“There is more to the Holy Spirit’s work than pointing toward the memory of Christ’s once for all work.”

If you appreciate the work, pay it forward. Literally! Become a paid subscriber.

“Western teaching that the Spirit proceeds “and from the Son” is the failure to acknowledge the saving work of the Spirit as the Spirit’s own new and particular initiative.”

The Nicene Creed celebrates its 1700th anniversary this year. However, for more than half that timespan the church in the West has not professed the creed in identical fashion with her ancient brothers and sisters. The four little words which the West added to the Nicene Creed approximately a millennia ago matter for all things that matter.

In his book on the basic flaw in ecumenical theology, Unbaptized God, Jenson argues that the conception of God in the Western imagination remains essentially unconverted by the gospel. Once again, the title distills his thesis. The God in whom most Christians believe is neither the Nazarene who submits to John’s baptism of repentance nor the one he called Father who entered into time to affirm his relation by the Spirit.

Speaking of the sense of futility that besets ecumenical discussions, Jenson writes:

“The repeated achievement of convergences never adds up to convergence, something deep in the conceptual-spiritual structure of the church’s life seems endlessly to pose and enforce choice between polar positions.”

The reason conversation between Christians from East and West, and, within the latter, Catholics and Protestants, feels pitted according to polarities is that we share “an incompletely christianized interpretation of God.”

Since the ninth century, the church in the Eastern church has diagnosed a failure of the church in the West to apply the gospel fully to its doctrine of God. The tiny clause which the West inserted into the Nicene Creed (“…who proceeds from the Father and the Son…”) is the root of deep distortion. The so-called Filioque Clause, Robert Jenson concedes, is not an embellishment— a bit of interior design— added to the creed so much as an un-permitted addition to the foundation of the faith. The result, Jenson argues, is a church that can’t find its center.

Forget God the Holy Spirit and you end up seesawing between two bad poles.

“Either the church as institution is detached from the genuine event of salvation,” Jenson suggests— ie, the church is not the miraculous creation ex nihilo of the Spirit at Pentecost— or the institution itself is regarded as sacral, as a direct result of Christ’s commission.” The church as the human voluntary association of believers (much of the Protestant Church) lies at the end of the first pole while the church as divinely-sanctioned authority (the Roman Catholic Church) lies at the other pole.

The latter pole begets rigid institutionalism.

The former produces hyper-individualized spiritualism, where every believer is their own pope, and every new idea comes stamped with the Spirit’s supposed approval.

Jenson cites the Orthodox theologian to diagnose the deficiency in both:

“The institution of the church is not seen as a charismatic work of the Spirit.”

In other words, we’ve turned the Spirit into a kind of divine assistant, tethered to the Son, instead of recognizing the Spirit’s free, personal agency in the Triune life and, by extension, the life of the church.

Jenson asserts that the Orthodox Church in the East is correct in their critique of the Western body of believers. Pentecost is not simply an event that happens after the conclusion of the story of redemption at Ascension (which is exactly how the church often proclaims God’s salvific work). Pentecost is the Holy Spirit’s “new and particular initiative” in the life of God and in the life of the world. Pentecost is not a memory; it is a miracle, according to which alone can the church account for her existence.

When the church earlier professed that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father,” she safeguarded the Spirit’s personal freedom. The alternative, the Filioque Clause now confessed in the West’s redaction of the Nicene Creed, collapses the Spirit’s work into Christ’s work, as if the Spirit is only there to remind us of something Jesus already did, long ago, in a Galilee far, far away.

There is more to the Holy Spirit’s work than pointing toward the memory of Christ’s once for all work.

And when that happens, when the Spirit’s work collapses into the work of the Son, Jenson suggests, the church can no longer identify miracles, she loses her prophetic voice, and she reduces the gospel either to authoritarian nostalgia or to an anxious scramble to reinvent the church to every perceived need for relevance. By contrast, when the church understands herself to be the creation of the Holy Spirit, tradition is no longer the static archive of the past but the dynamic, living ways in which the Spirit has made history with her.

As Jenson writes:

“Tradition is a living actualization of the past, a true anamnesis, a synthesis between what is transmitted and present experience, brought about by the Invocation of the Spirit.”

And because the Holy Spirit is “the power of the Risen Jesus,” every eucharist and baptism, every proclamation of the Word, every communal prayer just is the Spirit knitting the church’s “then” to the church’s “now” and pulling the church toward her “not yet.”

Tradition, in this sense, is the Spirit’s choreography, the continuity of God’s people across time because “the Spirit continuously creates it.”If this is true, then the church is never just a human project. Nor is the church ever merely a historical society founded by something Jesus did once upon a time.

The church is, in Jenson’s words, “the continuing creation of the Spirit.” Again, Pentecost is not a memory. Pentecost is the first labor pang of new creation, making Jesus’ Risen Body— the church— a community animated moment by moment by the Spirit’s presence.

This means the things we often pit against each other—the institutional versus the charismatic, the hierarchical and the spontaneous— are not opposites at all.

As Jenson explains:

“The office is charism, since the Spirit, the living Giver of life, is the source of the church’s office. Office and gift, structure and freedom, belong together because the Spirit is free to breathe both into Jesus’ body.”

With this, Jenson makes his boldest but most characteristic claim, connecting the Holy Spirit to the Last Future where Jesus now lives as its first resident. Jenson insists that the Spirit does not merely make the church continuous with its past (eg, an episcopacy established by apostolic succession), the Holy Spirit also makes the body of believers continuous with its End.

The Holy Spirit makes the body of believers continuous with its End.

Jens says:

“It is an implication of a “pneumatological” Christology, that the historical present of Christ is eschatological. Where the Spirit acts, he makes history enter into the last times, bringing to the world the foretaste of its final destiny.”

Just so, once again— every eucharist and baptism, every uttered prayer, every act of witness…it is not just about maintaining continuity with the past; it is about anticipating the Future. Quite literally, in all these acts the Holy Spirit pulls the community forward into God’s promised Future. This is why Jenson says the church’s continuity through time is eschatological. The church is eschatologically self-identical through time, identical with itself in each present in that in each present it anticipates the one end.

Why do four little words added to the church’s dogma matter?

According to Jenson, the difference— the takeaway— is as unsettling as it is exhilarating.

God has not stopped speaking.

The Spirit has not stopped acting.

The church is not the kingdom movement begun by the dead Jesus.

That she is his risen body, animated by his Spirit, is no mere metaphor.

The same Spirit who hovered over the waters in Genesis, who overshadowed Mary, who fell like fire in Jerusalem, is the Spirit delivering the church even now into the promised Last Future. Forget this item of dogma, and you’re left with the insufficient polarities which beset the church in the West.

On the one hand, a sterile bureaucracy incompatible with a message that just is a promise about the Future.

On the other hand, a free-floating individualism that is anathema to the gospel of Mary’s boy and Moses’ LORD.

But remember this dogmatic claim—recover the Spirit as the Spirit—and suddenly the church stops being a relic of the past and becomes what it was always meant to be: a people animated by God’s future, living signs of the kingdom breaking in.

This is why Jenson keeps pressing on his title phrase. Our problem is not just a matter of language; it’s a matter of imagination. As it turns out, the Holy Spirit is our unbaptized God. We left our pneumatology on the shore of the Jordan River, unconverted to the gospel. And until we let the Spirit be the Spirit—personal, free, and eschatological—the church will keep spinning its wheels, caught between nostalgia for what was and anxiety about what might be.

According to Jenson, here is the good news. Like the Dude, the Holy Spirit abides.

He writes:

“By the term Holy Tradition, we understand the entire life of the church in the Holy Spirit… dogmatic teaching, liturgical worship, canonical discipline, and spiritual life… together they manifest the single and indivisible life of the church.”

The ordinary life of the church is charismatic. To be a charismatic Christian, a believer need do nothing more than listen patiently when a lector invites him or hear, “Listen for the Word of the LORD.”

Put differently, forget the Holy Spirit and you no longer can see her at work in the ordinary life of Jesus’ body. In this, we are of all people the most to be pitied, for we have blinded ourselves to our reasons for hope.

The offices are gift.

This is good news of great joy.

Share

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app