After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West

by Eugene F. Rogers Jr.

Overview

To think about the Spirit it will not do to think 'spiritually' to think about the Spirit you have to think materially," claims Eugene F. Rogers. The Holy Spirit, who in classical Christian discourse "pours out on all flesh," has tended in modern theology and worship to float free of bodies. The result of such disembodiment, contends Rogers, is that our talk about the Spirit has become flat and uninspiring. In After the Spirit Rogers diagnoses a related gap in the revival of trinitarian theology, a mentality that "there's nothing the Spirit can do that the Son can't do better."The Eastern Christian tradition, by contrast, has usually linked the Holy Spirit with holy places, holy people, and holy things. Weaving together a rich tapestry of sources from this tradition, Rogers locates the Spirit in the Gospel stories of the annunciation, Jesus' baptism, the transfiguration, and the resurrection. These stories offer illuminating glimpses into both the Spirit's connection with the tangible world and the Spirit's distinctive place in relation to the other persons of the Trinity.Eight gorgeous color plates complement Rogers's witty and passionate prose.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802828910
Publisher:	Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
Publication date:	01/20/2011
Series:	Radical Traditions Ser.
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	733,762
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Read an Excerpt

AFTER THE SPIRIT

A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West

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By Eugene F. Rogers Jr.

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2005 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8028-2891-4

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Chapter One

Is There Nothing the Spirit Can Do That the Son Can't Do Better?

Or, How the Spirit Puzzles a Trinitarian Revival

i. Barth Fumbles

It's become a commonplace of recent scholarship that successive trinitarian revivals have slighted the Holy Spirit. Whether a theologian has anything interesting to say about the Spirit has emerged as a heuristic. The chief puzzle has been Karl Barth. Leader of the twentieth century's most successful trinitarian revival, author of more than one book with "Spirit" in the title, and of some 2100 pages with "Spirit" in bold-face theses, Barth nevertheless provokes some consensus that his doctrine of the Spirit subsides into christology, as if there's nothing the Spirit can do that Christ can't do better. As Robert Jenson writes, "The personal agent of [the community's] work in fact turns out at every step of Barth's argument to be not the Spirit, as advertised, but Christ; the Spirit is denoted invariably by impersonal terms," chiefly the "power" of Jesus Christ.

Now, everywhere in Barth the Spirit makes possible any human response to God. The Dogmatics begins and ends with highly promising pneumatological insights. In I/1 as decades later in IV/4, "it is the Spirit who constitutes revelation as historical, capable of being responded to by individuals in specific contexts." In the middle of the Dogmatics, however, Barth eclipses the illumination of the Spirit with the material objectivity of the Son. The Son becomes a "ray of darkness," the Spirit mere penumbra. In seven thousand pages Barth lodges this single protest against Christ-statements without Spirit-statements:

Both statements denote one and the same reality. But neither renders the other superfluous. Neither can be reduced to the other. Hence neither is dispensable. Again, neither can be separated from the other. Neither can be understood except as elucidated by the other.

And yet that is just what happens from I/2 straight through to IV/3. Christ-statements render Spirit-statements superfluous. Spirit-statements are reduced to Christ-statements. Pneumatological statements prove dispensable. Christ-statements are separated from Spirit-statements for hundreds of pages. Christ-statements are understood as true without elucidation by Spirit-statements. With few exceptions, the middle of the Dogmatics does render the Spirit automatically given or identical with Jesus, or percussively reduces her to his "power" or "promise."

Calling the Spirit "the power of Jesus Christ" recalls Gregory Nazianzen's warning, which Barth had certainly read, that one should not "give Essence to the Father and deny Personality to the Others, and make Them only Powers of God." Calling the Spirit the "act of communion" between the Father and the Son recalls Gregory's claim that "act" language reduces the Spirit to an accident of God. Gregory even anticipates a false reserve "out of reverence to Scripture."

A thesis statement of I/1 announces the Spirit as an agent, "the Lord who sets us free." But when Barth comes to deliver on the claim, he does so in christological terms: "Christ has 'set us free' for freedom." Now, there's nothing wrong with bringing in the other Persons, whose act toward the world is indivisible, and certainly nothing wrong with quoting Galatians. But Barth leaves the reader no reason to think you couldn't unpack the setting free in terms of Christ alone. The exposition abandons the Spirit to the rubrics. Another apparent treatment of the Spirit runs seven hundred pages, of which it shows up on fourteen. One wonders if Spirit-talk appears for variety or ornament.

Barth is aware that the early trinitarians did not have the nineteenth-century German notion of "person" to go by, did not conceive of the trinitarian Persons as Idealist centers of consciousness. He knows that the Latin persona comes from personare, to sound through, as a dramatic mask. Correctively therefore he writes,

[E]ven if the Father and the Son might be called "person" ... the Holy Spirit could not possibly be regarded as the third "person." ... He is not a third spiritual Subject, a third I, a third Lord side by side with two others. He is a third mode of being of the one divine Subject of [the] Lord.

But this goes too far. The early trinitarians did not need the nineteenth-century notion of person to recognize characters in the biblical story, characters who interact among themselves. Aristotle, for example, could conceive of characters without an Idealist theory of interiority. If Father, Son, and Spirit appear on the New Testament stage, that alone is enough to see that, at least among themselves, they interact, even if toward the world they have a single indivisible action. Gregory's correction belongs here: Not a single sun in three forms, but three suns aligned to give a single light. One can even refer to the metaphor of the dramatic mask without modalism. Aristotle would not have imagined that three masks mark three roles of a single actor in modalist fashion, especially if they appear on stage together. Rather the three masks simply mark - as we see now in von Balthasar - three dramatis personae, three characters in the drama. This language need not mean that the masks mark some reality hidden behind them, some deus absconditus or modalist hiddenness. They merely mean that a certain ancient literary analysis is going on, an obvious result of reading: in the narratives of the New Testament, three characters are one God. So while Barth is correct to reject nineteenth-century centers of consciousness, he is a poor reader of the New Testament if he denies that the Spirit is a character in the story, one who precedes the Son at the incarnation, hovers over him at the baptism, drives him into the wilderness, overshadows him at the transfiguration, anoints him at burial, indwells his body at the resurrection, and continues his mission at Pentecost. These acts of the Spirit do not follow automatically, as a power. Often they precede, anticipate, prevene, as grace. And when they follow, they do so with independent or unexpected initiative, as a gift.

Jenson diagnoses the problem like this: "[I]n Barth's theology, Western trinitarianism's common difficulty in conceiving the Spirit's specific immanent initiative in God must become a difficulty in conceiving the Spirit's entire salvation-historical initiative."

An intratrinitarian problem looms: the Spirit has no gift to give the creature, which is not Christ, because the Spirit has no gift to give Christ.

ii. Florensky Shrugs

It is also a familiar theme in all Christian traditions that the Spirit does not always flaunt itself. "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign"; their only sign will be christological (Matt. 12:38-41). Hunger for the Spirit can mask self-aggrandizement; the Spirit speaks in a "still, small voice" (I Kings 19:12); the Spirit initiates Christians into Christ's experiences of abandonment. Some suggest that such apophaticism is as it should be, including John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Reformer; Karl Rahner, the Kantian Catholic; and Pavel Florensky, the early twentieth-century Russian Orthodox polymath from whom both Sophiological and Neopatristic streams flow. We'll head straight for Florensky.

You might suppose that Calvin and Rahner have something in common to account for a retiring Spirit - namely, they are Western. The hiding of the Spirit behind the Son, a reader of Eastern polemics might confess, is a Western problem, a symptom of the Filioque and a tendency to subordinate the Spirit to the Son. But you would be wrong. The strongest case for an apophatic theology of the Spirit comes from the East.

Pavel Florensky's Pillar and Ground of the Truth (published in Russian in 1914) makes a stronger case than either Calvin or Rahner for the anonymity of the Spirit, because he - the Easterner - makes it explicitly. He makes it from the Cappadocians, the ascetics, and the liturgy: from the very sources in which Orientalist Western theologians expect to see an unreconstructed Pneumatic golden age. Furthermore, he finds the anonymity of the Spirit not a flaw, but an ascetic virtue.

For Florensky, the Spirit's job is to foster asceticism. Since the work of the Trinity in the world reflects character of God in se, he expects the Spirit to practice ascetic discipline precisely in regard to herself. Ascetic practice and the revelation of the Spirit are alike "only a betrothal," "a kiss of the Bride," "given in view of ... the many torments." The Spirit like the Kingdom appears only fleetingly before the End, even if truth and the ascetic run before it. For Florensky, "Come, Holy Spirit!" and "Thy Kingdom come!" pray the same prayer, even after Pentecost.

Florensky too "finds it strange" that a theologian should "speak of the importance of the ... Spirit ... but hardly ... [give] a clear and precise explanation of anything." He too applies this lack "chiefly to dogmatists, ... the ones who have to speak decisively and to the heart of the matter." As Barth's critics would complain after him, "It is they who turn out to be almost mute, or clearly confused."

Only this strangeness does not apply to twentieth-century theologians in successive trinitarian revivals (Barth, Rahner, von Balthasar): Florensky comes too soon for any of them. Nor does it specify the nineteenth-century trinitarian revivals of Hegel, Schelling, or Scheeben. Florensky has in his sights the theological tradition tout court. He aims his puzzled phrases at "all the holy fathers and mystical philosophers"! He concedes no more than a "false window" for symmetry's sake.

Preceding Barth's critics by some eighty years, he says that even among the ascetics the Spirit becomes "a kind of sanctifying and impersonal power of God." The ascetic fathers "began unnoticeably and gradually to speak of 'grace,' ... something completely impersonal," another failure of nerve usually noted elsewhere. Words like "spiritual" and "spirit-bearing" abound, because "what is usually known is not the Holy Spirit but His grace-giving energies, His powers, His acts and activities" on human beings. The more this happens, Florensky dryly observes, the harder it becomes to distinguish the Holy Spirit from the human spirit. He sums up: "If, by their indecisiveness or silence, the dogmatist fathers show their inner uncertainty concerning ... the Holy Spirit ... the ascetic fathers by their copious words reveal the same state of consciousness even more clearly."

The real test for Florensky is the liturgy, "the most reliable witness." He turns to "the point where the very celebration [sought to glorify] all three Hypostases" at Pentecost. The tone keeps up gentle bemusement as he narrows his eyes at the three kneeling prayers.

The first prayer addresses God the Father: "We pray to You and we beseech you, Lord who loves the human being, Father of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ."

The second prayer belongs just as explicitly to the Son: "Lord Jesus Christ our God, who gave your peace to human beings and the gift of the Most Holy Spirit when you were still with us in life."

The third prayer, "which occupies in the office a place that precisely corresponds to that of the two previous prayers, ... their liturgical analogue, opens with the address: 'Eternally flowing, living, and illuminating Source, consubstantial with the Father, enabling Power, You Who wonderfully accomplished the economy of human salvation.'"

Here Florensky's analysis deserves quotation at length.

According to the meaning of the feast itself (the Day of the "Trinity"), according to the liturgical place of this third prayer, and finally, according to the epithets it uses for the Person to Whom it is addressed, it is natural to expect the following continuation: "O Holy Spirit" or "Comforter" or "King of Truth" or some other name of the Third Hypostasis of the Holy Trinity. This expectation is so natural that, in listening to this prayer, one inevitably hears something like this and remains convinced that it is addressed to the Holy Spirit. But this is not in fact the case. Here is the immediate continuation of the prayer which we interrupted: "O Christ our God; You Who have broken the indestructible chains of death and the unbreakable bonds of hell...."

It is so shocking that one wishes for a historian to examine the transmission history.

Since Florensky, liturgiologist Miguel Arranz has argued that the third prayer was "unknown by the most ancient Greek euchologia." The Great Church at Constantinople may have adopted it at the beginning of the eleventh century, amalgamating a variety of forms.

Although Arranz describes the third prayer as "also" addressed to Jesus Christ, he does not otherwise suggest what seems obvious to Florensky, that the third prayer somehow ought to be addressed to the Spirit instead, leaving Florensky's concerns no direct answer. And yet for one who has read him they do not go away; but recur in different forms. Is not the trinitarianism of this community sufficient to discipline sequences with tendencies as aggressively binitarian as that? What can the amalgamators have been thinking? Did the prayers really survive from the eleventh century to the twentieth without comment or reform? Even if, on account of the indivisibility of the acts of the Trinity ad extra, it is not actually wrong to appropriate power, illumination, and management of the economy to the Son, how can this be liturgically fitting?

Here too Florensky sounds more bemused than alarmed: "ridiculous to see in this incompleteness ... a defect attributable to some deficiency of profundity."

If anything is predictable about Florensky's argument, it's that the East has something right that the West has overlooked. But reversing the usual claim of Orthodox polemic - in which preoccupations with nature and grace, and subordination of Spirit to Son, have led Western Christians to know too little of the Spirit - Florensky worries that Western Christians have sought to know too much.

The apophaticisms of Calvin, Rahner, and Florensky raise a question for scholars like me who wonder where the Spirit went. Do they seek to know too much? What if the tendency of Barth, to announce the Spirit and expound the Son, is the tendency of the Christian community (almost) always and everywhere? What if even the Eastern liturgy of Pentecost, in the third of three prayers, announces the Spirit and addresses the Son? What if the missions of the Spirit and the Son are such that this is just as it should be?

Does the Father send the Son and the Spirit into the world always together, in a pair? Then can we see theological practices as different as that of Athanasius in the Letters to Serapion (naming Son and Spirit always together), Barth (announcing one and speaking of the other), and Bulgakov (making the yoking, or dvoica, itself the subject of reflective exposition) as variations upon a theme, instead of rivalrous alternatives?

Or are all three authors really objecting to something that late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century theologians hardly exhibit at all, and even tend to ignore: enthusiastic movements? After all, Calvin like Luther was afraid of the Schwarmer; Rahner dismisses charismatic movements as "elitist" in favor of the "everyday"; Florensky castigates the "new consciousness," which sought fresh revelations and social utopia.

Perhaps this is the place to say how Christian practices of apophaticism, or Christian reflections about the human mode of language about God, qualify a book like this one. By the inseparability of divine operations toward the world, the mystery of the Spirit cannot leave out the Father and the Son. The mystery of the Spirit is also the mystery of the Father and the Son. The practice of apophaticism that leads Christians into the mystery of God is appropriated by Florensky to the Spirit because the Bible and the liturgy locate it there. Resistance to the anonymity he appropriates to the Spirit can be resistance to the practices of apophaticism that purify the mind for the triune God. Conversely, appreciation of the anonymity of the Spirit can foster the practices of apophaticism that lead into the triune God. The Spirit is among other things one of the scripturally appropriate sites for practices of reticence and silence before God. The reserve of the Spirit is the reserve of the triune God, somewhat as the incarnation of the Son is the incarnation of God, or creation by the Father includes the Spirit and the Son.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from AFTER THE SPIRIT by Eugene F. Rogers Jr. Copyright © 2005 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co..
Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: After the Body, After the Spirit	1
I	You Wonder Where the Spirit Went
1	Is There Nothing the Spirit Can Do That the Son Can't Do Better? or, How the Spirit Puzzles a Trinitarian Revival	19
i	Barth fumbles (Karl Barth, Gregory of Nazianzus)	19
ii	Florensky shrugs (Pavel Florensky and the Pentecost liturgy)	23
iii	How Barth's love for Athanasius can cast out fear of Schleiermacher (Barth, Athanasius)	29
2	Is the Spirit Superfluous? or, How the Spirit Does Economics	33
i	The Plowman suspects the surplus (Piers Plowman as in Vance Smith)	33
ii	Bulgakov diagnoses the suspicion (Sergei Bulgakov)	40
iii	How Feuerbach and Schmemann are what they eat (Feuerbach, Alexander Schmemann)	43
3	Where the Spirit Rests: Matter and Narrative; or, How the Spirit Does Material Culture	45
i	A person seeks to be known (P. F. Strawson, Emmanuel-Pataq Siman)	45
ii	The Spirit deifies: An excursus on Augustine (as interpreted by R. Williams and T. van Bavel)	47
iii	The narrative depicts the person	52
iv	The Spirit befriends matter	55
v	What the Spirit can do	60
II	The Spirit Rests on the Body of the Son
1	Resurrection	75
i	The Spirit rests on the Son in the resurrection and so identifies all three Persons by it (history of exegesis of Romans 8)	75
ii	The Spirit gives to Gentiles in the Son what Jews keep in the Messiah (against supersessionism, following Stowers)	85
2	Annunciation	98
i	The Spirit rests on the Son in the womb of Mary (Romanos the Melodist)	98
ii	Felix dilatio: The Spirit favors the order of consummation over the order of redemption (Amadeus of Lausanne)	104
iii	The Spirit rests on the Son in the womb of the Father (Augustine, Benedict, Toledo)	111
iv	The Spirit rests on the Son in the womb in Christ's side (Gregory of Nyssa, Caroline Bynum, Guerric d'Igny)	119
v	The Spirit rests on the Son in the womb of the wine (Ephrem and other Syrians, Rowan Williams, Judith Butler)	125
3	Baptism	135
i	The Spirit rests on the Son in the waters of the Jordan (Jacob of Serugh, Emile Durkheim, Gregory of Nyssa, and others)	136
ii	The Spirit rests on the Son in the waters of creation (Ephrem, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nazianzus, Irenaeus, and others)	148
iii	The Spirit rests on the Son in the wilderness (Isaac of Nineveh, Donald Mackinnon, others)	163
iv	The Spirit rests on the Son in reversing the Fall (Sebastian Moore)	168
4	Transfiguration	172
i	The Spirit rests on the Son in prayer on Mount Tabor	172
ii	The Spirit rests on the Son in prayer in the Trinity	174
iii	The Spirit rests on the Son in prayer in the liturgy	175
iv	The Spirit rests on the Son in the transfiguration of creation	179
v	The Spirit rests on the Son in asceses of marriage, love, and friendship (Simeon Stylites, Bulgakov)	183
vi	The Spirit rests on the human being at prayer: hesychastic aspect (Symeon the New Theologian)	191
vii	The Spirit rests on the Son in the habits of the law (Thomas Aquinas)	193
5	Ascension and Pentecost	200
	About-Face	208
	Epilogue: The Spirit rests on the Son in those who do not know how to pray	212
	Sources Cited or Consulted	223
	Index of Names and Subjects	244
	Index of Scripture References	249

Editorial Reviews

Dialog
"Postcritically mines the riches of the tradition while speaking in a fresh voice that moves us beyond the impasse of much modern thought on the Spirit. . . Intrigues and surprise at almost every turn." Jeffrey Stout
"After the Spirit is a learned, eloquent, gracious response to the dearth of theological reflection on the Holy Spirit in the modern Christian West. If you have been wondering where the Spirit went, or what it might mean for the Spirit to befriend the body, or how Barth, Coakley, and Rahner might be brought into fruitful conversation with Bulgakov, Florensky, and Simeon the Elder, then read this book." Lewis Ayres
"For those who have found themselves bored by the wilted spinach of recent writing on the Spirit, Rogers offers a real steak. . . Drawing on a wide range of Greek, Latin, and Syriac patristic sources, as well as engaging a fascinating variety of modern authors, Rogers shapes his theology through close readings of Scripture and tradition. In a way that we have come to expect from Rogers, tradition riffs on Scripture, and Scripture is then allowed to take up the chords of tradition and play something new that draws us back to listen again to the old. Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox should all find something here to delight and challenge." Sewanee Theological Journal
"I have read few books recently that have ended up with so many marginal notes and turned-down page corners. This one is worth not just reading but meditation, and it joins a small list of absolutely essential texts in the currently 'hot' discussion of pneumatology."

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