Vinculum Amoris: A Theology of the Holy Spirit

Vinculum Amoris

A Theology of the Holy Spirit

All Rights Reserved © 2004 by David T Williams

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Contents

Preface

1: Bond of love

2: Picturing the bond

3: Enacting the bond

4: Internalising the bond

5: Symbolising the bond

6: Sign of the bond

7: Expressing the bond

8: Relaxing the bond

9: Extending the bond

10: The crystallized bond

11: Fulfilling the bond

12: The benediction of the bond

13: Ministering the bond

Sources cited

Preface 

It is common, at the start of a book, to describe how it came into being, whether as a result of an invitation to lecture, or as an expansion of a course given to students. Very often an author describes the long process by which the work came into being. What is surely essential is to present a valid apology for adding yet another book to the rapidly growing number in the world today!

So why this one? Its genesis, as any bit of theology, must lie in experience. The author came to southern Africa as a missionary in the early 1970’s, abandoning a career in engineering in Britain for the mission field, albeit initially as a science teacher. Such a move, from many perspectives, was totally idiotic, involving the giving up of the security of a well-paid job, the closeness of family, a known culture and many other attractive features. Then repeatedly over the last thirty years has come the thought of returning, an option which has become increasingly less viable, yet never impossible, and still attractive. What has caused the writer to stick is a sense of calling, of irresistibility, of compulsion. It is no accident that he did his doctoral thesis on the call of Jeremiah!

Such compulsion must be the work of the Holy Spirit, bonding to this role. Over the years, the conviction has then grown that this bonding is characteristic of what the Spirit does, and that this is not simply an isolated experience, but that bonding is the key to understanding what the Spirit does, that he can in fact be appropriately described, in the words of that great African of old, Augustine of Hippo, as vinculum amoris, bond of love.

The compulsion of the Spirit led from science teaching in Swaziland to ministry in the townships of the South African port city of Durban, and, after a period in the pastoral ministry, to lecturing in systematic theology at the university of Fort Hare in South Africa, famous as the home of so many of Africa’s leaders, notably Nelson Mandela. Each step paved the way for the next; each was compelled by the vinculum amoris. Not that this was in any sense a result of a deterministic inevitability, but a yielding to his pressure, and an awareness that in obedience would come peace and fulfilment, which has been the case.

University lecturing has been a tremendous privilege, giving the opportunity to touch the lives of so many yielding in their turn to the pressure of the vinculum, mainly on their way to the Christian ministry. It has also provided the opportunity to yield to the Spirit in many other ways as well, giving access to schools and prisons and the opportunity to share the riches of Christ with a needy world. It has also given the opportunity to reflect on theology and to write, which is indeed expected of a lecturer. There has been no lack of inspiration about the topic for research! So much still needs to be thought through in the riches of the gospel message; and one of those areas is just this, the vinculum amoris.

It is understandable that the university, as a state institution, is not so much interested in research done out of a personal interest as that which has social significance. Here the author is particularly fortunate in that the last century, and particularly the later part of it, witnessed tremendous changes in the Christian Church, one of which stems from the growth of Pentecostalism and later related movements. Whereas it would have been difficult to justify writing on what has been termed the shy or neglected Person of the Trinity, that is hardly still the case. Nevertheless what has been a feature of Pentecostalism is its general lack of interest in theology, concentrating, understandably enough, on the group of unique experiences associated with it, especially, of course, on glossolalia, speaking in tongues. Thus although there have been a number of recent theologies of the Spirit, the subject is still largely neglected. As recently as 1969, James (1969:16) could complain that there had been no great work on the Spirit since that of Owen in 1674. There is ample room for this book, especially in its attempt to write a more systematic work on the subject around an underlying concept, namely that of the Spirit as vinculum amoris. This gives a framework to understand all of what he does in the Church, and through it, in the world as a whole. The stress will fall on the first word, not the second, important though that is, and characteristic of the Spirit. I am immediately reminded of many who have thought of the Spirit in these terms, such as a South African colleague, Brian Gaybba, who developed his university course into a book aptly titled The Spirit of Love (Gaybba 1987), or a more recent work from Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love: a theology of the Holy Spirit (Pinnock 1996). I have however sought to concentrate on what the Spirit does, and it seems to me that this can mainly be related to the first word, vinculum, or bond.

I am naturally grateful to the university in its provision of the backing needed for writing this book, such as library and computer facilities, and especially for the time that has been available. I am grateful above all for the inspiration of the Spirit, acting as vinculum amoris and linking me to the source of wisdom himself. This is no idle acknowledgement, for just as in the matter of leading, I have had a consciousness of his promptings and enabling. I have also been increasingly aware that the Spirit prefers to work through human agency, and so I must also acknowledge the part that my students have played in the development of the theology of this book, whether consciously or not. Certainly many ideas have emerged in the course of lectures and discussions which have found their way into these pages. Acknowledgement is also due to Koers, South African Baptist Journal of Theology and to Theologia Viatorum for material which first appeared in those journals.

Of course almost nobody writes just for the pleasure of the process, even if that in itself is a rewarding reality, but that others will benefit from the result. This is my prayer, and with it comes the request that as my readers are also guided by the Spirit, that this book may be only a step on the way towards a fuller understanding of the one who has indeed been sorely neglected. And may this be a step along the wider path.

The theologians of old used to speak of theology as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. My prayer, in an increasingly Godless world, is that this understanding may result in increased faith, and so obedience to the prompting of him who I love to describe as:

VINCULUM AMORIS

1: Bond of love 

The action of the Spirit

The last century has witnessed a concentration on the Person and work of the Holy Spirit, sparked off by the events at Azusa street in Los Angeles in the early years of the twentieth century. These resulted in the emergence and development of the Pentecostal denominations. The particular feature of this was the practice of the gifts, the charismata, the practice of phenomena described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, and in Acts 2; such as prophecy, healing and particularly glossolalia, speaking in tongues, became a central feature of Christian life and worship in these groups. Later, in the nineteen-sixties, there was a further development, commonly known as the charismatic movement, sometimes as the Renewal, or by some other name. The practice of the gifts was again central. Unlike the older Pentecostalism, followers of this movement tended to remain within their denominations, and often intended to renew them from within. These movements had a pronounced effect on the Church as a whole, not least because they now account for about a quarter of all Christians (Hummel 1993:290). Their influence is seen particularly in the style of worship, as there was an explosion of new songs in a much more contemporary form than the traditional hymns. Today, the emphasis continues, with a third wave, again emphasising the practice of the charismata, but as in original Pentecostalism, again forming separate churches and denominations. Christian centres and groups such as His People, and the Rhema church emerged in this way. However, even after a century, there are still many who believe that the gifts ceased with the end of the apostolic era, often with the availability of the written scriptures (cf Gaffin 1996). They feel, sometimes with good reason, that what is ascribed to the Holy Spirit is attributable to psychological effects, or is even demonic. Nevertheless, what is clear is that even if much of what is attributed to the Spirit is spurious, or has other causes, the Spirit has come into theological prominence, and with it, a renewed interest in the Trinity.

This is not to say that there was no interest in the Spirit in the previous nineteen centuries. There have been times of intense interest; an early example was the Montanism of the third century, which was even able to attract one of the sharpest Christian minds of the time, one who provided a basic framework for the western understanding of the Trinity, and much of its terminology, the lawyer Tertullian. A further example, often overlooked, but very significant, is that Calvin is sometimes known as the theologian of the Holy Spirit (Ferguson 1996:12,96); he found in the work of the Spirit the key to his understanding of several aspects of Christian theology. Less theologically, but probably with more impact, the charismata emerged now and again, such as in Irvingism.

Nevertheless, the startling thing was that after the dramatic experiences recorded in the book of Acts, and the obvious clear manifestations of the Spirit in several of the New Testament churches, such as Galatia (Gal 3:2), and especially in Corinth, where the charismata would seem to have been one of the foci of dispute in the church of the city, concern with the Spirit seems to have rapidly faded. As early as the Apostles’ creed, its formulators seemed content to merely affirm belief, and in the Holy Spirit, even if the articles of belief following it can justly be seen to fall under this as a heading, rather than as separate and distinct doctrines. The next major creed, the Nicene, which comes to us in its development at the council of Constantinople in 381 AD, does expand the basic affirmation considerably:

we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified together, who spoke through the prophets.

Hendry (1965:37) comments on the over-definition of Christ, but the under-def-inition of the Spirit.

The Council of Constantinople was the body which finally brought the Arian controversy to a close, and once and for all affirmed the equality of the Father and the Son. The affirmation that the creed made about the Spirit could well be understood as coming from a determination to avoid any similar subordination of the Spirit to the other two Persons. It is however still sometimes suspected that the belief in the full divinity of the Spirit crept into Christian orthodoxy without real justification, on the back of the affirmations about the Son. Certainly even the impeccably Nicene theologian Basil could not really bring himself to refer to the Spirit as homoousios with the other two Persons (Mackey 1983:150), preferring homotimos (of equal honour) or homodoxos (of equal glory). Possibly he saw homoousios as too connected with generation (Studer 1993:109), but perhaps more likely, for him substance was not ontological (Zizioulas 1985:134). In contrast, Gregory of Nazianzus clearly referred to the Holy Spirit both as theos and as homoousios (Torrance 1996:177), but he had to admit that the Scripture did not very clearly or very often call him God in so many words (Erickson 1995:88).

Much later came the controversy concerning the Spirit which led to the great schism between East and West in 1054 AD, a break yet unhealed. Western theology accepts the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, but also from the Son (filioque), a phrase unilaterally added to the Nicene creed. For a good discussion of the development of the controversy, and of the details of the differences in belief, see Forte (1989:122f), or Congar (1983). Vischer (1981) gives a good reflection on the modern state of discussion. Eastern theology thus prefers to speak of procession from the Father through the Son, believing that the West teaches that there are effectively two Fathers. While for the West, the Son is active in the procession of the Spirit, for the East, he is passive. The East insists that the sending of the Spirit was indeed by the Son (as Jn 15:26), but denies that this is a procession from the second Person, referring it only to the origin of the Spirit in the world (Gaybba 1987:73). It fears a merging of the first two Persons (cfWare 1964:221), particularly as the West sees the procession from Father and Son as from one principle (Congar 1983:120, 185), signified by the Latin-que, rather than et filio. At the same time, whereas the West saw the filioque as strengthening the unity of God, the East rather saw it as dividing the Persons, because in order to be distinct Persons, not distinguished in their production of the Spirit, the Father and Son had to be different (Gaybba 1987:126). The Eastern position gives rise to a suspicion of subordination by the West, and perhaps even of some similarity to the material creation which is also from the Father through the Son. It may also be taken to imply that a person can have access to the Father only through the Spirit, thus devaluing the work of the Son, a danger which Bray (1998:419) feels is perhaps present in some modern charismatic groups.

The doctrine of the Spirit is thus so vital that disagreement on it resulted in such a tremendous effect, the division of what had been effectively one Church into two. After all the fighting about the Trinity and the Person of Christ, and other issues which had seemed so divisive, it was this that had such an effect. Ferguson (1996:96) then interestingly adds that it was in fact the idea of the Spirit that also lay at the heart of the second big schism at the Reformation, where the division concerned how the work of Christ was applied to the believer by the Spirit. The understanding of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Church is the root of divisions in the Western Church (Hendry 1965:14).

But what may be asked is how far all this theology was really part of the life and experience of the ordinary Christian. This does not mean that it is irrelevant; Athanasius was so determined to uphold the full divinity of the Son that he was prepared to suffer, even being exiled five times for what many today would feel is an insignificant detail of faith. Yet, as he so rightly realised, if Christ is not fully divine (and, incidentally, also fully human, an issue which inevitably broke out after the end of the Arian controversy), then salvation is not possible. And then as he also realised all too well, the same argument applies also to the Spirit, for if he applies the work of Christ to believers, imparting the very life of God so that they might receive eternal life, then he too must be fully divine. His acceptance of the full divinity of the Spirit was however probably more influenced by the so-called liturgical texts, Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 13:14. As these put the three Persons together, then they should be totally equal.

Western theology, much more than that in the eastern Church, has concentrated on the Person and work of the Son. Again, part of the reason for this is that it has not been obvious what the role and function of the Spirit is. Indeed, by the very nature of spirit, there is a hiddenness. It is however, the burden of this little book that an fuller understanding of the Spirit is beneficial to Christian theology, and then to Christian life. It is vital both for individual Christians and for the Church to be more aware of the Spirit and his work (Strauss 1954:12). Indeed, without the active presence of the Spirit of God there must be a desperate vacuum at the heart of Christian life (Heron 1983:107). James Denney aptly wrote, to understand what is meant by the Spirit is to understand these two things—the N.T. and the Christian Church" (Johnston 1970:127). No small part of the reason for the lack of emphasis that the Spirit should have, and so of his contribution to Christian life, is a lack of understanding of what the Spirit does, based in part not only on wilful neglect, but on the difficulty ofconceptual-ising his nature (Hendry 1965:11). As will be seen, the Spirit largely works through human agency, but that working is never forced. It is a synergy, a cooperation between God and the human agent, even as Jesus himself was God come in the flesh (cf Ferguson 1996:124). What this however means is that the full effect of God’s actions depend on human cooperation, which itself means that it will be most effective the more the people through whom the Spirit acts understand who he is and the nature of his workings. While the Spirit only works by the Church, the Church finds itself impotent without him. The power of God is often not utilised fully, just because it is not appreciated as it should be.

I have elsewhere (Williams 2003a) tried to address one part of the problem by looking at the ways in which the Bible pictures the Person of the Spirit, and by suggesting some further metaphors, some from the modern world. Because of the nature of the Spirit, He can only be described in terms of metaphor (Taylor 1972:7). Here I want to turn to the work of the Spirit, and again it will very often be necessary to work in terms of pictures.

The work of the Spirit

What does the Spirit do? The most obvious answer is to empower. Taylor (1972:3) commences his well-known book The Go-between God by noting that it is the Holy Spirit who is the chief actor in the mission of the Church, lamenting that modern Christians have often forgotten that, an omission that has bedevilled the practice and theology of our mission. It is the rediscovery of this aspect which has then been so significant in the modern movements (Williams 1971:19). Spirit and power are often interchangeable in the Bible (Fee 1984:35). At his ascension, Jesus told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they received power from on high (Lk 24:46). That was advice that they were only to ready to follow, for they were frightened, and justifiably so, for they had seen what had happened to their Lord, and even though they had seen the apparent defeat of the cross be turned around to the victory of the resurrection, they were naturally not too eager to experience those events themselves. They knew full well that in themselves they just did not have the power to stand, let alone to proclaim the message of what Jesus had done. The whole situation was turned around by the events of the day of Pentecost, when they were transformed when the Spirit indeed descended with the phenomena of wind and fire, and they emerged from the upper room to speak to the world in the power of God. So powerful was this that three thousand were added to the Church on that one day.

The same scenario is presented by Paul in his great outworking of Christian theology in the book of Romans. He first describes the absolute inability of human beings to save themselves, that salvation is absolutely a gift of God, sola gratia, as the later Reformers were fond of saying. When it comes to salvation, people are impotent, and the reason is clear, sins have separated people from the ultimate source of life, only God himself, and so death, in the fullest sense, is inevitable. The having described the means of salvation, Paul turns to an intimately connected theme, the absolute inability of people to obey God, even when, as the Jews, they know full well what he wants.

It is then one of the most exciting parts of the Bible to read about the depths of depression and impotence of Romans 7, but to emerge into the victory of Romans 8. The reason for the difference is clear. Up to the end of Romans 7 there is no mention of the Spirit, but the eighth chapter is full of him. It is by his empowering that the Christian is enabled to be obedient to God, and only though that.

A little less clearly, exactly the same is affirmed even about Jesus himself, an affirmation that is extremely helpful to Christians, for even in the case of Jesus himself, his power did not come from the fact that he was the incarnate Son of God, but from the Holy Spirit (Storms 1996:307), who came upon him in a visible form at his baptism. In fact, of course, even the incarnation, the very being of Christ, was through the Spirit (Turner 1996:27). This means, most wonderfully, that the same power that enabled Jesus both to do miracles and to lead a sinless life is available to every Christian. Torrey insists that Jesus was subject to the same conditions as other people (Pytches 1985:49). Ferguson (1996:37) quotes Kuyper, the Church has never sufficiently confessed the influence the Holy Spirit exerted upon the work of Christ.

It is one thing to affirm that the power of God is available to Christians as it was to Christ himself, but it may then be asked how that power is available; what is the mechanism by which the Spirit does this? God is ultimately the source of all power, as he is the ultimate source of life; all that we have comes from him as a gift of grace through the Holy Spirit. But how does the Spirit do it?

Perhaps the most obvious answer is that God creates it. Just as power itself, and even life belong only to God, so creation is something that only he can do. There is an ancient tradition that connects creation with the Spirit, who was indeed present at the primeval event, brooding over the deep. Gaybba (1987:10) refers to the ancient Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, but notes that the association of creation with the Spirit is not stressed in the Bible. He concludes that there are no unambiguous references to the Spirit as the creator of the world. He very rightly stresses that the Spirit deals with people, and only through them on the world. The very few references that explicitly relate creation to the Spirit (Gen 1:2, Ps 33:6, 104:30 and Job 33:4) may all be naturally understood not in the sense of absolute creating, but rather of the creation of life. At the creation of the first human being, God breathed into the mouth of the clay figure that he had made, and it lived (Gen 2:7). The Hebrew word ruach spirit is not present in the text, neither is the Greek equivalent, pneuma, in the Septuagint translation, which uses pnoe, breath, even if most see in this act of breathing an allusion to the Spirit. Nevertheless, the point is that the Spirit does not create, and so equally he does not create power in the human being. David sings in his agony of repentance after his crimes with Uriah and his wife Bathsheba, create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and do not take your Holy Spirit from me (Ps 51:10). The language is clear; the Spirit may well empower, but he does not create. Indeed the New Testament, perhaps surprisingly, rather attributes creation to the second Person, and not even to the first (1 Cor 8:6). Hendry (1965:23) describes the work of the Spirit as remembrancing, not innovating.

The second obvious answer to what the Spirit does is of transformation, that the Spirit changes or enhances ordinary human attributes, thereby empowering. In particular, the Spirit is traditionally associated with sanctification. Again, however, this may be questioned, as again, transformation is attributed to the Son. we await a Saviour, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body (Phil 3:20), although this is by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself.

A third role is that of motivation. The Spirit is the one who implants in the Christian the desire to serve God and the details of how this is done. Indeed, the idea of the spirit of a human individual may well be understood in terms of desire and motivation; the Spirit then acts on this spirit, conforming it to God (Ez 36:27). One of the most astounding things about Christianity is that it is not, as often thought, a set of ethical rules, but that its ethics come as an internalised result of the transformation to God that is its central feature. This makes an immediate connection with ethics, and indeed there has at times been a tendency to reduce the Spirit just to morals (Heron 1983:112). This of course tends to make the Spirit impersonal, which has also been a recurring deviation from traditional Christianity. On the contrary, the Spirit is emphatically a Person, the third in the Trinity, who then transforms our spirits.

There is however a further possibility, which may be understood as underpinning those of motivation, transformation and empowering. This is that the essential function of the Spirit is to bond, or to relate. It is this which may well contribute to a deeper understanding of the Spirit; as Williams (1971:39) confesses, it is often hard to fit him into traditional theologies. Augustine’s understanding was that the Holy Spirit was the vinculum amoris, bond of love, linking together the first and second Persons of the Trinity. The Spirit then acts in a similar way in bonding the divine and human natures in Christ.

It has frequently been noted that the Spirit is commonly connected with escha-tology (eg Fee 1994:803f, who sees this as one of his main characteristics; he contrasts the centrality of eschatology in the early Church with its general irrelevance today). Gaffin (1965:29) also notes this point. Thus his coming at Pentecost was a sign of the last days, and his gifts are first-fruits of the abundance of the future life. By the reality experienced in the present, the Spirit gives a yearning for the future (Williams 1971:11). This aspect can be understood in the same way, as the Spirit relating to the future, in effect giving a link to it. This is similar to the fact that he links the Christian to the past events of the cross and resurrection, so enabling salvation. Taylor (1972:80) then says that by the Spirit we enter the Eternal Now.

The Spirit relates

In this case, what may be suggested is that the Spirit not only links within the Godhead, but that this fundamental function of bonding is applied also to humanity. Thus empowerment is possible just because the Spirit links a person to the ultimate source of power. Salvation is possible because the Spirit links the Christian to the ultimate source of life. Christ transforms the Christian only through the relationship that the Spirit gives. The Spirit links the head to the body in the Church (Smail 1975:76). Christians then do the work of Christ in the world, as they are related to him. They do his work of prophet, priest and king, as they enlighten, sanctify and strengthen, aspects traditionally predicated of the Spirit (Murray 1963:113), but who acts through Christians. Citing the opening of book 3 of Calvin’s Institutes, Ferguson (1996:100) can therefore point out that the idea of union with Christ is at the heart of evangelical theology. The Heidelberg catechism states that the Spirit is also given me, to make me, by a true faith, partaker of Christ and all his benefits (in Lederle 1988:239). The expression in Christ, or its variants, is so significant that it occurs over 160 times in the New Testament (Ferguson 1996:100). Christianity must, by its very name, be Christocentric, and any stress on the work of the Spirit must never replace this. Hendry (1965:41) fears a spiritualist heresy, a slide into mere religiosity. He (1965:68) adds that there can be an unfortunate tendency to sever the Spirit from Christ in Pentecostalism.

In other words, the Spirit generates relationship. The very fact that the Spirit glorifies Christ (Jn 16:14) gives a clue to understanding him, for he relates us to Christ. It is this that lies behind the frequent Pauline interchange of spirit and Christ (cf Robinson 1930:238). Heron (1983:31f) discusses the Biblical usage of the words commonly translated spirit and observes that the Greek pneuma had become conformed to the Hebrew ruach as applying both to God and to man, and so operate as a linking term between them (1983:33). The Spirit is the usual channel of communication between God and people in the Old Testament (Turner 1996:6), a current of communication (Taylor 1972:17). It is hardly surprising that relating to God is fundamental to eternal life. After all, very existence, and particularly life, is only possible in the context of a net of interdependent relationships. Interestingly, circulation, which is the means of the interrelation of the organs of a body, is the first thing to develop in a foetus. It is also significant that brain processes are a result simply of the interaction of the neurons, never of one alone. Relation is even fundamental to the material world. Nothing, except God, exists independently; he alone has aseity, existence from himself. Continued attempts to explain the existence of the world and of life without any reference to God, by some form of spontaneous creation (cf Davies 1984), have so far proved fruitless. Many feel that the world can only be explained by means of its relation to a creator. The one way nature of time, and the increase of entropy (the measure of the move from order to chaos which is characteristic of the world), supports such a view, although of course cannot prove it. This is particularly the case for life, which the Bible portrays as being totally dependent upon God for its origin. The Genesis account tells how the first man was formed from the dust of the ground (Gen 2:6), but who only then lived when God breathed into him the breath of life. The same is true elsewhere, as in Ezekiel 37, where the breath or wind is the same word as translated elsewhere as spirit. The essential idea here is that life is only possible by the action of God. The Spirit generates, or creates, the relations which are the essence of life. Indeed, the very picture of wind, which is the basic understanding of ruach (Heron 1983:4) must be essentially relational, as it is physically generated from the relation between areas of high and low pressure.

It is certainly true that things actually only exist in relationship to other things. Buber, in his classic I and Thou, treats relationship as foundational to being, a mould for the soul (Milandri 2001:174). He writes, in the beginning was relation (Moltmann 1985:11). It has been a modern realisation that a person is only such by relating to others, a particular emphasis of the African world-view, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through people, or as Mbiti formulates the same idea, I am because we are. Such thinking is a welcome corrective to Western over-individualism. This is also true of the individual, who only exists as a living being because of the fundamental inter-relating of the various components of the body. The same is however also true of the very nature of things, which only exist because their components have a particular relationship to each other. On the macro level, a car cannot really be called a car if it has been reduced to its components, and on the micro level, even an atom loses its specific identity if its protons and electrons stop relating to each other. Indeed, it has often been observed that the teleological argument for the existence of God, the argument from design that was popularised by the example of Paley’s watch, in fact reduces to the cosmological argument, simply because order and design are absolutely essential for existence.

Zizioulas (1985:29) suggests that the principle of relation is inherent to ancient Greek philosophy, seeing that it saw an inherent unity in all things due to this relationship and common origin; this means that every differentiation towards individualism is a move towards non-being. Perhaps significantly, the excessive individualism which has characterised recent western thought has found a reaction in this monism, manifesting such as in New Age philosophy. The genius of Christianity is to hold both poles together especially in its understanding of the Trinity, but also in its view of the world, and especially in that of humanity in imago Dei, in which, therefore, unitative relationship that does not destroy difference is fundamental.

Relation is foundational even to God. Different sets of relationships are what distinguishes the Persons of the Trinity, as Augustine realised, so it is a stress on relationship that gives a solution to the problem of understanding the Trinity consistent with the Biblical material. This follows from the nature of God as spirit (Jn 4:24), so totally immaterial. Dunn (1975:353) suggests that these words are not a description of the being of God, citing 1 John 4:8,16 God is love, and 1:5 God is light as parallels, but of his relationship to people. In any case, a view of God in even faintly material categories leads inevitably to either subordination or modalism, which were recurring problems in the early Church, due to the prevalent Greek world view which is still very influential in the West. This then means that God, as spirit, cannot in any way be possessed, but as spirit, can be related to.

Dunn’s suggestion is close to the idea that spirit is primarily a functional term, so bonding. This clarifies the understanding of other problematic texts such as 2 Corinthians 3:17 and 1 Corinthians 15:45, which both seem to identify or confuse the second and third Persons. On the former, Hendry (1965:24) comments that the is rather means signifies, and adds that the phrase spirit of Christ in any case indicates a difference. Rather the word spirit in each case refers to this spiritual activity of bonding by the second Person. The Spirit is then aptly called such, seeing that bonding is his major function; it is then, as Father or Christ, a title characterising his activity, not an ontological term.

The concept of the vinculum amoris thus puts the stress on what is bonded, and not on the bond itself. As commonly observed, the Spirit is self-effacing, the shy Person of the Trinity (Ferguson 1996:186), drawing attention to the other Persons, not to himself. Taylor (1972:43) suggests that we do not commune with the Spirit, for he is communion, we are not aware of him, but through him we are aware of God. It may be observed that the Old Testament makes a distinction between the Spirit of God and the Spirit of the Lord, depending on whether the general term for God, or his personal name, usually translated Lord, is used (cf Hendry 1965:47). The former is more usually in the context of empowering, the latter of prophecy, because in the first case, the point of the relationship that the Spirit enacts is for power, the second for instruction.

The idea of the Spirit as the vinculum amoris then throws light upon the enigmatic comment that Jesus made, .. .as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified (Jn 7:39), and on the related point, .if I do not go away, the Counsellor will not come to you (Jn 16:7). As he says, part of the reason for this is the fact that Jesus is the sender of the Spirit (Jn 16:7), and this cannot be the case when Jesus was incarnate, limiting the full exercise of his deity. Ferguson (1996:67) also