By doing so, the Spirit brings to fulfillment not only the incarnation of the Son, but also its fruits in our lives. Otherwise stated, the Spirit rests on the physical body of the Son so that the Spirit “might rest also on the body of the Son in the Church, … and on the body of the Son in the bread and wine, and the body of the Son in whatever other places she conceives it.”35 The materiality of the Spirit is evident. To show how the Spirit rests on us in a way that human diversity is not dissolved but also brought into unity in Christ, Rogers picks up on Staniloae’s argument that the Spirit’s procession from the Father to rest on the Son highlights both the Spirit’s uniting of the Father and the Son and the Spirit’s unitive function to take diversity in creation up into communion with the divine persons.36 Therefore, the Spirit is not superfluous and can actually do something better than the Son, namely, “rest.”37 Not because the Son lacks something, but because the Son makes the Spirit his own by receiving, bearing, and giving it to others. Resting becomes the author’s primary pneumatic lens to articulate a Spirit Christology.
Through the same Spirit, a human being can participate by grace in the prayer of the Son to the Father, and thus become “a liturgical being, a glorifying being, a blessing being, a thanks-giving being, a being that not only receives, but receives also the permission to give back and again.”52 By bringing them into communion with the Father through a sharing in the Son’s Abba prayer, the Spirit displays his role as one who transfigures or perfects humans in their glorification of God. The Spirit nourishes humans even now so that they might glorify God in time and space through embodied forms of life in community, such as marriage and friendships—forms of life that Rogers refers to as “the external fostering of the Spirit’s habituation of the human being, the external correlate to the Spirit’s internal habituation.”
The category of efficient causality rightly serves to make a clear distinction between God and creation, but it does not seem equipped to deal with the notion that God as such (and not merely God’s effects or created gifts) became flesh in the person of the Logos and analogously dwells in the believer by grace through the Holy Spirit. Positing that human nature is assumed by the person of the uncreated Logos (and thus assumed not only by acts external to his person), or analogously that the humanity of saints is inhabited by the person of the uncreated Spirit (and not merely by the Spirit’s created gifts), requires that the divine person who assumes or inhabits created reality have some real relation to it beyond that which efficient causality allows.
Dealing with human culture, social praxis, and interreligious dialogue. In his final chapter, Del Colle suggests ways in which a Spirit Christology can offer a lens to deal with three contemporary concerns, namely, human experience, social justice, and religious pluralism. Here the author argues for discerning the distinct, though related, missions of Christ and the Spirit in the church through her mission and witness in the world. In terms of human experience, Del Colle appeals to Walter Kasper’s argument that all humans ultimately find in Jesus Christ and his life the truth about their created identity, their sin before God, and their divinization.74 He then adds the pneumatological aspect to the argument by correlating Kasper’s christological anthropology with Franz Jozef van Beeck’s thesis, according to which the Holy Spirit acts as “the agent of inclusion, conversion, and transfiguration” who leads humans respectively to confess Jesus as Lord, to follow him, and to share in his resurrection hope.75 Based on their own relation to the risen Lord, believers speak in the Spirit by pointing out how all human aspirations are met in “the temporal and (eschatological!) missions of the Son and the Spirit.”76
79 In general, Del Colle hesitates to speak in a definitive dogmatic sense about the Spirit’s presence in the world, preferring to speak of the Spirit’s presence in the church for the sake of the world.
Regarding religious pluralism, Del Colle takes as his starting point Aloysius Pieris’s method of dialogue between Christians and people of other religions, in which the parties in conversation learn about and share each other’s religious or “primordial experiences” and their “collective memories” of the same in their traditions’ guiding narratives.80 In this process of dialogue, the church always interprets theologically what she hears and says. Del Colle suggests that in that process of interpretation, Christians will inevitably seek to correlate collective experiences of neighbors from other religions with those of the Christian tradition. This negotiation happens when Christians look for “christological analogues” in other religions, and by so doing implicitly acknowledge the uniqueness and normativity of Christ’s identity as the Son who bears and gives the Spirit for the sake of the world.81 There is also another way to dialogue, which is complementary to the first, where the Christian adapts a certain “christological kenosis” (Pieris’s term) and looks for more implicit “central motifs” that religions might share apart from an explicit mention of Christ.82 Del Colle associates the latter move with a different type of methodology in which the work of the Spirit is not yet spoken of “in relation to Christ and his work,” but more generally in terms of “the Spirit’s work in creation, Israel, the secular order, and in other religions even as we still confess the unique work in Jesus Christ.”83 Even though Del Colle does not elaborate on the second approach, one sees in his methodology a desire to strike a delicate balance between ecumenism in a pluralistic world and Christian uniqueness. He does so through a type of interreligious dialogue that seeks to neither fit the other’s views into Christian views nor move away from the traditional Christian claim to the centrality of Christ and the normativity of the Christian story for the world.
Father: “The Word of God … dwelt in man, and became Son of man, that He might accustom man to receive God, and God to dwell in man, according to the good pleasure of the Father.”7 Yet for God to dwell in humans, the Holy Spirit must also get involved with the material body, first the body of the incarnate Son and, through him, the body of those baptized into him. After the incarnation, Christ’s reception of the Spirit in the flesh serves as a condition in God’s plan of salvation for his giving of the Spirit to all flesh.
The name “Christ” reminds us that the Father anoints the Son, and the Son “is anointed by the Spirit, who is the unction.”9 In this sense, it was at the Jordan that the Word, already united to human nature, “was made Jesus Christ.”10 At his baptism, the Spirit descends on Jesus to anoint him for his mission to preach the gospel, heal the sick, and forgive sins.11 After carrying out his messianic mission, the Lord gives the Spirit, whom he received at the Jordan, to the church through baptism.
Yet an old, beat-up, wild olive tree can also be grafted into a good one, and, by drawing life from it, it can become a fruit-bearing tree (see Rom 11:17). So also those who by faith receive the indwelling of the life-giving Spirit have partaken of “the engrafting of the Spirit” and “the Word of God as a graft,” becoming spiritual and bearing good fruit.
His point is that the anointing at the Jordan does not affect or sanctify the Son as God, confirming instead for others that the Son “is not the sanctified, but the Sanctifier.”29 As the divine Word, the Son does not “become holy”; instead, the Word became flesh “that He himself may in Himself sanctify all of us.”
Through the Spirit’s work of christoformation, the baptized are initiated into the “pattern life” or “imitation” of Christ’s life, which besides a participation in his future resurrection from the dead includes living as new creatures according to his example of gentleness or lowliness, endurance or long-suffering, and freedom from the power of sin.
