The Problem of the Holy Spirit
There is a problem that arises as soon as one attempts to write about the Holy Spirit. It is similar to the problems we have when writing about the Father, but they are somewhat more pronounced. The problem is that there just isn’t all that much information about the Spirit in his personal distinction from the Father and the Son. When we wrote about the Father, we found that we are simply not able to speculate about who God is because, when the eternal Son of God became a human being, we found that God was somewhat different than our abstract speculation would generate. If Jesus is indeed God, then we cannot invent a God the Father that is utterly different than the God revealed in Christ, but, as Athanasius asserted, we must “name God through the Son and call him Father.” It may have been noted that there was not much reflection on the Father as distinct from the Son, but much reflection on what we can say about the Father in light of the incarnate Son. The discussion of creation was included under the discussion of the Father, not because the Father and not the Son or the Spirit is Creator, but because the classic creeds associate creation with the Father.
The problem we have in identifying the distinctions between the Persons of God is because they are not finally different Gods. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit each share a common being. Because of this incredible unity, it is simply not possible to identify rigid distinctions between then. It is easy to distinguish between the Son and the Father or between the Son and the Spirit because it is the Son and not the Father or the Spirit who took on flesh and lived among us. However, the line between the Father and the Spirit is and must remain blurry, though we affirm a distinction because the Scriptures do.
To give some more concrete reflection on the problem of understanding the Holy Spirit, let us consider some of the information we find in the New Testament. Christ is continually telling us that he does not do what he does on his own authority but points to his Father in heaven and claims to do nothing other than what the Father is doing. The Father, at various points (like the baptism of Christ and the transfiguration), speaks from heaven and declares that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed his Son and that we must listen to him. Even in those moments of direct self-revelation of the Father, we are directed to Christ as our point of contact with the Divine. We have the Father’s direct command to come to know him through his Son.
When we come to how the Spirit is related to the others, we find that the Father sends the Spirit, but the Father sends the Spirit through and with Christ (this is one of the key reasons why we must maintain a personal distinction between the Father and the Spirit, even though the line between them in our understanding is blurry). We are told that the Spirit will not speak on his own, but will speak what he hears from the Father and the Son. He will take the things of Jesus and disclose them to us (John 16:13-14). However, though the New Testament often speaks of the Spirit and does so in lofty terms (Paul comes closest to providing a definition of a Christian when he says, “But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him” (Romans 8:9)), the Spirit is not often, if ever, spoken of as doing something fundamentally different than Christ.
What we do know is that the Spirit is the same God as the Father and the Son, though personally distinct from each of them. The New Testament speaks of the Holy Spirit as both the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ, and this reality will provide the structure for the rest of this chapter, which will be, admittedly and for the reasons already discussed, shorter than the chapters on the Father and Son.
The Spirit of the Father
While this section will be far shorter than the next on, focusing on the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ, it provides us the opportunity to reflect on some key ideas. The early church used the language “of one being with the Father” (ομουσιος τω Πατρι) to stress the bond of being between the Father and the Son. Once this language was in place and proved to be an incredibly helpful way to understand the interrelationships within the being of God, it quickly became clear that the same had to be said about the Spirit, that it too was of one being (ομουσιος) with the Father.
This is a helpful corrective for us. Even though the Son of God (who is of one being with the Father) has taken on flesh, this does not mean that we can read the fleshliness of Jesus back into God. After all, Jesus has fingernails and hair, but it seems inappropriate to say that those things belong to the divine nature as such. When we remember that the Spirit is also of one being with the Father, we see that, though God has chosen to be imaged to us in human flesh as the man Jesus, the Spirit images God but does so, not as a human being. Indeed, the Holy Spirit images God, but does so in an imageless way.
It is because of this imageless imaging of God that all our preconceived notions and conclusions about God not based on God’s actual self-revelation are ruled out of bounds. It is quite interesting to reflect on the fact that the Gospel narratives include next to no information about what Jesus looked like. It is the essentially imageless nature of the Spirit that is the reality behind the prohibition against making idols. How can we image an imageless God? Even though God has become incarnate in Jesus in such a way that what God is toward us is the same as God is in God’s own life, we are reminded by the Spirit that the intimate relationship between the divine and human natures in Christ is not like the relation between the Persons of the Trinity. Whereas the latter are intrinsic to God himself, the former is a union of grace, one where God makes room for himself in the depths of our humanity.
Because of this relationship between the Spirit and the Father, we can stand on objective reality when we say that the nature of God is Spiritual rather than physical, even though God took on physical human nature in the Incarnation. We stand on firm ground when we say that, proper to God’s own nature, God does not have hair, fingernails, bodily organs, or, perhaps most importantly for the debates in this contemporary world, physical gender. The fact that the Spirit, and not just the Son is of one being with the Father shows us that God is finally neither male nor female, that such things are not part of who God is but, when we apply them to God, are false constructs that are not what is the case. This has the effect of reinforcing the radical particularity of Jesus. God became a particular human being, not humanity in general (though Jesus represents and substitutes for all of humanity). There is no analogy of being (Latin: analogia entis) between human nature and divine nature where we can equate the two, even in Jesus, but there is an analogy of faith (Latin: analogia fidei) where God has graciously entered fully into human nature and made it his own.
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