Pentecost - A Pneumatologically Conditioned Christology.

It is a deficiency in much theology when one considers the Person of the Holy Ghost and His operations. Too often He is seen as a mere auxiliary, as one who assists in some indefinite way in our Christian pilgrimage. How can we correct this view? How can we truly appreciate the infusion of the Holy Ghost without viewing Him as an afterthought? One will often hear something said of discernment, ''...with the help of the Holy Ghost', but what is this help and how essential is He to the oneness of God and the salvific will of God? I will not attempt to answer all of these questions as they are certainly above my ability but I would like to refer to some of the insights of an Eastern Orthodox theologian, the Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon on this crucial matter.

In the Creed it must be seen that the Third Person of the Holy Trinity should never be considered as an optional extra or a name to be inserted out of a certain form of piety. We sing each Sunday while kneeling, 'et Incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine: et homo factus est'. The Oblation of our Redemption could not occur unless the Logos united Himself with a human nature so that He could offer Himself as a propitiation for our sins. This is the key point of our Faith. In other religions, man raises himself up by his own will through his own energy often through some form of 'purification'. On the other hand, the beauty of the Christian Faith is that the Son of the Eternal Father descended out of love to dwell amongst us as man by the power and work of the Holy Ghost. By the work of the Holy Ghost. It was the same Paraclete that overshadowed the Holy Virgin so that she may conceive and bring forth the holiest of all fruit, Jesus, that fell upon the disciples on the day of Pentecost.
His Excellency states in this respect that Christ is conditioned 'Pneumatologically', and that this is absolutely essential to His becoming man. According to this theologian, Jesus Christ is inconceivable as an individual by is ontologically relational. In first place, He is the only-begotten Son of the Father, and without this filiation the Father could not be Father. He descended not as an individual but with a body, a body that was to unite the dispersed people so that they may become holy. He came with one intention, for our sanctification in obedience to the Father's will.
So how is man, once redeemed by the shedding of the blood of the Lamb, to be united to this propitiatory offering? Through Holy Baptism, the ''individual'' (as opposed to person in Zizioulas' thought) enters into and shares the Son's essential relation to the Father existentially. Yet, this laver of regeneration can only occur by the work of the Holy Ghost. It was through Him that the world began to be renewed by His overshadowing of the Woman, it was He that led Jesus into the desert to prepare for His ministry and redemptive work and it was in He that Christ offered Himself on the Cross to the Unbegotten One. Our baptism is by water and the Spirit. Not by water alone. But the Spirit presupposes the blood and the blood presupposes the Spirit. In fact, they are simultaneous. Christ dwells in our hearts by faith with the Father and the Paraclete. We are temples of the Holy Ghost. There can be no opposition.

In the life of the Blessed Trinity considered apart from creation, the Holy Ghost precedes (primarily/principaliter) from the Father through the Son. There is a one-ness in the immanent Trinity and this is manifested in the work of the economic Trinity. It is absolutely true that the redemption, regardless of appropriation, is conducted in common. The Three Persons act.

How then does this relate to Pentecost? It is certain that on this solemn day we celebrate the Birthday of the Church. By the appearance of the tongues of fire, the Apostles depart with a firm conviction and a new awareness of the uniqueness of the Person of their Saviour and His divine mission. This only occurs because of the illumination of the Holy Ghost. Apart from Him, Jesus can only be regarded as an individual from the past, someone subject to historical constraints and prejudices. This is entirely false. If the Third Person were not to be shed above the disciples gathered in prayer, how could we possibly reach the one that had ascended to the Father?
While Christ instituted the Church, we may say truly that she is constituted by the Holy Ghost.

In conjunction with this truth there can be no discord between the spirit and the institution. Amt und (oder?) Geist can never enter into our consideration of the Church and the world. Just as the doctrine of Christ is not His own by that of the Father, so the Holy Ghost only reveals what He has heard from the Father. The unity of the Godhead consists in the Monarchia of the Unbegotten. That same Spirit is not a liberator considered apart from Christ (the institution-maker) but is sent by the Son to convince the world of sin, justice and judgment. He has the same mission as the Son, as 'One sent', ''He shall glorify Me (Jesus): because He shall receive of Mine and shall show it to you.''

Therefore in accordance with the words of the Saviour, we must continue to rejoice in that same Spirit Who is building up the Body of Christ unto the fullness of the man. He still works in souls to unite them to the Death of the Lord so that we may be taken up to the dignity of sons of God in the Holy Ghost. There is no other name in heaven or earth that man can be saved under except Christ and no one can proclaim Christ is Lord apart from in the Holy Ghost.

'A New Creation'

We must guard constantly against the notion that baptism is merely a rite of initiation, or passage through which one has to go. It is not a formal 'declaration' that one is a Christian nor does it simply represent the cleansing of sins that have already been forgiven. So what actually occurs in the person who approaches this laver of regeneration?

Alan Brown commenting on the thought of John Zizioulas writes:

'Within the mode of fallen existence, says Zizioulas, human beings come to exist through the communion of erotic love, a generative communion through which the human being constituted thereby suffers from the two 'passions' of 'ontological necessity' and 'individualism'. According to the first passion, man is 'inevitably tied to natural instinct', and so is bound by the necessities of nature and as such is not ontologically free. According to the second passion, men 'affirm their identity as separation from (and hence opposition to) other unities'; it is because men are atomized from each other in this way that they express their freedom over and against each other in a war of all against all. Thus the inabilities of human beings to attain true personhood to which the existentialists point have, says Zizioulas, their root in the situation of fallen human existence - not in human existence per se. And insofar as their analyses of fallen human existence, says Zizioulas, they are entirely correct: inasmuch as man remains constituted ontologically by the 'biological hypostasis', he is unable to attain the true ontological freedom (in the existentialists' sense). But what the patristic location of such analyses within the mode of being of fallen existence shows is that these inabilities of man to attain true personhood stem from the mode of his birth. As such, what man needs to attain true personhood is a 'new birth', a birth 'from on high'.
This 'new birth', says Zizioulas, is attained precisely in baptism, where God 'hypostasises' the person according to God's way of being'. In baptism, says Zizioulas, man is hypostasized with a different hypostasis from that of biological existence. He is hypostasized with 'the hypostasis of ecclesial existence'

As all in summed up in Christ, the Son of the Father, man being baptised into His Death, overcomes such a division. Only in Him is found true personhood and relationality, the uniquely beloved of the Father. The Logos containing the logoi of all creation, allows man to return to his source and rejoice in God's invitation to love and communion with the divine life. On such a view, man is unable to be opposed to the 'other' as an impediment to his 'liberty', but he comes to acknowledge the unrepeatable neighbour as a child of the Eternal Father. Through his cleansing in the font, man arrives at a new mode of being, a new creation is relation to God and to man in the Body of Christ. He truly becomes free by becoming a child of the Father, Who brought forth His beloved Son and all through his own freedom, which man becomes to participate in his 'ecclesial existence'.