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David Coffey’s “Did You Receive the Holy Spirit When You Believed?”
A Review Essay
Donald L. Gelpi, S.J.
Professor David Coffey has made significant contributions to contem- porary theology in pneumatology, Christology, and trinitarian theology. As the holder of the Kelly Chair at Marquette University, Prof. Coffey delivered the text of the present study as the 2005 Père Marquette Lecture in Theology.1 This relatively brief but theologically dense work exem- plifies the kind of careful and scholarly thinking that students of Prof. Coffey have come to expect.
As pneumatologists, Prof. Coffey and I share a number of things in common. We both employ Bernard Lonergan’s theory of method in the- ology, although I reground Lonergan’s theory of functional theological specialties in the logic and metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce. As the title of this work suggests, Prof. Coffey takes very seriously the experi- ence of the Spirit, as I do. We both recognize the need to do doctrinal justice to the New Testament witness to the Spirit, and we share a con- cern to make sure that doctrinal statements about the Spirit interpret as defined what the New Testament has to tell us about the reality and activ- ity of the Spirit. We both show a concern to take very seriously patristic pneumatology in all of its theological richness.
In the present work, Prof. Coffey divides his reflections on the Spirit among three different headings: (1) the Holy Spirit as agent, (2) the Holy Spirit as a trinitarian person, and (3) the activity of the Holy Spirit. In what follows, I shall summarize Prof. Coffey’s reflections on each of these topics and then respond to them from my own theological perspective on pneumatology.
(1) The Holy Spirit as Agent: Prof. Coffey begins his discussion of the Holy Spirit as agent by recalling the classical and somewhat paradoxical doctrine of attribution. The doctrine asserts that when the three divine persons act on any created reality outside of themselves they always act as one, even though we attribute particular actions to one person rather than another. Thus, we attribute creation to the Father, redemption to the
1
David Coffey, “Did You Receive the Holy Spirit When You Believed?”: Some Basic Questions for Pneumatology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2005).
© 2006 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden pp. 322–334
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Son, and sanctification to the Holy Spirit even though in fact all three persons together effect creation, redemption, and sanctification.2
Irenaeus of Lyons, in his theological attack on Valentinian Gnosticism, had spoken of the Son and the Spirit as the “two hands of God.”3 With the emergence of the Arian doctrine of subordinationism, however, it became clear that one could construe this manner of speaking in a sub- ordinationist sense if one denied to one of the divine hands the power to do something that the other hand or that the Father could do. Any divine person unable to do what the other divine persons could do clearly lacked some perfection they possessed and therefore counted as ontologically inferior to and therefore subordinate to the more perfect divine persons. Athanasius of Alexandria, that lion of trinitarian orthodoxy, concluded that the coequality of the divine persons required that whenever they act on creation, all three have to act simultaneously.4 He took this stand in order to avoid subordinationist heterodoxy. Other orthodox trinitarian the- ologians agreed.
The doctrine of perfect, personal coaction on the part of the divine persons in any divine activity on creation led to more than one paradox, as Prof. Coffey points out. First of all, the doctrine contrasts with the dis- pensational language of the New Testament. Calling the language of the New Testament “dispensational” simply calls attention to its largely descrip- tive, experiential character. New Testament writers describe a complex saving intervention of God in human history that people experienced before they tried to interpret it doctrinally and philosophically. Once the- ologians like Athanasius and others began to formulate a strictly doctri- nal way of talking about the Trinity, the “immanent Trinity” began to separate from the “economic Trinity.”
Even when theologians talk paradoxically about two kinds of Trinity, they know perfectly well that Christians worship only one, triune God. The terms immanent Trinity and economic Trinity refer, in fact, to two different ways of talking about the Trinity, not to two different Gods.
The “economic Trinity” employs dispensational language in order to describe how the events unfolded in space and time that reveal to us the triune God partially and sacramentally. A historical, sacramental revela- tion of God simultaneously reveals and conceals the divine reality. It tells us something true about God; but no finite, historical event can reveal a
2
Ibid., 10–42.
3
Against the Heresies IV, xx, 4; V, viii, 1, xiii, 4; Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching V, VII.
4
Letters to Serapion, I, 22–28.
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supremely perfect God exhaustively, not even the event of the incarnation. The “immanent Trinity” refers to the attempt of doctrinal and philosophical theologians to formulate a technical doctrinal or philosophical language for talking about God in God’s eternal transcendence of space and time. The Arian controversy promoted the formulation of such a language, although, in the Latin West, Tertullian had already advanced significantly down that linguistic path in his polemic work Against Praxeas.
Perhaps Karl Rahner, S.J. made his greatest contribution to trinitarian theology when he suggested that the time had come to close the speculative gulf that over the centuries had come to yawn between the economic and immanent Trinities. Rahner suggested as a strategy simply identifying the two Trinities.5 For Rahner, the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa. While Rahner had named an important doctrinal problem, I find his solution inadequate. Theologians will always need two kinds of language for talking about the Trinity, one dispensational, descriptive, and experiential for giving an account of the events that reveal the Trinity as they unfolded historically and eschatologically, on the one hand, and another language, a metaphysical and doctrinal language, for talking about the reality of God in God’s transcendence, on the other.
As we shall see, I shall argue on both logical and metaphysical grounds that one needs to verify the “immanent Trinity” in the “economic Trinity.” By that I mean that one needs to ensure that one can verify in the events that reveal the triune God, events to which the dispensational language of the economic Trinity gives us access, any doctrinal or metaphysical God-talk one might as a theologian choose to employ in one’s account of the eternal, transcendent reality of the triune God. Moreover, one must do so in the sense in which one has defined one’s technical God-talk. Charles S. Peirce’s logic, which shapes my theological method, makes such verification necessary, because it correctly points out that events make all propositions true or false.6 In theological thinking revelatory, eschatological, historical events perform the same logical function.
The doctrine of attribution sought to heal the incipient gap that Athanasius’ doctrine of the perfect coactivity of the divine persons in deal- ing with the created universe had begun to open between a doctrinal and
5
Karl Rahner, S.J., The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).
6
See Francis E. Reilly, Charles Peirce’s Theory of Scienti fic Method (New York: Fordham University Press, 1970); H. G. Frankfurt, “Peirce’s Account of Inquiry,” Journal of Philosophy 55 (1958): 588–92; Idus Murphee, “Peirce’s Account of Inquiry,” Journal of Philosophy 56 (1959): 667–78; and Len O’Neill, “Peirce and the Nature of Evidence,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 29 (1993): 211–37.
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a dispensational language for talking about the triune God. Unfortunately, the doctrine of attribution did not entirely succeed in closing the gap. It allowed us to attribute to one of the divine persons an activity that they all perform with perfect simultaneity; but it left obscure the real, onto- logical basis for attributing the simultaneous action to one and not the other. If one asserts a real, ontological basis for the attribution of a divine activity to one person and not to the others, one would appear to assert a qualitative difference among the divine persons and so, at least implic- itly, to deny their perfect coequality.
Prof. Coffey sees the problem clearly and casts about for some realis- tic grounds for attributing the kinds of actions the New Testament assigns to the Holy Spirit—justification, sanctification, and charismatic empow- erment—without falling into subordinationism. No small speculative chal- lenge, that; but then, Prof. Coffey does not traditionally try to duck thorny problems for fear of getting stuck.
Prof. Coffey identifies as the nub of the problem of attributing an action done by all three divine persons to only one of them the fact that a tra- ditional doctrine of attribution interprets the simultaneous divine activity on created realities as efficacious causality. He discovers in the sugges- tion of a Jesuit theologian, Johannes Petavius (Jean Petau, 1583–1652), a way out of this impasse. Petavius suggested that we should view the action of the Spirit within the economy of salvation as formal rather than efficient causality.7
All this talk of distinguishing between efficient and formal causality has a scholastic ring. In Aristotelian and in medieval scholastic thought, an efficient cause expends energy in order to cause something to exist in an entity other than itself. A formal cause remains immanent to the reality that it endows with a specific essence and intelligibility. Formal causes actuate the reality they imbue with intelligibility. They do not bring about a result in something other than themselves by changing that real- ity physically.
Petavius’ suggestion did not receive general theological acceptance. In the end Coffey seeks to render Petavius’ suggestion more theologically acceptable by appealing to Karl Rahner’s account of grace as the effect of quasi-formal causality. Rahner holds that the indwelling of God through supernatural grace bears some resemblance to strict formal causality but also differs from it in real and significant ways. Coffey finds genuine sim- ilarity between the position developed by Rahner and that proposed by
7
Coffey, “Did You Receive the Holy Spirit When You Believed?” 15–16.
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Maurice de la Taille (1872–1933), except that de la Taille stressed more the dissimilarity between grace and formal causality, while Rahner stressed rhetorically more the similarity.8 Rahner described in his characteristically convoluted prose the persons of the Trinity “as divine, mutually distinct persons, each in his proper quasi-formal causality on the created spirit, a causality that makes it possible for this [created spirit] to possess these divine persons ‘consciously’ and, what is more, immediately.”9 In quali- fying Petavius, Coffey also invokes Rahner’s doctrine of the “supernatural existential” which deduces a priori the need for a nonjustifying, super- natural gracing of the human agent intellect. That gracing transforms the agent intellect from a natural longing for the beatific vision into a super- natural longing for Christ. This a priori, nonjustifying, graced orientation of all human spirits to Christ grounds Rahner’s doctrine of “anonymous Christianity.”
I find myself in sympathy with Prof. Coffey’s attempt to transcend “mere attribution” and to discover realistic meaning in the New Testament’s attribution in a special way of an action like sanctification to the Holy Spirit. My own approach to this thorny problem, however, finds the philo- sophical language of scholasticism too fatally flawed with fallacies like essentialism and dualism to discourse in a speculatively adequate way about the Trinity, about the incarnation, and about supernatural grace. The scholastic doctrine of formal causality, however qualified, connotes the philosophical fallacy of essentialism, a fallacy I believe that any clear- headed thinking needs to avoid.10 In addition, I believe that the logic of Charles Peirce invalidates all a priori thinking. As a consequence, I find Rahner’s doctrine of the supernatural existential both logically invalid and unverifiable in human behavior. At the same time, I find that Coffey moves in the right direction when he suggests that the relational distinction among the divine persons within the Trinity holds the key to transcending the doctrine of mere attribution.
I prefer to invoke the logical and metaphysical categories of Charles Peirce in doing theology rather than the speculatively dated language of scholasticism, because I believe that Peirce’s thought manages to avoid the worst fallacies of both classical thinking and of modern, Enlightenment thought. Peirce created a constructive alternative to classical metaphysics by insisting on the fallible character of all metaphysical hypotheses and
8
Ibid., 17–20.
9
Ibid., 31.
10
Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Gracing of Human Experience: Rethinking the Relationship between Nature and Grace (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2001).
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by requiring the verification of all metaphysical, philosophical categories in both social experience as lived (the experience on which metaphysics reflects) and in the verified results of the sciences and scholarly disciplines that examine limited areas of human experience. In the process, Peirce created what I call a constructive postmodern way of thinking vastly supe- rior to both scholasticism and to the muddled deconstructionism which in some intellectual circles passes itself off fallaciously as “postmodern.”11
Peirce proposed a fallible, relational, functional account of reality that I have tried to develop, using insights from other classical and contem- porary American thinkers, into a verifiable metaphysics of experience that interprets not only human experience as lived but also the results of more focused scientific and scholarly disciplines as well. As a theologian I test the ability of that metaphysics to interpret the events of Christian revelation. My construct of experience recognizes three forms of rela- tionship: (1) evaluative, conceptual relations; (2) concrete, decisive envi- ronmental and social relationships; and (3) real, general, habitual, dynamic relationships.12
In the classical world of substance philosophy, the divine persons sound anomalous. Trinitarian theology speaks of the divine persons as subsist- ing relations; but, strictly speaking in both ancient and medieval substance philosophy, relations cannot subsist. They must either modify accidentally a subsisting substance or function within a relationship of act to potency. On Aristotelian principles, the divine persons cannot, strictly speaking, do either of those things without becoming finite and thus losing their divinity.
In a world in which everything functions as a relationship, however, it becomes speculatively easier to conceive an analogy between divine and human persons viewed as subsisting relationships. Indeed, I have argued that all the relationships that occur in the higher forms of experi- ence and especially in human experience stand revealed historically and eschatologically as functioning within the divine experience.
Verifying the immanent in the economic Trinity puts very real con- straints on what one can and cannot say about the triune God in the deity’s eternal transcendence. The fact, for example, that the Son of God knows his own personal relation to the Father through the illumination of the Spirit means that the Spirit stands historically and eschatologically revealed as the cognitive link between Father and Son and therefore as the mind
11
Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000).
12
Gelpi, The Gracing of Human Experience, 263–314.
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of God. If God has a mind, then evaluative, cognitive relations function within the divine reality.
Mission reveals the relations of distinction among the divine persons that trinitarian theology calls the divine processions of Son and Spirit within the triune God. The fact that the Father sends the Son efficaciously into the world reveals that within the Trinity the Father generates the Son. The fact that the Father sends the Spirit through the Son reveals that within the life of the triune God the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. As the source of all reality, including the reality of the Son and of the Spirit, the Father stands revealed as the aboriginal source of creative efficacy within the Trinity. The Son who stands in a perfectly obediential relation to the Father and to the Spirit who reveals to him the Father’s will stands historically revealed as a source of obediential efficacy within the Trinity. The Son’s obediential relationship to Father and Spirit trans- forms him into the one through whom they act efficaciously whenever they act on creation. Indeed, the New Testament moves very quickly from the perception that God chose to save us through the Son to the further conclusions that God will judge the world through him and in fact cre- ated the world through him (2 Thess. 1:5–10, John 5:22–30; Rom. 11:36, 1 Cor. 8:6, and Col. 1:16).
I have also argued that one cannot consistently or even plausibly talk about the unity of the Trinity, as the scholastics did, by identifying the principle of unity in the triune God with an essentially simple sub- stance since essential simplicity rules out all multiplicity in God, includ- ing a multiplicity of persons. In addition, postulating with Augustine a divine substance in God that has both an intellect and a will sounds remark- ably like postulating a fourth person in God. Augustinian trinitarian theology does postulate such a substance, and the specter of quaternity, of a fourth person in God, has traditionally haunted the Augustinian trini- tarian tradition.13
One can only offer a credible account of a complex, relational reality by its constitutive relational structure. I have argued that Jesus’ complete and total gift of himself to the Father and Spirit in his passion and the revelation of their complete and total self-donation to the Son in the res- urrection, which reveals the Son’s divinity, also reveals that in addition to processions in the Trinity that ground the divine persons’ distinction, we must speak of unifying relations of mutual self-donation that create
13
Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 129–31.
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the identity of divine life that all three persons in God equally possess. In the dynamic, relational construct of the Trinity I have proposed, with- out the mutual and total self-gift of the divine persons to one another, none of them would qualify as either fully personal or fully divine. Without the self-gift of the Father, Son and Spirit would lack the power to create. Without the gift of the Spirit to the Son and Father they would lack per- sonalizing self-consciousness. Without the gift of the Son to the Father and Spirit, they would lack the capacity to act upon created realities.
At the same time, the Father remains the eternal, aboriginal source of creative efficacy in the triune God. The Son remains the eternal aborigi- nal source of obediential efficacy. The Spirit remains the eternal, aborig- inal source of evaluation.14 This last insight into the reality of the Christian God that the events of revelation disclose makes it clear why we human persons must be transformed graciously in the Spirit and not in either the Father or Son. Let us try to understand why.
Both the Father and Son function as sources of efficacy: the Father as a source of creative efficacy and the Son as a source of obediential efficacy. Any human experience transformed in the Son or Father would have to undergo efficacious transformation as did the human experience we call Jesus of Nazareth. The efficacious, obediential transformation of the human experience called Jesus of Nazareth in the Son of God caused it to act with a divine autonomy and therefore caused it to act and evaluate, not as a human person, but as the human experience of being a divine per- son. In other words, any human experience transformed in either the Father or the Son would cease to function as a human person, because all per- sons function autonomously by originating their own activity. In virtue of its efficacious transformation in a divine person, any human experi- ence would cease to function autonomously and become the human expe- rience of being that divine person, as the human experience we call Jesus of Nazareth did in the incarnation.15
Because the Spirit of God functions within the divine experience, not as a source of efficacy, but as a source of evaluative, persuasive response, we as human persons must, as the New Testament insists, experience the graced transformation of our experiences persuasively in the Spirit, not efficaciously in either the Father or the Son, since our gracing as human persons requires us to collaborate autonomously, as human persons, with
14
Ibid., 134–43.
15
Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., The Firstborn of Many: A Christology for Converting Christians, 3 vols. (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), 3: 296–354.
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the Spirit’s gracious, persuasive illumination.16 This relational account of the necessity of our gracing in the Holy Spirit, as the New Testament insists, seems to me to succeed somewhat better than the language of for- mal causality, however qualified, in interpreting doctrinally the dispensa- tional language of the New Testament about justification, sanctification, and charismatic empowerment. Moreover, that relational account of the Trinity appeals to the real, relational function of the Spirit within the tri- une God for attributing to her such activities and does so without com- promising the coequality of the divine persons. Or so it seems to me.
(2) The Holy Spirit as a Trinitarian Person: Prof. Coffey regards the Western Latin Church’s insertion of the filioque into its creed as an endur- ing bone of contention between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches. He shows sensitivity to Orthodox sensibilities when he argues that this remains the case despite the advances toward greater mutual understanding that ecumenical dialogue between these two theo- logical traditions has produced. He also asserts (and I would feel inclined to agree) that one need not necessarily regard disagreement over the filioque in trinitarian theology as a Church-dividing issue.
For all his sensitivity to Orthodox attitudes toward the filioque, Prof. Coffey endorses both the Latin tradition and the filioque in his own account of the Spirit as a divine person. In that account, he opts in the end for a form of Augustinianism. He discovers in God one “absolute” subject sub- sisting in three “relative” subjects. Such a conception of the Trinity, he argues, allows each of the divine persons to act in that person’s own right. That allows for the Father and Son to love one another really and mutu- ally and for the Spirit to proceed from and exemplify the mutual love of both persons for one another. With Aquinas, Coffey portrays the Spirit as the “subsistent mutual love of the Father and the Son.” Personal subsis- tence allows the Spirit to stand “over against the Father and Son… in a real relation of opposition.” Moreover, Coffey argues that such an under- standing of the Spirit as a divine person makes an endorsement of the filioque theologically inevitable. Why? Because, as the result of the mutual love of Father and Son, the Spirit of necessity proceeds from both.17
Like Prof. Coffey, I also endorse the filioque, but defend it on differ- ent grounds from his. If one endorses the methodological principle that one must verify any doctrinal or metaphysical God-talk in the events that reveal the triune God, then Coffey’s defense lacks the necessary verification.
16
Gelpi, The Firstborn of Many, 3: 335–36.
17
Coffey, “Did You Receive the Holy Spirit When You Believed?” 42–74.
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He derives his understanding of the Spirit from Augustine’s trinitarian theology. That theology stands squarely in the tradition of LogosChristology begun by Justin Martyr and developed by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius. All these thinkers, including Augustine, identify the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, with the mind of God. This identification has no solid foundations in the scriptures. Indeed, Spirit-talk in the Bible exhibits a remarkable consistency, even though it spans centuries. As George Montague’s The Holy Spirit: Growth of a Biblical Tradition doc- uments, the writers of both the Old and New Testaments all conceive of the Spirit as the source of graced, empowering enlightenment and ulti- mately as the mind and wisdom of God.18 As I have already indicated, because the incarnate Son of God during his mortal ministry understood his relationship to the Father through the illumination of the Spirit (and on this point the Gospels all agree), then the Spirit stands historically revealed as the cognitive link between the Father and the Son and there- fore as the mind of God. That revealed fact falsifies any theological attempt to portray the Son as the mind of God.
Not only does Augustine identify the Son with the mind of God, but that identification motivates his identification of the Spirit with love. In addition, Augustine’s argument presupposes his postulation of a spiritual substance endowed with a spiritual intellect and will as the principle of unity in the Trinity. As we have also seen, this particular dimension of Augustine’s construct of the Trinity seems to imply quaternity in the Tri- nity and for that reason alone merits avoidance. Moreover, in Augustine’s trinitarian theory, as the mind of God, the Son proceeds from the divine intellect, while the Spirit, who proceeds from the divine will, exemplifies divine love. If, in fact, the Spirit functions as the divine mind, then, Augustine’s account of the divine processions falls by the way.
Viewed in the context of the development of patristic trinitarian the- ology, Augustine’s association of the Spirit with the love of God never- theless has something to say for it, though not enough to cause me to endorse Augustine’s position. Justin’s Logos Christology had a very neg- ative impact on the development of patristic pneumatology. Once Justin and other major Greek fathers identified the second person of the Trinity as the causal source of all those saving activities of graced enlightenment that the Bible attributes to the Spirit, the Spirit seemed to have nothing left to contribute to the economy of human salvation. As a result, by the
18
George T. Montague, The Holy Spirit: Growth of a Biblical Tradition (New York: Paulist Press, 1976).
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fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus could legitimately refer to the Spirit as the “Theos agraptos, the God about whom no one writes.”
Augustine’s association of the Spirit with love finally came up with a saving act the Spirit might perform. The Son continued as the source of the intellect’s saving enlightenment, while the Spirit could inspire the graced love of the will. This account of the workings of divine grace also rests, of course, on a dated and unverifiable scholastic faculty psychology.
For all of the above reasons, I find myself unwilling to follow Prof. Coffey in grounding the filioque in a Thomistic identification of the Spirit as the subsistent love of the Father and the Son. Without the incarnation and sending of the Spirit, we humans would have no knowledge what- ever in this life of processions in the eternal Godhead. That we do have knowledge of the reality of the processions results exclusively from the historical missions of Son and of Spirit, because mission reveals proces- sion. I defend the filioque on the basis of the fact that the resurrection reveals the risen Christ as the efficacious source of the Spirit, as “a life- giving Spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45) in Paul’s phrase and as “Spirit-baptizer” (Mark 1:8, Matt. 3:11, Luke 3:16) in the language of the Synoptics. The Fourth Gospel also makes it clear that the Son functions in the sending of the Spirit (John 1:33, 4:10, 7:37–39, 16:6, 20:22). With several of the Greek fathers, therefore, I hold the fact that the Father sends the Spirit through the Son and argue that this fact reveals that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.
(3) The Activity of the Holy Spirit: In discussing the activity of the Holy Spirit, Prof. Coffey asserts that the Spirit unites us to Christ and to the Father. The fact that the Holy Spirit has the perfection of a divine per- son requires that the Spirit’s saving action have a personal character. The personal character of the Spirit does not stand clearly revealed in the Old Testament, but it does in the New Testament. In the New Testament, the Spirit also stands revealed not only as the Spirit of God (the Father) but also as the Spirit of Christ, and that for two reasons: (1) the risen Christ sends the Spirit efficaciously, and (2) the Spirit centers on Christ and inspires his ministry. Within the Trinity, the Spirit has an eternal orienta- tion to the Son; but the incarnation endows the Spirit’s centering on the Son with an historical character that it would otherwise have lacked. The Spirit who dwelled in Christ also dwells in the church, transforming it both communally and individually in the image of Jesus. Coffey calls the theology of the indwelling Spirit a theology of Spirit as “entelechy.” As entelechy, the Spirit effects the union of Christians with Jesus by inspir- ing their faith in him. Moreover, Prof. Coffey cites with approval Rahner’s
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assertion that, since the mission of the Spirit reaches its zenith in its his- torical mediation in the Christ event, we ought to regard the Spirit as the Spirit of Christ even before the Christ event.19
From a doctrinal standpoint, I find nothing to fault in any of this, although I do have some reservations about aspects of Prof. Coffey’s exegetical justification of his doctrinal statements. He discovers what he calls a “procession” model of the incarnation in Luke and John and a “return” model of the incarnation in the other Synoptics. The “return” model portrays Jesus as the one who leads us back to the Father, while the “procession” model portrays the eternal Son of God entering history as human in order to lead us back to the Father. Coffey regards the “pro- cession” model as the more adequate, since the incarnation of the eternal Son of God seeks to lead us back to the Father. In other words, proces- sion makes return possible.
While I understand the point that Prof. Coffey is making when he speaks of models of the incarnation, I must confess that I hesitate to attribute “models” to the evangelists. Models function in strictly inferen- tial thinking and especially in abductive, or hypothetical, thinking. We can use scale models in thinking rationally, as architects do. We also use mathematical and imaginative models in formulating hypotheses. Often the adoption of a model makes the formulation of a hypothesis possible. Once, for example, scientists decided to imagine the structure of an atom on the model of the solar system, they could begin to formulate hypothe- ses about how atoms behave.
I avoid the language of models in speaking about the Gospels because Gospel writers do not think rationally and abductively. The evangelists wrote narratives. They did not formulate doctrinal hypotheses. Because the evangelists wrote narratives, we can interpret the Gospels adequately only when we view them as narrative statements about Jesus rather than as making hypothetical, doctrinal statements about him. In order to read the Gospels as narrative Christology, we need to read them through the lens of literary criticism. By that I mean that we need to situate them within the spectrum of possible narrative forms, understand the unique character of Gospel narrative, and name the literary techniques that the evangelists used in order to tie together into a narrative whole the mis- cellaneous anecdotes about Jesus of Nazareth that make up Gospel nar- rative. When one reads Gospels as narrative, one does not attribute to
19
Coffey, “Did You Receive the Holy Spirit When You Believed?” 74–110.
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them forms of thought proper to inferential, rational thinking. I have devel- oped these and the other points I have made in the course of this discus- sion in The Firstborn of Many: A Christology for Converting Christians (3 vols.; Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2002) and in The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989).20
Despite the reservations I have expressed about this latest formulation of Prof. Coffey’s theology of the Holy Spirit, he speaks with the author- ity of a world-recognized theologian and pneumatologist. His most recent excursion into pneumatology raises a host of important issues and will repay close study by anyone interested in the theology of the Holy Spirit.
20
See Gelpi, The Divine Mother, and The Firstborn of Many, esp. vol. 2 and vol. 3, Part I.
334
13
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