The Holy Spirit hovered over the dark chaotic waters to bring forth creation, “”hovered over” the dark womb of Mary the Virgin to bring forth the Incarnate Word; hovered over the mutilated corpse of Jesus in the dark tomb to raise him from the dead; creates us all over again as we made to drink from It (Her? Him?) in Baptism; raises us from the dead along with Christ; with the grace of Jesus and the love of the Father brings us into everlasting communion with God and each other; and will create new heavens and a new earth.
Some have considered all this and decided that the doctrine of the Trinity needs to be radically reoriented in favor of the Spirit. For instance, in his 1976 Bampton Lectures, G. W. H. Lampe derides the “wooden exegesis [of the Fathers], which fastened on particular words without considering how the authors intended them to be used […] the personal distinctions have no content and therefore are meaningless, so long as they are understood to be the relations themselves.”[1] Jesus as the human manifestation of God as Spirit is more in line with lived Christian experience, he argued.
The Jesuit Roger Haight proposed a similar reordering in Jesus: Symbol of God, which drew condemnation from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.[2] These are not the only “Spirit Christologies” being proposed. Sarah Coakley does so as well as…
