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Theology - Trinity: Spirit and Suffering

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Mark A. McIntosh (Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)) offers a profound and moving pneumatological response to what he describes as the “mythological” and “Cartesian” Trinitarian theology in Moltmann and La Cugna.

The Spirit, he affirms, elicits from people who hear the message of Jesus “the only real response that one can make to God’s self-communication in Jesus, namely a willingness to participate in Jesus’ own life and mission.” Thus, “the strain of distance between Jesus and the One he calls Father” that is expressed most dramatically on the cross “is something Christians are drawn into by the Spirit.” The Spirit is “God presenting God’s Word to the community and within the community, thus initiating the whole creation’s response to this Word spoken in the events concerning Jesus.”

The Spirit by which the Father raised Jesus, the Spirit given to the church, leads the church into deepening grasp of the truth of Jesus, which means a deepening participation in His death and resurrection:

“the community is initiated [by the Spirit] into the hidden depths of [Jesus'] relationship with the Father, and from that perspective they begin to think in new ways about Jesus’ death. The painful distance that sin seemed to have pried open between the Father and the Beloved Son comes to be seen in a new light, as the outpouring in history of the eternal divine self-giving. The coming of the Spirit within the Christian community makes it possible, even necessary, for the communicate to participate in the mystery of Jesus’ dying and rising, and so to interpret his relationship with the Father from within – precisely by becoming, as the Body of Christ, the living sign of God’s embrace of all creation within the love of the Father and the Son in their Spirit.”

That “from within” is lovely: Sharing the cross, the church does not simply watch Jesus cry from the outside, but shares in that cry as the sign of God’s faithfulness to death.

More: “God’s self-expression is not just a bare announcement but a saving event. God the Word speaks the mystery of God into history, and because God’s life is ultimately giving and sharable life, God’s Word is only fully realized insofar as it is heard, understood, accepted. In the eternal life of God, this self-outpouring (Son) and self-understanding (Spirit) take place in the infinite glory of God’s perfect intelligibility. . . . But, Christians believe, God chooses in love and freedom to include the creation of a universe in the expression of God’s own being; and so the divine activity of understanding and interpreting this Word takes place not only in the joy of heaven but also in the struggle and confusion of broken human history. And ‘Holy Spirit’ is the name Christians give to the activity of God by which the community is led into that ongoing process of hearing and interpreting Jesus – a process of reception which, in the world we have made, must be a continuing work of reconciliation.” The Spirit’s work is to “drive Jesus the Word into the wilderness of human lostness,” which is precisely where He drives us as well.

Altogether lovely, that: Creation as the free decision to “include” what is not God in the expression of His being; the Triune God’s activity of self-expression being worked out not only in the eternal divine life, but in the mess of history; the work of the Spirit as that of driving the Son into the wilderness. And all this without the insurmountable tangles that Moltmann gets himself into, all without the ripping of Father and Son.

As McIntosh says, “the ‘disappearance’ of the Son into the plight of history might be construed less as a diastasis introduced into the very heart of the divine and more as a divine faithfulness to God’s own being and thus to God’s creation; for it reveals an unwillingness to allow the meaning of God’s creative love to go unheard – no matter how deafening the noise of human alienation.” And, “If we speak of the suffering of the Son in the extremity of the Father’s self-emptying self-disclosure, it is only because the Spirit is the crucial and eternal affirmation and acceptance of this Word.”

That, it seems to me, is a theology fully capable of meeting the challenges of protest atheism and metaphysical rebellion.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 4:51 pm

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Theology - Trinity: Spirit and Suffering

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