Month: July 2004

God comes to us. The Son has set out to fetch us. We need two accounts of this coming. We need an account of the coming of the Son to us. And we need an account of the coming into being of the Son. The coming into being of the Son is the growing up of mankind. This is the account Irenaeus gives us. Then we need a subsidiary account of the resistance man puts up, an account of his idleness and reluctance, and thus of sin and fall. Augustine provide this account. We need our main plot from Irenaeus, in which the Son comes to us and we grow up to be members of the Son. And we need our sub-plot from Augustine to show the actual event of his taking on and dealing with our lost and vicious condition. Then we have to relate these two accounts. The first is the account of Adam who starts out as a child, but did not grow up with, or cling to his head and master. He is led and misled. He became a people without a leader, a body without a head, a group without definition or determination. He fell into torpor and delusion, and was for a long time lost. He failed properly to name and locate all creatures over which he was to exercise dominion. Instead he began to dislocate them, creating for himself all sorts of frightening, imaginary powers to whom he was increasingly in hock. The second account is of another version of Adam, the obedient son, who receives his discipline and as a result does grow up. This new Adam is that humanity headed and led by Christ, that receives its whole definition from Christ. This is the journey of the obedient Son, made the criterion of man, and constitutive of our humanity.

Continue reading “The Descent of the Son”

God is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead. There are other spirits. Spirits may be understood as natural forces, some moral authorities. Some of these authorities are institutions, so nations, their legal systems and governments, empires, their rulers and their figureheads. Where these authorities are not themselves under authority, we can refer to them as gods, the gods of nations other than Israel. When these step beyond the bounds set for them, we may also call them idolatrous, and even demonic. These spirits are not insubstantial and ethereal. Their impact on us is real. Only the gospel of Christ can either give them their proper role, or rid us of them.

The Holy Spirit makes a world for us. This world is composed of things which together represent the hospitality of God, and his invitation to pass that hospitality on, and exercise it for one another. So God, the Holy Spirit, makes things physical for us. The Spirit makes the body, and indeed many bodies, and he makes the letter, and he makes the law, the Scripture, and the many words of God, some invitations, some commands. As long as these are sourced from the Spirit, and return to him to be refreshed by him, they are good. When they are withheld from him, they decay and cease to be what he made them. The Holy Spirit supplies us also with order and instruction, guides and guidelines, rules and institutions, forms of public order and worship. The Spirit is not against the letter, or the institution, or tradition or ritual. He creates, sustains and renews them. He is not responsible only for the spontaneity, but also for the continuity and reliability of all that is. We can talk about the Spirit only by talking about the continuum of this world with heaven as the act, and the economy of the acts, of the hospitality of God. We talk about the Spirit by talking about the world as the act of his hospitality.
Continue reading “The Holy Spirit and the other spirits”