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Theology - Trinity: Barth and Filioque

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Several years ago, I posted at length about Barth’s discussion of the filioque clause. One point I left undeveloped was: “If the Spirit is also the Spirit of the Son only in revelation and for faith, if He is only the Spirit of the Father in eternity, i.e., in His true and original reality, then the fellowship of the Spirit between God and man is without objective ground or content.” Perhaps worse, without the filioque, God’s revelation in history becomes “a purely temporal truth with no eternal basis, so to speak, in itself.”

What could he mean? Let me try a picture:

Is the Spirit “imprinted” with the character of the Son in all eternity, or only in redemptive history? If the latter, then the Spirit brings only a temporal truth, the truth perhaps of the history of Jesus, but does not come as the Spirit who discloses the eternal Son in human flesh. If the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Son, then the Spirit is eternally inflected with the Son’s sonship. He comes as the Spirit of adoption because He comes as the eternal Spirit of the Son. The “content” of the Spirit is the content He receives from the Father and the Son, and this is an eternal content only if the Spirit always had the Son.

Let’s say I got Barth right. Is he correct? Why can’t we say that the Spirit who comes from the Father only takes His content from the Father? That doesn’t work, it seems. The Son is the Father’s eternal articulation, His image and radiance; He is the form of the Father in eternity as well as in time. If the Spirit comes from the Father only, then how has the Spirit been “determined”? How does the Spirit have the Father’s “character” if He proceeds from the Father only, since the Son is the exact character of the Father? To say that the Spirit is a second determination alongside the Son is to make Him a second Son.

Another picture: A Spirit from the Father only may be the Father’s breath; but can He be articulate breath?

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 2:20 pm

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Theology - Trinity: Barth and Filioque

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