Pr. Ole Schenk
The historic disagreement over the wording in the Nicene Creed about the Holy Spirit (the so-called “Filioque Controversy”) may be important for theological discussion at the ecumenical and interchurch level, but what’s at stake in it for people in the pews? How could the difference between confessing that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father” or “from the Father and the Son” carry such church-splitting importance in the minds of theologians if that same wording makes virtually no difference in the daily lives of most Christians? My purpose is not to contribute to scholarly literature about the history of the filioque debate, let alone to argue for a resolution in favor of one form of the Creed or another. Rather, I wish to invite my readers into perceiving the implications for how Christians might imagine, interpret, and receive the Holy Spirit’s role and power in Word and Sacrament as it relates to congregational mission. Most especially what I hope this piece will contribute is an appreciation for the Holy Spirit’s power amidst feeling and thinking one’s way through the tensions of communication.
I want to begin not with the Creed itself but instead with art. Cast your eyes above the communion table and the focal altar space in many traditional sanctuary spaces and there you might see the winged dove. For Lutherans and many others, this iconography locates the role of the Holy Spirit within the sacramental ministry of the church. As the dove descends on Jesus and remains upon him at his baptism, so the Holy Spirit descends with power through the words proclaimed over the newly baptized and the eucharistic elements. The touch of water and the bread, joined with the promise of Christ, communicates into the physical and hidden dimensions of our lives the spoken word that Christ has given us in his own body to raise us from the death of sin. The pulpit, altar, and font are sites of the Holy Spirit’s power at work in the emotional and physical fabric of the community, and the ordained pastor (through these sacramental actions) is a means of the Holy Spirit’s enlivening power for the congregation.
"The pulpit, altar, and font are sites of the Holy Spirit’s power at work in the emotional and physical fabric of the community, and the ordained pastor (through these sacramental actions) is a means of the Holy Spirit’s enlivening power for the congregation."
Confessing that the Holy Spirit proceeds “from the Father and the Son” in the Nicene Creed underscores and supports the way that many Western Christians perceive the Spirit’s role in the sacramental ministry of the church which I just sketched out above. When the Spirit is conceived as proceeding from both Father and Son, the double procession implies that the Holy Spirit is a living link suspended between the two. In baptism and eucharist, the Holy Spirit communicates the death that the Son suffered for our sake and communicates its power for us. To use the wording of the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit’s procession from the Son is now located in our death in daily baptismal remembrance. The procession from the Father is the Spirit’s strength to raise us to new life midst the daily encounters where we’ve found ourselves sinking in unfaithfulness and death. The two processions imagined this way create a dynamic and practical tension. Regin Prenter’s Spiritus Creator, a classic of Lutheran theology, identifies the Spirit’s power to raise up the believer with the “groaning of the Spirit” in Romans 8:26: groaning that intercedes with a life-giving power beyond what any human reason can achieve.[1]
I cannot deny that I’ve found the imagery of the double-procession to be powerful for interpreting the Spirit’s role in my own life. Like me, many readers may be able to relate personal experiences that witness to the Spirit’s power within congregations. When relationships are strained to their limits, when hearts have grown heavy and dense with accumulated hostile emotions, I’ve heard and received what I can genuinely identify as the Spirit’s power to create and work through me in the words and actions shared at Christ’s table. I have looked at the face of someone with whom I thought the relationship had all but ended, and I have heard and seen the words of Christ spoken, “this is my body, given for you”- given bodily to that very person with whom I’d thought the living tension of relationship had irrevocably snapped. The power of emotional healing, of breathing and speaking and communicating again, even if taken in small steps, courses through the web of relationships in a congregation gathered at the table and sent out to the places where conflicts have taken root. Of course, not every relationship can or should be mended. My advocacy here for the power of reconciliation on the way to or from the communion table needs to be taken with a critical awareness that sacramental ministry may just as easily be misused.
It’s important to stress that the double procession of the Holy Spirit has come under critical scrutiny. I attended the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago and Vitor Westhelle in his lecturers on pneumatology paraphrased criticism of the filioque in this way: “If you have a double procession, then you end up with a linear form of the Trinity: Father – Spirit – Son. Since the church is the continuity of the Body of Christ, the church can control the Holy Spirit through its institution, from the ‘Son side.’ The Spirit then becomes subservient to the institutional bodies of the church.” The imagery of the Spirit as suspended power between the Father and Son then suffers the fate that Westhelle raises: “proceeding from the Son” locates the Spirit as effectively controlled or submerged under the structures of the church that claim to administer the body of Christ. The simplest way to perceive this is in how the Spirit’s linking power within sacramental ministry also appears to link the power differential between those who are ordained ministers and those who are lay with all the potential for misuse that such a difference allows. More generally, Westhelle’s suspicion points to all the subtle ways that the Holy Spirit’s role might get roped into justifying the workings of an institution. Many can relate stories where “the workings of the Spirit” have been invoked to explain an all-too-human institutional decision in ways that seem hollow or cynical.
Further, while I admit that the double-procession theology makes vivid some biblical images for the Holy Spirit (like the dove descending at Jesus’ baptism), it also obscures or marginalizes other aspects of biblical witness. Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky argues that the Western church - in confessing that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son” - risks confining the work of the Spirit to the redemption of sinners.[2] For the Orthodox, redemption is not the only theme of salvation. The Orthodox confession of the Spirit proceeding “from the Father” alone implies additional roles distinct from the redemptive work of the Son: that of sanctifying each baptized person, in divinizing and raising them so that each partakes in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Divinization cannot be my main theme here, except to note in passing the predominant imagery of ascent in the Spirit’s power which the Orthodox theology allows may differ from inhabiting the real tensions I’ve sketched for the western procession - different images of sanctification, not necessarily better. Lossky’s criticism requires a serious recognition that “the mystery of Pentecost is as important as the mystery of the Redemption.”[3] That is a question for each pastor, for each ministry, and each congregation: do we perceive the role of the Spirit at Pentecost as important as Christ’s redemption?
"...do we perceive the role of the Spirit at Pentecost as important as Christ’s redemption?"
Before I had encountered Westhelle and Lossky, I had already experienced conflict in ministry that prepared me to perceive how an emphasis on Word and Sacrament theology might diminish the scope of the Spirit’s power. During 2013-2014 I had served as a volunteer in the Young Adults in Global Mission program of the ELCA in Hungary. I’d lived for a year in a small town in a rural setting attending a Lutheran church and working as an English and religion teacher. I’d learned sufficient Hungarian to have dialogues with members of the church and residents of the town, and I’d sought to live out the accompaniment model of ELCA’s mission by building relationships with Roma people, a racial minority treated with stigma, prejudice, hostility, and oppression by many white Europeans. My Hungarian supervisor introduced me to a loosely structured Pentecostal assembly of Roma who met in private homes or outdoors in parks. Worship was set in a circle that began with singing and evoking the temple of the Holy Spirit present in each believer. Worship proceeded to an interactive Bible teaching which included a free back-and-forth conversation between the women and men, both literate and illiterate, as the Word of God was shared and debated among the different ethnic Roma subgroups represented in the circle.
My stumbling Hungarian was a limit to my participation in the Pentecostal assembly. I eventually invited two women from the assembly to meet me and one of my closest Hungarian colleagues, an English teacher at one of the schools and a member of the Lutheran church, who could translate for us. Though I had my own agenda and questions, I was stunned by the questions the Roma women had for me: “How can you call yourself a Christian, and be a participant in a church that is so filled with racism?” She meant the Lutheran congregation. I stumbled around within myself seeking an adequate answer, and reaching into Lutheran theology I responded quietly and slowly that: “Yes, it is true that many of my congregation and myself sometimes are guilty of the sin of racism, and we will continue to struggle against it, but I also believe that the Holy Spirit works in our church through the preaching of God’s word and through the sacraments even if we are also sinners.” She continued by pressing the theology to its limits: “So, are you saying that the Holy Spirit, too, is racist?” This stretched the limits of my theological imagination. I felt as though I had to say something new, something I hadn’t ever said in quite the same way before. I looked at her directly and said: “No, no, of course you are right, the Holy Spirit is Holy, the Holy Spirit is not sinful, not racist.” She acknowledged my humility, and in my emotional tone accepted the limits of my Lutheran tradition and upbringing: neither could address the reality she wished me to perceive.
I received a unique gift from that encounter that burned a hole through my thinking with what felt like Pentecost’s fire. The daily sins of the baptized members within a church are brought to death and resurrection in the Spirit’s power through the ministry of Word and Sacrament. Even so, the critical question is whether that congregational and pastoral theology of the Spirit can come to terms truthfully with sin’s power to divide peoples, nations, and tribes - the historic and accumulated sins embedded within whole communities and societies? Does not truthfulness require of us open and direct face-to-face encounters that bring us beyond sanctuary spaces to horizons that the Pentecost of Acts more fully evokes: situations where walls of structures shake, where people speak and receive truthful words that move like fire?
I will be untruthful to myself, however, if I take my readers with me to this point only to end with the suggestion that the double procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son in the Western Creed must be abandoned. Criticized? Yes. Expanded? Yes. Both East and West disclose faithful understandings of the Spirit’s work. Both versions of the Nicene Creed confess that the Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of Life.” If I had thought that my knowledge of theology let me grasp the work of the Spirit as a kind of tensile structural cable running through my theology, then I was wrong. No structural piece of a dogmatic puzzle is the “Giver of Life” in the way that the Spirit is. And because of this truth, I could hear the Roma women’s testimony to me about the sin of racism and the power of the Spirit. Because of this truth, I could receive her query without becoming defensive. Because of this truth, I was called again to the radicality of dying with Christ to the power of sin and moving farther than I had in discipleship (my relationship with the Roma community only grew because of the boldness of her speech to me). In dying and rising, the Spirit’s power is again made real in the sinner, in this case on the other side of burning experiences that score the heart with new learning.
"In dying and rising, the Spirit’s power is again made real in the sinner..."
The excellence and virtue of teaching and confessing the double-procession is in its capacity to guide the church on the way of learning that grows through new experiences and tensions. Taken at its best, double procession means the church lives in real tension. The same criticism raised above that “proceeding from the Son” submerges the Spirit under the control of church institutions need not be absolute. When communities that emphasize Word and Sacrament also seek and sustain the kind of Pentecost encounters that break open any pretensions of fully grasping the living Spirit or predicting and controlling its power, and do so for the sake of the Gospel, those same expressions of the church can be changed. The “proceeding from the Son” side of the filioque interpreted in this way affirms that the Holy Spirit can communicate through the kind of transformational changes that have opened Christian traditions to the ordination and leadership of women and GLBTQIA+ people, changes that began with the courage of their own embodied witness to Christ and the forgiveness of sins.[4] Experiences of Pentecost fire and the Spirit’s groaning amid the suffering of all creation will always have more to teach to the church. I point my readers to the work of Cheryl M. Peterson who interprets the third article of the creed in Luther’s Large Catechism not only as advocating for individual sanctification but also as advocating robustly for the creation of a Spirit-breathed people.[5]
As I said at the outset, my purpose here is not to argue dogmatically for the filioque’s preservation. The Holy Spirit’s capacity to take the tensions of the church and draw forth the music of faith will continue whether Lutherans and others decide to return to the original wording of the Creed shared with the Orthodox. Many will make that decision out of yearning for ecumenical concord and respect. Those decisions are faithful. My hope is that no matter what we do, we will continue to pass on the insights of the Spirit’s power amidst living tensions that the double-procession has faithfully taught.
Notes:
[1] Prenter, Regin. Spiritus Creator. Tr. John M. Jensen. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1953, pgs. 16-19.
[2] Lossky, Vladimir. “Redemption and Deification,” in In the Image and Likeness of God. Ed. Erickson and Bird. Crestwood NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1985.
[3] Lossky. Image and Likeness of God, pg 109.
[4] Mark E. Chapman asserts the value of the Filioque in relation to history this way: “To begin with history, as history-bound humans must, and, so, to begin with Christ, is to begin with a Holy Spirit intimately attached to the person as well as the work of this Christ.” Chapman, “A Lutheran Proposal for the Neuralgic Question of the Filioque” in Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 28:2 (1991): pg 254. I take Chapman’s point about history to include historical change.
[5] Peterson, Cheryl. Who is the Church? An Ecclesiology for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013. 121-137
PASTOR OLE SCHENK serves at United Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Oak Park, Illinois.
I have never heard of this dispute before. And to me, a pew sitter, it makes no difference.