Holy Spirit

It was thirty or thirty-five years ago and I don't remember much about it, but one Sunday I handed out pen and paper and asked folks in the congregation to answer the question "Who or what is the Holy Spirit to you?" Anonymous, unsigned, no names, and we collected the responses at the offertory. I recorded every response and published it with the worship bulletin the next Sunday. It may have been instead of a sermon on that Day of Pentecost, I don't recall. But I do remember their responses being better than anything I might have preached in a sermon about the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

Who or What is the Holy Spirit? My theology professor at Lutheran seminary said the Holy Spirit is the love between Father and Son. God the Holy Spirit is the love between God the Father and God the Son. That was my first semester of seminary, and I was taken aback by his view. In fact, looking back at myself, I was quite naive and taken back by much. In further fact, to tell a bit more truth than I should, I wondered at the time why it was necessary for me to go to seminary at all, why didn't the bishop just ordain me right out of the Navy and assign me as a parish priest. Jeepers! I'm still learning how ignorant I am; and I'm reminded every week in our Sunday School class by how smart and inquisitive they are. I have to work to stay up with them, much less a step ahead.

Lots of things were said in seminary class that floored me. And freed me too. Not just in Theology-101 but in all my classes. People were thinking, perceiving, conceptualizing. New thoughts, astonishing thinking and wondering. I recall the theology professor telling us that, responding to something he had written, a reader - - he had studied in Europe so maybe it was one of his professors - - challenged him, "Where did you get that, Jenson?" And his answer, "Where did I get it? I got it out of my head." 

Seminary was a place to learn scripture and doctrine, but even more, at least for me, it was a place to learn to theologize, that it was permissible to do one's own theological thinking, indeed, that one is expected to do so. And not only while in seminary, but as one's lifetime practice. There was thought, challenge, thinking, uncertainty, discussion. I came to realize and learned to accept that the ancient Church Fathers were just men like me, with different world views, and that my own thinking could be just as competent and valid as theirs. I found that I could do my own theological discourse with myself, think and examine, challenge, doubt. Come to realizations or conclusions different from what I'd brought to seminary from children's Sunday School class and the Catechism, and as an adolescent learning the Offices of Instruction in the BCP preparatory to being Confirmed.

But the professor's notion of the Holy Spirit as the love between the Father and the Son. A world-renowned theologian, he was a brilliant and gifted theologian, teacher - - and author though I've not read his Systematic Theology. I remember thinking in class that his idea of the Holy Spirit seemed more "Binitarian" than Trinitarian. Love can be defined as a Person? I mean, if you have two electronic devices, say this computer and the printer across the room, to ascribe "Personhood" to the wireless signal between them doesn't make sense, does it. Even that the impulse goes both ways, the computer sends the signal, and the printer responds that it has received and is acting on the signal; and those transmissions go at the speed of light, it still doesn't make the signal itself a Person, does it? Or does it. Maybe it does. 

Maybe it depends on how one understands and defines what a Person is. And whether one is using Personhood as the best metaphor one can devise for a perception that is ineffable, indescribable, one of our creeds says "incomprehensible". Yet that the signal to the printer initiates with the computer justifies the Eastern Church's rejection of the Filioque, "and the Son", that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. But then, metaphors cannot well represent God, and the notion of the Holy Spirit as Person is not offered as metaphorical, but as doctrinal fact.

Our trinitarian doctrine asserts One God, Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It discerns the Son as of Two Natures: Divine and Human. It defines the Holy Spirit as a whole and complete divine Person, as fully a separate Person and as fully God as are the other two Persons in the Unity of Godhead. It refutes, among other "heresies", the notion that One God does this and that as needed, modalism. It won't have One God with three heads, or with three pairs of arms, each pair working on different projects. It's three individual Persons; I reckon each with his/her own thoughts? 

Which makes me a heretic, actually. I've said, and written here, about a parishioner who was sorely distressed that the Father would be so low as to send his Son to suffer and die on the cross in order to purchase, of the Father, forgiveness of the sins of the world's humans of all time, past, present, and yet to be. That this purchase of blood was, in the Father's sense of absolute, uncompromising justice, essential and the only way the Father could forgive human sins so that humans could become acceptable to the Father. 

My explanation was, it is not as if an earthly father decides to send his son on such a horrific mission; that it was God himself coming as the Son to do the job. By Christian doctrine, my explanation is modalism, the heresy of modalism, One God seeing a need and coming to accomplish it. One God walking into a village and, accosting a grieving mother, says "Young man, get up". It may sound good, and it may quiet down most Sunday School questions, but it's heresy. It was not God the Father, but someone else, Other, a different Person, Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, who walked into Nain that day. Furthermore and incomprehensibly, our doctrine is that the Father did indeed send the Son to be the bloody sacrifice.

I'm wandering off track from the Holy Spirit, but how did the Son feel about that? His divine nature probably wasn't fazed. His human nature, we've been told what he thought and said but nevertheless did. "Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me; yet not my will but thy will be done". Which, among other things, settles any doctrinal question of whether the Father and the Son have separate wills. These issues, questions, are among the Beyond Human Knowing factors that make Schleiermacher and me uneasy about the Nicene Creed that fourth century bishops meant to settle various theological arguments once and for all time. 

At any event, now that I've confessed to teaching heresy, I have to wait until next Sunday, for the liturgical Absolution, to be shed of this sin. Or maybe that, my sin, was forgiven on Good Friday? By no means am I being facetious.

But the Holy Spirit: Who or What? And what does She do? Inspires? Enlightens? Fills? Enthuses? Enlivens? Your answers are as good as mine. Better.

T