Author: Douglas Knight

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On the Holy Spirit – at a glance

Summary of John Zizioulas on the Second Ecumenical Council
(Constantinople) and Basil on the Holy Spirit

1. Basil is saying that if one professes the Spirit is not a creature, then one does not have to profess the ‘homoousios’ of the Spirit. The real and only issue behind the use of the notion of substance in theology was to safeguard the difference between created and uncreated.

2. Basil prefers to speak of the unity of God’s being in terms other than that of substance. He prefers to use Koinonia whenever reference is made to the oneness of the divinity. Anxious to stress and safeguard the distinct and ontological integral existence of each of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, Basil saw that the best way to speak of the unity of the Godhead was through the notion of koinonia rather than of substance.

3. By calling the Person a ‘mode of being’ the Cappadocians introduced a revolution into Greek ontology. For the first time in history Person (prosopon) is not secondary to being. Person is now the ultimate ontological category we can apply to God. The real existence of being or substance is found in the Person.

4. Since the Person is an ultimate ontological notion, it must be a Person – and not a substance – that is the source of divine existence. Thus the notion of ‘source’ is corrected by the notion of ‘cause’ (aitia). The cause of God’s being is the Father. The divine existence does not ‘spring’ so to say, ‘naturally’ as from impersonal substance, but is brought into existence, it is ‘caused’ by someone. It carries connotations of personal initiative and freedom. Divine being owes its being to a free person, not to impersonal substance.

5. There is a fundamental distinction between what we can say about God as he is in Himself (immanently or eternally) and what we can say about Him as He reveals Himself to us in His Oikonomia. These two ways are indicated by two doxologies. One was ‘Glory be to the Father through (dia) the Son in (en) the Holy Spirit.’ Another Basil claimed was just as ancient, was ‘Glory be to the Father with (syn) the Son, with (syn) the Holy Spirit.’

6. In justification of the second doxology, Basil points out that if we look at the Economy in order to arrive at Theologia
we begin with the Holy Spirit, then pass through the Son and finally reach the Father. The movement is reversed when we speak of God’s coming to us: the initiative starts with the Father, passes through the Son, and reaches us in the Holy Spirit. When referring to the Economy, the Spirit is a forerunner of Christ; so in the Economy, for Basil at least, the Spirit does not seem to depend on the Son.

7. This means that the through/in (dia/en) doxology can indicate either the precedence of the Son or the precedence of the Spirit in our relation to God. But if we speak of God in terms of liturgical and eucharistic experience, the three persons of the Trinity appear to be equal in honour and placed next to the other without hierarchical distinction.

8. Basil’s introduction of this with the Son and with the Spirit doxology supports his idea that the oneness of God is to be found in the koinonia of the three persons. The existence of God is revealed to us in the Liturgy as an event of communion.

9. Basil stresses the unity of divine operations ad extra, and cannot see how else one can speak of God in His own being: ‘If one truly receives the Son, the Son will bring with him on either hand the presence of his Father and that of his own Holy Spirit;
likewise he who receives the Father receives also in effect the Son and the Spirit. So ineffable and so far beyond our understanding are both the communion (Koinonia) and the distinctiveness (dianerisis) of the divine hypostases.’

10. From whatever end you begin in speaking of the Holy Trinity you end up with the co-presence and co-existence of all three Persons at once. The only thing which we can say about God on the basis of this relation is that He is three Persons and that these three Persons are clearly distinct from each other in that they exist in a different manner each. Nothing however can be said
about the way they exist – which is why we cannot say what the difference is between generation and procession. The
safest theology is that which draws not only from the Economy, but also from the vision of God as He appears in worship.

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On the Holy Spirit

John Zizioulas The Second Ecumenical Council on the Holy Spirit in Historical and Ecumenical Perspective

Introduction

1. From Nicaea to First Constantinople. The crucial issues and the new theological ideas

1. The establishment of the dialectic between ‘created’ and ‘uncreated’
Arianism did not appear as a storm out of the blue. It was connected with an issue that became crucial once the Church tried to relate the gospel to the educated and philosophically inclined Greeks of late antiquity. This issue can be summed up in the question of the relationship between God and the world. To what extent in this relationship a dialectical one? For the ancient Greeks the world and God were related to each other with some kind of ontological affinity (syggeneia). This affinity was expressed either through the mind (Nous) which is common between God – the Nous par excellence – and man, or through the Reason (logos) which came to be understood, especially by Stoicism, as the link, at once cosmic and divine, that unites God and the world. Attempts, like that of Justin, to identify Christ, the logos of the Fourth Gospel, with this Gospel of the Greeks concealed a problem which remained unnoticed as long as the issue of the relations between God and the world was not raised in the form of a dialectical relationship. For many generations after Justin the Logos (Christ) could be thought of as a projection (provole) of God always somehow connected with the existence of the world. Origen’s attempt to push the existence of the Logos back to the being of God himself did not help very much to clarify the issue, since he admitted a kind of eternal creation, thus giving rise to the question whether the Logos was not in fact to be understood in terms of an eternity related to this eternal existence of the world. This is why both the Arians, who wanted the Logos to be related to creation rather than to God’s being, and their opponents could draw inspiration and arguments from Origen himself.
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Proprietors or Priests of Creation?

Our ecological crisis is due not so much to a wrong ethic as to a bad ethos; it is a cultural problem. In our Western culture we did everything to de-sacralise life, to fill our societies with legislators, moralists and thinkers, and undermined the fact that the human being is also, or rather primarily, a liturgical being, faced from the moment of birth with a world that he or she must treat either as a sacred gift or as raw material for exploitation and use. We are all born priests, and unless we remain so throughout our lives we are bound to suffer the ecological consequences we are now experiencing.
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The Holy Spirit and the other spirits – at a glance

The Holy Spirit is the God of Israel who has distinguished himself from us by raising Jesus from the dead, and now distinguishes us from one another, securing our diversity and uniqueness

1) The Holy Spirit is the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead. The world is the hospitality of God. There are other spirits. Spirits may be understood as natural forces, some moral authorities (nations, their institutions and ways of life).

2) The Holy Spirit is all in all, indivisible and unknowable. He can preserve himself and the Son from being grasped or known. But he makes himself known first as the communion of saints, then as the whole company of heaven.

3) Knowledge of God is God’s own knowledge of himself. It is pure and undivided. It also protects us from itself, by preventing us from attempting to grasp it. The glory of God protects us from God. It does this so that we are not shattered by the impact of his arrival, or disintegrate under the pressure of his stronger gravity.

4) The West has made Christian teaching about the holiness of God abstract and absolute, so this holiness is no longer for us.

5) The West has taught that God is too distant to enter the circle of the universe, that the universe is not God’s space for us, nor time for us but empty and neutral space and time.

6) The holiness of God is a series of force fields, within each of which God extends to us a greater and more hospitable space.

7) As a result of our rebellion this hospitable world has become a remedial and custodial version of itself.

8) Holiness burns. Yet the holiness of the things God gives is too pure to be picked up by our own perception. Regular light exposure to this holiness will toughen us, and make us holy.

9) Holiness is ‘otherness’, the otherness of God from man, and for man. It regulates and make compatible all it touches. It never becomes tangible to us
as such, is not visible to us, because it is the condition of there being objects to us.

10) Modern Western theology distinguishes the spiritual from the physical and the literal. To avoid this dualising, and show that this world is the hospitable act of God to us, we must re-state the action of God in this world for us. Our pneumatological account must be in terms of
physical things made available for us by God.

11) The Holy Spirit is the creator of plurality. He makes the host and crowd of supporters and ministers. Because the Son has these
superior numbers, he will face down his opponents.

12) The work of the Son is the effort of the Spirit. The company of the Spirit chooses the Son and raises him. The chorus fills him and
lifts him up, and lifts him from us, making him the Son, not us.

13) We can give all the credit of the Son to the Spirit. The tradition (and ‘Filioque’) do not illegitimately subordinate
the Spirit to the Son, but reflect the functionalist subordination that the Spirit takes on himself.

14) Both Son and Spirit abase and subordinate themselves and each is raised by the Father. The action (existence) that goes out from Son and Spirit is subordinate. The Son and Spirit come to the Father as his subordinates and are received by him as his equals.

15) The Spirit creates and animates the whole company of heaven. He makes this company an actor, and even makes their liturgy an actor,
and make Jesus a subordinate actor.

16) The whole company exalt Jesus. They throw themselves down before him. He exalts them. He makes them get up, not thereby saying that
their worship of him is inappropriate, but rather that it is appropriate and he has acknowledged it.

17) The Spirit will be us, but we will never be the Spirit. We are not the definition of the Spirit – Christ is that. The Son can distinguish the Spirit from us. When Christ is all in all, we will have no other definition than as his Spirit.

18) Christ is the body and the head. When he is head and body, we may also become part of this body. The body is all head, it is headed (led, perfected) but we are never that head. He is always more than we are, always what we are not.

19) We can use a secular pneumatology as an account who make us, a many too many to name, and thus an indefinable flow of influences and forces. We are the result of the efforts of scores of workers (unknown to us) who have made the material which sustains – and constitutes – our own bodies.

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God and the gods: Christian theology and the modern constitution of knowledge

The argument of this essay is that we must speak about God in the face of the many gods. The Western tradition does not do this. It assumes that is that one God may or may not exist. The Christian account claims that the world is full of forces, influences and imperatives, and where these are destructive of human life, it calls them gods. Theological talk of God requires a conceptual henotheism, which concedes that these of gods are identified and defeated by the God of Jesus Christ. Christian theology does not ask if God exists, but which god is God?

God is the Holy Spirit. He is the God of Israel who has demonstrated he is holy for us by raising Jesus from the dead. There are other spirits. Some of these may be understood as natural forces, others as such moral authorities as nations, their institutions and legal systems, their figureheads and ambitions, amongst all the gods of nations other than Israel. Where these authorities are not themselves under authority, but step beyond the bounds set for them, we may call them idolatrous, sometimes even demonic. These spirits are not insubstantial and ethereal. Their impact on us is real. Only the God of Jesus Christ can give them their proper role, or rid us of them.
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Future directions in systematic theology

Future directions in systematic theology – there’s a title that invites a big answer. I am going to start though by giving you a modest account of what is being done, and from that we can see what there is to look forward to. I am going to give my answer in terms of three theologians you may well have met for yourself, and then a fourth who is not so well known.

Let me say right away that the short answer is that the future of systematic theology is political, and that that means public. It is no more about religion as a way of talking about the emotional inner life of the individual. Now it can be publicly challenging and challengeable. The future of systematic theology is escape from Kant. Christian thought is systematically engaged in encounter with, and in confrontation of, other systems of ideas. If it is good to talk, it is also important to disagree, and do so honestly, and not to suggest that underneath our differences we are really trying to say the same thing. We do not all share the same essential beliefs, and to insist we do prevents public debate of public issues. Instead there can be a real encounter and contest of world-views, and that is what I mean by political.

To outline where systematic theology is going I want to say something about its current best practice. I am going to limit myself to three theologians who all work in the UK, all producing what we could call political theology. They are Tom Wright, Oliver O’Donovan and John Milbank. Tom Wright is a historian of the New Testament, O’Donovan a historian of the Christian tradition from the beginnings to the seventeenth century, while Milbank deals with the modern period.
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The Descent of the Son

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.

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The Holy Spirit and the other spirits

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.
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Worship as binding and loosing

The liturgy is the speech of God. The speech of God opens us up and closes us down, blesses and curses. God’s speech finishes and makes good what we start but cannot finish, and undoes what we have done falsely. The act of God creates a community and a life; it creates plurality, it sets all things in motion, and distinguishes every thing from every other thing. It creates the Church and gives it a speech and a work. It gives the Church the task of untying the world that ties itself up, and picking up and binding in again whatever the world has abandoned. God gives his speech to the world in the form of the Church: the Church is the action of God in the world. The Church interprets the world to itself and is God’s own compassionate act of world-analysis and -diagnosis. Theology serves this speech of God given to the Church. The doctrine of God who speaks and acts for us serves to secure our daily action and freedom of action against all that threatens to bring it to a close. Only the God of Jesus Christ will free us and drive out the forces that have colonised us. He will raise us from this merely illusory diversity and this premature unity, from this indistinguishable entity of the observer and the world he sets before him, that cannot be given its independence from him.

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