in society. These ideas would find fuller expression in Latin American liberation theology, to which we now turn.
Liberation Theology: The Spirit and Empowerment
We have already noted the importance of liberation theology as a distinctive movement within the Catholic church in Latin America. In some respects, liberation theology can be seen as a response to the revolutionary fervor which gained the ascendancy in many parts of Latin America in the 1960s and beyond. It was during this period, for example, that the Cuban revolution took place, with its president Fidel Castro (born 1926) adopting an explicitly Marxist agenda, which he attempted to export to other nations in the region. Many liberation theologians valued Marxism as a tool of social analysis, seeing it as helping them to do theology in their context in much the same way as Aristotle helped Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74) in his theological task.
Yet there is no doubt that there was a significant theological component to liberation theology's vision for the renewal of society, partly arising from the Second Vatican Council and partly from reflection on the significance of charismatic renewal for the institutions and structures of the church. For many liberation theologians, the Spirit poses a challenge to institutional visions of the church, which too easily become forces of social conservatism and privilege.
José Comblin (1923–2011) was a Belgian theologian who emigrated to Brazil in 1958. His Holy Spirit and Liberation (1987) is widely regarded as one of the best accounts of the significance of the Holy Spirit for liberation theology. Comblin appeals to Irenaeus's phrase, “Where the church is, there too is the Spirit of God.” The Spirit is present wherever the poor are awakening to action and freedom and are gathering in community. Comblin's appeal to the Spirit was unusual in the liberation theology of the 1980s, which tended to focus specifically on Jesus Christ as a figure of liberation. For Comblin, the new realization of the importance of the Spirit marked the end of traditional understandings of the church as an institution, modeled on human organizations. The First Vatican Council had articulated a strongly institutional model of the church. Yet the conceptual triad “Father–Son–Church” had to give way to the more theologically appropriate “Father–Son–Holy Spirit” and the more communitarian visions of the church that this entailed.
For Comblin, the Spirit encourages new forms of community “for the sake of transformation of the world, through the liberation of the poor and oppressed.” The Spirit's creative and energizing power motivates communities of the poor to become agents of their own freedom, and to work toward a renewed and just society. The Holy Spirit “gathers the poor together so as to make them a new people who challenge all the powers of the earth.” Comblin links this liberationist agenda with the church – understood not as a hierarchical institution but as a community of believers. The Holy Spirit is present in all its members, empowering them to transform cultures and societies that do not yet reflect God's justice and love.
Leonardo Boff (born 1938) also regarded a correct understanding of the Holy Spirit as countering strongly institutional models of the church. His Church: Charism and Power (1985) was severely critical of what he regarded as the authoritarian character of the church, and argued for the importance of more accountable and supportive church communities. This was given more theological weight in his study Trinity and Society (1988), in which he argued that the Christian understanding of God as Trinity offers a model for relationships within society, the family, and the church. The Trinity, when properly understood, undergirds the social project of liberation by providing a model of a “divine society.” This could act as the basis for a vision for society, family, and church in which there are coequal relationships, with no place for a hierarchy or oppression.
Feminism: The Spirit and Relationality
Elizabeth Johnson (born 1941), a Catholic professor of systematic theology at Fordham University, New York, has been a particularly significant contributor to recent feminist discussions about the role of the Holy Spirit, especially in her landmark publications She Who is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (1992) and Women, Earth and Creator Spirit (1993). Throughout these works, Johnson refers to the Spirit as “she.”
Why is this important? At one level, it represents a traditional feminist critique of male images of God as damaging for women. Yet there is another point that needs to be made. The Greek word for “Spirit” (pneuma), used extensively in the New Testament, is grammatically neuter. For this reason, many translations refer to the Holy Spirit as “it,” thus depersonalizing the Spirit. Yet in Syriac, one of the languages used by the earliest Christians, the word for “spirit” (ruha) is grammatically female. More importantly, most Syriac Christian writers refer to the Holy Spirit in feminine terms, occasionally designating it as “mother.” The classic example of this is the Demonstrations of Aphrahat the Syrian (c.270–c.345), which refer to the Spirit in the following way in a comment on Genesis 2: 24:
As long as a man has not taken a wife, he loves and reveres God as his Father and the Holy Spirit as his Mother, and he has no other love. But when a man takes a wife, he leaves his (true) Father and his Mother.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, most Christian writers began to speak of the Holy Spirit in masculine terms. But many modern theologians wonder whether these older texts preserve an important insight. Johnson's work reflects this older tradition.
One of Johnson's leading themes is that a proper understanding of the person and work of the Holy Spirit opens up new understandings of creation and our place within it. Johnson argues that there are three ways in which Christians can experience the Spirit's presence in creation: first, through the immanent presence of the Spirit in nature; second, through the Spirit's presence (and absence) in relationships; and, third, through the Spirit's presence (and absence) in societal systems and structures. Johnson offers her reflections on the Holy Spirit as a way of understanding God's presence in the world.
Emphasizing the presence of the Holy Spirit within creation, Johnson suggests that this recognition leads to two important insights. First, it helps us to appreciate the creative agency of the Spirit (as seen, for example, in Genesis 1: 1) while helping us to understand how the natural world is capable of disclosing God (Romans 1: 20). Second, it provides us with a deeper vision of nature, helping us to appreciate our own distinct place within it. Sensitive to the Darwinian account of the origin of biological species, Johnson suggests that to affirm the presence of God's Spirit in creation forces us to “extend moral consideration to species beyond our own, and moral standing to ecological systems as a whole.”
Johnson builds on this analysis to suggest that a theological position that emphasizes the immanence of the Holy Spirit in all of the creation calls into question any human assumption of privilege within the natural world. A belief in the presence of the Spirit in creation challenges us to move away from an anthropocentric view of the world to a more eco-centric view, which calls for a respectful love for creation that transcends a mere appreciation of its utility for human beings. We are given a theological framework that invites us “to preserve bio-diversity,” in that “when a species becomes extinct we have lost a manifestation of the goodness of God.”
Yet the presence of the Spirit is not restricted to nature; it extends to the world of human relationships, especially the love of human beings for each other. “We seek and are found by the Spirit in the person – creating give and take of loving relationships, in each fresh, particular discovery of the other's beauty in the strength of ongoing fidelity.” Johnson suggests that we can think of the absence of love in human life as an experience of the absence of God's Spirit. Yet such experiences of absence can be seen positively, in that they can help “motivate critical resistance to evil.” The experience of the absence of God's spirit is also important in the third area of Johnson's analysis – societal structures. The Spirit is the source of a relationality which reflects the Spirit's distinct identity as “love, gift and friend both to the world and within the holy mystery of God.”
Finally, Johnson comprehends that recognizing the Spirit as the source of relationality offers insights into a feminist analysis of power structures. It challenges people to engage situations which reflect damaged and flawed relationships, such as the oppression of women, the injustices meted out to the poor, and damage to our environment. A proper understanding of the Spirit encourages us to seek “the flourishing of all beings in their uniqueness and interrelation – both sexes, all races and social groups, all creatures in the universe.” This vision of a proper relationality is not well served by replacing males with females in positions of authority. Johnson calls for the reform of patriarchal language about God that legitimates a patriarchal culture that excludes women and exploits nature but avoids the fallacy of simply inverting existing social structures. Something more radical is required – and Johnson believes this lies in a proper understanding of the person and work of the Spirit.