CREATOR SPIRITUS Paul Hinlicky on Pneumatology, Ecclesiology, and the Life of Holiness Michael Plekon It is rare today that a theologian sets about producing a thorough systematic theology, but Paul Hinlicky is just that rare and gifted theologian. Just a few introductory remarks are necessary. I have had the privilege of knowing Paul for twenty years and more, and also his family. I had much correspondence with him years back and a memorable month of Orthodox-Lutheran dialogue he set up while teaching at the theological faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava. I revere that moment as one of profound ecumenical fellowship in which not only did we give papers, discuss, and debate, but we also traveled extensively in Slovakia to important sites of both churches. And we prayed—daily. But we also ate and drank, truly sacramental sharing, particularly of the homemade wine of the sub-Carpathian region around Svaty Jur. I also need to say that while we once were fellow pastors in the Lutheran Church in America and then the ELCA, I subsequently moved to the Orthodox Church in America where I have been a priest for twenty years. I was an external reader on his daughter Sarah’s doctoral dissertation on Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, the great theologian of the Orthodox Church in France. I was able through another friend to have Sarah and Elisabeth meet before Elisabeth’s death. Elisabeth said to me that though an Orthodox Christian most of her adult life, she never stopped being a Lutheran—she had actually served as a lay pastoral assistant in the 1920s in rural parishes. I want to say the same is true of myself. Like Elisabeth, her friend Fr. Lev Gillet, and Thomas Merton, I have tried to reunite the churches in my own persona, life, and work. Michael Plekon, Professor, Sociology/Anthropology, Baruch College, City University of New York, 55 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10010. E-mail: mjplekon@aol.com Pro EcclEsia Vol. XXVi, No. 2 159 160 Michael Plekon Let me begin by saying a few things about the work as a whole. I think the very title is remarkable, with the many meanings of “Beloved Community.” That this denotes the Tri-Unity of God, the Trinity, immediately sets the project within the great Catholic and Orthodox ecumenical tradition. It is also most significant and admirable to me that “Beloved Community” signifies as well both the kingdom of God preached by Jesus in the gospels from the very start and “church,” in a diversity of meanings of which the author notes Blessed Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The procession of others lifting up the beloved community of God and God’s friends is the cloud of witnesses—the figures who do not know the walls of division with which we are afflicted still: Francis of Assisi and Seraphim of Sarov, Thomas Merton and Alexander Men, Philip Melanchthon and Sergius Bulgakov, Maria Skobtsova, Elisabeth Fedde, and Dorothy Day, just to name a few As this is a large book and one cannot focus on everything, I will concentrate on the section titled Creator Spiritus, with its treatment of pneumatology, ecclesiology, and baptism. I wonder if Hinlicky knows that in his trilogy on the Incarnation, “the humanity of God” (Bogochelovechestvo), perhaps the greatest Eastern Orthodox theologian of the modern era, Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944), also wrote with a focus on the Trinity and church, but in not the classic way. Rather, he began with The Lamb of God (1933), then The Comforter (1936), and lastly The Bride of the Lamb (1945), with the “unknowable abyss” of the Father almost at the end of the book on the Spirit.1 Bulgakov too avoided modalism and the other ways in which the three persons were hypostasized away into metaphors, functionalities, and identities. The life shared by Father, Son, and Spirit was emptied out in the life of the world, for the life of the world. Luther recognized this kenotic relationship of God to the world, of Creator to creatures. And this becomes an icon, an image of church and mission. “Holy secularity” becomes the way for Hinlicky to describe the life of the baptized, how we live according to “the Spirit of the Son of the Father,” who as the Eastern Church prayer that starts most services says, “is everywhere, filling all things.” He also cites Robert Benne’s Ordinary Saints. I too have reflected on worldly spirituality in three books on everyday holiness. It is not at all an interesting aside, but crucial to thinking about how we all live out the Gospel in the seemingly secular and mundane activities of work, family, and neighborhood. These are anything but mere everyday tasks. They are the very bread and wine of the universal priesthood of all believers, the way in which all of life becomes liturgy. With almost as much pastoral experience as academic in my life, how welcome is Hinlicky’s rejection of parish life as “funeral societies,” the 1. Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, The Lamb of God, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002, 2008, 2004). Pro EcclEsia Vol. XXVi, No. 2 161 slow decomposition of institutional structures, but worse, of living communities struggling to keep the heat and the roof on. I am gathering a collection of reflections from laity and clergy titled “The Church Has Left the Building” precisely on these mistaken commitments. The ecclesiology that follows from Hinlicky’s vision here is truly Catholic as well as Orthodox and Evangelical—but of course not the denominational sense those words can bear. Essential to this vision is the constant awareness of the end of “Christendom” in all its various manifestations. The alliance of church, culture, state, ethnicity, and more is not completely over, as political rhetoric here in America makes evident to me. Not that it is any longer authentic or believable religious rhetoric, it can be heard in political discourse or better, primary campaigning all the time and not in an edifying way. The mission of God as the core activity of church has nothing in common with the former order. In thinking through church in the eclipse of Christendom, Hinlicky very ably considers several important aspects that I cannot discuss in detail. These include the ordination of women and the important questions this raises about not only how women figure in church and salvation, but also about ordination and pastoral ministry more generally. Included also is a very thoughtful look at how ordained ministry and the Petrine ministry and papacy have been regarded in decades of fruitful ecumenical dialogue, most particularly the Lutheran–Roman Catholic dialogue in the United States. It is enormously important that along with other great contemporary theologians in the Lutheran legacy like Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, Hinlicky wants to move forward ecumenically to restore communion in the churches while steering away from both the conservative and liberal extremes in ecclesial engineering. He also takes seriously Ephraim Radner’s ecclesiological ponderings, acknowledging some convergence but disagreeing in the end. The sense I take away from this ecclesiological portion of the entire work is not only one that is ecumenical in the best meanings, but also one that for all the critique of culture and church is constructive and hopeful. I know that I do not share every criticism of church life, society, and the political landscape that undergirds the theological reflection here. That was the case even decades ago between Hinlicky and myself. I can add that the passage of time has made me more critical of the institutional dimension of church everywhere, much as the author is. But if I had to say where I find it most hopeful now, it would be somewhere close to the bishop of Rome Francis’s very Franciscan sense of the need for understanding, compassion, that God’s limitless mercy become the model of ours. Such a stance can seem weak, too concessionary to the pluralism and disorder of the twenty-first century. But somehow I find it more the Jesus of the gospels. This brings me to a closing thought. 162 Michael Plekon I have disagreements too with this remarkable work, but I prefer to engage with it only in constructive ways, putting as far as I can the best possible reading of the important theological proposals Paul Hinlicky gives us. That said, his dismissal of apokatastasis or universal restoration/ reconciliation as “all-too-easy-doctrine” is not worthy of his careful reflection or learning, for this is anything but a sell-out belief or effort to paint God as all merciful and our freedom and will as insignificant. Those who have seriously contemplated it—Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, centuries ago, Bulgakov and Evdokimov, and to some extent von Balthasar more recently—surely do not see universal restoration as a palliative to comfort anxious minds or a reluctance to take human agency seriously. In the last pages of this part of his work, Hinlicky also rejects it again, somehow making the hardness of the human heart, the resistance to grace as strong or as significant as the triumph of the resurrection, the victory of the Anastasis/Harrowing of hell. Perhaps in the Eastern Church we are guilty, as the author has said, of valuing the resurrection more than the cross. I stand unrepentant and in fact grateful then, because therein, in the recognition of the unfathomable graciousness of God, Philanthropos, the “Lover of humankind,” stand those who hold out not as doctrine but as hope and opinion, the universal reconciliation and salvation. Likewise, having drawn on Barbara Brown Taylor’s work in my recent writing, beginning with her Leaving Church, I was struck by how different are our understandings, both of her personal pastoral crisis and her larger critique of ecclesial belonging. Hers was a crisis not just of ministry as relationship and identity, but also of doctrine. The other books in her trilogy, An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark, make clear that while she has not left church or ministry, like many of us, she has come to very different understandings of both.2 And these understandings would be at odds with Paul Hinlicky’s in his systematics. I could mention as another example Ephraim Radner’s radical vision of the end of the church in our time, one I do not at all share. But then this should be no surprise, as so often we read the same texts differently, have conflicting interpretations that sometimes actually converge. What appears to be falling away from faith and church today—the rise of the religious “nones”—may also be taken as the end of social and cultural pressure to affiliate with congregations. What seems to be less concern for doctrine may also be a different take on what basic faith is about and where it resides. Here in Creator Spiritus we receive a probing, provocative meditation on church and being church. More broadly and throughout, Beloved Community is a major contribution to theological reflection in our time. 2. Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church (2007), An Altar in the World (2009), and Learning to Walk in the Dark (2014), all published by Harpe One, New York.