Sculptor Spirit

Models of Sanctification from Spirit Christology

Leopoldo A. Sànchez M., Leopoldo A. Sánchez M.

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780830852338
• eBook ISBN: 9780830873173
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Holy Spirit is sculpting you.Like the work of an artist who molds a lump of clay into its intended shape, the Spirit's sanctifying work lies in shaping people into the image of Christ.Avoiding either a "Spirit-only" or a "Spirit-void" theology, Leopoldo Sánchez carefully crafts a Spirit Christology, which considers the role of God's Spirit in the life and mission of Jesus. This understanding then serves as the foundation to articulate five distinct models of sanctification that can help Christians discern how the Spirit is at work in our lives.

SCULPTOR SPIRIT

SPIRIT CHRISTOLOGY and the SANCTIFIED LIFE

A SPIRIT CHRISTOLOGY FOCUSES on the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit in the life and mission of Jesus. It asks what the identity of Jesus as the receiver, bearer, and giver of God’s Spirit contributes to our theological reflection and Christian living. Thinking about the Spirit in relation to the Son lends itself to reflection on the theology of God, Christology, and pneumatology itself. As a field of theological inquiry, Spirit Christology has focused precisely on such questions. But how does a Spirit-oriented account of Christ operate as a framework for exploring sanctification or holiness? This question needs further development in the field and will be the focus of this chapter. Our guiding thesis is that the same Spirit in whom Jesus lived shapes the lives of his disciples today.

Because a Spirit Christology points to Christ as the locus or privileged place of the Spirit, it gives us a variety of pictures of Christlikeness we can draw from to discern the Spirit’s work of forming Christ in human persons. Indeed, the Spirit of God blows where it wills, and there is a certain hiddenness and anonymity to its works in the world; and yet, the Scriptures also reveal rich images of the Spirit’s activity in the world that help us discern its presence in our midst. A Spirit Christology offers us a theological lens to explore how the identity of Jesus as the receiver, bearer, and giver of God’s Spirit assists us in that discernment. In chapters one and two, we make the case for Spirit Christology as a robust trinitarian framework, grounded in Christian traditions of the East and the West, with the capacity to promote discussions about the Spirit’s indwelling of persons. In chapter two, we will delve into contributions from the early church to the development of a Spirit Christology, looking at their apologetic arguments for the unity of Christ and the Spirit but also at the rich variety of catechetical images they use to tell the story of the Spirit in Christ and his saints.

In chapter one, we focus on Spirit Christology today. Our presentation proceeds in two stages. First, we offer a bird’s-eye view of the field by looking at two contrasting contemporary examples of Spirit Christologies, namely, a revisionary and a complementary approach. British scholar G. W. H. Lampe represents an example in the field of the revisionary route, which sees Spirit Christology as a replacement for the Logos (or two-natures) Christology inspired by the ecumenical councils. French theologian Yves Congar represents an example of the other method, which sees Spirit Christology as a complement to Logos Christology. Though distinct in fundamentally different ways, both theologians show how a Spirit Christology functions as a lens to reflect on the doctrine of God, the identity of Christ, and life in the Spirit. With these two authors, we also give readers unfamiliar with the field a taste of its European contributions.

Second, we survey a bit more in-depth two North American systematic theologians who exemplify narrative and historical approaches to the field of Spirit Christology and ask how these two authors have tested constructively the implications of the theological framework in response to various issues. Focusing significantly on Eastern Christian sources, Eugene Rogers Jr. represents a narrative approach that tracks the acts of the Spirit in the Gospels in order to suggest how humans participate in Christ’s life through the same Spirit. Focusing mainly on Western sources, Ralph Del Colle represents a historical approach that tracks the development of Roman Catholic neo-scholastic (and post-neo-scholastic) ideas on the Spirit’s presence in Christ in order to establish a coherent trinitarian account of the incarnation and grace. By looking at these two constructive contemporary trajectories in the field by North American authors, we are in a better position to assess what has been done on this side of the Atlantic and what needs further attention. Our exploration will expose a gap in the field, leading to our proposal for the constructive yet underutilized use of a Spirit Christology as a trinitarian narrative for articulating a models-based approach to the sanctified life and as a theological lens for addressing the spiritual needs and hopes of North Americans with an interest in spirituality and religion.

TWO STORIES OF THE SPIRIT IN CHRIST: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO EUROPEAN SPIRIT CHRISTOLOGIES

In the last half of the twentieth century, events such as the revival of trinitarian theology across theological traditions, the rise of the ecumenical movement (including the interest of Western churches in Eastern Christian traditions), and the growth of Pentecostalism across the globe led to a renewed commitment to reflect on the person and work of the Holy Spirit. Parallel to this development, a number of theologians in the North Atlantic began to explore ways of thinking about the place of the Spirit in the life of Christ. Roughly speaking, two schools of thought surfaced. Some argued for Spirit Christology as a replacement for the classic Logos (or two-natures) Christology of the ecumenical councils, offering a revisionary view of trinitarian theology and the incarnation. Others argued for a Spirit Christology as a complement to Logos Christology, looking for ways to add or integrate a strong pneumatological trajectory into the mystery of the incarnation, while avoiding an adoptionist view of Christ as a mere man endowed with the Spirit.

My work tends toward the complementarity of Spirit- and Logos-oriented aspects of Christ’s identity as a methodological basis for exploring models of the Christian life or sanctification. But before taking a closer look at North American contributions and setting the stage for my own argument, let us explore some of the basic contours of a revisionary and a complementary approach to Spirit Christology by looking at two European authors.

G. W. H. Lampe: Jesus acts divinely by God’s Spirit. Anglican scholar G. W. H. Lampe exemplifies a revisionary Spirit Christology.1 Against notions of the Holy Spirit as a personal agent or hypostasis (person) distinct from God, Lampe defines “Spirit” in more general terms as God’s simultaneously other-worldly (transcendent) and worldly (immanent) presence in all creatures. Consider the following definition, where “Spirit” functions as a metaphor for describing divine presence and activity:

In speaking now of God as Spirit we are not referring to an impersonal influence, an energy transmitted by God but distinct from himself. Nor are we indicating a divine entity or hypostasis which is a third person of the Godhead. We are speaking of God himself, his personal presence, as active and related.2

Although Lampe highlights the divine identity of “Spirit” in functional terms or according to its activity and presence in creation, the framing of his proposal in a non-trinitarian monotheistic mold leaves him open to some objections. Lampe shows awareness of the historic problem of modalism, according to which God is said to be one only in Godself (Lat. ad intra) but appears as (or is named in) three modes only in his relationship to us in history (Lat. ad extra). Yet his proposal still tends to depersonalize Spirit due to his preference for an absolute monotheism that admits no difference or distinction in God. Lampe does not think in terms of “the” Spirit, but in terms of “Spirit.”

The theology of God at work in Lampe’s view of Spirit shapes his Christology. The author speaks of Jesus’ divinity in terms of his unique possession of Spirit as a man. In doing so, he redefines the incarnation so that the subject or agent of the union is not the person or hypostasis of the divine Logos per se, but the man Jesus who bears Spirit. In distinction from the Logos Christology of the ecumenical councils, a goal of Lampe’s Spirit Christology is “to acknowledge that the personal subject of the experience of Jesus Christ is a man. The hypostasis is not the Logos incarnate but a human being.”3 Therefore, Jesus is not God “substantivally,” but because of the Spirit’s presence in him “such a unity of will and operation with God” takes place that he can be called God in an adverbial sense, namely, in “that in all his actions the human Jesus acted divinely.”4 It is not the divine Logos who acts humanly to save us, but rather the human Jesus who acts divinely as our spiritual example.

Although Lampe is eager to recapture a strong sense of the true human reality and personality of Jesus as determined by God’s Spirit in order to make him more relatable to other Spirit-bearing humans like us, his interpretation of Jesus’ divinity as a function of Spirit-led actions makes one wonder whether a strong sense of Jesus’ divine identity in distinction from his acts in creation remains possible. The problem does not lie in the preference for a more relational conception of Jesus’ divine identity, but rather in whether there is a ground for such relationality in God as such, as opposed to in an act external to God. Without such ontological ground, even if penultimate in an overall account of Jesus, one ends up with a Spirit Jesusology more than a Spirit Christology. While aware of the problem of adoptionism, Lampe’s option for a non-ontological or non-substantival approach to Jesus’ divinity still moves in the direction of an ontology driven by an “anthropological maximalism,” one in which the human response of Jesus to the influence of God’s Spirit in him overshadows the divine transfiguration of his own human life and ours through the power of the Spirit.5 Otherwise stated, Lampe’s focus on Jesus as a superlative Spirit-bearing man can at best give us a picture of an ideal spiritual person to emulate, but cannot show us how the transformative presence of the Spirit in the man Jesus reveals and defines him as the divine mediator of the Spirit of God to human persons.

As noted above, Lampe in his own way desires to make Jesus more relatable to us and like us, and finds in the reality of Spirit a bridge between Jesus and other saints. As a man of Spirit, Jesus can serve as a paradigm for others. To be a true model for imitation, however, Lampe suggests that Jesus’ identity as Son must be seen in terms of the “degree” to which his bearing of Spirit makes him both unique from and similar to other humans.6 Because Jesus is the fullest expression of the cooperative interaction between God’s Spirit and the human spirit, Jesus’ human acts as one possessed of Spirit makes him an unparalleled pattern of divine self-giving to the creature and human self-transcendence toward the divine that others can to some extent aspire to and replicate.

Lampe’s approach allows him to posit both pneumatic discontinuity and continuity between Jesus and others. Yet in keeping with the author’s anthropological maximalism, Jesus does not actually shape us into his likeness internally through the Spirit in order to bring us to communion with God. Instead, Jesus merely points us in an external way to the human life he lives divinely as an example of divine likeness through human obedience in the hope that others can act divinely as humans, though in a lesser degree than Jesus. Although Lampe’s proposal for a continuity of degree between Jesus and us depends heavily on an account of his identity as receiver and bearer of God’s Spirit, it does not consider just as fully the strong discontinuity between Jesus and us inherent in the former’s identity as the unparalleled giver of the Spirit. Jesus’ receiving and bearing of Spirit is not adequately seen in light of his giving of the Spirit. Practically speaking, the former aspect is disconnected from the latter or simply overshadows it. Yet the author’s attempt to describe Jesus’ Spirit-led life in the context of human participation in his Spirit deserves attention in the development of a Spirit Christology.

Yves Congar: Decisive moments of the Spirit in the Son’s life. Roman Catholic theologian Yves Congar illustrates a complementary approach to Spirit Christology that takes into account the concerns of a Logos (two-natures) Christology. In continuity with the ecumenical councils, Congar holds to the Son’s identity as the only-begotten of God, of the same divine substance with the Father. Avoiding an adoptionist Christology that reduces Christ to a Spirit-bearing man, while also giving the Spirit its important place in his human history, Congar states that Jesus “was ontologically the Son of God by a personal (hypostatic) union from the moment of his conception and that he was also from that moment onwards the Temple of the Holy Spirit and made holy in his humanity by that Spirit.”7 Congar allows for the place of both the Logos and the Spirit in an account of the incarnation.

Congar acknowledges that, due to the influence of Thomas Aquinas’s theology of created grace in Western Christology, the Son is said to have the fullness of grace, the Holy Spirit, and its gifts already from the moment of conception.8 Although this assertion remains true from the ontological perspective of the Word’s “descent” to assume a full humanity, such a move makes it difficult to give full weight to “the action of the Holy Spirit” in God’s economy at various special moments or “kairoi” of Christ’s human life and mission.9 The testimony of the Scriptures to the H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Oscar García-Johnson
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Sculptor Spirit: Spirit Christology and the Sanctified Life
• 2 Voices from the Past: Patristic Images of the Sanctifying Spirit
• 3 Baptized into Death and Life: The Renewal Model
• 4 Facing Demons Through Prayer and Meditation: The Dramatic Model
• 5 Sharing Life Together: The Sacrificial Model
• 6 Welcoming the Stranger: The Hospitality Model
• 7 Work, Pray, and Rest: The Devotional Model
• 8 I Want to Tell the Story: North American Spirituality and the Models
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Sculptor Spirit
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright