So up to this point, I've spent quite a bit of time in my lectures speaking about the Holy Spirit in relation to the Trinity. And that's important, of course, if we're going to understand and see carefully that the Spirit is not separate from God, not some kind of special creature that God has created. after the beginning of creation, or even before the beginning of creation, not a created entity, not a rival demigod, and not some kind of tool or instrument that God uses. The work we do on the Trinity is meant to reaffirm again and again the co-eternal threeness of the oneness of the Triune God. So to reaffirm that the Holy Spirit is one with the Trinity at each step.
All of this is largely about, or up to this point, has been largely about God's imminent nature. That is to say, who God is inwardly, so to speak, toward God's own self, God's inward relations within the Trinity. I want to turn now... towards what is called the economic trinity.
So the imminent trinity is God inwardly towards God's own self, but now we're going to turn a little bit towards the economic trinity. And to say economic in this sense has nothing to do with commerce or trade or money. It has to do with how God relates and how God acts toward the created order.
The root word in the economic trinity is the word oikos, and the oikos is something like the household in ancient Greece, and oikonimene is something like the management or the leadership of the household. So we get... from that root word oikumene, both economic but also ecumenical, incidentally. So it's within this frame of speaking about the economic trinity, the way in which the trinity is outwardly towards the created order, that we get a number of important insights about the Holy Spirit. Above all, Theology that is grounded in the Bible and in Christian tradition asserts that the Spirit is not a principle, is not distinct or distant from creation, nor a mere phantasm, just sort of an idea.
The biblical narratives are especially good at helping us to see how invested The Holy Spirit is within and towards creation. The Holy Spirit is invested within and towards creation. Again and again, we see a Holy Spirit who descends upon bodies in creation, as David Jensen puts it.
From a biblical perspective, then, what can be said about the Spirit will always attend. to how she is vibrantly at work within and through creation rather than apart from or beyond creation. This perspective is often called panentheism, and I'll make a note of that as a word or a term to clarify in my notes with the lecture links. The word en, e-n, within that word panentheism is quite important.
It means in, and panentheism should be distinguished from pantheism. Again, without the little word en in the middle of it. Pantheism is the belief that God and nature are the same. Really, that there's no distinction between God and nature.
In pantheism, all that is, all that exists, is God. And God is identical with the natural world, with the material world. Panentheism, in contrast, respects the divine reality that exists outside, or at least beyond, the created order. So that there is a reality of God that is not only bound to the material order. Because, of course, God is the creator of God.
creation. God is not creation itself. The idea that God is creation, the same as creation, is a religious conviction, but it's not Christianity.
Panentheism is a way of understanding God's involvement within and through creation without being the same as creation. So what we're... tracing down here is the way in which God celebrates creation, values creation, is present within creation, but not identical with creation. The foremost theologian of panentheism is Jürgen Moltmann, who works to discover God, quote, in all the beings God has created, and to find God's life-giving spirit in the community of creation.
Elsewhere, Moltmann writes, through the spirit, God is also present in the various structures of matter. So there's that sense that God is present within creation, but not limited to creation, not the same as or identical with creation, not the same as nature. While Christians will conventionally conventionally look first to the divine presence of the Spirit in Second Testament accounts, in the New Testament.
For instance, we would look to the baptism of Jesus as sort of a key example of the Holy Spirit being present, or the the Pentecost story in the book of Acts. There are many accounts of the Holy Spirit, of course, in the First Testament as well. in relation to creation. The first one we probably would think of is the story of creation itself, the waters, the spirit brooding over the waters of creation in Genesis 1, or the spirit giving life to the creatures in Genesis chapter 2. The spirit throughout the first testament is giving life and giving gifts to the prophets and to the judges. The spirit is leading and teaching the people.
The Spirit is in the midst of the people in the Exodus and both in the camp, the people of Israel migrating from their slavery in Egypt towards the promised land. The Spirit is present in the camp and the Spirit is also present later on in the Ark of the Covenant. You might remember that term Shekinah. That's especially...
attached with that sense of the Spirit in the ark that travels with the people in the midst of the people. In these and other ways, we can think of the Holy Spirit as the outward movement of God toward creation and within creation and human beings. A kind of a conventional religiosity both in the ancient world and in the contemporary world. might suppose that the material and the spiritual are radically separate, that assumption or that convention does not bind and limit God.
God is not limited, in other words, to enlightenment binaries, for example, that radically separate the physical and the spiritual reality. One expression of this, of course, is in Jesus Christ, in whom God takes up physical reality, a human identity. And there we see this uniting of the spiritual and the material realms in kind of an astonishing way, or perhaps a surprising way. But well before that, well before the incarnation of Jesus Christ in first century Israel, the acts of creation. that are described in Genesis reveal that the Holy Spirit is already well acquainted with the material order.
The Holy Spirit is already acting within creation. Again, Genesis 1, she hovers, hovers over creation as a ruach, as the breath, as the wind, as the spirit of God. As a theologian called Sergei Spolgakov notes, the physical world of materiality, physical world of materiality is not closed off to the spirit. Created out of nothing.
The world receives its reality, the world receives its materiality from the Holy Spirit. The prophets who are giving their testimony to the Holy Spirit in the First Testament also find expression in the Second Testament when the apostles give their testimony to the Spirit, and that testimony is itself. empowered by the Holy Spirit, as the Nicene Creed will attest in 381, that is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which states that the Holy Spirit spoke by the prophets, spoke through the prophets. Although the first person, or the father, within the Trinity, the first identity, is often considered as the creator, especially in modern theology, this is true, the whole Trinity is involved in creation. And there are good reasons to work towards finding some non-gendered language for the first person.
Sometimes the word mother is substituted for father, although that's still gendered. Some people have introduced mother-father as kind of a hyphenated solution, or divine loving parent, something like that. But a straight substitution of creator for father distorts this teaching that the whole Trinity is involved in the work of creation.
Again, we see the Holy Spirit's involvement, for example, in Genesis 1 and 2, and then again later in Proverbs 8, where she is called Wisdom or Chokmah. the Proverbs, or in translation, Sophia in Greek. The wisdom of God, the Spirit of God, Chokmah, is present from the beginning, in the beginning of all things, and remains active in the ongoing and creative work and sustaining work of the Triune God in creation.
I'm going to say that again because it was a lot of dense thought there. The wisdom of God, the Spirit of God, Chokmah, is present before the beginning of all things, is present in the creation, and then remains present, remains active in the creative and sustaining work of the Triune God within the created order. The Nicene Creed uses the phrase all things visible and invisible, all things visible and invisible, all that is. is bound up in the creative, sustaining work of the Holy Spirit.
In the Church of North India, there's a theologian called Darendra Sahu, and he says the Holy Spirit is the pouring out of God's love in endless, fresh creativity. I really love that expression. The Holy Spirit is the pouring out of God's love in endless, fresh creativity.
creativity. That ongoing presence of the Spirit has an immediacy to it, a freshness, giving a sense of how God is dynamically at work, very close at hand within creation, within creatures. The diversity of creation is also a hallmark, an indicator of the Holy Spirit's work.
The Holy Spirit seems to love this diversity. Consider, for example, how there is this command at the creation that the heavens and the lands and the seas bring forth multiple kinds of creatures. Every living creature that moves, as the Bible puts it, all the things that God has made flow forth from this desire for diversity. Now, again, with respect to this work of the Trinity as the creator.
There is a principle at work which is a technical Latin phrase, I'll put it in the notes. Opera Trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt. So everything that the Trinity does, the works of the Trinity toward that which is outside the Trinity, so the economic work of the Trinity, all that work is indivisible. So even though we appropriate or attach or attribute the work of creation to one or other identity of the Trinity, the whole of the Trinity is at work when the Trinity is at work, is active towards that which is outside the Trinity.
The three triune identities act toward and within creation in concert. There's no separation. of the three persons or the three identities, as if one does this and one does that.
When the Father acts, the Son and the Spirit are also acting. I've said this before, all of God acts all the time. All of God is creating. So it is the fullness of the Trinity that sustains life, the fullness of God that sustains life.
But we might attribute or appropriate... I prefer the word attribute, but the word is appropriate, this work of sustaining creation to the Spirit. We might associate the actual creation to the first person, the first identity, God who is Father. We might associate redeeming with the second person, the second identity, Jesus Christ.
We might think of the third identity, the Spirit, as sustaining life. reinvigorating life, bringing healing and growth and greenness and freshness and renewal. That conventional kind of appropriation I think can be quite useful even as we are retaining that principle that the whole of the Trinity is always at work towards creation.
All right, that might be enough technicality for now. But just to remember this sense that the economic Trinity, the way in which God is acting towards creation, is always unified. The whole of the Trinity is always at work. But we might appropriate or attribute the Holy Spirit's action in the renewal and the ongoing giving of life, vivifying, as one of the creeds puts it, towards creation in a particular way. That might...
be one of the associations we would make as the Holy Spirit comes within and works within creation in a panentheistic way.