October 30, 2024
| Pneumatology: Christian theology which deals with the Holy Spirit, Part 1 offering by Dick Fichter, parishioner with support from Rev. Dina |
| Turning from the procession of the Holy Spirit, from a few weeks ago, I want to look more closely at Pneumatology, which is from the Greek pneuma (wind, breath, spirit) and logia (doctrine). This is the branch of Christian theology which deals with the Holy Spirit. The aspects of the received doctrine (Trinity) which are most relevant here are: 1) The recognition by the Council of Constantinople in 381 that God is one Being in three Persons. This recognition acknowledges the full divinity of the Spirit, “who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified” (Nicene Creed, BCP, pp. 327, 328, 359). This decision is said to represent the triumph of the Cappadocian Fathers over the pneumatomachians or Macedonians, who were from the northeastern mainland portion of Greece and who denied the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. 2) The definition of the difference between the Son and the Spirit. As the Council of Nicaea declared the Son to be “begotten, not made” (Nicene Creed, BCP, p. 326), the Council of Constantinople declared that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father” (see BCP, p. 327; Jn 15:26). The Council of Nicaea in 325 stated the crucial formula for that doctrine in its confession that the Son is “of the same substance [homoousios] as the Father,” even though it said very little about the Holy Spirit. Over the next half century, the doctrine of the Trinity took substantially the form it has maintained ever since. It is accepted in all of the historic confessions of Christianity, even though the impact of the Enlightenment decreased its importance in some traditions. |
| The Trinity |
| The doctrine of the Trinity is considered to be one of the central Christian affirmations about God. It is rooted in the fact that God came to meet Christians in a threefold figure: (1) as Creator, Lord of the history of salvation, Father, and Judge, as revealed in the Old Testament;(2) as the Lord who, in the incarnated figure of Jesus Christ, lived among human beings and was present in their midst as the “Resurrected One”; and(3) as the Holy Spirit, whom they experienced as the helper or intercessor in the power of the new life. I have always accepted the Trinity but never really thought about it in detail or what necessitated it. Neither the word “Trinity” nor the explicit doctrine appears in the New Testament, nor did Jesus and his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Hebrew Scriptures: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Note that the Jewish scripture was accepted and made part of the Christian bible as the Old Testament. The earliest Christians, however, had to cope with the implications of the coming of Jesus Christ and of the presumed presence and power of God among them—i.e., the Holy Spirit, whose coming was connected with the celebration of Pentecost. The New Testament’s Influence The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were associated in such New Testament passages as the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19); and in the apostolic benediction: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:13). Thus, it is argued that the New Testament established the basis for the doctrine of the Trinity. But how do you explain it in a way to understand it. The problem for me is that I can relate to Jesus’ life on earth more readily than the metaphysical aspect of the Holy Spirit which deals with abstract concepts such as being, substance and essence. The definition of metaphysics is that it is the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. Next Week: History and Doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Over the Centuries The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies. Initially, both the requirements of monotheism inherited from the Hebrew Scriptures and the implications of the initial need to interpret the biblical teaching to Greco-Roman religions traditions seemed to demand that the divine in Christ as the Word, or Logos, be interpreted as subordinate to the Supreme Being. An alternative solution was to interpret Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes of the self-disclosure of the one God but not as distinct within the being of God itself. The first tendency recognized the distinctness among the three, but at the cost of their equality and hence of their unity (subordinationism). The second came to terms with their unity, but at the cost of their distinctness as “persons” (modalism). Insofar as they began to separate or be separated from Judaism, which did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, the earliest Christians expressed certain ideas about the one on whom their faith focused. As with other religious people, they became involved in a search for truth. God, in the very nature of things, was necessarily the final truth. In a reference preserved in the Gospel According to John (14:6) , however, Jesus refers to himself not only as “the way” and “the life” but also as “the truth.” Roughly, this meant “all the reality there is” and was a reference to Jesus’ participation in the reality of the one God. In John, the Spirit mediates truth in the disciples which enables them to do their work and the truth is Jesus who sends his advocate and helper, the Holy Spirit to provide a spiritual force field to direct man’s moral compass to the truth. Just like the earth’s magnetic field, which is also always present to us, the compass needle can be distorted by other fields so that you lose sight of true north, and spiritual, the truth. The compass needle must be made of a substance which responds to the earth’s magnetic field. In my opinion, there must be a similar requirement of a substance for receipt of the Holy Spirit for one to learn and act on the truth. Is that substance what constitutes your conscience? Metaphysics and Substance The common understanding of “substance” in contemporary English is material in the physical sense … the substance of the chair is made from is wood. The meaning of the creed is philosophical/ metaphysical, that is religious, and not a physical material as such. Many of the concepts analyzed by philosophers have their origin in ordinary – or at least extra-philosophical – language. Perception, knowledge, causation, and mind are examples. But the concept of substance is a philosophical term of art. Its uses in ordinary language tend to derive, often in a rather distorted way, from the philosophical senses. There is an ordinary concept in play when philosophers discuss “substance”, and this, as we shall see, is the concept of an object, or thing when this is contrasted with properties or events. But such “individual substances” are never termed “substances” outside philosophy. There exist two rather different ways of characterising the philosophical concept of substance. The first is the more generic. The philosophical term “substance” comes from an early Latin translation of the Greek ousia. Ousia is a noun derived from the verb “einai” (to be) and is naturally translated “being”. According to the generic sense, substances are those things that best merit the title “beings”. This is usually interpreted to mean those things that are the foundational or fundamental entities of a given philosophical system. Thus, for an atomist, atoms are the substances, for they are the basic things from which everything is constructed. In David Hume’s system, impressions and ideas are the substances, for the same reason. In a slightly different way, Forms are Plato’s substances, for everything derives its existence from Forms. The second use of the concept is more specific. According to this usage, substances are a particular kind of entity, and some philosophical theories acknowledge them and others do not. This conception of substance derives from the intuitive notion of individual thing or object, which contrasts mainly with properties and events. According to this usage, it is a live issue whether the fundamental entities are substances or something else, such as events, or properties located at space-times. The issue is how we are to understand the notion of an object, and whether, in the light of the correct understanding, it remains a basic notion, or one that must be characterised in more fundamental terms. Whether, for example, an object can be thought of as nothing more than a bundle of properties, or a series of events. The reason “substance” has acquired these two usages is that the work that introduced the term to philosophy, Aristotle’s Categories, claims that the things that most merit the title “beings” (substances in the generic sense) are individual objects as opposed to properties or events (substances in the specific sense). Source: Robinson, Howard and Ralph Weir, “Substance”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/ |
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