The Holy Spirit as Communion

Colin Gunton’s Pneumatology of Communion and Frank Macchia’s Pneumatology of Koinonia

I. Leon Harris

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781498297493
  9781498297516
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498297509
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In The Holy Spirit as Communion, Leon Harris examines the pneumatologies of Colin Gunton and Frank Macchia. For both theologians, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is foundational to understanding their doctrine of God, Christology, and ecclesiology. Drawing on the theme of communion, The Holy Spirit as Communion expresses the concept that the Holy Spirit is the person who perfects the divine nature and personhood of the Father and Son. It is the Holy Spirit who perfects the eternal communion within the divine Trinity, which is the source of the divine action that also perfects the communion in creation as an expression of the Father's will through Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit as Communion explores the essentiality of the Holy Spirit through a unique approach to Spirit Christology: Gunton is represented by a radicalized version of Chalcedon Christology, and Macchia formulates his account through the overarching metaphor of "Spirit baptism." Therefore, the doctrine of God, Christology, ecclesiology, and eschatology cannot be construed without a proper account of pneumatology that takes into consideration the eschatological perfecting work of the third person of the Trinity--who perfects creation's koinonia as a gift from the Father through the grace of Jesus Christ.

Chapter 1

The Doctrine of God: Being as Being-in-Communion

Introduction

The doctrine of God is that which shapes our understanding of creation itself, and our place within creation; but it also shapes our understanding of Christian theology, especially God’s economic activity. Herman Bavinck says that

the knowledge of God is the only dogma, the exclusive content, of the entire field of dogmatics. All the doctrines treated in dogmatics, whether they concern the universe, humanity, Christ, and so forth, are but the explication of the one central dogma of the knowledge of God. All things are considered in light of God, subsumed under him, traced back to him as the starting point. Dogmatics is always called upon to ponder and describe God and God alone, whose glory is in creation and re-creation, in nature and grace, in the world and in the church. It is the knowledge of him alone that dogmatics must put on display.35

The doctrine of God is a central theme throughout Gunton’s corpus: for if God is the creator of our reality, then it follows that God’s self-revelation of himself should have an impact on how we develop an account of creation itself. The doctrine of God is only possible because of God’s self-disclosure through his acts in creation. This way, what we know about God begins with God’s free will decision to give of himself in revelation to us. Hans Schaeffer’s states, “Colin Gunton’s theology can be summarised as a quest for a Trinitarian ontology.”36 Schaeffer continues his evaluation of Gunton by averring that the doctrine of God serves as the means to evaluate and resolve problems in those earlier accounts of the Trinity which limited the role of the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of God, which really means the doctrine of the Trinity, is that which serves as the relation between God and his creation; we learn about ourselves by learning about God. William Whitney’s survey of Gunton’s doctrine of creation argues “that for Gunton, if one is to understand the triune nature of God, then one must grasp the unity of divine action in the created order, and this includes God’s action in salvation and eschatological perfection.”37

Gunton does not break any new ground regarding our knowledge of God as Father, Son, and Spirit; the tradition of the Church has established the Triune nature of God. For Gunton, it is the understanding of God as triune that gives shape to all Christian theology in such a way that the doctrine of the Trinity has a logical priority in the order of knowing about God and his relation to creation. It is not just the doctrine of the Trinity, but the immanent Trinity that has logical priority. The economic points to the immanent life of God, which in turn has logical priority over the development of the rest of Christian doctrine. Gunton says that “because God is, ‘before’ creation took place, already a being-in-relation, there is no need for him to create what is other than himself.”38 The economic activity of God reveals that God is a being-in-relation, and this must have decisive bearing on theology. Gunton says that “it is the Incarnation that determines both the reality and the limits of the knowledge of God. Therefore, we must accept that the limits to the knowledge of God are set Christologically, not philosophically.”39

The doctrine of God has logical priority in Christian theology because God is the basis of creation’s existence. Since God is the basis of creation’s being, there should be some indication within creation of its Creator: “or said another way, who God is in his movement and relations towards the created order is who God is in his eternal being.”40 For Gunton, the relations between the infinite and the finite are to be found in his concept of “open transcendentals.” Gunton states that,

the error of imposing a priori philosophical categories on the being of God must also be avoided. If there are transcendentals, they have their being in the fact that God has created the world in such a way that it bears the marks of its maker. They are not then the “forms through which being displays itself,” because that might suggest a priority of “being” over God, but notions which can be predicated of all beings by virtue of the fact that God is creator and the world is creation.41

The doctrine of God has priority because the divine transcendentals are conceived by Gunton as a means of relating God to his creation—eternity meets time, infinity meets the finite. What we know about God is revealed in history through God’s action in the incarnation, but once that knowledge is apprehended, then Christian theology can develop a systematic approach that is grounded in the revelation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. Gunton says that “we cannot say it too often: Genesis presents an account of the knowledge of God the creator, not by negation but by affirmation of his power and absolute creativity, incomparable with anything attributed to the pagan gods.”42 God reveals himself not in creation, but within his economic acts of creation. Irenaeus, to whom Gunton repeatedly returns, says, “there is one only God, the Creator . . . he is Father, he is God, he the Founder, he the Maker, he the Creator, who made those things by himself, that is, through his Word and his Wisdom—heaven and earth, and the seas, and all things that are in them . . . he is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”43 Gunton interprets Irenaeus to be determining God’s attributes by reference to his act of creation, instead of philosophical speculation alone. It is the divine action of God that determines our way of being, and which in turn determines our understanding of God. Gunton says,

Barth’s project to bring revelation and being together is an implicit, and often explicit, reproach to much of the tradition. It establishes an important principle: that treatments of the being or essence of God must be trinitarian from the outset and that it must be trinitarianism which is based in, and a drawing out of the implications of, the economic Trinity: of how God reveals himself to be in the narratively identified economy of creation, reconciliation and redemption.44

So, it is God’s acts in creation that determine our knowledge of God, because God’s essence cannot be separated from his enacted being. Barth states,

but we have consistently followed the rule, which we regard as basic, that statements about the divine modes of being antecedently in themselves cannot be different in content from those that are to be made about their reality in revelation. All our statements concerning what is called the immanent Trinity have been reached simply as confirmations or underlinings or, materially, as the indispensable premises of the economic Trinity. They neither could nor would say anything other than that we must abide by the distinction and unity of the modes of being in God as they encounter us according to the witness of Scripture in the reality of God in His revelation. The reality of God in His revelation cannot be bracketed by an “only,” as though somewhere behind His revelation there stood another reality of God; the reality of God which encounters us in His revelation is His reality in all the depths of eternity. This is why we have to take it so seriously precisely in His revelation.45

John McIntyre explains Barth at this juncture by saying that “a right understanding of the elements of the doctrine of the economi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Colin Gunton: Pneumatology as Recovery of Relationality
• Chapter 1: The Doctrine of God: Being as Being-in-Communion
• Chapter 2: Pneumatology of Communion: Particularity as Being-in-Relation
• Chapter 3: A Pneumatological Christology
• Chapter 4: Ecclesiology: The Church as Pneumatic Community
• Frank D. Macchia: Pneumatology as Justification
• Chapter 5: Toward a Spirit-Baptized Ecclesiology
• Chapter 6: Christology: Christ as the Spirit Baptizer
• Chapter 7: Pneumatology as Baptism in the Spirit
• Chapter 8: Doctrine of God—The Spirit-Baptized Divine Life
• Conclusion
• Bibliography