C is for Conversation

We are privileged in this Crossings-for-Pentecost to engage in conversation with a long-time partner in the promising tradition of the gospel: Robert Schultz. Bob was a professor at Valparaiso University in the late 1950's together with Bob Bertram, Ed Schroeder and others who were reshaping the theology curriculum into a Crossings/law-gospel curriculum. Schultz is retired now and living in Seattle, Washington but still practicing his faith. He will be a speaker at our Crossings Conference next January, 2007, addressing how the Law/Gospel lens helps the spiritual caretaker.

Hoy: Bob, this is the season of Pentecost when we recall God's gift of the Holy-ing Spirit for the life of the church. What did it mean for the early church to have the Spirit in their midst?

Schultz: The Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit began when the disciples began to differentiate between their memories of the presence of the Christ before and their experience of this presence after the crucifixion. The disciples were defined by their certainty that the Christ lived - some thought the Christ had not died [the early Docetists], others that he did die but had overcome the power of death [the promising tradition]. The presence of the living Christ after the resurrection gradually was described as the presence of the Holy Spirit. This understanding was repeatedly and variously redefined not in terms of the disciples' past but rather of their always changing new experience.

Some described this living presence using analogies based on their experience of Jesus of Nazareth before the crucifixion. Others focused only on the crucified Christ. Always it was the experience of the Christ as alive and working within them. In describing this experience, they often drew on analogies derived from the words in Hebrew [ruach] and Greek [pneuma] interpreted as "wind" and "breath." Parallels to these analogies from other religions abound. Over time, the early church found it helpful to use these terms to speak of the presence of Christ that they experienced in their own lives. The New Testament's differentiation of the various 'gifts of the Spirit' presupposes that some experienced the Spirit differently than others did. Paul emphasized that while the experiences differed, it was the same Spirit. The writers of the New Testament tested a variety of ways of describing the presence of Christ.

Hoy: I appreciate how it is here that you make the connection of the Spirit with the living presence of Christ. It recalls for me at least what we mean when we say that the Spirit comes to us through the means of grace-the means of the gospel-to make our faith alive in the promise of Christ. Yet the Spirit is also regarded in the creeds of the church as the third person of the Trinity. How do you understand that teaching?

Schultz: Some analogies from the early church are well-known: the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that comes to us from the New Testament, the parallel of the early church to complete this more naturally by describing the Holy Spirit as the Mother or as the Love that binds the Father and the Son together, as well as the analogies to a red hot iron, a three-foldness of iron, heat, and light.

Although our experience is not defined or limited by the inadequacy of language, the term 'Spirit' (Holy or not) is rarely used in our language in any appropriate way. In the present, it is difficult to reproduce the Hebrew and Greek associations with "wind" and "breath" or the New Testament associations with "wisdom" [sophia] in the Wisdom literature. We increasingly describe human life in monistic terms and 'spirit' has historical but little contemporary meaning.

All such analogies change in meaning as our understanding of the natural phenomena changes - either enhancing or reducing the usefulness of an analogy. No analogy is exempt either from misinterpretation or reformulation. For example, the ELCA is currently reexamining its creedal language describing the procession - however anyone understands what that means - of the Spirit from the Father or from the Father and the Son. However meaningful this difference in language once was, neither its assertion nor revision can have the same meaning today.