Transcript
Thank you sir for introducing me. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, we find that the Father spoke of the Holy Spirit only in the last single sentence, we believe in the Holy Spirit. This clause indicated that faith in the Father and the Son
and all that is affirmed of them is to be understood in a Trinitarian context, in the oneness of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the one name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit into which we are baptized. The addition of this clause on the Spirit alongside that of the Father and of the Son indicates that the doctrine of the Spirit qualifies and completes the doctrine of the Father and of the Son and deepens it
in the doctrine of the Divine Trias or Trinity. The effect of the doctrine of the Spirit on the doctrine of the Father and the Son can be seen in the Athanasian statements that while he insists that Christ is the only Eidos, loosely form of Godhead, he can also speak of the Spirit as the Eidos of the Son, a term that puzzled me greatly until I realized that what he was saying was this, that the relation of
the Son to the Father seen in the Trinitarian context is to be understood as an essentially spiritual relation. In the first lecture I spoke about the fact that when we come to the terms Father and Son we have to think of them as referring image-lessly to the Father. Now it is by putting alongside the image of the Son, the image of the Spirit of the Son, that this enables us to refer the images in a
spiritual and not in a material or a creaturely way to the Godhead so that the homoousion of the Spirit that emerges in this period between Nicaea and Constantinople enables us to understand more adequately and more spiritually the homoousion of the Son. Now at Nicaea there had been no controversy with regard to the Holy Spirit, for in the actual context of the evangelical and doxological life and faith of the Church, the Holy Spirit is inseparably
associated with the Father and the Son in the worship of the Church as the divine source of salvation and renewal. It is the biblical and apostolic message of course that lies behind this and specifically there was the Messian passage where our Lord commands the Church to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit which looks back to the actual baptism of Jesus acknowledged by the Father as his Son with
the descent of the Holy Spirit. But within the New Testament itself there are triadic formulae which entered into the substance of the apostolic faith and message and worship and which were drawn out in the theology of the early Church. In the first case there are three explicit Trinitarian formulae. First, the one I've mentioned, the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19 where baptism is in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit. And then there is a familiar grace of 2 Corinthians 13, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. And then the much discussed passage in the early Church, 1 Corinthians 12:46, there are diversities of gifts but the same spirit and there are diversities of administration but the same law and there are diversities of operations and it is the same God
who works all in all. Now in the first of these the Father is mentioned first, in the second the Son is mentioned first and in the third the Holy Spirit is mentioned first. Now that seems to say that the order is one which does not detract from the full equality between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Although in the practical life of the Church, as reflected for example in the benediction or in baptism, the
name of the Father is mentioned first in the case of baptism and in the spiritual life of the Church it is the name of the Son that is mentioned first. And this as Kuhlmann has shown is reflected in the post-apostolic period when faith in God the Father and in the Holy Spirit are functions of, as he puts it, and are included in faith in Christ the Son. This is particularly, however, in the eastern-western development,
I say eastern-western development of Irenaeus because he wrote in Greek and yet it's thought is there in the west. There are, however, other triadic formulae in the New Testament which had also their measure of impact on the post-Nicene development of the apostolic message. Notably 1 Peter 1:2, elect according to the knowledge of the Father through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Christ, again a different order. Ephesians
2:18, for through him, that is Christ Jesus, we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. And Ephesians 4:4-6, one Spirit, one Lord, one God, passage we shall discuss tomorrow. And 2 Thessalonians 2:13, following, but we are bound to give thanks all the way to God for you, brethren, beloved of the Lord, because God has chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth, whereunto he who called
you by our gospel to obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. And then Acts 2:33, following, This Jesus Christ has God raised up, whereof we are all witnesses, therefore being exalted by the right hand of God, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has shed forth this which you both now see and hear. That is to say, the message of the gospel, as handed down by the apostolic tradition,
is one in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit belong together in the essential faith and the foundational experience of the Church, as it is rooted in Christ. The Nicene theologians found that this biblical stress on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit presses toward triadic or trinitarian understanding and cannot in fact be understood without or apart from a doctrine of the Trinity. Hence they held that the Trinity arises out of faithful, exegetical interpretation of the New Testament
and out of the basic experience and liturgical life of the Church from the very start. But there is more to it than that, for we penetrate into the inner structure of the Trinity as we have it through the homoousion, we find that the doctrine of the Trinity is bound up with the inner ontological structure of the faith, the economic Trinity, and behind that in what we call the ontological Trinity. Now following upon the Council of
Nicaea, in the process of continued struggle against Arianism which remained rampant, largely due to the political theologians of those days, it became evident that the denial of the deity of the Son entailed denial of the deity of the Spirit. The Spirit and the Son are so deeply intertwined in the Nicene faith that acceptance of the full deity of the Son carried with it acceptance of the full deity of the Holy Spirit, so that the traditional recognition
of the Spirit had to be given theological formulation parallel to that of the Son. This explains in part why formally the doctrine of the Spirit developed from the doctrine of the Son. In this context, however, what was primary was once again the evangelical faith and the doxological approach of the Church in response to the prayer and worship to the Holy and naming presence of God through Christ and in the Spirit, that is, access to the Father
through Christ in one Spirit. This is the side of the post-Nicene doctrine we have most clearly in the Dei Spiritu Sancto of St Basil. The theologians then proceeded to develop theological clauses about the Spirit which paralleled those which Nicaea had formulated about the Son in his relation to God the Father. It was, however, with Athanasius, Gregorine of the Andes, Basil and Epiphanius that the more rigorous theological formulation of faith in the Holy Spirit took place.
Athanasius' approach to the doctrine of the Spirit is entirely in line with his approach to the doctrine of the Son or the Logos. Just as he sharply turned away from any conception of the Logos in terms of a cosmological principle, an imminent reason, and is occupying an intermediate status between God and creation, so Athanasius would have nothing to do with any attempt to reach an understanding of the Spirit beginning from the manifestations or operations of the
Spirit in creaturely existence in man or in the world, but from what he called the propriety of the Spirit to the being of God on the divine side of the line of demarcation between the creator and the creature. Precisely because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, he developed the doctrine of the Spirit from his essential relation to the one God and his undivided activity as God, and specifically from his
inheritance in the being of the eternal Son. The Spirit is not outside the being of the Word or the Son, but inherent in him as he is inherent in God the Father, and as the Father is in him. So the Father is also in the one Spirit. It is then the one God who works all things in all through the Son and in the Spirit, so that the operations of the Spirit are not on any account
to be looked on at a lower level than that of the Father or the Son, but are operations of the one God and from the one God, a point which I shall come to later. Now this explains why in the order of Athanasius' development of formulated doctrine controlled knowledge of the Spirit is taken from our controlled knowledge of the Son and of the Father through the Son. The doctrine of the Spirit is developed therefore not merely
from biblical statements or from doxological formulae alone, but from the essential structure of knowledge of God grounded in his self-revelation and self-communication as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Now this is of course the very point Karl Barth develops in his understanding of the Spirit from Revelation, and it is not a level point, it is a point that Barth rightly takes from the Athanasian theology of the 4th century. He develops it of course in his
own distinctive way, but basically it is exactly the same point. It was then this structure that was brought to light at Nicaea through the formulation of the homoousion of the Son, and all that remained was to show that this applied equally to the doctrine of the Spirit. It is only in and through the Son, the one and only Son, that the Eidos of God head is made known, that is, in the Son, in and through whom
God has communicated himself to us, creaturely beings, within the structures and conditions of our earthly existence and knowledge. It is only in and through Christ Jesus that we really know God in the incarnate Son, who is homoousios topatri, but he is also homoousios with us, as we saw yesterday, that we know God in himself and in accordance with his nature. Hence it is on that ground, the same ground, where we know the Father through the Son,
that we also know the Spirit, for we know the Father through the Son and in the Spirit, thus knowledge of the Father and knowledge of the Spirit, once again, are taken from and controlled by knowledge of the Son. The Holy Spirit, therefore, does not bring to us independent or additional knowledge of God, does not bring to us any new content in our knowledge of God, for the Holy Spirit comes at the Spirit of the Father and
of the Son, revealing the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. It is then in this light and in this way that Athanasius applied the homoousios relation of the Spirit to the Son and of the Spirit to God the Father. And here he is followed by Didymus, Epiphanius and Nazianzus. Now the doctrine of the Spirit is given further emphasis and content in two different directions or respects in the period between Nicaea and Constantinople.
First, in relation to the holy sacraments or mysteries, and this is the side that is set out earlier, let's say before Epiphanius, by Cyril of Jerusalem in his famous catechetical lectures, especially in Lectures 4:16 and 17. And then secondly, in relation to ascetical theology and the doxological tradition of the Church, above all by St. Basil in his De Spiritu Sancta, which I have already mentioned. But it seems to me the decisive clauses of the Theologumena
were clearly enunciated by Epiphanius, who in the Encoratus, where we have the earliest form of the Constantinopolitan Creed, and in the Panarion, where all the clauses of the Nicene Consonantopolitan Creed are anticipated more than by Cyril of Jerusalem. Now here I must differ in my judgment from many of the patristic scholars, for example John Kelly, who tend to trace the Creed of Constantinople back to Cyril of Jerusalem. But if so, it's a very meager relation, because
I've tested all the clauses that you can find in the writings of Cyril of Jerusalem, and they are different from and indeed they are less than those which we have in Epiphanius. In my judgment, then, it is mainly the Athanasian doctrine and tradition through Epiphanius, that's Epiphanius of Salamis, as the Bible calls it, or Constantia, as it's called in those days. It was through Epiphanius of Constantia that the really decisive influence on the doctrine of the
Spirit at the Council of Constantinople was made. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Greek Orthodox Liturgy says, I believe, but the Epiphanius has, we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, and who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. Now let me try and point out the distinctiveness of these, of this theology. First, God is Spirit. God is
the Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is God and very God. The inclusion of these clauses on the Holy Spirit tell us two main things at once. That the very nature of God as God is Spirit. And that the Spirit with the Father and the Son belongs to the very inner life and eternal being of the Godhead. The inclusion of the Spirit in the doctrine of God means that we are to understand God in the interior relations
of his eternal life as God. Without the Spirit, the doctrine of God would not stand as a coherent whole in our faith. The confession of faith in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, emphasizes then the divine nature of God as Spirit, which applies to the Father and to the Son as well as to the Spirit. But more specifically, the Holy Spirit, the Lord, refers to the presence to us of God in the full reality of his divine
life and being. In the full reality of his divine life and being. The presence to us of the Holy Spirit is the immediate presence of God Almighty and all holy in his ultimate majesty, glory and power, in his sheer deity, in his utter godness and holiness. Now that is reflected above all in the Athanasios who is from beginning to end overwhelmed and astonished at the fact that God has given us his very being to be present
with us in the Spirit. The presence of the Spirit then is the presence of God in his unapproachableness, his ineffability, and unutterable majesty. The presence of God to us in such a way that like the Seraphim who can only cover their faces in humility and awe before him and his infinite holiness and sublimity, we can only fall down before him. A point that you will remember is characteristic effectively of all Calvin's prayers when he concluded a
lecture. The presence of the Spirit is the presence of God in his eternal usia as God. As such, the Holy Spirit expresses the sheer incomprehensibility, the utter transcendence of God over all our knowing and speaking, and that belongs to the distinctive difficulty we have in speaking of the Holy Spirit. For as such he is not knowable, that is, he is not knowable directly in his own hypostasis, or to put it another way. He is God in
his hypostasis precisely as the unknowable, the incomprehensible, ineffable being come to us and whom we may know only through the self-humiliation, the self-communication of God in and through his incarnate son and in and through his atoning reconciliation. Apart from the Spirit, however, we human beings, we creaturely beings could not possibly know God. We would not be able to break through to the being of God, nor would the divine being break through to us as
the eternal divine being in his utter distinction from our thought and speech about him. The Holy Spirit then is the immediate presence of God in the lordliness of his divine being, he who is Lord of our being, he from whom we derive our being in existence, God the almighty creator, the one source of all being from beyond all created being, he comes to us from the divine creator side of the creator creature uncreated created line of
demarcation, the creative source of our being and reality to whom we are altogether indebted and before whom we can only fall down in sheer adoration and worship. The Holy Spirit is thus to be adored and worshiped in one undivided worship and adoration with the father and the son as one undivided God and indeed is God in the oneness of his spiritual being. Everywhere else throughout the early church we find repeated and pondered the word of Jesus
about the fact that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, which reinforced the sheer respect, the veneration and the worship of the Spirit as very God, God in his unlimited godness and majesty as God, God in his utter sovereignty and lordship and holiness before whom we can only clap our hands on our mouth and join in the Trisagion of the angels who fall down before their faces in the worship that surrounds the throne above.
Now secondly, the Holy Spirit is distinctively personal reality along with and inseparable from the father and the son. Serol of Jerusalem here constantly emphasizes the fact that the Holy Spirit is living, existent, subsistent, speaking, intelligent being, enhypostatic or personal reality in himself in God. Determined to lay the emphasis in adjective after adjective upon the fact that he is personal and indeed personalizing reality in utter distinction from Greek notions of spirit and of course remember that in
Greek notions of spirit, the spirit is neutered. But here he is personal and this emphasis is reinforced again and again. But more than that, it is precisely as such that he is a source of all spiritual or rational being and in fact rationalizing and personalizing being. Now there is an important point here that many people find it difficult to understand. Grillmeyer for example in expanding the Athanasian doctrine tells us, I don't know how in the world
he could have concocted this, that for Athanasians the presence of the being of God swallows up all created being. The God overwhelms us. Now that is the exact antithesis of the Athanasians as it is indeed of Cyril. Far from overwhelming and crushing us, the spirit is the immediate presence of God as the creator who creates being and who relates created being to God himself in such a way that he imparts to created being over and above
their creatureliness, their rational nature and their personal nature. So the Holy Spirit comes to us as personalizing and as rationalizing being. Now if I may pause for a moment to explain the significance of this. This is precisely the point that Karl Barth develops in Dogmatic 1.1. When he speaks of the Holy Spirit first of all in Brazilian language as the presence of God to the creature in order to realize the relation of the creature to
himself. This is the Brazilian doctrine of the teleosis. But further Barth goes on and this comes from the Cyril of Jerusalem and Athanasios. The Holy Spirit is the freedom of God to be present to the creature and to open him up to, make him open to divine revelation. To bring him into personal and understanding relation with God, that is as I called it, the Holy Spirit is the presence of God which is rationalizing and personalizing relation.
Let me put that in another point. Many people find it extremely difficult to understand at a later period how one can think of the eternal son as taking our human nature apart on him in such a way that there is no diminishment of the human personality, the human hypostasis while there is only one hypostasis of God the son become man. Now the point is this and this is the language used by Cyril and used the way
he uses and hypostasis that it is precisely the son of God, the word of God in the spirit who creates being rationalizing and personalizes it so that the incarnating activity of God in Christ is a personalizing activity. Now we are all persons but we are persons in the sense of personalized persons. Each human being is a persona personata, they use the Latin. But God the son and God the spirit in this activity, here we have a
personalizing activity where we are concerned with personalizing persona personam. Now to precisely in terms of that personalizing activity the incarnation takes place so that the very incarnation of the one word in the spirit far from damaging creaturely personality has the opposite effect. It recreates, it creates human personality so that no human being has such a rich human personality as Jesus. Far then from the presence of the divine humanity, of the ability, overwhelming or crushing or leaving
out in an Apollinarian sense the human person, the human mind and the human self, the exact opposite is in place. Now that is the point that is being hammered out in the middle of the 4th century between Cyril and the Council of Jerusalem and the Council of Constantinople. Well then the Holy Spirit, personalizing, creative, rationalizing spirit is present to us and acts upon us in such a way that in his own distinctive operations of sanctification, renewal
and redemption and liberation he reveals himself to be in himself transcendently what he is toward us. He is divine and saving activity which he manifests toward us and thereby he shows that he is divine reality in his own distinctive person as Holy Spirit. He is in his own nature the divine blessing that he bestows and conveys. It is the connection between theosis and theopoiesis and his own inherent and eternal divine nature that is so distinctive of
the early doctrine of the spirit. Theosis means, not the Latin deification or divinization, but theosis means that face to face with Jesus Christ in the spirit our creaturely human being fall under the immediate creative impact of God, the Holy Lord Jesus the creator, the source of our being. And in such a way that divine acts are done upon us and we are lifted up from our mere creatureliness to experience and share in divine blessings the blessings
of the immediate presence of God himself and indeed to share in the very life and love and life which God is in his own being. The Holy Spirit then is to be acknowledged as in himself in his own nature and reality the divine personal being which he is toward us in all speaking and acting and saving operations. Now it is highly distinctive of the presence and operation of the Holy Spirit that while he comes to us
and acts upon us in sheer unlimited might of God, he does so in utter gentleness and in quietness. As Sylvain DeLustre puts it, like light falling upon the creation or like dew coming upon the fleece. Now this is very distinctive of the operation of the Holy Spirit. In lecturing at home upon how we are to understand the power of God. To my first year class I used to say we cannot think of the power of God
by thinking of supreme power as we know it. Let's say in an enormous nuclear explosion and then raising that to the nth degree and saying God is omnipotent, God is potent raised to the nth degree. That's not what God's power is like. If you want an analogy, then take this analogy. The supreme power in all the universe is the power of light. Light which makes the seed to grow out of the ground and it does it
quietly creatively. Now in the Bible and in the early church it is light that reveals to us how God's power operates and it's in relation to the power of light, to the power of the Holy Spirit is thought of as light, as life giving and as Jesus mediates the very life that is the light of men so the Holy Spirit has to be understood in that kind of quiet but absolutely supreme power. It's only the almighty
who can be utterly gentle. I said in the first lecture, I think it was the second one, that one of the manifestations of the supreme almightyness of God to the early church was that God Almighty was free to become a little infant, a wailing infant at Bethlehem. How the God Almighty, the creator of the universe could become little. Now that is a manifestation of unimaginable power. That's only the mighty who can become weak and the Holy
Spirit is precisely the relation between that almightyness of God and the gentleness of his activity. This then is the distinctive presence of the Holy Spirit which we meet in God in the utterly distinctive tropos huperxios as the Cappadocians put it, his own distinctive personal and hypostatic mode of reality and being. But this is a mode of being or reality in which the spirit as spirit is not only gentle but utterly transparent. Now again, I mustn't eat
up all my time, but the fathers realized, as I think I said here last year, the fathers realized, as we now realize much better, that light itself is invisible. We see only what is lit up by light, but light itself we don't see. John Philopoulos of Alexandria used to think that light moved at an infinite speed and of course you can't keep track with anything that moves at infinite speed, but you only see what light lights
up. Now it's in the same way that God's spirit is quite invisible, but we understand the spirit when he lights up the face of God and the face of Jesus Christ. When in Jesus Christ we see the light of the Father in the Son, the face of the Father in the Son and so we understand the face of the Son in relation to the Father. That is the transparent enlightening activity of the Holy Spirit and it
is that enlightening activity that was so highly associated with baptism. That's why baptism came also to be called photismos, enlightenment. But because the Holy Spirit is transparent in this way, inherently invisible, he hides his own hypostasis from us. He comes to us in the sheer ineffability and invisibility of God and comes in such a way that he speaks and reveals the Son in the Son and thus is known only as and in and through his revelation
of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. The revelation of God in his spirit then, as I said before, is not an additional or independent, does not carry additional independent content except that it is revelation of God as Holy Spirit. But the content of that revelation we know only when we turn to the Father and the Son for once again our knowledge of the Spirit is controlled and governed by the Father-Son
-Son-Father relationship. Hence it is impious and irreverent to inquire into the hypostasis of the Spirit beyond what we are given to know in this way. So say both Cyril of Jerusalem and Athanasius. Now thirdly, the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity. The doctrine of the Spirit in the one triune God depends upon the doctrine of the homoousion of the Son to the Father from which it becomes clear that the homoousion of the Spirit to the
Son and to the Father must be affirmed also. Now this is the great argument of Athanasius in the letters to Serapion in his insistence that knowledge of the Spirit in relation to God and in his own divine nature of Spirit in God must be taken from our knowledge of the Son. And it's repeated by Gregory of Nazareth who no less than Athanasius, well no less a little more with a little hesitant, is prepared to express the
homoousion of the Spirit. Now the ground for this doctrine had already been laid in Athanasius and given expression by Epiphanius. So let me quote passages from Epiphanius and I quote them explicitly because as I said earlier I differ from most patristic scholars at this point in giving prominence to Epiphanius in this connection. There is one true God, Trinity in unity, one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We call the Father God, the Son God and the
Holy Spirit God. When you pronounce the homoousion you assert that the Son is God of God and the Holy Spirit God of the same Godhead. The Holy Spirit is ever with the Father and the Son and is from God proceeding from the Father and receiving of the Son. The Holy Spirit belongs to the inner relations of the structure of the Trinity. Now this was also expressed by Basil by saying that the Holy, that speaking of the
Holy Spirit in relation to the koinonia, the communion of the Father and the Son and as himself mediating that koinonia for he belongs to and mediates the koinonia that inheres in the very being of God and is common to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Now I stress this point because again and again Greek orthodoxologians have said this is not orthodox and it is Augustinian. Now I want to show that it is definitely
Greek orthodox thought. Epiphanios spoke of the Spirit in respect of his being homoousios with the Father and the Son as and I quote the bond of the Trinity, sun desmos te triados. Now that's not Saint Augustine, that's Epiphanios. For he is from the same being as the Father and the Son. Now that's a remarkable expression because he then proceeds from the being of the Son as well as by the Father but not in the way that
was said by the Latins. He is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, intermediate between the Father and the Son and from the Father and the Son. And mesopatros kai huiyu, kaitupatros kaituhuyu. The Spirit is God from the Father and from the Son. Neither does anyone know the Spirit but the Father and the Son from whom he proceeds and from whom he receives. Now this idea then that the Spirit is intermediate between
the Father and the Son is established also by John of Damascus in his classical Byzantine theology, the Ecclesis 1:13. But of course along with the Brazilian idea of the relation of the Spirit to the koinoni of the Father and the Son and the naisin homoousion of the Spirit, the doctrine was developed by Saint Augustine in his concept of the kumune aliquid patris et filii and the kumunio quaidam consubstantialis, the consubstantial communion between the Father and
the Son where it is related also to the love that God eternally is in himself and which he sheds upon us through the Spirit. Now the significance of all this adds up to this fact that the Holy Spirit belongs to the inner being or usia of God and to the constitutive internal relations of Godhead as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And that God the Father is not the Father nor God the Son without God the Holy
Spirit. There is therefore only one divine activity of God through the Son and in the Spirit. For whatever the Father and the Son are, the Spirit is except Father or Son. Now here we have to face up to a rather difficult problem and that is one created by the Cappadocian theologians. The Cappadocian theologians, unlike Athanasius, Athanasius used the terms, theological terms, always in a flexible way, apostasis, usia and so on, are used in such a way
that they are determined by and defined beyond themselves by that to which they refer. I quoted his hermeneutic principle the other day where it is the nature of realities that determines and changes the very terms that we use. So that while Athanasius could use these terms flexibly and often uses verbs rather than nouns because he dislikes definitions because they are always, definitions are always partitive he said and they are also delimited, just the Latin definitio expresses
that. But with the Cappadocian we have a little Aristotelian tidiness of language so to speak, at least that's how they think of it. So here we begin to have terms defined and we have the usia defined and the apostasis defined and I explained in an earlier lecture how I think we ought to understand these. But if you define the usia, a god as one usia and there are three hypostases and you try to keep to that
and you are tempted as the Cappadocians are to explain the relationship between these two not in terms of primary and secondary substance and Aristotle which they didn't know but in terms of the botanic doctrine of the common nature and so the Cappadocians use the term there are several men they have a common nature but they are all distinct. Now that I believe is a false way to understand the trinity and a false analogy and the Cappadocians
were trapped in that problem because then they had to defend themselves against the idea that when you said one common nature and three hypostases are there not three gods there? You remember Gregory of Nyssa wrote one book specially dedicated to trying to rebut that but how did they rebut it? Now they rebutted that by a doctrine in which they said God the Father is the only source, the only cause, the only fount of all that exists.
God only is Piggy, Archie and Aetia and therefore when it comes to the Holy Spirit and the Son they have to be thought of as eternally derived from the Father and they actually use the expression of the Son as the Son is Aetiatos caused by God. Although of the three we must admit that Gregory of Nyssa says he trembles at such an expression. He has very considerable fear and reserve and using the idea that the Father
only is the Piggy, the Archie and Aetia of God the Father because this seems to subordinate the Son and the Spirit to God although all the Cappadocians insisted that the Son is eternally generated in the Father and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and therefore the Spirit is eternally God along with the Father and the Son but they are trapped nevertheless in a difficult language. Now this notion was later rejected by Cyril and Cyril said it
is impious to speak about cause in the being of God. How can you speak about God causing the Son or God causing the Spirit even though it is eternally God, eternal causation and he is dead right. Now what I want to suggest is this that in modern orthodox thought led largely under the genius of lost faith and the idea of philosophy, Greek orthodox or orthodox theology has tended to be interpreted largely in terms of the Cappadocian
way of thinking in which they distinguish between the being of God and the energies of God which I find to be dualistic and also when they think of God alone as the Father, the source and the cause and the Spirit and the Son as eternally derived from that. I believe that if you take the Cappadocian line then you create the problem which East and West had to face about the so-called phileochoic laws of the creed.
If you take the Cappadocian line then the West has to say the Spirit proceeds from the Son and the being of the Son as well as by the Father otherwise the Son is not equally God of God and God in the same sense as the Father is God. And the East goes on finally to say because they think that they are now preserving the monarchy, the unity of God, when the East with Photea says he proceeds
from the Father only then you created another deep ambiguity because if you say from the Father only you must have in mind the hypostasis of the Father and not the one who is the Father. And of course that then becomes nonsensical. Now I believe that this whole way of thinking about the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son or from the Father only need not have arisen had orthodox theology taken the line of Athanasius
and Cyril through Epiphanius. Here we have a way of thinking of the relation of the Spirit and the Son to the Father where that kind of problem doesn't arise. And therefore I have proposed to the orthodox church and last year when Dr. McCord led the Form delegation to Constantinople we suggested that if we can rethink the whole doctrine of the Spirit and the whole doctrine of the Trinity on the Athanasian-Cyrillian axis we can cut behind
the divisions of Eastern West and Evangelical and Catholic and establish a doctrine of the Holy Trinity on the Athanasian-Cyrillian model which all Christendom could be agreed without the problems arising from what I call the Cappadocian distinctions. Now let me proceed and say something again about the distinctive operation of the Holy Spirit. The clauses of the Nicene Creed are inserted in a way parallel to the clauses about the Son but there is a difference. They are
asserted in a way appropriate to the activity, the distinctive activity of the Spirit and these we must note. Now the Holy Spirit is speaking Spirit, hence the clause on who spoke through the prophets. With this statement Nicene theology stressed also, and I think this is important, the unity of God's self-revelation in the Old Testament and the New Testament through the one Spirit. Certainly it is only in and through the incarnation of the Son and only
on the ground of his atoning and redemptive work that the Holy Spirit is given to us, mediated to us, by mediating Christ to us. But the relation of the Spirit and the Word is utterly fundamental to Nicene theology and this was developed from Irenaeus through Athanasius and Serapion and I quote Serapion himself here because the liturgy of Serapion where we have one of the earliest forms of the epic lazes is the epic lazes of the Word
or epic lazes of the Word and the Spirit and not simply the epic lazes of the Spirit. Because here there is an understanding of the Word as in hearing in the Spirit and the Spirit as in hearing in the Word so that the Word, the Spirit is not dumb Spirit, the Spirit is essentially speaking Spirit, eloquent Spirit and that is the Spirit we have in the Old Testament Church and in the New Testament Church. But this
speaking secondly is a life-giving activity. So the Holy Spirit is Zewapoyun, it is life-giving Spirit. He is present to us not only as creator Spirit but specifically as he mediates life to life itself and as the source of all living existence and being outside God. Not only then is the Spirit to be understood on the creator side of the creator creature relationship but he through his creative presence to us imparts life a new being
and actualizes the divine revelation, actualizes the divine Word. Now again if I may refer to Karl Barth, this is the point where the so-called evangelicals fundamentalists radically misunderstand Barth when Barth speaks of the Word of God, the Bible as becoming the Word of God. What he is relating to here is the Word of God to the Holy Spirit, to the Zewapoyun activity of the Holy Spirit. So that if you don't do that then you are
deficient in the Trinitarian understanding of revelation. Now that is precisely the point that is made here at this stage in the doctrine of the Word and the Spirit in hearing together in divine revelation and in God speaking to us. One further point, another further point here and this again is something that I now have no time to elaborate and this is the vicarious activity of the Holy Spirit. Now the early Church fastened upon the fact that
the Holy Spirit is paracletos as well as the Son and in a real sense he is the alter ego or the alter advocatus of Christ incarnate Son. The Spirit is so closely related to the being and activity of the incarnate Son from who is sent to us that he resonates the activity, the intercessory, the atoning, the intervening activity of Christ. He resonates the priestly activity of Christ so that even as early as Hippolytus we find the
Holy Spirit spoken of high priestly spirit. And here we have in Christic theology a considerable development of the passage in Romans 8 where it is the Holy Spirit who intercedes for us. And interestingly in the Roman epistle St. Paul at this point elaborates this hupper and tunkenine. It is the intercessory, the vicarious activity of the Spirit is reinforced in the language that St. Paul uses. Now that is what happens when we pray because when we pray
the whole prayers of creation are taken up and gathered to the intercessory intervening vicarious activity of the Spirit and presented before God. And lastly the Holy Spirit comes to us from the inner communion of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He is the bond of oneness in the Holy Trinity, the sundesmas of the Trinity and he creates union and communion with us and between us and the Holy Trinity. It is then through and
in the Spirit that we are given koinonia in the mystery of Christ, this expression that comes from St. Paul, and through the corporate personalizing activity of the Spirit creating not only reciprocity between Christ and ourselves but a community of reciprocity, a community of koinonia. It's in that way that the Church comes into being and is constantly maintained in and through the Spirit and united to Christ as his body. But as such the Church is the Church
of the triune God actualizing in the conditions of our human and temple existence the divine koinonia so that the Church as Church lives in so far as it shares in and participates in the triune life of God in himself and the union of life and love which God is. Hence it is on this ground that we have to go on to consider the nice induction of the One Church which we shall do on Thursday. Thank you.