ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 15 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> I have a close friend here in town who is an Orthodox priest. He and I have some interesting discussions, let me tell you. But I have to admit that I don't always hold my own yet. So I have a question for you about Orthodoxy which relates directly to the Nicene Creed. The third article of the Nicene Creed says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Eastern Orthodoxy, which as you probably know accounts for approximately one quarter of all Christians, does not confess "and the Son." That church tradition only has "proceeds from the Father." Does this have any implications about what they think about Jesus and the Trinity? Is it substantially different from how we Lutherans think about Jesus? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: You know, frequently we Lutherans and more particularly Martin Luther, are held responsible for dividing the church during the Reformation and to Catholic and Protestant. That kind of attitude is a little naive. Because the church was split several times before. The really major split between the east and the west. Between the Roman church and the church which centered for a long time around Constantinople. Many of you have traveled and perhaps you will travel through Italy and Greece. And one of the things that is so striking about that kind of a trip is that you realize how close Italy and Greece are. And this gives us an opportunity to understand what kind of rivalry there was in the early church after the Roman Empire fell. Constantine took the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome over to Constantinople. And this really allowed for two centers of the church to grow up. The one center was in Rome. And the other center was Constantinople. Rome was the Latin church and Constantinople was the Greek church. And so it is to this very day that the churches of the west frequently use Latin but in the Roman Catholic Church, Latin is very rarely used. And insofar as the Eastern Church is concerned, it's not only the Greek Orthodox Church, there's the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Russian Orthodox Church. And not all of those churches agree with one another. And there has to be one point in which there is a great divergence or should we say a recognizable divergence? Because there really are some fundamental differences. And the real problem is how each of those churches say the Creed. In the Eastern Church, they simply say, "And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the Father." And they stop there. In the west, we say, "We believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the Son." That word "and the Son" in Latin is ***philioqua. And this difference between the east and the west has revolved around that word philioqua. We Lutherans really belong to the Western tradition because we -- we set our Reform over against the Roman Catholic Church. And therefore, our liturgy and our forms are very close to theirs. We can go into a Roman Catholic Church and have an idea of what's happening. And so we also say the Creed the same way as they do. There are many Lutherans who have looked at this issue of whether this really was an issue worth fighting about. In other words, putting in the word philioqua. The Pope was quite willing -- the last Pope was quite willing to make an accommodation on this as long as the doctrine in no way would be given up, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. I think there are -- I think you can argue on both sides of the question. If you want to follow the words of Jesus as they are recorded in the Gospel of John, he says, "I will send you the spirit who proceeds from the Father." That's all it says. And maybe that would be the easier way to get out of this particular dilemma. But there is more at stake. And that is there is no activity of the Father in which the Son also does not participate. What is problematic in that phrase, "he proceeds from the Father and the Son," remember that the problem is with the words "and the Son." And it is not a small problem. In the west we might think it's a small problem. But if we go to the Greek tradition, the Russian tradition, it is a huge problem. It's a very important issue for them. I think the real problem lies with the word "and." The Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Son in the way he proceeds from the Father. Because if we held that he proceeded from the Father and the Son in the same way, this would mean that the Holy Spirit has two sources. That the Spirit comes out of the Father and in another sense he comes out of the Son. And therefore, he would have a double origin. And that's really impossible. We would never want to say that. But we can use the phrase correctly and understand it properly if we understand that the Spirit must proceed from the Son. Because wherever the Father is, there is the Son. Does this have any other ramifications? I think it does. If we say that the Spirit just proceeds from the Father without proceeding from the Son, this means that when the Spirit speaks, he could speak things about God in general. He would be what is called in German a ***wirlspared, ***anvelt guist. But when the Spirit speaks, he has no choice but to speak about Jesus. And Jesus specifically says this when he says, "I will send you the Spirit who proceeds from the Father." It is Jesus who was in control of the Spirit. It is so that when the Spirit speaks, he testifies to Christ. And that's what Jesus says when he sends the Spirit. "He will testify to me." The Spirit doesn't testify to himself. But he testifies only to Jesus. I always get a little uncomfortable when somebody suggests that maybe we Lutherans don't pay enough attention to the Holy Spirit. Well, I think that's a fair concern. I'm not so sure that we don't pay attention to him. We have three major holidays. Christmas is the Feast of the Father. Easter is the Feast of the Son. And Pentecost is obviously the feast of the Holy Spirit. But the Spirit cannot -- can no longer be detached from the Son no more than the Father can be detached from the Son. We have no knowledge of God as Father apart from the Son. Specifically in the incarnation of Jesus. And even we could take this a little bit further. And that is the Spirit that Jesus gives to the church is the Spirit that he releases from the crucifixion from the cross. On that account Paul can say that he's determined to know nothing among us except Jesus Christ in him crucified. And that's because St. Paul had the Spirit that proceeded from Jesus. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***