Sunday, November 1, 2020

"the mistake [that] trails this Person like a veil"

      "To explain the existential and perhaps even metaphysical adequacy of this scripturally narrated Jesus would end up, at least grammatically, making 'sufficiency' ('it is enough') and 'worth' ('it is worth living') simply synonyms for 'the Holy Spirit,' while also failing to indicate the living Person of God who the Spirit is.  Such a grammatical equivalence would be a mistake, although it is a common enough move (cf. the traditional and often-used identifications of the Spirit as 'Gift' or 'Love').  But since the Spirit has neither personal name nor relational identity—since the Spirit is neither the Son whom 'you shall call Jesus' nor the Father who sends the Son and is invoked as such—the mistake trails this Person like a veil.  One might wish to call this nameless identity 'shyness' or 'modesty,' but that too is to miss what is going on.  It is as if the Spirit stands as the very obscurity of the divine Persons themselves, whose life 'for us' nonetheless cannot be escaped.  Just as mortality is simply what it means that God has created us—utter grace—so suffering is what it means that God is in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.  Who does not before these truths, even with face unveiled, yet through the Spirit's still opaque reflection, stand with hand upon the mouth?"

     Ephraim Radner, A profound ignorance:  modern pneumatology and its anti-modern redemption (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2019), 247.

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