The Third Person: A Critique of Trinitarian Systems and Cosmological Footings through the Binitarian Pneumatology of the Early Church

In light of the varying shades and degrees with which early Christians considered the Holy Spirit, we can attend to these as means to answer our animating question: what is the cosmological function of the Third Person. In the most elemental sense, it appears iteratively in early Christian thought, that the Third Person serves as the betwee n in-between God and world.15 Further clarification of this principle relies heavily on suggestive language all of which inevitably leads to further problems: i.e. joint, link, connection, contact, relation, etc. Pneumatology (ancient and modern) has relied heavily on the use of theological terminology such as flow, return, animation, empowerment, inspiration, revelation, presence, indwelling, etc. to describe the Third Person. It is no stretch to say that the use of this language which builds on the spiritual groundwork of ancient Judaism, takes root in early Christian thought and then germinates well into the modern era is based largely on a mysterious faith commitment. This commitment is rooted in a phenomenological religious experience, that leans on a somewhat opaque understanding of the God-world relationship. It is for precisely this reason, that a better understanding of the Third Person is part and parcel to developing a better understanding of the God-world relationship (and vice versa). Suffice to say, that all of these conceptualizations, and experienced realities, are unified by (but not necessarily exhausted by) the ubiquity of the Third Person in relation to the activity of God in the world.

Surely, "the between in-between God and the world" is no less obscure than any other terminology.16 The question "What is the between?" serves as the trajectory for thought beyond this methodological and axiological study.17 Suffice to say, the rest of this analysis will focus primarily on the historical modality of systematic trinitarianism as a methodology, assuming this conclusion about the cosmological function of the Third person in early Christian thought. Notably, the analysis does not seek to undermine the fundamental premises and conclusions of Trinitarian theology, but rather to reinterpret the proper orientation of the trinitarian theological enterprise by building on the phenomenological binitarian orientation of the early Church.

The diversity of pneumatological thought in the works of Early Christians, and the relative absence within rigorous, explicit theological development serves to highlight the mysterious, and yet tacit communal convictions concerning the Third Person. This may be in part due to the fact that Early Christian thought was occupied (rightfully so) by the pressing need for rigorous Christological thought that provided the theological substructure necessary for justifying and preserving the work of Jesus in and through the Church. Before attempting to substantiate anything trinitarian, it is evident why the Church felt the pressing need to focus first on substantiating their binitarian position (read: the fullness of the deity of Jesus). The strange irony inherent to this orientation, is that by possibly disregarding the meticulous development of pneumatology, the church still stood tacitly on an axiomatic, phenomenological foothold from which they were able to precisely develop a genuine and thorough Christian theology via the "presence" of the Third Person.18

footnotes

  1. Amos Yong, The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 76: "Pentecostal Christians, for all their reliance on the apostolic witness to undergird their expectancy of miracles, have not usually noticed that the earlist Christians did not hold similar assumptions regarding a law-governed world. Whereas pentecostal supernaturalism and interventionism contest the naturalistic paradigm, early Christian miracles opposed not naturalism—an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment phenomenon—but pagan magical practices. In other worlds, God's power was not needed to overthrow strictly defined laws of nature (these had not yet been "discovered"), but to expose the futility of pagan magic. More importantly, divinely wrought miracles were evidential not to reveal God as more powerful than the laws of nature, but to highlight God's power vis-à-vis other divine beings believe to populate the ancient world and to validate the ministry of Jesus and produce faith in his announcement of The coming Kingdom." While Yong's critique of pentecostal readings of the early Church is prescient, what is of greater import here is his reframing of phenomenological mode in which the early Church engaged with the question of spiritual activity in the world. That is, as we are here attempting to show how the early Church considered the Spirit a vehicle of divine action in the world it is fundamental to recognize that they were not "supernaturalists" in the ecsatic, mystical way we envision in a post-Enlightenment world; but rather, that the reality of supernatural action in the world would have been considered a less remarkable plausibility. ↩

  2. It is however, arguably more precise, and less encumbered by anthropomorphic connotations ↩

  3. McIntyre, 239f: To suggest just one helpful point of departure along these lines, Mcintyre places the focus on the work of the Spirit as emperichoresis, a logical extension of perichoresis, and rejects the "from above, from below" pneumatological dichotomy: "[...] the fact that the Spirit bears the emperichoretic relation to the Father and the Son in the created world presupposes, for its validity and its very being, the anterior existence of the relation among the three Persons from eternity to eternity. So we have to conclude that the dichotomy between pneumatology from above and pneumatology from below is a false one; they are co-implicatives in so far as each presupposes the other and conditions the other." ↩

  4. Cf. Peerbolte, 9: "[...] it is worth emphasising [sic] again that for Paul the Spirit was far more than a concept—it was the term by which he described the experiential dimension of his theology, a lived reality instead of an abstract concept." Here, Peerbolte interfaces adeptly with the contemporary New Testament studies work of F. F. Bruce and Gordon Fee; in n. 14 Peerbolte gestures to a critique of this vein of late 20th century New Testament historicism that contrours with the basic direction of this analysis: "Even though I consider Fee's book a more than excellent study, I part ways with him when he speaks of the 'Trinitarian presuppositions' to theology and his 'Trinitarian understanding of God' (e.g. 1994:898). The concept of the Trinity is a later, patristic concept, and although Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are of utmost importance to Paul, the usage of this terminology obfuscates rather than clarifies what is happening in Paul," (emphasis added). Significant here, is not the criticism of the Trinitarian systematics, but rather, the complication inherent when appropriating explicit Trintarian systematics in the interpretation of early Christian theology (i.e. scripture). Cf. Elizabeth A. Dreyer, "An Advent of the Spirit: Medieval Mystics and Saints," in Advents of the Spirit: An Introduction to the Current Study of Pneumotology, ed. Bradford E. Hinze and D. Lyle Dabney (Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 2001), 123: "Long before the Spirit was a theme of doctrine, He was a fact in the experience of the community." ↩