On the main differences between a Spirit Christology and a Word Christology
Pneumatology, Q. 1
This piece is part of a series in which I share the short essays I wrote for my doctoral comps. To read the intro, click here.
Recent decades have seen a resurgence of Spirit Christology. There are many marked differences between Spirit Christology and Word Christology (henceforth, Logos Christology) that makes it worthwhile to assess between the two. Are these two approaches mutually exclusive? Or can they be complemented? What follows is my attempt to define, explain, and assess the differences between the two, in an effort to arrive, at length, at a mutual complementarity approach.
Logos Christology sees Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the eternal Son of God. The second person of the Trinity, in a kenotic movement, emptied himself of his glory and took upon himself a human nature to work out God’s plan of salvation and redemption in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. By contrast, Spirit Christology looks at the significance of Jesus Christ through the lens of the Spirit – it aims to underline the active presence of the Spirit in the life and ministry of Jesus.1 As it is possible to glance from these introductory definitions, the difference is one of stress and directionality: either Jesus is God made flesh (“from above”) or Jesus is a human endowed with the Spirit of God (“from below”).
What the authors on my list highlight (in my view, correctly) is that the recent resurgence of Spirit Christology underlines how Logos Christology, on its own, fails to account for the complexity of the biblical testimony concerning Jesus. Logos Christology has generally been the standard mode of thinking about Christology throughout the history of the Church because it aims to be grounded in the orthodoxy passed down from conciliary and creedal statements. The councils, however, were culturally and historically specific, that is to say, they were responding to contemporary Christological heresies that aimed to de-stress the divinity of Christ (i.e., Arianism, Adoptionism), so that stressing Christ’s eternal status becomes, not only relevant and fitting, but urgent.2
As Myk Habets shows, however, Logos Christology alone is not without its faults. Stressing Logos Christology might show an over-dependence on Greek philosophy that fails to perceive the humanity of Christ as genuinely good news. The humanity of Christ becomes a problem to be solved if one starts from metaphysical abstraction. Further, Frank Macchia raises the problem of the ontological/functional objection to the significance of Christ. Was Christ one with God’s being or one with God’s actions to save the world? Logos Christology argues the former, whereas Spirit Christology argues the latter. The problem here is one of reductionism. Leopoldo Sanchez shows the way forward.
Sanchez argues that there are three ways of thinking about the resurgence of Spirit Christology. It is either (1) a substitution to Logos Christology because of its defect to account for the humanity of Christ, or (2) parallel avenues of speaking of the same reality – taking care, of course, that they do not cross over each other, or (3) they serve in mutual complementarity, as two sides of the same coin.
Modern liberal Christology, for example, has argued for (1). To speak about the Spirit in relation to Christ is to speak about the presence of God in Christ; it is ultimately to ask about how Christ is human. Of course, there is some truth here. Spirit Christology does seek to stress the humanity of Jesus. My problem with this has to do with the fact that salvation does not come principally through the divine Son’s saving acts, but through human imitation of the historically particular Jesus. The substitute approach, in my view, does not leave room for participation in the mystery of Christ. The parallel approach is better, argues Sanchez, but still does not go to great lengths. Sanchez aims for the third option: mutual complementarity.
Mutual complementarity seeks to have Spirit Christology assess the weaknesses of Logos Christology, and Logos Christology assess the weaknesses of Spirit Christology. They are meant to be taken as two sides of the same coin, as it were. One of the ways Sanchez argues for this position is by showing how Alexandrian and Antiochene Christologies approach this mutual complementarity. In an Alexandrian approach is the Logos’s assumption of the human nature which is filled with his own Spirit, whereas in an Antiochene approach is the historical particularity of the Logos’s assumed human nature empowered by the Spirit. Conceiving it as such, we can both affirm a “from above” directionality (Alexandrian) and a “from below” directionality (Antiochene) but phrasing it in a way that takes account of both Logos and Spirit Christologies.
In my view, it is the mutual complementarity of both Christologies that allows us to steer clear from the heretical extremes both approaches are prone to if left on their own. Logos Christology steers towards Docetism and Gnosticism, whereas Spirit Christology steers towards Adoptionism. Going back to Macchia’s ontological/functional question, one could say that the question is a false dilemma: the answer is that Jesus is both one with God’s being (Logos Christology) and one with God’s actions to save the world (Spirit Christology). The human Jesus we see as empowered by the Holy Spirit is no one else than the eternal Logos made flesh.
Myk Habets, The Anointed Son
It is relevant to say here that Spirit Christology is not a modern/postmodern invention. Theological thinking about the relevance of the Spirit in Jesus’s own life goes back to Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Basil of Caesarea as well as medieval mystics like Hildegard of Bingen (who said Jesus was raised by the power of the Spirit), reformers like Calvin, and many others.