A Man of the Church

Honoring the Theology, Life, and Witness of Ralph del Colle

Michel René Barnes, Barnes

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781621899730
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Iglesia cristiana

Ralph del Colle was born in New York City on October 3, 1954 and was raised in Mineola, Long Island. He attended Xavier High School in Chelsea and received a BA in History and Literature of Religions from New York University, and MDiv, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Union Theological Seminary. Ralph taught for 17 years in the Marquette University Theology Department; prior to that he taught at Barry University, Miami Shores, Florida and at St. Anselm College, Manchester, New Hampshire. Ralph's lively Christian faith and interest in church unity led to his participation in ecumenical dialogues. He served as a representative to the International Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue for the Pontifical Council on Christian Unity for 12 years and also served on the Catholic-Reformed Dialogue and Catholic-Evangelical Dialogue, both for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He was invited by the Pontifical Council to serve as a representative to the World Council of Churches Assembly in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1998. In 2002-2003, he served as the President of the Society for Pentecostal Studies and in 2003 Ralph received the Archbishop's Vatican II Award. Ralph's scholarly work, especially his work on the Holy Spirit, made significant contributions to the field of Systematic Theology. Ralph died in July of 2012, slightly more than four weeks after he was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer. He was fifty-seven.

I

A Last Word

1

Spirit Christology: Dogmatic Issues

Ralph Del Colle

[Editor’s Note: It has famously been said that no one begins at the beginning; we all begin in the middle. In the same way, we all come to our end in the middle as well. In the midst of his final days, Ralph Del Colle was at work on this essay. Although it is by no means complete—as he himself recognized—he asked that we include it in this collection as a final witness to his own theological concerns and as a marker indicating where his voice in the contemporary theological debates was silenced. The skeleton, if not always the body, of his argument is clear. He sought to demonstrate that Pneumatology should rightly enrich traditional Christological and Trinitarian dogma, against those who see Spirit Christology as offering an alternative to those formulations. This essay manifests, therefore, two themes, indeed, perhaps the two themes, that run through the length and breadth of his scholarly activity: his passion for Pneumatology and his commitment to the Western, above all the Roman Catholic, theological tradition. But beyond that, this essay demonstrates something about Ralph Del Colle himself, something more than simply his doctrinal concerns or denominational identity, namely that he lived and died as what Patristic theologians once called ἄνϑρωπος τής ἐκκλησίας, “a man of the church,” one who was committed to the struggle for the truth of the church’s theological witness throughout its history. May this essay help us to remember and honor him as such.]

Introduction

My interest in examining the dogmatic issues that accompany Spirit Christology has to do with how pneumatology, especially in the Western Catholic tradition, ought to inform our christological constructions. That is, I take it, the whole point of Spirit Christology. At the risk of oversimplification, I will identify the two major contemporary options for this new christological model as 1) a trinitarian Spirit-Christology, and 2) a post-trinitarian Spirit-Christology. By post-trinitarian, I do not necessarily mean unitarian or pre-trinitarian. The former implies rejection of the dogma of the trinity and the latter assumes a pre-conciliar theological milieu, which is clearly impossible, although appeal is often made to that era, whether it is to New Testament Christologies or to ante-Nicene and pre-Chalcedonian Christologies. The Spirit Christology proposed from this perspective is understood as part and parcel of a larger project to revise the classical presentation of trinitarian and christological doctrine. The focus usually has to do with the cogency of maintaining the intra-trinitarian distinctions in the so-called immanent trinity, the exclusive dominance of Logos Christology, and questions of pre- or post- existence relative to Jesus as the Christ, and/or the use of the Chalcedonian terminology of natures and person.

The ascription “post-trinitarian” is intended to underscore that the classical distinction between Son and Spirit is now subsumed under a schema in which the triadic structure of the Christian confession—soteriologically speaking, <God, Christ, Spirit>—is conceived as an account only of God’s saving activity and presence in the man Jesus and in the experience of the Christian community. The distinct hypostases (or persons) of Son and Spirit are relegated to what is understood negatively to be have been a process of “hypostization” which basically comes down to something getting in the way between God and the humanum—I am thinking of the work of Geoffrey Lampe and Roger Haight especially. In other words, the symbolic representation of the dynamism that is the divine-human encounter in Jesus and the Spirit becomes objectified into existent mediators of that encounter, the results of which are Christolatry, on the one hand, and a neglect of pneumatology on the other. To stalwart adherents of trinitarian orthodoxy this evaluation is indeed a departure from the classical norms.

All of this is to say that the debate between the two positions can be waged on a number of levels: 1) fundamental—the nature of religious language and theological predication, 2) hermeneutical—how to interpret the norms of Nicaea and Chalcedon, 3) dogmatic—how to integrate the doctrines of God, Christ, and salvation. I propose to consider the common ground between the two positions, what Roger Haight observed as the two foci of Spirit Christology: “. . . Spirit Christology that sees Jesus during his life time as one in whom God as Spirit was at work . . . [and the] dimension of Spirit Christology [that] applies to the risen Jesus, the Jesus alive, with God, and called the Christ.1”

Borrowing from James D. G. Dunn, upon whom Haight also drew, we can phrase the issue in terms of the following two questions.

1. How is the divinity of the incarnate Christ a function of the Spirit?

2. How is the humanity of the risen Jesus a function of the Spirit?2

As I will concentrate on the dogmatic configuration attending classical trinitarian Spirit-Christology let me summarize the difference between the trinitarian and post-trinitarian positions in a series of concise bullet points:

• In trinitarian Spirit-Christology the relationship between Jesus and the Spirit in both cases must negotiate the intra-trinitarian relationship between the Son and the Spirit. In other words, Spirit-Christology will include both a filiological and a pneumatological dimension.

• In post-trinitarian Spirit-Christology the relationship between Jesus and the Spirit reconceives the intra-trinitarian distinctions (Son/Spirit language) as referring to the modality of Jesus’ historical revelation of the divine and the Christian experience of the God revealed in Jesus and now present among us.

Therefore,

• Trinitarian Spirit-Christology would answer Dunn’s first question by stating that the Spirit actualizes the incarnation of the divine Son and enables the intensification of Jesus’ Abba relation through the course of his journey from Jordan to Gethsemane to Golgotha.

• Post-trinitarian Spirit-Christology answers this question by stating that Spirit is the presence of God in Jesus that enables authentic revelation along the contours of that same evangelical narrative.

• Trinitarian Spirit-Christology would answer Dunn’s second question by stating that the risen Jesus is present in the Spirit who is poured forth upon the community of faith.

• Post-trinitarian Spirit-Christology answers this question by stating that the presence of God as Spirit has a Christ-character about it that invokes the memory of Jesus.

What is really being controverted in these two positions is the hypostatic rendering of the trinitarian distinctions, or from the point of view of the Christian experience of salvation, what may be termed the inseparability but non-identity between the Christus praesens and the Spiritus praesens. Of course, I am framing the issue from the perspective of the divine economy. From the more classical position, Spirit Christology raises two questions. First, how does one distinguish the christological and pneumatological missions? Second, how does the mission of the Holy Spirit so inform the mission of the Son that we have an authentic Spirit Christology? If we do not adequately answer the first question we inevitably end up with a rather limp pneumatology, and with help from a narrow understanding of the filioque, one that for all intents and purposes is subordinated to Christology.

From the point of view of the Christian experience of salvation, we may query how the agency, identity, and presence of the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit, the Christus praesens and the Spiritus praesens, are to be distinguished within the economy of the triune God. If this cannot be answered—if, for example, the agency of the risen Jesus is subsumed by that of divine Spirit—do we not end up with a binity of divine transcendence and divine immanence as the basic criteria for terms of distinction in God? Or, at the level of the divine economy do we not fall into a modalism of Christ and the Spirit? If this is the case, the irony of post-trinitarian Christology (which I believe succumbs to these charges) for us in the Western Catholic tradition is that, whereas once we tended to instrumentalize the work of the Spirit relative to that of Jesus Christ—the usual charge, we now reverse that process by instrumentalizing the person of Jesus Christ relative to the presence of Spirit. Either way, in my judgment, a truly pneumatological Christology is short-circuited.

Therefore, the first major dogmatic issue to be resolved has to do with the comportment of the terms of Spirit Christology with orthodox Trinitarian dogma, namely, that the christological and pneumatological dimensions of Spirit Christology bespeak the filiological and pneumatological aspects of divine agency and presence. In other words, the distinction but inseparability between the Christus praesens and the Spiritus praesens underscore how the divine persons or hypostases of the Son and Holy Spirit are related to each other in reference to 1) the life, death and resurrection of the incarnate Son, and 2) the presence and agency of the risen and exalted Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. This will resolve the specifically christological issues concerning the person and work of Christ. Second, we then must negotiate the relationship between Christology and speculative trinitarian theology, namely, how the temporal missions and eternal processions of Son and Spirit impact Spirit Christology. Within this horizon I will address what is for some the bane of Spirit Christology relative to the ordering or taxis of the trinitarian persons, namely, the filioque. At that point it will become clear why Spirit Christology complements but does not displace Logos Christology.

I. The Spirit in Jesus

Proceeding from the premises already elucidated Spirit Christology entails the recognition that every aspect of the mystery and work of Jesus Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit. His conception and nativity, viz., Incarnation, his life and ministry, his death and resurrection, viz., the redemption, abide under the agency and work of the Spirit. Indeed, this is the evangelical witness of the New Testament. Jesus is conceived in the womb of Mary when the Holy Spirit comes upon her (Lk 1: 35). According to tradition Mary’s virginity was sustained in the birth of Jesus because, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, “all these things took place miraculously by Divine power” (Summa Theologica III, Q 28, A 2, ad. 3). I will return to the Mariological aspects of Spirit Christology. Jesus grows in wisdom and grace (Lk 2: 52): grace as given by the Spirit—another exposition that I will also engage in. At his baptism the Spirit descends upon Jesus to inaugurate his public mission (Lk 3:22). Thus filled with the Spirit Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert (Lk 4:1) and returns from his temptation in the power of the Spirit (Lk 4:14). His preaching, healings, miracles and exorcisms are accomplished in the power of the Spirit, captured in words of the Matthean Jesus, “But if by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt 12:28). Perhaps Jesus’ Spirit-endowed life and ministry is best summarized in the Johannine statement that he possessed the Spirit without measure (Jn 3:34). This is consistent wi...