whereby God acts upon us. Since (as we have seen) authority always resides in persons, this conception of the Spirit diminishes or eliminates the Spirit’s authority and implies that the Spirit is simply a function of Christ. Inch, a Western theologian who remains strongly in favor of Filioque, summarizes the effect of this weakness upon the Western Church:
Herein lies one of the fundamental errors in the Western Church, according to their Eastern counterpart: it presumes to know the secret working of the Spirit in others. It does not respect the sanctity of life expressed in the diversity of the Spirit’s work. Thus, this understanding of the way of the Spirit proves too narrow. But the problem lies more deeply in that the West presumes to understand what escapes us all. By attempting to bring divine truths down to human forms, it loses the mystical quality of faith and the transcendent character of the Spirit as being present within us.92
Such criticisms, while valid, do not pose a death sentence upon Filioque or the notion of the Spirit’s executorial authority. We must realize that the Eastern view has gaping weaknesses as well (and that in discerning the Spirit’s authority to act we must take contributions from both views into consideration). Gunton charges that, like the charismatic movement, Eastern Orthodox theology tends to develop an insufficient relationship between Christ and the Spirit. As Barth has stated, this suggests a mystical assent to the Father without the mediation of the Son.93 Such a lack of theological development gives the impression that the Church can stand under the authority of the Spirit alone. This can be sensed in Hryniewicz’ description of the Spirit’s “authority” with respect to Orthodox Church bishops.
In light of the orthodox tradition, the function of the bishops does not emerge out of the personal legal delegation, which is given to him individually through Christ; it is instead the work of the Holy Spirit in the entire community. . . . The general consensus of all bishops became the expression of the highest authority in the Church as the indication of the presence and the work of the Holy Spirit.94
Kasper points out another weakness in Greek pneumatology. Not only is the Eastern tradition, in its dogmatic creedal formulas, almost completely silent about the relation of the Spirit to the Son, but there is also no relation drawn between the economy of salvation (the economic Trinity) and the inner life of the Trinity (the immanent Trinity). According to Kasper, if the Son has a share in the sending of the Spirit in the history of salvation (which he obviously does), then he cannot fail to have a share into the intra-trinitarian procession of the Spirit.95
Protestant Theology
The Catholic-Protestant controversy battled in two arenas—the nature of authority and the basic doctrines of the faith—that became interwoven through the notion that “correct” doctrine is ultimately determined by the authority one accepts regarding the interpretation of Scripture. Such an “interpretative authority” was presumed by both parties to be possessed primarily by the author of the text. In this section, we will examine the nature of “interpretive authority”96 as well as the Holy Spirit’s possession or delegation of such an authority. Western Medieval theology, which developed a general framework for understanding the Spirit’s role as authoritative “Executor” of Christ’s will on earth, had not yet worked out precisely how the Spirit fulfills this role in the world, particularly in relation to the interpretation of Scripture. Thus, in the development of a “post-medieval” pneumatology, the issue of scriptural interpretation was naturally the first “executorial” question to arise. It is “prolegomena” in that, before the Church can develop a systematic set of doctrines, she must first determine her interpretive methods.
The Reformers sought to establish a pneumatological method of interpretation that could guide their subsequent theologizing. Before the Reformation began, however, interpretive authority was essentially equated with Roman Catholic authority. The Roman Church claimed that she possessed two key ingredients necessary for interpretive authority: (1) the proper source of truth—the Bible, and (2) the proper hermeneutical tools for interpreting the source of truth—Tradition. God, who was considered final authority, had expressed his authority in revelation and continues to express his authority in and through the Church. This led to the doctrine of the Church’s “infallibility.” Several factors led to the eventual mistrust of Roman Catholic hermeneutics from the perspective of the “Protestants.” The Protestant rallying cry, “sola scriptura,” did not mean that scriptural authority excludes all other means of knowing God’s will (i.e., Tradition, reason), but that Scripture provides the norm for the other means as the “final court of appeal.” Luther, for example, held to the primacy and all-sufficiency of the sensus literalis of Scripture, thus countering the four-fold hermeneutical approach of medieval theology (which included analogical [logical], allegorical [mystical], and anagogical [moral] approaches). The cultural changes that resulted from the Reformation did not come about by any attempt toward social revolution—the “revolutionary” aspect of the Reformation era was its new emphasis on the Word of God. This emphasis coincided with the rise in literacy, the invention of the printing press, and the rediscovery of Greek and Roman classics within the culture of Renaissance humanism. All of these changes resulted in an interest in returning to “sources.”
The Reformation of the sixteenth century was a modern movement that drew inspiration from the general culture and learning of the time. It is no accident, therefore, that the earliest heroes of the Reformation were, when all is said and done, not visionaries or social revolutionaries or even religious mystics, but scholars and Bible translators.97
The Reformation also coincided with the breakdown of ecclesiastic unity, cultural unity and denominational unity. Without an emperor or Pope as their ecclesial authority, the Protestant’s authority became individualized or denominationalized. The Bible, as interpreted by the individual believer or the denomination, could once again become the foundation of societal authority.
Martin Luther and John Calvin
The debate over the nature of the Spirit’s role in biblical interpretation is exemplified at the Diet of Worms, where Martin Luther cried, “It is written!” and the Church replied with excommunication. While many theologians recognize Luther’s role in the development of the Western world’s understanding of the nature of authority, few however, have understood Luther’s perspective regarding the authority of the Spirit. For Luther, the Spirit has his own existence in God’s eternal glory, apart from the Word and apart from the physical world, and thus cannot be controlled by us. The Spirit is the “sphere” of revelation where Christ is present and the Word is alive. Luther remarks,
For Christian holiness, or the holiness common to Christendom, is found where the Holy Spirit gives people faith in Christ and thus sanctifies them, Acts 15[:9], that is, he renews heart, soul, body, work, and conduct, inscribing the commandments of God not on tables of stone, but in hearts of flesh, II Corinthians 3[:3].98
Luther also proclaims, “In the whole of Scripture there is none but Christ, either in plain words or in involved words.”99 Instead of adopting the Augustinian view of the Spirit as the gift of grace mediated primarily through the Church, Luther connected the Spirit once again with the authority of Christ and the authority of the Word of God—and thus gave us grounding for our pattern of authority. As a result, Luther’s pneumatology is best understood as the Spirit of Christ working through the channel of the Word of God. This became a major theme of Reformation theology, representing a shift away from the earlier concern for precise definitions of the Spirit’s nature and toward the doctrine of the work of the Spirit in terms of the subjective appropriation of the
