Stephen Bevans, SVD - God Inside Out: Notes Toward a Missionary Theology of the Holy Spirit

Stephen Bevans, SVD
God Inside Out: Notes Toward a Missionary Theology of the Holy Spirit

Introduction: A Change in Perspective

A sentence in Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is has made me think in a different way about the Holy Spirit. "Whether the Spirit be pictured as the warmth and light given by the sun," Johnson writes, "the life-giving water from the spring, or the flower filled with seeds from the root, what we are actually signifying is God drawing near and passing by in a vivifying, sustaining, renewing, and liberating power in the midst of historical struggle." And then follows what is for me a most insightful sentence: "So profoundly is this true that whenever people speak in a generic way of God, of their experience of God or of God’s doing something in the world, more often than not they are referring to the Spirit, if a triune prism be introduced" (Johnson 1992: 127).

Most theology conceives of the Spirit in what we might call Johanine terms: God (theos) sends Jesus who sends the Spirit; Holy Mystery is incarnate in Jesus and continues to be present in creation through the Spirit. This, for example, is the perspective attributed to Aquinas and Barth, and evident in the first chapter of Ad Gentes (AG 2-6) and Chapter III of Redemptoris Missio (RM). With Johnson, however, I’ve come to see that it is indeed the Spirit that we know first, who precedes Jesus not only in our own lives but in the history of the world and in cultures which have not known him. And it is the Spirit whom Jesus reveals to us the Holy Mystery that is only dimly intimated in the fabric of history, culture and life.

I have subsequently discovered that Johnson is not the only theologian to point out the priority of the Spirit’s presence in our knowledge of God. In 1972, at the beginning of his book The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission, British theologian John V. Taylor urged Christians to recognize that the Spirit needs to become "so central to our thoughts about God and about man that when the name ‘God’ is used our minds go first to the Spirit, not last" (Taylor 1972: 5-6). To cite another important expression of this insight, Jesuit theologian Frederick E. Crowe has proposed, as an interpretation of the thought of his mentor Bernard Lonergan, a thesis which, he says, also finds some resonance in both Augustine and Aquinas:

We have simply to reverse the order in which commonly we think of the Son and Spirit in the world. Commonly we think of God first sending the Son, and of the Spirit being sent in that context, to bring to completion the work of the Son. The thesis says that, on the contrary, God first sent the Spirit, and then sent the Son in the context of the Spirit’s mission, to bring to completion--perhaps not precisely the work of the Spirit, but the work which God conceived as one work to be executed in two steps of the twofold mission of first the Spirit and then the Son (Crowe 1985: 8; the connection with Augustine and Aquinas is asserted in p. 11).

Implications of the Change in Perspective: A Two-fold Proposal

This change in perspective which results in the Spirit’s "historical" and "experiential" priority has, I believe, profound implications for the theology of Christian Mission. To discover some of these implication I would make a two-fold proposal that I will attempt to "unpack" somewhat in the paragraphs that follow.

The first part of my proposal corresponds to the first part of the title of these reflections: God Inside Out. I mean this title to be reminiscent of Johannes Hoekendijk’s challenging ideas in ecclesiology and in particular of the title of one of his books, The Church Inside Out (Hoekendijk 1966). Hoekendijk insisted that the essential nature of the church (its "inside," its ad intra nature) is not to be discovered by focusing on the church but on the church’s Mission (its "outside" or ad extra character). The church is radically "ec-centric" and "centrifugal" (Hoedemaker 1978: 658).

In a way that I believe supplements Hoekendijk’s insight, I would propose to apply this same logic to God. Echoing Rahner’s now-famous dictum about the immanent and economic Trinity (Rahner 1970: 22), I propose that God’s "inside," i.e. God’s mystery, can only be known from God’s "outside," i.e. God’s movement to creation in Mission. Furthermore, in the light of the insights of Johnson, Taylor and Crowe sketched out above, this movement is accomplished in the first place through the action of the Holy Spirit. God’s deepest nature, in other words, is discerned not by focusing on God’s inner Trinitarian, communal life, but on God’s "ec-centric," "centrifugal" reaching out to the world in love. The first way that God reaches out, however--"limited neither by space nor time" (RM 28, DEV 53)--is through the active presence of what the Christian Tradition has named the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is divine mystery sent from "inside" to be that mystery fully present and active "outside"--in the world, in human history, in human experience: the Spirit is God Inside Out.

The second part of my proposal corresponds to the second part of my title and regards specifically the missionary implications of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as God Inside Out. I would propose that the church will only live out its Mission worthily to the extent that it allies itself with and is transformed by the Spirit. Only in this way can it live in fidelity to its Lord, who himself was allied to the Spirit in his Mission and was transformed by the Spirit’s power. If the Spirit is the first way that God sends and is sent, the Spirit’s activity becomes the foundation of the church’s own missionary nature. If the church is to express its nature, therefore, it needs first to look to the Spirit’s activity. Its task is, like that of Jesus, both to follow the Spirit’s lead and to be the concrete "face" (Breck 1994) of the Spirit in the world.

Unpacking the Proposal

1. The Activity of the Spirit

What is the Spirit’s activity in the world? From the Bible Christians associate the Spirit first of all with creation, where God’s Spirit sweeps "like a mighty wind . . . over the waters" (Gen.1:2, NAB), or, in Elizabeth’s Johnson’s description, "hovers like a great mother bird over her egg, to hatch the living order of the world out of primordial chaos" (Johnson 1992: 134). The Creator Spirit is also the Life-Giving Spirit (Gn.2:7); as Elihu attests in his angry speech to Job, "the spirit of God has made me, the breath of the Almighty keeps me alive" (Job 33:4). The Spirit endows prophets with authority so that they can speak the Word of God (Ez.2:2; Mic.3:8), calling Israel back from unfaithfulness (e.g. Hos.10:12) or announcing God’s healing, forgiveness and freedom (Is.61:1-3). It is the Spirit that renews and restores life, giving flesh and breath to dry bones (Ez.37:1-14) and turning hearts of stone into hearts that beat again (Ez.36:25-28). It is the Spirit by whose power Mary conceives Jesus (Lk.1:35) who is poured upon Jesus (Mt.3:16) and who sets the agenda for his ministry (Lk.4:18-19). That same Spirit that guided Jesus is promised to be given to the disciples, and in that Spirit they will understand all of God’s purposes (Jn.14:26). The Acts of the Apostles, often called the "Gospel of the Holy Spirit," is a theology of history which reflects on the role of the Spirit in the coming-to-be of the church. Acts is the amazing story of how the Spirit challenges and stretches the early community’s prejudices and presuppositions and calls it beyond anything it dreamed possible--or, as Donald Senior puts it, how the Spirt "drives" the community to universal mission and it its identity as "church" (cf. Senior and Stuhlmueller 1983: 259). Paul attests that the early communities are not only "created and formed by the Spirit;" they are "a fellowship of the Spirit" as well (Fee 1994: 872).

To turn briefly to contemporary theological interpretation of the work of the Spirit, J. V. Taylor calls the Spirit the life-force of creation. "From within the depths of its being [the Spirit] urges every creature again and again to take one more tiny step in the direction of higher consciousness and personhood; again and again he creates for every creature the occasion for spontaneity and the necessity for choice, and at every turn he opposes self-interest with a contrary principle of sacrifice, of existence for the other. . . ." (Taylor 1972: 36). In his powerful article in Mysterium Liberationis, José Comblin says that "Latin American Christians recognize the God of liberation and feel the presence of such a God in their very midst, acting in their own actions and commitments. This Dios Liberador is the Holy Spirit--whether known by name or not" (Comblin 1993: 464). Frederick Crowe argues that, since the Spirit is the way that God is present to humankind from the beginning of its emergence, we Christians are already in relation to women and men of other religious ways (Crowe 1985: 17-18). Among many other references which could be quoted, let me cite, finally, John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Missio: "The Spirit offers the human race ‘the light and strength to respond to its highest calling’: through the Spirit, ‘humanity attains in faith to the contemplation and savoring of the mystery of God’s design’ . . . . (GS 10, 15). . . . The Spirit, therefore, is at the very source of humanity’s existential and religious questioning, a questioning which is occasioned not only by contingent situations but by the very structure of humanity’s being (DEV 54)."

The Spirit’s activity, to summarize this quick tour of the Bible and contemporary theological reflection, is creating and life-giving, prophesying and renewing, empowering and uniting, freeing and inspiring.

2. Jesus and the Spirit

Jesus’ Mission, it would seem, is to align himself with the Spirit’s work, and so make historically concrete and visible what God had been doing through the Spirit since the creation of the world. Jesus is the "face" of God’s Holy Mystery in history (Breck 1994; Dotzel 1995), the Mystery hitherto known through the Spirit’s powerful yet "anonymous" presence (Crowe 1984: 18). In a concrete human nature, within the parameters of a concrete human culture at a very particular time in human history, Jesus is led by the Spirit to perform acts of life-giving healing, to say words of prophetic insight and renewing forgiveness, to live a life of freedom within the Mosaic Law, to draw people together in a table fellowship that included the naturally excluded, and to show by his death the depth of God’s love for humanity. The same creative, prophetic, life-giving and death-negating power that characterized the Spirit in the history of Israel is active in Jesus, who is raised from the dead by the power of the Spirit, and who lavishes that Spirit in a concrete and focused way on those who believe in his Name.

3. The Church and the Spirit

This community of believers, women and men who share and continue Jesus’ mission in the world, are, in Paul’s image, the body of Christ. As such, they continue to be the "face" of God’s Holy Mystery in history, and to give concrete shape and focus to the creative, life-giving, challenging, renewing, uniting power of the Spirit that has always been loose in the world (cf. Dotzel 1995: 8). It is as the body of Christ and the "face" of the Spirit that the church discovers its mission in the world.

In view of the priority of the Spirit’s activity, however, the word "Mission" needs to be understood in a particular way. The church is not so much "sent" as much as it has become part of God’s embrace of the world, an embrace made flesh in Jesus, but accomplished already in the past, the present and continuing presence of the Holy Spirit. As John Paul II has said forcefully, the Spirit is indeed "the principal agent of mission" (RM 30); or, in the words of John V. Taylor: "Our theology would improve if we thought more of the church being given to the Spirit than of the Spirit being given to the church" (Taylor 1972: 133). The church’s task is not so much to "do it all," therefore, as it is to point, to name, to witness to, to cooperate with God’s powerful and transforming presence. As Jesus made this visible in his life, death and resurrection, so the church makes this visible in its community and its commitment to God’s creation. Proclaiming Jesus is proclaiming, as Taylor insists, not knowledge about Jesus but knowledge of Jesus; and the knowledge of Jesus is to be transformed, like him, by God’s out-reaching love in the Holy Spirit.

4. Mission and the Spirit

The Spirit’s activity as God Inside Out in the world might be expressed by the notion of "transcending immanence"--immanence because God is totally and thoroughly involved and interwoven within cosmic and human history; transcendence because God presence and activity is beyond the capacity of human beings to predict, control, grasp or express. The Spirit is God so involved in the world (immanence) that we need constantly to be amazed and challenged by God’s presence (transcendence).

4.1 Transcending Immanence

The transcending immanence of God Inside Out means that "Spirit-Sophia is the living God at her closest to the world, pervading the whole and each creature to awaken life and mutual kinship" (Johnson 1992: 147). As the Spirit works, so must the church. Since nothing is foreign to the Spirit, nothing need be foreign to the church. Since the Spirit pervades all things, so must the church. The task of the church is to be in the midst of history, to be partners in God’s creation, to be a living sign in its community of creation’s future. The church’s mission is world mission in the fullest sense; one might even speak of cosmic mission. Nation building, earth keeping, ecological action, education, preserving and transforming culture, enhancing the quality of life, cultivation of the arts--all these are the fields of activity for those who are given to the Spirit. The church’s Mission, like God’s Mission arises out of passion for all that is and can be. It does not replace God’s Mission, of course, but it points to and cooperates with God’s activity with all its heart.

God’s transcending immanence means that God is genuinely involved in the world and its history--"not existence over and against but with and for, not domination but mutual love emerge as the highest value as the Spirit of God dwells within and around the world with all its fragility, chaos, tragedy, fertility and beauty" (Johnson 1992: 147). Mission proceeds not through "strategies"--a military term--nor by alliances with "worldly powers;" its procedure is that of the persuading, cajoling presence of the Spirit, with the power that comes from vulnerability and openness. The passion for Mission is the passion of relationship, and relationship is defined not by being and doing "for," but being and doing "with." Reinhard Hütter writes about the church’s task as paraklesis, or "comforting appeal" (Hütter 1993: 441).

"Comforting appeal," however, is neither feeble nor passive. It is a challenging, disturbing presence, the presence of the prophet. "The Spirit is the Spirit of freedom, partial to freeing captives rather than keeping them bound, biased in favor of life’s flourishing rather than its strangulation" (Johnson 1992: 147). To be church, therefore, "is to be agonizingly aware of the contrast between what is and what should be" (Taylor 1972: 96), and so to be committed to calling itself and the world in which it lives to constant renewal and reform, and to the development of systems and structures that combat the forces of death and enhance the emergence of life. Aligning ourselves with the Spirit, therefore, is to oppose injustice, to be involved in the political process, and to build communities of solidarity and resistance. And to align ourselves with the Spirit is to take the risks involved in hope, in joy and in fearlessness.

The transcending immanence of God Inside Out bears witness to creation’s holiness. All is grace, and sin is sin precisely because of this fact. Calling people from sin is always calling them to grace, and no call to repentance is worthy of the name without it being done out of a conviction of the sinner’s basic goodness and tragic "missing the mark" in his or her life. The universe, work of the Creator Spirit, can only be holy. Physical creation is holy, and is to be reverenced, protected and developed; human life and human bodies are holy, and are to be respected; human cultures are holy, and need to be celebrated in our expressions and activity of faith; even human religions are holy, and need to be studied, appreciated and critically evaluated. The church’s Mission, as given to the Spirit, is as much about being evangelized by the cosmos, the earth and other human beings as it is about a commitment to their welfare and cultivation. My colleague Claude-Marie Barbour speaks of this as Mission-in-Reverse (Barbour et al.: 1994).

It is in this spirit of reverence of and obedience to the transcending immanence of the Spirit’s holy creation that we can devote ourselves to inculturation and interreligious dialogue, and see them as truly essential parts of Mission. Through efforts of inculturation we come to the full meaning of God’s embrace of the world, and by engagement in dialogue (at all levels) we become aware of how thorough is the Spirit’s presence, and just how wondrous are the magnalia Dei to which we witness and which we proclaim. What Frederick Crowe says of the Christian attitude toward other religious ways can said of our attitude toward the world’s cultures as well: "We cannot shirk that task [of evangelization]--woe to us if we do not preach the gospel (1Cor.9:16)--but our approach will be modified by our new understanding of the situation" (Crowe 1985: 21). Mission carried out in obedience to the Spirit is that "mission in bold humility" that David Bosch wrote about so eloquently and lived so convincingly: "We know only in part, but we do know" (Bosch 1991: 489). Jesus is indeed the face of the Spirit; in his concreteness we encounter mystery, but we never fully grasp it.

4.2 Transcending Immanence

This leads to some reflection on the transcending immanence of God Inside Out and its implications for the church’s Mission. The Mystery present in the midst of creation and human history is nonetheless Mystery, and the church, like its Lord, must be obedient to the Spirit as it leads in directions that seem strange and uncomfortable. "Unless the missionary movement can be responsive to the unpredictability of the Holy Spirit," wrote Max Warren,"it will cease to be a movement" (Warren 1978: 194). Mission in obedience to the transcending immanence of God’s Spirit can avoid the danger of what William R. Burrows calls the over-objectification of the Christ-event, that is, preaching the gospel as if one controlled its message, or as if that message could be exhaustively expressed in objective, rational categories. "Although," says Burrows, "theology in the West has generally confined the Holy Spirit to the status of mysterious energy making for the efficacy of ecclesiastical activities, ‘Spirit’ functions biblically as a name that moves beyond and disrupts attempts to define Jesus or mission in straightforward language. ‘Spirit’ injects an uncontrollable, effervescent element into the structure of Christian existence--a dimension scarcely explored by theology" (Burrows 1996: 128). The transcending immanence of the Spirit can help us realize that Jesus is the face of the Spirit, and so is "not the end of life’s mysteries" (Oman 1941: 147) but one that lays us open to all of life’s unfolding possibilities.

The Spirit’s unpredictable and unsettling lead, of course, will never violate the "logic of salvation"--it will never contradict the truth of Christ, nor suspend his law of love. But Mission in partnership with and obedience to God Inside Out might reveal depths to that "logic" that human minds could never come to by themselves. Who in Jerusalem, through their own insight, would have concluded that even Gentiles could be saved? What would have happened if Rome had recognized the Spirit working through Martin Luther? Or through Matteo Ricci? What might the African church look like if we take more seriously the Spirit’s work in the African Independent Churches? Or the Spirit’s work in healing and exorcism?

Conclusion

"To think deeply about the Holy Spirit," writes John V. Taylor, is a bewildering, tearing exercise, for whatever he touches he turns inside out" (Taylor 1972: 179). The Spirit is the Spirit as God turned inside out; the Spirit given to Jesus turned him inside out and opened him up to the vision of God’s reign among women and men; the Spirit lavished through Jesus turns his disciples inside out as they include unthinkable people and go to unthinkable places. Thinking missiologically about the Holy Spirit can turn the church inside out, and perhaps make it more responsive to where God is really leading it in today’s world.

REFERENCES CITED

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