The Spirit is the Difference

I came on this passage reading Jenson again today and thought it was too good not to share with you:

In Western theology of the Trinity the Holy Spirit usually comes up short…

When the Holy Spirit who is the unity of the Father and the Son drops out of sight, Christian theology self-destructs into deism or “Jesus hero-worship.”

Without the activity of the Spirit the hermeneutical chain that links us with the mystery of divine salvation in the Word made flesh is broken.

Without the Spirit the Bible is just a book of ancient texts and not the canon of holy Scripture.

Without the Spirit the gospel is only a myth invented by the friends of Jesus to keep a good thing going.

Without the Spirit the church is merely an association of likeminded people who gather from time to time to share religious experiences.

Without the Spirit the sacraments are mere aids to remember what happened once upon a time...¹

That, which Jens co-wrote with Carl Braaten in the mid-90’s, I take to be an homage to this, which Patriarch Ignatius, Metropolitan of Latakia, shared in an address at the Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1968:²

Without the Holy Spirit: 
God is far away,
Christ stays in the past,
the Gospel is a dead letter, 
the Church is simply an organization,
authority is domination,
mission a matter of propaganda,
liturgy no more than an evocation,
and Christian living a slave morality.

But with the Holy Spirit:
the cosmos is resurrected and groans with the birth-pangs of the Kingdom.
the Risen Christ is there, 
the Gospel is the power of life,
the Church shows forth the life of the Trinity,
authority is a liberating service,
mission is a Pentecost,
the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation,
human action is deified.

The Spirit, in other words, does not only make the difference; the Spirit is the difference. We can’t remind ourselves of that truth too often.

1. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds.), Reclaiming the Bible for the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), xii.

2. Quoted in The Uppsala Report (Geneva: WCC, 1969), 298.