God's Own Wild Card

It is easier to say what Life isn't than what it is. Among other things, it is not and cannot be a machine. Why? Mainly because a machine is composed of parts with exterior relations, whereas everything about Life has interior relations, resulting in a virtual infinitude of interconnections, feedback loops, and entailments. 

So, if we're on the right track, the key principle is interior relations. Or, you could even say relations, because inanimate things aren't actually related until we perceive the relation. A rock, for example, isn't related to another rock. Likewise, we can be in relation to a rock, but the rock isn't in relation to us.

Some people think this is how God rolls -- that we are related to him, but not vice versa. However, a trinitarian metaphysic suggests otherwise, positing a God that is irreducible substance-in-relation. Turns out the Absolute is relative after all.

I'm reading an interesting book on Pneumatology, the Pneuma (AKA Holy Spirit) undoubtedly being the most underrated of the Three. After all, he's a Person too, just a rather slippery one, always blowing about here and there. Hard to pin down. Whoops, where'd ego? To quote Mr. Cale, 

They call me the breeze / I keep blowing down the road.

Nevertheless, 

I ain't hidin' from nobody / Ain't nobody hidin' from me.

This being the case, it seems that the ungraspable Spirit may actually be the easiest of the Three to grasp. He's not hidin', rather, we are. He's always related to us, but we may or may not be related to him (or notice the relationship).

Put it this way: anyone who says they're "spiritual" -- which is almost everybody -- is confessing either the Holy Spirit or a hostile spirit of one kind or another (or a mixture of the two). 

This Spirit is and always has been available to man, ever since man became man. The testimony is abundant, diverse, and continuous. For not only is the Spirit always related to us, I would argue that He is relationship as such -- beginning with the interior relatedness of Father and Son. 

For example, in one famous formulation, the Trinity is Lover, Beloved, and the Love that binds them. Another says something to the effect that the Father is God above us, the Son God with us, and the Spirit God in us; and above, with, and in are distinct but inseparable, each being with and in the others.

As God's divine energy that permeates all life and everything in the cosmos, the Spirit is... the most intimate "contact point" between the Triune God and human beings (Kärkkäinen).  

Or at least change my mind.  

Of note, 

The doctrine of the Spirit has always played a more prominent role in Eastern Orthodox theology...., whereas the Christian West (Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Protestantism) focuses on Christology.

This can lead even to ill-sounding charges "of 'Christomonism' against Western theology." One hates to criticize such believers, but after all, Christ went to a great deal of trouble to reveal the threeness of the One. "Too often," writes Kärkkäinen, "a subordinate, secondary role" is "assigned to the Holy Spirit." 

This strikes me as self-evident, now that I think about it. It's one reason why Catholic theology is more rational than Orthodox theology, the latter being more mystical and experiential. Of course, all Three are present in both; rather, it's a matter of emphasis.  

This relative neglect of the Spirit, I think, accounts for people moving from one church to another in search of Him, for "people are experiencing a hunger for a concrete, lived experience of the life-giving Spirit" (ibid.). 

Not unlike earlier times of perceived crisis, Christians today attempt to reconnect with the wellsprings of the faith, hoping these roots will bring about stability, order and meaning to a postmodern world that is often felt to be hopelessly fragmented. In particular, many seek to retrieve a three-personed God who is related to the human community and to the entire universe in love... (Dreyer, in Kärkkäinen).

Emphasis mine, because there's that word again: related. 

Now, to quote another authority, The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. I want to say it is the wild card of divinity, emphasis on the wild. For which reason we need to test it, as alluded to above vis-a-vis Holy and unholy maninfestations.

Think of how wildly the Spirit behaves in Acts. Maybe the Spirit is just as wild today -- but again, both the good and bad kinds: for

People are paying attention to the spiritual dimension of their lives and often seem to be experiencing the Spirit in ways and places that often challenge traditional theologies and Church structures.... The Spirit is present and active beyond the official structures and ordained ministries of the Church (Sachs, ibid.).

There's something going on here that is analogous to Gödel's theorems, only as applied to doctrine. For doctrine is a structure that "contains" the uncontainable Spirit, which necessarily eludes containment. Again, it is the wild card: 

Theologians from whom I have learned the most, both ancient and modern, all warn against trying to comprehend the Spirit in a systematic way (ibid., emphasis mine).

As alluded to above, we're talking about something fundamentally relational and experiential -- "the most intimate 'contact point' between the Triune God and human beings."

Even though the experience of the Spirit always leads to theological reflection on its meaning, spirituality is the first contact point. This is clearly evident in the biblical record: a powerful, often charismatic experience of the Spirit came first; only afterward, and in a slow tempo, came theological reflection (Kärkkäinen). 

Exactly. The earliest councils first had to sort out the business of the Son before getting to the isness of the Spirit, which wan't nailed down until later.

On the one hand, "talk about the Spirit cannot be based on pure theory but must touch on experienced reality." But on the other, "experience alone does not suffice. It must be tried and tested so that 'one's own spirit' does not take the place of the Holy Spirit."

This post actually began with a very different subject in mind, that is, Rosen's "relational biology," which is a biology that is mindful of the infinitely rich interior relations of organisms. While Rosen doesn't say it, I will: that Life cannot be reduced to anything less than Life Itself, which is in turn related to the living relationship-as-such of the Holy Spirit. 

This is only the introduction to a vast subject, but I suspect creation is substance-in-relation all the way down, starting not only at the top, but within it. 

So many aphorisms, so we'll limit ourselves to five:

God is infinitely close and infinitely distant; one should not speak of Him as if he were some intermediate distance.

God does not reveal with discourses, but by means of experiences. The sacred writer does not transmit a divine discourse; his words express an experience given to him. 

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge. 

The objectivity of mystical experience cannot be demonstrated. Just like that of any other experience.

Any shared experience ends in a simulacrum of religion.