Receiver, Bearer, and Giver of God's Spirit

Jesus' Life in the Spirit as a Lens for Theology and Life

Sánchez M.

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498227629
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What difference does the Spirit make in the life of Jesus and in our lives? Answering that question without doing away with the divine dignity of Christ has been a challenge in the distant and recent past. But this need not be the case. The current work is a contribution to the growing field of Spirit Christology, which seeks to enrich the classic Logos Christology of the ecumenical Councils with a Spirit-oriented trajectory. Sanchez tests the productivity of a Spirit Christology as a theological lens for assessing the main events of Jesus' life and mission, accounts of the atonement, the significance of the incarnation, the concepts of person and relation, and models of the Trinity. Seeing Christ as the privileged locus of the Spirit also has implications for the church's life in the Spirit. Sanchez shows how a Spirit Christology fosters Christian practices such as proclamation, prayer, and sanctification. Among the highlights of this work the reader will note the author's assessment of early church fathers' readings of the place of the Spirit in the anointing of Jesus, a constructive proposal towards the complementarity of Logos and Spirit Christologies, ecumenical engagement with various theological traditions in the East and the West, and the first constructive assessment of the field informed by the Lutheran tradition.

1

The Eclipse and Promise of Spirit-Oriented Christologies

Early Church Responses to Heterodox Views of Jesus’ Anointing

In this chapter, I show how three classic orthodox reactions to heterodox views of the baptism of Jesus paved the way for church theologians to defend his divine preexistence and incarnation to the extent that in some cases the place of the Spirit of God in his human life and mission became only revelatory for others but not constitutive for himself. These responses represent foundational arguments for, and at times influential instances of, a broader problem in the history of dogma, namely, the partial but significant eclipse of the pneumatological (and thus economic-Trinitarian) dimensions of Christology. In some cases, however, these responses also offer promising insights towards an inclusion of the Spirit in the mystery of Christ.

In his treatise on the baptism of Christ, Cantalamesa argues that the rise of Gnostic, Arian, and “adoptionist” (more specifically, Samosatenian) views of the relationship between Jesus and the Holy Spirit contributed to a weakening of the pneumatic aspects of Christology.1 His comments serve as an instructive guide and point of departure to pursue the causes for the partial eclipse of Spirit-oriented Christology in the early church:

In the Gnostic view, Jesus was one person and the Christ another: Jesus denoted the man born of Mary, whereas Christ denoted the deity that descended on Jesus at the moment of baptism. Thus the baptism came to negate the reality of the incarnation and this could not but give rise to a strong reaction on the part of the Church. Other heresies came later to reinforce the reasons for “discrediting” the baptism of Jesus: Arianism used Jesus’ baptism as a pretext for asserting that if any change occurred in Jesus at the moment of baptism, this meant that he was subject to change and therefore not a changeless God like the Father; the adoptionism of Paul of Samosata made Christ’s actual divinity depend on the coming of the Holy Spirit, as though Jesus were one of the prophets, though certainly the holiest one, in whom the power of God had worked.2

At a methodological level, Cantalamesa proposes that Jesus’ baptism serves as a fruitful locus to investigate and analyze heteredox views of Jesus Christ’s identity and orthodox reactions to the same. Following the lead of this patristic scholar, I elaborate further on Christian responses to a Jewish question, Gnostic views (at times combined with Ebionite elements), and Arian theology.3 All these responses deal to a significant degree with the issue of the proper use of biblical texts pointing directly or indirectly to the anointing of Christ at the Jordan.

First, I look at the arguments of the Christian philosopher Justin Martyr (ca. 100–ca. 165) in his Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew, an apology on the Old Testament’s witness to Christ’s messiahship and divinity. Second, I study the major extant apologetic work of Irenaeus (ca. 130–ca. 200), bishop of Lyons (beginning ca. 177), namely, his extensive refutation of various Gnostic systems entitled Against Heresies (written between ca. 182 and 188). Finally, I deal with one of the most significant and mature works of Athanasius (ca. 296–373), bishop of Alexandria (beginning in 328), namely, his first of four Discourses Against the Arians (written between ca. 356 and 360).

The reason for exploring these particular patristic sources lies in the conviction that any proposal for a Spirit-oriented Christology today must learn from history, especially from dangers inherent in adoptionist Christologies. In general terms, adoptionism sees Jesus as a mere man made worthy of sonship and/or elected by God to be his son by the grace or indwelling of the Spirit in him.4 The problem of Jesus’ preexistence and divinity becomes irrelevant, meaningless, or simply denied. Of those mentioned in our study, Trypho, Cerinthus (a Gnostic with Ebionite leanings), and the followers of Arius represent the adoptionist principle in various ways. Indeed, an in-depth examination of post-Niceno-Constantinopolitan adoptionist Christologies in their complete historical development and as a dogmatic problem needs more elaboration and precision than this chapter requires. Such a study would have to include, for example, the problem of Nestorianism5 and the Spanish adoptionism of the late eighth century.6 Here I am only interested in three early heterodox views of Jesus’ reception of the Spirit at his baptism that called forth some alternative explanations from the orthodox for the first time in the history of dogma. I focus on the orthodox responses as such, leaving the issue of their accurate portrayal of the heterodox positions to other scholars. It is the relatively distinct, articulate, and lengthy answers of the orthodox to the controversies at hand that provide hermeneutical building blocks for the church’s later judgment on similar issues.

The Jordan Reveals the Son’s Eternal Anointing: Justin Martyr’s Answer to Trypho

Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho is of great significance in the history of dogma for later reflection on Jesus’ baptism in the face of threats to his messianic claims and divine preexistence. He gives us a key second-century response to a question concerning the appropriate manner to reconcile belief in Christ’s preexistence with his reception of the Spirit’s gifts as cited in Isaiah 11:1ff. Concerning Christ, Trypho asks how

He can be demonstrated to have been pre-existent, who is filled with the powers of the Holy Ghost . . . as if He were in lack of them?7

Justin answers that Christ did not need the anointing for himself, but rather was anointed for our knowledge of his messianic or divine power. Indeed, if Jesus is God from eternity and then also from the first moment of birth (as incarnate God), what could he possibly need for himself from the Spirit (even in his humanity) that he does not already have? Instead, Justin focuses on the pretemporal anointing of Christ as God in view of his creation of the world (cosmic anointing) or his messianic fulfillment of the offices of priest, king, and prophet (titular anointing). Divine preexistence and messiahship become intrinsically related realities that converge under Christ’s eternal anointing as God and are thus grounded in the Logos’s eternal divine being from God the Father. Justin’s teaching on the cosmic and titular functions of Christ’s eternal anointing eclipses in some measure the unique significance of God’s historical anointing of Jesus with the Spirit for his messianic mission at the Jordan. As a result, Jesus’ baptism mainly reveals to or for others the saving knowledge of his prior ontological identity as Christ or Messiah (= God). A partial eclipse of the pneumatological dimension of Christology occurs.

Let us look at the development of Justin’s arguments more closely. Prior to Trypho’s question above, Ju...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Eclipse and Promise of Spirit-Oriented Christologies
• Chapter 2: Reading the Story of Jesus as Receiver and Bearer of God’s Spirit
• Chapter 3: Reading the Story of Jesus as Giver of God’s Spirit
• Chapter 4: The Joint Mission of the Son and the Spirit
• Chapter 5: The Son’s Eternal Life in the Spirit
• Chapter 6: The Holy Spirit in the Incarnate Logos
• Chapter 7: Preaching Jesus in the Spirit
• Chapter 8: Praying to the Father in the Spirit
• Chapter 9: Living in the Spirit of Christ
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Bibliography