Disputing the Spirit: power, ecology, the feminine and the filioque

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)

In one sense, the fifth article, dealing with the Holy Spirit, is a bare minimum of what might be said.

V. Of the Holy Ghost
The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.

This is a fairly straightforward affirmation of the core Western understanding of the Holy Spirit’s person, complete with Filioque clause. (I must pause here to record not my astonishment that my Mac’s spell-checker drew a wavy red-line under the word “filioque”; but amazingly that right-clicking revealed a pop-up of the word with a capital “F”. I’m not sure that I would capitalise it myself, but I am impressed that my computer dictionary has such a relatively recondite theological term in it.)

What this article is not, it seems to me, is any kind of statement about the Holy Spirit’s work, whether within the life of the church or the believer. In some respects this is almost the opposite of some of the most typical ways in which contemporary Christian language about the Spirit is largely instrumental talk of gift, power and equipment. This is one of those differences between past and present ways of thinking that can emerge unexpectedly from thinking about confessional texts. Both ways of speaking belong together, surely, yet the fact that a past age talked one way and ours speaks in another reminds us that there are quite significant differences between past and present ways of thinking that are disguised by the use of the same Christian and biblical vocabulary.

It is difficult, however, to think that the article provides a particularly adequate articulation of what needs to be said about the Spirit. Instead, I find myself wondering what issues would need to be addressed by a contemporary version. What should a statement about the person and work of the Holy Spirit include?

1. I think I would still wish to start somewhere where the article starts, with a statement about the Holy Spirit that starts with God and the constitutive relationships of the Trinity. In classical terms proceeding is different from begetting because Spirit is different from Son. And, I suppose, that could be put exactly the other way round. Identity and relationship mutually define each other. (The gospel is not cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am, but amor ergo sum – I am loved, therefore I am.) The reason for starting there is to avoid the sense some Christian language seems to encourage – of the Church or the Christian’s possession or ownership of the Spirit, and interest in technique and power and so on.
2. That of course reminds us that one of the major theological fissures of the Christian world predates the Reformation, and this article seems happily oblivious to it. The way in which the Church of England’s Common Worship deals with the Filioque is not terribly constructive: it prints an alternative text of the Nicene Creed in which the Spirit “proceeds from the Father” with the rubric that it might be used on appropriate ecumenical occasions. I am not sure that our Orthodox friends will be any more reassured by such supreme indifference to theological niceties. What, if anything, is at stake here?
3. I think we need to address the tendency that creeps into some prayer forms (especially) to make the Spirit the feminine side of God. Doing so seems to me to not only introduce the concept of gender into the Godhead (which is beyond gender), but to have the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing Father and Son as essentially masculine terms. I think that a careful use of feminine language about God has its place, who like a mother feeds us with the milk of the word. I just think that we should not confine such language to the Spirit.
4. There seems to be quite a bit of room for exploring whether a great deal of Christian language today uses talk of the Spirit as a shortcut to environmentally-friendly panentheism. Spirit seems linguistically as so much less specific and more inclusive form of language to talk about God’s presence in the world. There are, especially, OT texts which can be used to justify this, although in context language of the Spirit, like much of the language of angels, may simply be ways of speaking of YHWH’s work in the world, and not a separate hypostasis.
   In the light of much of the NT, however, I wonder whether this kind of God-in-Creation thinking both sunders the Spirit from Christ, and also fails to do justice to the characteristically eschatological framework within which the language makes sense. Is the NT witness getting bracketed out in favour of a green God whose breath is everywhere and in everything?

There are, in short, a very large number of contemporary questions to be explored which this article comes nowhere near to touching on. It is another reminder of why we will not serve ourselves well simply to preserve and repeat the formulations of the past. I suggest that seems obvious in the course of this discussion. Equally, I feel it seems quite forgettable whenever debate moves onto those areas which were controversial at the Reformation, and where the articles take sides. We are not bound to the same questions they asked then, far less to the same conclusions.

One thing further: these first five articles seek to root the Church of England’s theology in the common faith of the historic, credal and patristic Church. The articles start in the (really quite substantial) area of agreement, with the core of the ancient rule of faith, before proceeding to the areas under dispute. It is a method with much to commend it.

Tagged as: 39 articles, anglican, Holy Spirit