God Given By God

Pentecost is Pascha's Peer

Is Pentecost a peer of Easter?

Or does Pentecost merely display what Easter already reveals?

The question is relevant if unexamined; in that, this coming Sunday the church recalls the visitation of the Word to the prophet Joel and the fulfillment of Joel’s consequent vision upon the disciples in Jerusalem:

“And suddenly there came upon them a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared to them and rested upon each one of them. And they were each of them filled with the Holy Spirit…”

— Acts 2

For the Ascension, Jesus makes a promise most of us pass over too quickly. Speaking of his imminent departure and the subsequent arrival of his Spirit, Jesus promises, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” The alighting of the Holy Spirit signals a still more intimate arrival— the Father and the Son making each and every believer alike the ark of Mary’s womb. Pentecost not only occasions the outpouring of the Spirit, it signals the Trinity taking up residence in each of us. This is either a non sequitur or the most compressed piece of pneumatology in the New Testament.

Despite our prejudice towards the former, the straightforward teaching of the scriptures is the latter. That is, Pentecost is neither the rippled after effect of the empty tomb nor a redundant revelation. Pentecost is Pascha’s peer.

As my teacher Robert Jenson reads St. Augustine’s On the Trinity, the Spirit’s identifying predicate must be “Gift of God.” God— the Father and the Son— are the only relations that appear in the name is when the Holy Spirit is said to be given. The Holy Spirit, says Augustine, “is a certain ineffable communion of the Father and the Son,” the bond of their mutual love, proceeding from the first and second of the triune persons. In other words, the Holy Spirit is the Gift of God— God, given by God; the gift necessarily presumes, a priori, a recipient. But then, if the Holy Spirit’s very identity is constituted by being given to an other, how does the Spirit exist as a divine person before there is any recipient to receive him as grace? How is the Spirit eternal if the Spirit’s identity depends on the existence of creatures?

How is the Spirit eternal if the Spirit’s identity depends on the existence of creatures?

To call Jesus the Son, in other words, is already to posit his relation to a Father. To refer to the Spirit of either the Son or the Father is to suggest a fourth identity to whom the Spirit is given. If God is sheer monad— if the Father is without the Son, then God has no need of his Spirit. If the Father and the Son are without a covenant people, they likewise require no bond but the relation between them. As Jenson writes, summarizing the teaching of the church in the West as bequeathed it from Augustine and Aquinas, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of a relation constitutive of his very identity— the love of the Father and Son in their processions outward.

The Holy Spirit cannot be identified without reference to the community toward which that love moves.

Just as we should not want to specify the Son’s identity without Jesus, we should not want to specify the Spirit’s identity without the Israel God gathered to himself, Mary’s boy in whom that gathering became flesh, and the church in whom that flesh is distributed in loaf and cup, water and word.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of a relation constitutive of his very identity— the love of the Father and Son in their processions outward.

Which means, the Holy Spirit’s existence already encodes election.

Just as preachers perpetually (and mistakenly) present the incarnation as a solution in time to a world gone wrong rather than the primal decision of God not to be God without us, the church just as often speaks of the Spirit as the presence later dispatched by God to manage the relationship begun with Israel. This linear, causal ordering is incoherent if God’s proper, personal name— the name revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush— is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Rather, the Spirit who proceeds eternally cannot be hypostatically identified apart from the community toward whom that movement was always already aimed. That in Jesus Christ God determined not to be God without us means that God likewise determined not to be God except as the Holy Spirit.

That in Jesus Christ God determined not to be God without us means that God likewise determined not to be God except as the Holy Spirit.