What If It Were True?
So soon as we pose the question, "What indeed if it
were true?" about any ordinary proposition of the faith, consequences
begin to show themselves that upset our whole basket of assured convictions.
By Robert W. Jenson
About the Author: Robert W. Jenson joined the Center of Theological Inquiry in 1998 as Senior Scholar for Research after a long career teaching theology at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Oxford University. He helped found the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology which he continues to serve as associate director. A co-founder and co-editor of the journal Pro Ecclesia, he was a member of the North American Lutheran-Episcopal Dialogue I and II, and served as a permanent adviser to the International Roman Catholic-Lutheran Dialogue III. His two volume Systematic Theology was published in 1998 and 1999 by Oxford University Press.
THE CHRISTIAN GOSPEL makes a good many statements that present themselves as would-be statements of fact, as what it was once common to call truth-claims. Some of these are epistemically or ontologically surprising, but that does not change how they present themselves. So the gospel's messengers have said there was a man named Jesus who prophesied, taught, healed, was executed for his pains, and was so rescued from death as to live with death now behind him; that the national God of Israel sent him on that mission and performed that rescue; that this same God is responsible for the existence of the universe; etc.
Much of modern theology has labored to interpret some or all of the faith's apparent truth-claims as indeed apparent truth-claims only, and as discovering their true import only when translated into some other mode of discourse. What they "really" are—we have been told—is value-judgments or expressions of religious experience or grammatical rules or Vorstellungen in need of conceptualization if they are to become truth-claims or myth in need of existential interpretation to show that they are not truth claims but something much better—but you see what I mean.
I do not mean to denigrate the theological enterprises of which these caricatures will remind you; they have all contributed indispensably, or anyway to me. To say what I am about to say, I have no need to deny that such a statement as "The Lord raised Jesus from the dead" does play such roles. Indeed, in a perhaps more commonsensical way than intended by any one of the great Neo-Protestant projects themselves, most Christian propositions play many such roles at once: "The Lord raised Jesus from the dead" makes a judgment of value and express religious experience and functions as a grammatical rule and it indeed calls for a bit of conceptual working up and down. But what if it and propositions like it were also and antecedently true? That is, true in the dumb sense, the sense with which we all use the word when behaving normally, and which just therefore I cannot and do not need to analyze further, true in the sense that folk are likely to demand when they hear academic theologians and their academically trained pastors begin to talk about "deeper" meanings and the spiritual experience that so and so was trying to express and the religious tradition carried by the text, and so on.
What, indeed, if even some less primal and more controversial theologoumena were true in the ordinary way? What, e.g., if Cyril of Alexandria's Christology were true in that way? And were not only—to use language I often use—a conceptual "move" that I like to make but that others again prefer to avoid, etc.? That is my question for this essay.
Something heavy is, of course, presupposed by our normal way of saying that certain statements are true: it is presupposed that the word "true" has some constant meaning, if only, like most adjectives, in the way of Wittgenstein's rope; in the language of earlier philosophy, it is presumed that truth is at least analogically one. When we are behaving normally, we use "true" as an adjective which attributes a presumed common characteristic—or anyway Wittgensteinian rope of characteristics—to certain beliefs, assertions, etc; and we proceed so even if we are unable to analyze that characteristic further. In this paper I will assume this presumption is justified, and will not attempt to establish that it is. But I will pause just long enough to note that late modern failure of confidence in truth's unity is doubtless one cause of our skittishness about saying flat-out that some propositions are true, particularly big-ticket propositions like those made and implied by the gospel.
Many analysts have pointed to a shift at the beginning of modernity, in what is taken as the ground for confidence in truth's unity. The unity of truth was once conceived as a corollary of the simplicity and uniqueness of God. But in modernity it came to be conceived as a corollary of the unifying action of the human intellect. This shift is doubtless part of the reason for modern theology's uneasiness with ordinary truth claims, for the unity of the human intellect is pretty obviously too fragile to bear much weight—and postmodern thinkers' explicit pointing to this fact is doubtless a salutary purgation.
Yet I think there is another reason for our skittishness with the gospel's truth claims, that is probably more important and is moreover perennial. As soon as we pose the question, "What indeed if it were true?" about any ordinary proposition of the faith, consequences begin to show themselves that go beyond anything we dare to believe, that upset our whole basket of assured convictions, and we are frightened of that. The most Sunday-school-platitudinous of Christian claims—say, "Jesus loves me"—contains cognitive explosives we fear will indeed blow our minds; it commits us to what has been called revisionary metaphysics, and on a massive scale. That, I think, is the main reason we prefer not to start, and have preferred it especially in the period of modernity. For Western modernity's defining passion has been for the use of knowledge to control, and that is the very point where the knowledge of faith threatens us.
Let me give a prolegomenal instance. We sometimes join our daughter's family
for the main Sunday Eucharist at New York's cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Besides seeing our family, we go there because what happens of a Sunday morning
often makes an occasion within which we can credit biblical stuff that stumps
us in other contexts. For my colleague's sake I will not mention clouds of
incense or splendid processions, and will stick to what the cathedral's organist,
the amazing Dorothy Pappadokos, does. While her French-style improvisations
are shaking the stones of the building, and my stony heart, when climax upon
climax each improbably eclipses its predecessor, I am able to sustain the
notion that all God's various holy ones are gathered there with us, that in
fact we are praising God, as the liturgy of my church has it, "with angels
and archangels and all the company of heaven," that if only we could
see what is actually there, we would see the mighty thrones and dominions
and Mary and Paul and Olaf and my father-in-law and so forth around us in
the cavernous spaces. But sitting in front of my computer to write for publication,
in what the world decrees is comprehensible fashion, I chicken out, and begin
looking for ways to pare down the proposition to what fits the antecedent
opinion-stock of someone like myself, an academic of recently professional
family and more or less liberal education. To be sure, theological reflection
has always found it necessary to demythologize "six-winged seraphim"
and such a bit, at least with respect to the wings, but are there distinct
entities to which the biblical evocations refer? Or are there not? Normally
inquiring minds would want to know, but insofar as we are limited by modernity's
prejudices we hold back because of what a Yes would do to our vision of the
world and what a No would do to our reading of the Bible. And of course it
is a mind-bending exercise to consider in what ontological mode dead believers
make one living company with living ones, but do they or don't they? Is Papa
Rockne there for our Eucharist or is he not? If we say he is, the mind-bending
exercise must be undertaken.
So much for introduction. The body of this essay will be a set of three cases. They are selected one for each article of a standard creed. And each belongs to a systematically different theological discourse. So there will be three mini-papers, which do somehow, I think, make a whole.
The First Case
The Bible says that the world is created by God, specifically by the God
of Israel. If there is a flat-out dogma in the Bible, this is it. Moreover,
the Bible provides a fairly comprehensive unpacking of what it means by "creating."
I will here adduce but one item thereof. To create, in Scripture, is not to
make a thing, not even a big and beautiful and wonderful thing like
a cosmos. It is rather to initiate, sustain and fulfill a history.
Thus, as the fathers understood, even the beginning of the creation is not
accomplished except as history, of the seven days. And what is posited at
the beginning is not a container or platform for a history that may then commence,
but simply the first and enabling event of a history that then continues.
What God creates is narrated from beginning to end of Scripture.
Now let us consider some consequences. If it is true that what the Creator does is the history told by Scripture, and that what the Creator does is all there is besides him, then the beginning told by Scripture is the beginning of everything but God, the fulfillment prophesied by Scripture is the goal and conclusion of everything, including in some sense of God, and what is narrated in between is the actuality of everything. But then Scripture's story is the meta-narrative to end all meta-narratives, the necessary epistemic context of all true statements whatsoever. Then history is the defining mode of being, and precisely the history of salvation is the encompassing history.
If the doctrine of creation is true in the dumb sense, then—and this is the offense—any and all accounts of reality other than the biblical story are abstractions from the full account of what we actually inhabit, that is, they are abstractions from the story of God with his creatures. Some such abstractive accounts, as it turns out, are true within their range of abstraction, and some of the true ones are marvelously revelatory and practically powerful. Nevertheless, the moment we take such accounts for more than abstractions, they will lead us away from reality. Indeed, it is a necessary condition of their truth that we can, to some perhaps slight extent, describe their place within the biblical history of God with his people. An account of reality for which no place can be found within that history must be either false or empty. Now—try maintaining all that in the modern university—and yet one must, if the biblical proposition that God created and creates all things but himself is true.
Modernity has been particularly deformed, spiritually, politically and even in its sheer materiality, by one error on these lines, the ideology of mechanism, a metaphorical transcription of Newtonian physics that Enlightenments' second-stringers have proclaimed to the bourgeois world as science's discovery about what things really are. Now of course there are machines; people build thousands of them every day. And since the same laws govern the operation of these machines and the operation of, e.g., the solar system, there are indeed contexts in which metaphoric talk of mechanism can help to understand also that bulk of reality that people do not make. But even such modest metaphorical use is a risky business, for already the observable behavior of the solar system stretches any actual analogy with machines quite far. To cut to the universe and the ideology, is the universe anything like a big machine? If the doctrine of creation is true, not even remotely.
Those who know about creation, Jews and Christians, must be prepared to say that to whatever extent someone thinks about the universe as if it were a machine, or of the cosmic or political sub-universes in that way, to that extent they are alienated from what is actually out there, and must indeed become progressively unfamiliar with fact. And Christians must be prepared to say that any attempt to inhabit the cosmic or human world as if it were a machine will come into conflict with reality, that is, must eventually lead to disaster of one or another sort. It is worth noting that at the beginning of the mechanist nightmare at least one more courageous Christian theologian, Jonathan Edwards, did make the latter prediction, particularly in political context, and that it seems to be fulfilled around us.
Knowledge of the universe, that is, knowledge of everything other than God, is nothing like information about the workings of a machine. Indeed, it is not knowledge about any fixed context of change, not even of a stage on which history is then played—as I have myself misleadingly put it. It is simply knowledge of comprehensive history itself taken as a whole.
It is therefore an advance toward concreteness that the accounts given by the modern sciences increasingly take explicitly narrative form, or, more precisely, tend to devolve into narrative and sheer mathematics. And it should not surprise believers, that ideological attempts to obscure this, by positing that there just must be mechanisms underlying or controlling the great dynamic processes, now become increasingly desperate.
The more fundamental point, however, is this. The narratives with which we rightly are so impressed—the grand narratives of cosmological physics and evolutionary biology, and modernity's social and political narrative of initial state, contract and liberty—particularly insofar as they continue to abstract from teleology, that is, from using propositions about what things are for as warrants of discovery and demonstration, and that is, so long as they continue to abstract from God, abstract from what is actually around us. Now there is nothing the matter with abstraction, it is at the heart of our intellectual gift. But there is one thing narrative made by such drastic abstraction from reality cannot do: it cannot be a comprehensive true account of what is, or make a part of one. Most particularly it cannot be a metanarrative within which the narrative of God's history with his creation could be located. The reverse has to be the case.
Modernity was in large part constituted by awe before the tactics and achievements of the new sciences, and this awe was well earned. It was doubtless historically inevitable that the culture, in the grip of this awe, supposed that those accounts of reality which could be labelled "scientific" must be parts and sketches of a universal account in process of construction, and indeed surely nearly complete. And it may even have been inevitable that Christian theology for a time made the same assumption, and thought it was the task of theology to find a niche for its talk about Israel and Jesus and God within a secular metanarrative supposedly in construction. But whether or not this abnegation was appropriate for a time, the time is in any case over. It is not over because the achievements of the sciences have become any less impressive but because theology has played out that line, and—more important—because the life of the church, insofar as it has responded to the theology in question, has played out that line.
It may be that the sciences should continue to abstract from the teleology displayed by the actual world, though of course no one knows what possibilities of theory or experimental opportunities might accrue from eschewing this particular abstraction.. But theology, anyway, can and should construe cosmological and evolutionary and social-political narrative as meaningful narrative, and that is to say, should construe cosmological and evolutionary and social-political narrative as partial narrative within the story of God's purpose to bring all things into himself.
It makes a difference which way we interpret our world as we inhabit it, and it is a public difference. Insofar as the sciences are human practices, not only the uses to which their results are put, but the directions in which inquiry is pushed, and perhaps even the paradigms by which results are accorded the status of results, are determined by the culture of the scientists—and one does not need to be a deconstructing perpetrator of "science studies" to say this. In fact the sciences as actual practices have been decisively determined by the culture's erection of them into a universal framework of interpretation, that is autonomous and forbids attributing purpose to events construed within it.
It is now commonplace that acceptance of scientific accounts as a comprehensive meta-narrative, and as a meta-narrative which attributes no meaning other than succession to the events within it, especially when this works in combination with the machine-metaphor, lies behind the modern West's treatment of the world as a vast heap of raw materials, and so behind the ecological disasters we provoke. Nor, despite all activism and all warnings, do we desist from our plunderings. It may indeed be doubted that we can desist, so long as the culture's whole understanding of its own story is not changed.
There is a rule of the modern West's behavior, that if it can be done it will be done. Many years ago my Doktorvater, Peter Brunner, convinced me that this dynamism must finally destroy those whose behavior it determines. There are things that can be done that must not be done. But this will be seen only if some other narrative than any suggested by the sciences themselves provides the framework of their interpretation. Humans must not be cloned. Fetal stem cells must not be turned into immortal and impersonal cultures. The bomb should not have been built, even to counter a Nazi bomb. And this is a question not of deontological ethics but of truth: Peter Brunner's proposition is a fact about the universe. Those who do whatever they can do will come into conflict with reality, and if they persist will be broken on it.
The Second Case
It is time for my second instance, this time related to the second creedal article. It is of very different sort: a specific and controverted theologoumenon. In 451 the Council of Chalcedon set out to establish Cyril of Alexandria's teaching, in the less alarming of its forms, as the norm of teaching about the person of Christ. It was Cyril's great concern that everything the Gospels say about their protagonist is to be taken as true of one and the same concrete subject, that whether the Gospels say Jesus told a parable or forgave sins, whether he wept for Lazarus or raised Lazarus, we are talking about the same personal protagonist. So the council, starting off on Cyril's line, laid it down as its primal doctrine that "one and the same" is the subject of the whole gospel-narrative. Particularly, in the council's polemic context, it is one and the same one who is born of Mary in Bethlehem and born eternally, begotten of the Father. And we can very straightforwardly continue with Cyril: it is one and the same who has the divine attributes displayed in the Gospels and who has the human attributes therein displayed, one and the same one who forgives sin and who is tempted, one and the same one who prays in anguish and rules all history, one and the same one—though it took a few more councils to say it out loud—who is crucified and who orders the galaxies, one and the same one who—as Luther loved to say—lies muling and puking in his mother's arms and the while restrains Satan.
Chalcedon begins with the "one and the same," and so far, one may say, so very good. But when the fathers at Chalcedon moved on to the necessary work of setting boundaries for the contending schools of theology, outlawing the errors that each side feared the other must really be thinking, they did not quite dare carry on from their beginning. The formulas they produced have been memorized by centuries of theological students and have frustrated all of them, by their surface profundity and material elusiveness. Notoriously, the council stipulated that Christ has two "natures," one divine and one human, which while remaining unmixed, unadulterated, etc., are united in "one hypostasis." The trouble is, that they refrained from unpacking the notion of "one hypostasis," which one would have thought was more or less the whole point. Chalcedon's formulas fulfill some ecumenical and occasionally disciplinary functions, but conceptually they are close to being empty. Then finally the council appended the famous letter of Pope Leo as an authorized interpretation of the whole, which at least on its face says something rather different than the face value of what I earlier called the council's primal teaching. According to Leo, one entity, "the divine nature" does the glory bits and another entity, "the human nature," does the suffering bits, each "with" the other.
Ever since, at least in the West, we have found great relief in the notion that each of Christ's natures does its own thing. We have been relieved to think that while of course it is the one hypostasis of Christ who died on the cross, he did it in such fashion "according to his human nature" that we do not need to think that the God the Son himself was ontically affected. We have been relieved to think that while of course it is the one hypostasis of Christ who rules the universe, this is in such fashion "according to his divine nature" that Jesus qua human participates in this rule only by way of special but nevertheless creaturely human endowments. Christology, we have supposed, is a matter of discerning the relation between two entities, Christ's "divine nature" and his "human nature," and we have exploited that way of thinking to shy away from Cyril's blunt faithfulness to the narrative unity of the Gospels.
But what if Cyril's teaching, and the teaching with which the council began its decree, were true in the dumb sense? What if, given the Incarnation, there were not two entities for Christology to relate to each other, but just the one person for Christology to describe? Perhaps indeed with such analytical terms as "divine" or "human" or "nature?" What if talk of distinct human and divine "natures" of Christ were therefore only a sometimes useful, or even necessary, abstraction from what is actually given? What if it were the unadulterated fact of the matter, that this particular human individual with all his peculiarities, the executed Palestinian Jew, the prophet and rabbi from Nazareth, is the second identity of God? Getting down to the level I want to probe: that he is the being who appears in Scripture and theology as the Logos of God and God the Son?
For this essay, I will consider consequences of only the first of those two propositions: that Jesus of Nazareth is the Logos of God. God, we are taught by Scripture and dogma, has a Logos. That is, in part, he makes sense to himself, and so makes sense to us, if he wills there to be any us. In the long tradition stemming from the great Origen, it is taught that God has a self as which he knows and intends himself, knows and intends what sort of being he is, which includes knowing and intending what he can do and what he will not do, what is true for him and so for everyone else and what is false for him and so for anyone else, which includes knowing and willing, at the highest level of conceptual concentration, what it is to be.
Now accompanying that tradition there has always been the temptation to conceive this Logos not as in contingent but simple fact "one and the same" as the man whom Mary bore, but as a metaphysical extra entity of Ockham's worst fears, as a sort of immaterial mirror floating in empty ontological space, for God to see himself in, a mirror reflecting a "divine nature" in the abstract. The temptation is understandable, for indeed one must be alarmed by what comes of staying with Christology's starting point and saying simply that Jesus, the Palestinian rabbi and prophet, Mary's child and Pilate's victim, is the Logos of God. For what comes of thinking such things is the contradiction of most religious antecedent wisdom.
God, it follows from thinking such things, does not know and intend himself as a divine essence, but as a particular, a specific someone, and indeed as someone whom we also know, and indeed as the man of the Gospels and the prophets, the man of sorrows acquainted with grief, the proclaimer of the Kingdom in which the last will be first and the first last, the friend of publicans and sinners, the enemy and participant of human suffering, Mary's boy and the man on the cross.
We can to a limited extent abstract the conception of a divine essence, of divinity as such, and this conception will be comprised of such predicates as "impassible," "omnipotent," "omniscient" and the rest of them. But God does not, if Jesus is the Logos, first know himself as an essence. Also for God, insofar as he knows himself this way, such knowing is a secondary abstraction.
It was doubtless, e.g., proper that in the name of divine "impassibility" the ancient church condemned "patripassionism," the doctrine that on the cross not only the Son but also the Father as such suffers. But this again is an abstraction. When I tripped on one of the mesas of which Princeton sidewalks are composed, came crashing down and for a moment knew myself as a bundle of pain signals, I could of course distinguish myself from this pain-constituted object, I could identify myself as the subject who knows this thing, and as that subject assure myself that this too will pass, that if when I get home I groan loudly enough I will even get some delightful sympathy, and so forth. When we say that the Father can distinguish himself from the suffering Son in whom he knows himself, this is doubtless true, in an analogous way—and profoundly uninteresting. To call God "impassible" or by any such adjectives is true and in some contexts a necessary abstraction, but God does not first know himself that way, he knows himself in the concrete history of the Israelite, Jesus.
We obviously will fear God best, and speak to him in prayer most appropriately, and be most likely to live in a way pleasing to him, when we comport our knowledge of him to his knowledge of himself. That is, when we direct our acquaintance with him not by divine attributes but by what the Gospels say about Mary's child and the prophet from Nazareth and the man on the cross.
Or look at it this way: when at the end, or now in worship or other religious experience, we are taken into the eternal life of God, no matter how far we are taken we will never get past the Jewish prophet and sufferer, the friend of sinners and radicalizer of Moses. I doubt one would understand that from the preaching and catechesis and liturgy in many churches, and I have no doubt that this is a chief reason why the church's preaching and catechesis are mostly so dull. To the way in which the Western church most often talks about God, the fact of the Incarnation has made far too little difference; most of what we say could equally well be said if God's Logos were that immaterial mirror and Jesus simply a great prophet or rabbi—or beach-boy guru. And that God and that Jesus are indeed fundamentally uninteresting.
Writing this paper, I turned to a favorite target of mine, and had just started to write that since God knows and intends himself as a someone knowable by us, God is not after all "mysterious" as we usually understand mystery, that there is no abyss of God above or beyond or behind the Christ whom we know. But then I thought about a previous paper in the series for which I was then writing, David Tracy's lecture on "The Hidden and Incomprehensible God," and was reminded that some things I was about to elide cannot be elided. Luther, Tracy reminded me, was right: precisely Jews or Christians who know that God is love must often experience also the hiding of that love, must sometimes experience God's history with us as menacing rather than loving, indeed as horrific. And the other tradition that speaks of the incomprehensibility of God and cultivates apophatic theology, the evocation of what God is not, includes too many saints and lovers of Scripture to be ignored. What I must say instead of what I almost said, is that even God's most threatening gestures, and the incomprehensible depths of his being, are the hiddenness and mystery that belong—not to a featureless infinity but—to being a someone, even a human someone, indeed a knowable someone.
The analogy, once noticed, is obvious. The more profound another person is, and the better we get to know her or him, the more he or she will astonish us, not always in ways that please or affirm us, and the more we will glimpse depths we have not plumbed. The more I know that Blanche Jenson loves me, the more terrified I am by her occasional silences, the silences that belong of course precisely to her reality as someone other than me and of course only therefore able to love me.
So what I have to say instead of what I first thought of saying, is that indeed we will not at any height or depth of God get past Jesus of Nazareth. But that does not mean that now or in all eternity we will capture or control God, because we will not in all eternity capture or control this man. There is indeed an abyss in God and since he is God this abyss is infinite. But the abyss is that of Jesus' particular humanity.
Taking one more step on Cyril's line, God knows what it means for him to
be. And so, since he is God, he knows what it means to be at all. And it is
this man whom God knows as what it means to be. To be at all means to be this
someone, Jesus of Nazareth, or to be someone or something involved with him.
Thus "being" is not refuge from the commerce of someones, to be
is rather to be caught up in a specific such commerce. To be is to be involved
in a drama; the universal dramatic narrative that Scripture tells.
It makes a difference. What do we think we inhabit? A system of some sort?
Even if not particularly machine-like? If so, we are victims of an illusion.
What we really inhabit is rather a drama, the drama of Israel's Lord Jesus.
To understand anything at all, is to trace its relation to the events so named.
It makes a difference. I do not know if our culture can be rescued from the
superstition that recognizes only subpersonal forces as finally real, and
insists it must construe all drama as epiphenomenal. If it cannot be rescued
from that illusion, we will, for but one matter, continue so to present reality
to students in the schools as to persuade them of their own meaninglessness
and of the inconsequence of all their actions, except perhaps those most like
cosmic collisions or natural selections, that is, the most brutal ones.
I acknowledge that left to myself, I would despair of the late-modern West's ability to recover any sort of dramatic self-understanding, for the society or for its victims. But since we are not left to ourselves, who knows? The church, anyway, must fight in all the ways she can against the realization of the Clockwork Orange—also in her own life.
It makes a difference if Cyril was or was not right, and for those caught by the fascination of theology, the difference is wonderful in itself. But let us consider one more matter, of immediate religious practice and experience, prayer. If God knows his own being as an essence or force or ousia or hyperousia, it makes little sense to talk to him, and particularly it makes no sense to try to persuade him of something. But if God is also for himself a someone, it must of course make sense to talk to him. And if he is also for himself a someone among us other someones, then we are present in his own self-understanding, then he is for himself your fellow and my fellow. Then his mere deity, his omnipresence and omniscience and all the rest of it, cannot intervene between us. Then our cries for help are not alien to his absolute freedom but rather constitutive of it, just as my freedom is constituted by your addresses to me, and yours by mine. Then my telling him of my situation is not alien to his omniscience; rather this conversation between us is constitutive of his omniscience. Then his presence where two or three are gathered is not an instance of his general everywhereness but just the other way around. Then precisely humble petitionary prayer is the greatest honor we may show him. Simple proclamation that God the Son and Jesus of Nazareth are not two persons but one, as the truth about God, might make some considerable difference to our churches, that have become so very diffident with our prayers.
The Third Case
And so to the third mini-paper, on a Christian truth-claim located in yet a different sort of discourse. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed takes up the matter of spirit, which, with much of the religious world, it regards as lordly and life-giving. Then it identifies which spirit is these things: it is the one who proceeds from the Father of Jesus the Son, whose worship is simultaneous with their worship, and who spoke by Israel's prophets.
There are, as Paul reminded his churches, many spirits around. But according to the creed, only one of them is fully and authentically what a spirit should be, transcendent and animating, and that is the one identified as we have just rehearsed. Now what if that creedal claim were true, in the dumb sense?
Let us consider first ". . . who spoke by the prophets." If the spirit who did that is the one and only Spirit, then any dynamism that lifts us out of ourselves either lifts us into what it lifted those prophets into, or this elevation is not true transcendence but only projection, then its dynamism is not life but the death-spasm, however exciting or fulfilling we may find our transports to be. Am I truly lifted beyond myself in my experiences and disciplines? Am I coming alive in them? There is a way to tell: I can read Isaiah or Jeremiah or Amos, and see if I swing with them. Does this spirit within me make me long for justice to roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream? Does it free me for the community, or from it? Does it animate my rights and choices, or my duties and loves? Does it fulfill what I anyway envision as human flourishing, or does it give me a new vision?
The prophets were, after all, prophets: that is, they were engaged with the future. And at prophecy's penultimate fulfillment, that future was discovered to be a future beyond the possibilities of this world, not describable within the limits set by the way things now go. A new heaven and a new earth are envisaged, where the death-shroud is removed, and those who are now first are last and those now last are first, and the nations are pacified in the worship of the Lord. Is the spirit that moves me a spirit of impatience for that day? Or is it a spirit of calm and reconciliation to the way things are? If it is the latter, it is a fraud or a demon, if indeed the creed is true.
We may next consider, ". . . who proceeds from the Father of the Son." A spirit always proceeds from someone; for a spirit is just someone's own liveliness as that life transcends its own boundaries to animate others. So what a spirit is, is determined by from whom it proceeds. According to the creed, the only lordly and life-giving spirit is the one proceeding from the Father, which of course means the Father of the Son.
If this be true, believers have again been insufficiently triumphalist in our expectations. It is not just that the Logos of all things is the man Jesus. Also the dynamism of all things is the dynamism of the life lived between the Father and this man. Then the metaphysics of dynamic processes are very different than custom assumes.
How do we face the future? Modernity has oscillated between experiencing the dynamism of temporal succession as determinism and experiencing it as chaos. Most of the time we still suppose at the back of our minds, even if we have banished the supposition from the front, that if we knew the past history of every item of the universe we could predict its future in every detail. This is false of course; among other points, it is now well understood that the carriers of change are events which themselves have to be understood as either free or random. If we can force ourselves actually to think them as random, a yet more chilling vision must open. But how are we to think temporal succession as free?
It is at this point that not only Christian reflection invokes the notion of spirit. In this late- or post-modern West, the culture has not the strength to think of the universe's history as moved by freeing spirit, but hopes to find sanctuary from the Nietzschean horror in various little spirits of individuals or groups, each hoping to sustain a "spirituality," a feeling of freedom within its little shelter in the chaos. For freeing spirit is always someone's, and if you and I and others are the only someones around, there can only be little patches of spirit in the dispirited universe.
It will not help simply to say that there is some God or other, and that time is moved by it, or that there is Spirit, and that this is the universal dynamism. That the world is blown onward by something, countervenes neither determinism nor the apprehension of chaos. Only if the world is animated by someone, and by someone who knows himself, who has a Logos, is the world encompassed and moved by a freedom.
With the first two cases, I instanced matters both of general interpretation and of believing existence. There remains only to do the latter with this case also. It is by no accident that the "forgiveness of sins" appears in the Spirit's creedal article, or that when in John's Gospel the risen Christ gives his disciples the Spirit, the actuality of this is the power to forgive sin. For in Scripture, forgiveness is a gift of life; in Jesus' mission healing and forgiving are two sides of the same thing. And so of course forgiveness is a work of the "Giver of life."
There is and can be no greater offense to the way all of us now manage our lives, then the forgiveness of sins. Also the church has much difficulty with it. On the one hand, if we are all ok in any case, there is nothing to forgive; "acceptance" is not the same as "forgiveness." "Accept yourself as you are" is not the same as "I forgive you," and assuredly not as "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I absolve you of your sin." In the mainline churches, and it seems increasingly in the evangelical churches, forgiveness is taken for a matter of course; but then it is not forgiveness. Voltaire's God for whom forgiveness is son métier, cannot in fact forgive at all.
On the other hand, the more we deride "guilt trips" the more we
send one another on them. When you add one group to another, a sizeable part
of the American people regard themselves as my victims. But were I to accept
this burden, there would be no way to get absolution, none of my victims will
grant it, since we mutually define ourselves by our status as victims.
For professed antinomians, we show a remarkable inability to get over past
sin.
There is a reason for this deadlock. The only spirit who actually exists to deal wth sin is the one who proceeds from the Father of the Son. "Acceptance" and guilt-tripping cannot work, neither can be life; because the only real life-giving Spirit is given by the crucified and risen one, and proceeds from that Father who sees his own character in him. There is therefore no way past sin except death, that is, here, repentance; and there is no new life possible but absolution. But that way is in fact open. The life-giving Spirit, who enables forgiveness, is the Lord.
That is three mini-essays. I hope you will agree that they do, despite their
difference, make a whole. Let me state its two theses, which are more general
than my method of instances can strictly support. First: the encompassing
reality called forth by the Father is a history, whose plot is determined
in the life of Jesus the Son and whose dynamism is the Spirit that liberates
these two for each other. Second: that this is so, instead of what we all
want to be so, makes all the ontic and epistemic difference, which could make
all the public difference.
