Classic Christianity

Thomas C. Oden

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061897320
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

For the first time, Thomas Oden's Systematic Theology classic series (individually titled The Living God, The Word of Life, and Life in the Spirit ) is available in one complete volume. A renowned theologian, Oden provides a consensus view of the Christian faith, delving deeply into ancient Christian tradition and bringing to the contemporary church the best wisdom from its past. In this magisterial work, Oden tackles the central questions of Christian belief and the nature of the trinity.

Written for clergy, Christian educators, religious scholars, and lay readers alike, Classic Christianity provides the best synthesis of the whole history of Christian thought. Part one explores the most intriguing questions of the study of God—Does God exist? Does Jesus reveal God? Is God personal, compassionate, free?—and presents answers that reflect the broad consensus culled from the breadth of the church's teachers. It is rooted deeply and deliberately in scripture but confronts the contemporary mind with the vitality of the Christian tradition. Part two addresses the perplexing Christological issues of whether God became flesh, whether God became Christ, and whether Christ is the source of salvation. Oden details the core beliefs concerning Jesus Christ that have been handed down for the last two hundred decades, namely, who he was, what he did, and what that means for us today. Part three examines how the work of God in creation and redemption is being brought to consummation by the Holy Spirit in persons, through communities, and in the fullness of human destiny. Oden's magisterial study not only treats the traditional elements of systematical theology but also highlights the foundational exegetes throughout history. Covering the ecumenical councils and early synods; the great teachers of the Eastern church tradition, including Athanasius and John Chrysostom; and the prominent Western figures such as Augustine, Ambrose, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, this book offers the reader the fullest understanding of the Christian faith available.

BOOK THREE

LIFE IN THE SPIRIT

SOME OF THE MOST INTRIGUING QUESTIONS of classic Christian teaching lie straight ahead. The topic now is the work of the Holy Spirit in the renewal of persons in community. I will be as brief as the subject allows. The intent is not to include anything the historic church does not consider consensually essential.

Introducing the Study of the Spirit

The Father and Son are giving the church an incomparable gift: the outpouring of God’s own Spirit. “God does not give a Gift inferior to Himself” (Augustine, Faith and the Creed 9.19). The Son promised that the Spirit would follow his ministry on earth. Incomparable blessings would ensue with the ministry of the Spirit. Having once been given the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, the believing community has never been left without this Comforter (John 14:18; Chrysostom, Hom. on John 75).

The Spirit leads the faithful into all truth by pointing constantly toward the truth embodied in Jesus (John 16:13; Ignatius, Eph. 9). In any glimpse the human mind may have of God’s revelation, the way has always already been prepared by God’s own Spirit (Matt. 3:3). “Pave within you the way” (Chromatius, Tractate on Matt. 8.1). “Remove the stones from the road” (Is. 40.4).

The study of the Spirit is called pneumatology (from the Greek word, pneuma, spirit). It is the systematic analysis and interpretation of the texts of scripture and consensual tradition that deal with the regenerating and consummating work of the Holy Spirit (hagion pneuma; Ephrem, Comm. on Heb. 6.6).

The Neglect of the Teaching of the Holy Spirit

The modern tendency is to depersonalize the Spirit, to treat God the Spirit as reducible to a general idea of spirituality. This stands in contrast to the biblical view of God’s own intensely personal meeting with ordinary living persons dwelling in regular houses and cities in everyday history. This is always a meeting that requires decision. Thus this meeting exercises that capacity unique to humans as distinguished from animal creation: deliberate and reasoned willing, always occurring in a specific Now—a given context.

It is a scandal to modern critical scholarship that standard exegetical and theological discussions of the Holy Spirit have given little attention to the great early treatises on the Holy Spirit by Didymus, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzus, and Ambrose. It remains a mixed blessing that modern charismatic and Pentecostal voices have so stressed special aspects of the work of the Spirit that some other Protestant voices have tended to back away completely from all teaching concerning the Spirit. The texts of scripture, however, leave no doubt in our minds of the importance of teaching of and by the Spirit (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 9.22–23).

“The subject of the Holy Spirit presents a special difficulty,” wrote Gregory of Nazianzus, because by the time we get to it in the long sequence of teaching topics, we are already “worn out by the multitude of questions.” So we become like those who have “lost their appetite, who having taken a dislike to some particular kind of food, shrink from all food; so we in like manner have an aversion from all discussion” (Orat. 31, Of the Holy Spirit).

The work of the Spirit has been far less studied and consensually defined than the work of the Son. When Paul asked his hearers at Ephesus, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” they answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit” (Acts 19:2). Even now many think it possible to teach the gospel of Jesus without any thought of the work of the Spirit (Ammonius, in Cramer, Catena on Acts 19.5).

From God “For Us” to God “In Us”

The final third of Classic Christianity focuses upon Life in the Spirit. It asks how the work of God in creation and redemption is being brought to consummation by the Holy Spirit. This renewal is occurring inwardly in persons and socially in communities (Origen, OFP 1.3.2). It promises ultimately to encompass the whole of nature and cosmic history.

We stand at a crucial pivot of Christian teaching, shifting the focus from the work of the Son to the work of the Spirit in the church in applying the benefits of the work of the Son.

In the previous pages we have spoken of God for us. Now we speak more deliberately of God working in us. We speak not of events addressing us as it were from the outside of our experience (extra nos, outside us) but more deliberately of active inward processes and events by which persons in community are convicted, transformed, regenerated, justified, and brought into union with Christ, one by one (Heb. 3:14; 1 Pet. 5:1). This is God’s work within humanity (intra nos, in us) viewed individually and socially. “Just as God stepped out of his nature to become a partaker of our humanity, so we are called to step out of our nature to become partakers of his divinity” (Hilary of Arles, Intro. Comm. on 2 Pet. 1.4).

The forgiveness of God the Son, having been once for all offered on the cross, must be ever again received in each new moment in time. At each stage we are being freshly enabled to receive it. In Christ we learn what God has already done on our behalf. By the Spirit we are being enabled to reshape our doing in response to what God has done, to reform our loves in relation to God’s incomparable love.

“I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1). “The difference between asking and appealing is that we ask about unimportant matters but appeal about important one…. Our bodies are sacrifices because the flesh is put to death. They are living sacrifices, because the Spirit has given them life” (Luculentius, Commentary 3 on Rom. 12.1).

With this pivot, our own decisions and actions now become a crucial part of the salvation story—the history of the body of Christ. God not only forgives sin through the Son but through the Spirit works to actually overturn the power of sin in our actual daily interpersonal behavior and life in community.

The Lord and Giver of Life

The Spirit is “Lord and Giver of Life” (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, 1 Cor. 15:45). “The Spirit gives life” (John 6:63; 2 Cor. 3:6; Ambrose, Of the Holy Spirit 1.15). “God our life is the life of all” (Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: 143).

The new life involves entry into a family (Rom. 8:12–17; Gal. 4:6) in relation to an incomparably caring parent (Abba, “Papa”). The Spirit bears witness within our spirits that we are children of this Abba in this family (Origen, Comm. on Rom. 8.16).

Flesh (sarx) refers not merely to the physical body but to the whole person under the power of sin who becomes acclimated under the power of sin to pursue works of the flesh (Gal. 5:19–21). All who faithfully receive the Spirit are born anew, given a new spiritual beginning and called to grow toward good health in grace (John 3:1–8; Justin Martyr, First Apol. 61). The new person in Christ is born of the Spirit to faith active in love (Rom. 8:1–7). It is lived out in freedom for the neighbor, freeing persons to fulfill their original human purpose whatever the historical conditions, to enjoy all things in God, to receive life day by day from the eternal Giver (Gal. 5; Calvin, Inst. 3.10; 3.23.12).

The Third Article of the Creed: I Believe in the Holy Spirit

All ancient baptismal confessions and classic creeds confess in this or similar language: I believe in the Holy Spirit (pneuma hagion; Lat: Spiritum Sanctum; Der-Balyzeh Papyrus; Roman Symbol, Psalter of Rufinus). “We believe in one Holy Spirit the Paraclete” (Eastern Form of the Apostles’ Creed, Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses, 9). This article of baptismal faith became expanded through a history of exposition and controversy into the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

In learning by heart the Creed of Epiphanius (first reported as a long-received written tradition in AD c. 374), the one to be baptized rehearsed twelve clauses that summarily set forth the work of the Spirit:

We believe in the Holy Spirit who

spoke in the law,

and taught by the prophets,

and descended to the Jordan,

spoke by the Apostles,

and lives in the saints;

thus we believe in him: that he is the Holy Spirit,

the Spirit of God,

the perfect Spirit,

the Spirit Paraclete,

uncreated,

proceeding from the Father [ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon]

and receiving of the Son [ek tou huiou lambanomenon], in whom we believe.

(SCD 13)

The primitive rule of faith as recorded by Irenaeus about 190 AD shows the prominent role of the Holy Spirit recognized by the early Christian community. Salvation history is placed within the context of the work of the triune God. It is the Spirit who bears testimony in the present age to the Father and the Son. The confessing community believes “in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven” (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 1.9.1)

The earliest Christian teachers understood that this rule of faith had been passed along by apostolic testimony in an unbroken line from Jesus to the present. According to Tertullian, God “sent from the Father the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, the sanctifier of the faith of those who believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That this Rule has come down from the beginning of the Gospel, even before all former heretics, not to speak of Praxeas of yesterday, will be proved as well by the comparative lateness of all heretics as by the very novelty of Praxeas of yesterday” (Ag. Praxeas 2, italics added).

The Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople I) would settle the question of the deity of the Spirit as firmly as Nicaea had defined the deity of Christ and triunity of God in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381). It set forth an ecumenically received summary definition of the person and work of God the Spirit in these terms: “We believe in the one God…And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver, Who proceeds from the Father, Who is worshiped and glorified together with the Father and Son, Who spoke through the prophets” (Creed of the 150 Fathers, SCD 86).

The Personal Pronoun: If Not “It,” Is the Spirit “He” or “She”?

We acknowledge the prevailing form of address to the Holy Spirit as “He” in the English-speaking Christian tradition. Yet it is still useful to ask whether it is appropriate within the bounds of classic Christian assumptions to address the Spirit in the feminine gender.

The issue is only partly decided on grammatical grounds: Ruach in Hebrew is feminine. Pneuma in Greek is a neuter, yet even when the neuter is used, masculine pronouns may accompany it. Even in the New Revised Standard Version, whose mandate specified that “masculine-oriented language should be eliminated as far as this can be done without altering passages that reflect the historical situation of ancient patriarchal culture,” crucial passages could not be rendered in the neuter: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” (John 16:13). God is named as Abba (Father); the messianic Son (ben, huios) stands in the male line of David; the Spirit is ruach or pneuma (feminine or neuter).

Gregory of Nazianzus was amused by any who would insistently hold “God to be a male” which he regarded as a misplaced analogy. You cannot conclude that God, because Father, is therefore male. Nor can you conclude that “Deity is feminine from the gender of the word, and the Spirit neuter,” since the designation “has nothing to do with generation. But if you would be silly enough to say, with the old myths and fables, that God begat the Son by a marriage with His own Will, we should be introduced to the Hermaphrodite god of Marcion and Valenti-nus who imagined these newfangled Aeons” (Orat. 31.7, On the Holy Spirit).

God has become revealed in scripture largely but not exclusively in masculine terms such as king, lord, husband, judge, master, and f...