9

Dust and DNA

The Intertwining of Word and Spirit
in History and the Trinitarian Life
Robert Davis Hughes III

INTRODUCTION AND THANKS

May we begin with prayer, starting with the words of Orthodox
Patriarch of Antioch, Ignatios IV, as translated by Metropolitan Kal-
listos in his 2007 Holy Spirit Lecture:

Without the Spirit,

God is far away,
Christ belongs to the past,
The Gospel is a dead letter,
The Church is a mere organization,
Authority takes the form of domination,
Mission is turned into propaganda,
Worship is reduced to bare recollection,
Christian action becomes the morality of a slave.
But in the Spirit,
God is near,
The risen Christ is present with us here and now,
The Gospel is the power of life,
The Church signifies Trinitarian communion,
Authority means liberating service,
Mission is an expression of Pentecost,
 DUST AND DNA 215

The Liturgy is a making-present of both past and future,

Human action is divinized.1
O God, you teach the hearts of your faithful
people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit:
Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all
things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through
Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with
you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and
ever. Amen.2

First, let me [say how grateful and honored I am to be the recipient of

the inaugural des Places-Libermann award in Pneumatology for my
book, Beloved Dust.3] What I propose to do here is build on what was
said in Beloved Dust and what has been said about it.
One guiding passion of Beloved Dust is missiological, a search for
a missiology that must, of necessity now more than ever, include an
apologetics, a commending of the gospel to our time, place, and cul-
ture that addresses the scientific worldview. In many ways science
recommended, if not dictated, the anthropology of dust,4 a physicalist
interpretation of humanity enhanced only by the Holy Spirit, not by
any occult properties of humanity itself. Beloved Dust was also born
out of a passionate desire to retrieve, recover, and revise for our time
the wisdom about life in the Holy Spirit locked in the neo-scholas-
tic rhetoric of the classic spiritual theologies. It backed into pneu-
matology by suggesting that a theology of the spiritual life must be
foremost about the Holy Spirit, not about us, however much we may

1 See chapter 4 of this volume, especially footnote 52 for Metropolitan Kallistos’ full attri-
bution of these words.
2 Collect for Pentecost Sunday, translation The Book of Common Prayer (1979), 227,
modified.
3 The occasion for this colloquium was the inaugural des Places-Libermann award in Pneu-
matology, given for Robert Davis Hughes III, Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in Christian Life
(New York and London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008). The award is
named for Claude-François Poullart des Places and the Ven. François-Marie-Paul Libermann,
the founder and re-founder of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. The causes of both are
being advanced in Rome. For the theological, spiritual, and missiological interests of these
two saintly founders, see the excellent articles in the inaugural issue of Spiritan Horizons,
Fall 2006. If you are wondering about “pneumatology,” it is the study of the Holy Spirit,
from the Greek pneuma for spirit.
4 See Beloved Dust, ch. 4, 53–68 and the attributions there.
216 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

have learned from the spiritual psychologies of much of the modern

mystical tradition. By its very nature and conception, Beloved Dust
is not a complete pneumatology, because it focuses on the personal
dimension of the spiritual life. Yes, there are important “hooks” to
the larger story in the insistence that all true Christian spirituality
must be corporeal, corporal, corporate, and ecclesial, and ultimately
grounded in the eschatological reality of the Holy Spirit’s work of the
final pleroma, the fullness and fulfillment of all things. But the larger
issues of the Spirit’s role in creation and history were evident only in
hints and glimpses. My own current thinking and research is focused
on expanding the insights of Beloved Dust to the consideration of
these larger issues; it is some preliminary thoughts about these that
I would share here. And I do mean preliminary. Please bear with me,
as this will be more glimpses of a work under construction than a
finished piece, more of an effort to probe problems and questions and
make a few tentative suggestions than an offer of complete solutions.
Let me quote something from Ralph Del Colle’s book, Christ and the
Spirit,5 which helps define the intersection we seem to be occupying at
present. He has discussed the temporal missions, the sending of Word
and Spirit by the Father into time and history and the work they do
there in what is called the divine economy, describing them as hypo-
statically engaged (that is, each person of the Trinity is fully involved
in propria persona, not merely as a kind of appropriate hook for the
undivided action of the one divine essence), and also as distinguish-
able but inseparable at every moment. In examining the human recep-
tion of these missions in cultural and historical pluralism, he states:

Formally speaking, all that is human is included in these

temporal missions of the Son and the Spirit. Also, as we
have seen, the two missions are not identical but neither
are they separated. The Holy Spirit creates, sanctifies, and

5 Ralph Del Colle, Christ and the Spirit: Spirit-Christology in Trinitarian Perspective (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). I cite Del Colle’s work not only because he
was a colloquist on this occasion, but also because I find it admirable and accurate. His work
is in turn a consideration of that of David Coffey, see his “Spirit-Christology and the Trinity,”
in Advents of the Spirit: An Introduction to the Current Study of Pneumatology, ed. Bradford
E. Hinze and D. Lyle Dabney, 315–338 (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2001),
with Del Colle’s response to Coffey and Moltmann, 339–346.
 DUST AND DNA 217

unites the human nature of Jesus to the divine Son while

the risen Lord is present through the modality of the Holy
Spirit who is the mutual love of the Father and the Son
and who now in the divine economy extends that love to
include all those who are sons and daughters in the Son.
However, this delineation of the model does not extend to
a material explanation of the manner in which the various
concerns, actions, and dimensions of the human are the
object of the missions. This would come under the rubric
of a more practical exposition of the theology of grace and
the Christian life.6

This latter is what Beloved Dust attempted, not yet fully engaged with
the dogmatic concerns in Del Colle’s work, though certainly with those
concerns on the horizon. So, we might envision this conversation as
me working up from Dust toward the dogmatic concerns, while Del
Colle might work down from the constructive-dogmatic model of
Spirit-christology toward Spiritual theology, perhaps as performed
not unlike as in Beloved Dust. That is at least one way of defining
where we are.
As Cardinal Kasper noted in the opening lines of his paper for the
second Holy Spirit Lecture,7 the motto of Duquesne University “It is
the Spirit who gives life” is the ground of all our work at this Lecture,
and it is precisely this theme that I undertake here, in exploring the
Christian creedal confession that the Holy Spirit gives life; specifically
the Spirit is confessed in the Nicene Creed as Dominum et vivificantem,
to Kyrion, to Zõopoion, “the Lord and Giver-of-Life.” What does that
mean in our day, with our understanding of cosmology, evolution,
natural history, and history? At the interface of dust and the Holy Spirit
as life-giver we find above all in our time, the remarkable properties
of DNA, which Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project
and now of NIH, called “the language of God.”8 Also, one concept

6 Del Colle, Christ and the Spirit, 202.

7 Cardinal Walter Kasper, “The Holy Spirit and Ecumenical Dialogue: Theological and Practi-
cal Dimensions,” in chapter 7 of this volume.
8 Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New
York: Free Press, 2006). This book is a rarity, sensible on both the science and the theology,
making a philosophical/theological claim for theism as an interpretation of the scientific
218 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

stands out from all the current discussion in pneumatology—the

inseparability of Word/Wisdom/Child/Son/Christ on the one hand,
and the Holy Spirit on the other. The missions of the second and third
persons of the Trinity in the divine economy of creation and history
are now seen as accompanying one another, as indelibly linked and
inseparable, even though distinct and thus distinguishable. We speak,
and here my fellow colloquists have been eloquent, as have Killian
McDonnell and Eugene Rogers,9 of the ongoing necessity of both a
pneumatological christology and a christological pneumatology, of
understanding the Spirit as the mediation of that of which Christ is the
mediator. Furthermore, pneumatology proper has begun to ask about
the implications of this fundamental insight from the economy for
our understanding of the inner life of the Triune God, the immanent
Trinity. I propose to bring together these two insights, the inevitability
of dealing with DNA when we consider the Spirit as life-giver on the
one hand, and the intertwining of the Word/Wisdom and the Spirit in
their missions on the other, by suggesting that DNA may indeed be a
vestigium, a vestige or footprint, of the Trinity. Or, to be a more faith-
ful interpreter of my own work, I suggest that DNA as the very struc-
ture of life as we know it is a kind of resonance of the divine life, one
of the myriad ways in which the self-expressive self-transcendence
of the Triune God evokes all drives toward self-transcendence in the
creation. So, I propose to do three things. First, we shall explore the
idea of DNA as a vestigium or resonance of the Trinity and the way
that enlightens our understanding of the tradition of the Holy Spirit
as life-giver as we have received it. Second, this will lead us inevitably
into a consideration of the role of the Holy Spirit in history, and how
what we have learned from DNA may strengthen suggestions I have
made about that role in earlier work. Finally, we shall ask if we have

picture without falling over into Creationism or Intelligent Design as the importation of
occult causes into science. For a similar account see the document “Catechism of Creation”
at: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/03/CC-Creation-
Catechism.pdf.
9 Killian McDonnell, The Other Hand of God: The Holy Spirit as Universal Truth and Goal
(Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2003); Eugene, F. Rogers, After the Spirit: A Construc-
tive Pneumatology From Resources Outside the West (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerd-
mans Pub. Co., 2005) are seminal works in contemporary pneumatology, cited frequently
throughout Beloved Dust.
 DUST AND DNA 219

learned anything in these largely economic considerations that might

give us insight into the place of the Spirit in the immanent Trinity, and
especially the question of the filioque, the debate between Eastern and
Western Christianity over the procession of the Holy Spirit.

DNA AND THE MISSIONS OF WORD AND SPIRIT

The first proposal, then, is that we examine DNA as a possible foot-
print or resonance of the Holy Trinity in creation, especially the cre-
ation of life. This is not designed to replace others, but to complement
them; for example Irenaeus’ picturing of the Word and Spirit as the two
hands of God is a model that has been used by many contemporary
authors. The idea of an aspect of evolution as a vestige of the Trinity
is not itself new. James Salmon and Nicole Schmitz-Moorman propose
as a Trinitarian vestige the unity we see in systems evolution and later
stages of thermodynamics in generating the irreversible arrow of his-
tory.10 Ian Barbour has likewise written persuasively on how we might
envision divine action in evolution.11 He suggests five issues in contem-
porary biology that any theological reflection must take into account:
self organization in material systems; indeterminacy at various levels
from the quantum to the historical; the phenomenon of “top-down
causality” in complex systems; new concepts in information theory
and its communication; and, most especially, the place of history in
all of these. Each provides a possible model of God’s interaction with
the evolutionary process, which Barbour then supplements with what
he sees as an even more powerful model—the concept of interiority
in process thought. Thanks to Phillip Cary’s work on Augustine,12 I

10 James F. Salmon, SJ, and Nicole Scmitz-Moorman, “Evolution as Revelation of a Triune

God,” Zygon 37 (December 2002): 853–871.
11 Ian G. Barbour, “Five Models of God and Evolution,” in Evolutionary and Molecular Biol-
ogy: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Robert Johnson Russell, William R. Stoeger,
SJ, and Francisco J. Ayala, 419–442 (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications, and
Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1998). I am grateful to my
Sewanee colleague, Dr. Cynthia S. W. Crysdale, for calling my attention to these last two
works.
12 Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and
Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External
Things in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
220 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

am becoming even more wary of Western notions of interiority than

I was when I wrote Beloved Dust, so, perhaps, Teilhard’s notion of
“centreity” in complex systems will serve us better than the concept
of “interiority.” I should also note again that Francis Collins has also
called DNA “The Language of God,” which is, indeed the title of his
book relating his scientific work to his Christian faith. As far as I know,
however, no one has as yet proposed the double helix structure of
DNA itself as a Trinitarian vestige or resonance, though Elizabeth A.
Johnson has imagined a triple helix as such.13 It is vital, when we make
a move like this, to be clear that we are not letting theology dictate to
science or importing occult causes into science, or even supporting
creationism or intelligent design as scientific concepts. Rather, we are
doing some philosophical and theological reflection on what science
offers as a picture of the world.
This reflection, however, suggests that DNA is more than a mere
metaphor for God as the source of life. To summarize quickly some
common but contested ground, proper theological language goes
beyond metaphor to analogy, looking for places where there are true
commonalities between creaturely realities and God; by the principle
of analogia entis or analogy of being, when we find such an analogy
there really is something in common between the creature and God

13 As Bradford Hinze reminded me at the colloquium, I was wrong about DNA as such never
having been used. Elizabeth A. Johnson has twice made the suggestion, She Who Is: The
Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 221; and
Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God (New York and London:
Continuum, 2007), 220. As I am familiar with both of these excellent works and admire
their exposition of the current state of the doctrine of the Trinity, I should have been aware
of these references. In a personal communication, Dr. Johnson has stated that she has not
developed this suggestion further, nor have others who have found it attractive, as far as she
knows. (E-mail, Sept. 23, 2010, in which Dr. Johnson graciously gave permission for me to
forge ahead with the idea.) In both instances, she uses the image of a “triple helix” for the
Trinity, while acknowledging that the double helix is the form of life as we know it. In fact,
Linus Pauling originally imagined a triple helix, until the work of James Watson and Francis
Crick showed that such an arrangement would be unstable and proposed the double helix
as an alternative. A triple helix may exist at the end of chromosomes and in at least one
biological process, and has also been envisioned as a possible structure for DNA-influencing
medications. The Wikipedia article “Triple Helix” as of January 10, 2011, is actually quite
accurate and helpful. See also Peter E. Nielsen, “Triple Helix: Designing a New Molecule of
Life,” Scientific American (December 1, 2008). Despite the obvious Trinitarian resonances
in a triple helix model, as will be seen, I have chosen to stick with the double helix as the
fundamental structure of life, and the result is different though not contradictory insights
into the Trinity from those that would follow from a triple helix model.
 DUST AND DNA 221

at the level of being, even though there is also much that is not in
common, as the finite can never completely or accurately reflect the
infinite. This prevents us from ever thinking that an analogy asserts a
simple, literal identity, which would be idolatry. The task of positive
theology is to explore the commonality and learn from it, and of nega-
tive theology to state and take careful note of the differences, which
will always be more than the similarities.14 Sacraments, understood as
real symbols rather than mere signs, are one example of this analogi-
cal existence between metaphor and identity, and Augustine’s idea
that creation contains vestigia, vestiges or footprints of the Trinity, is a
particularly interesting case. The most famous example of the latter is
his assertion that the threefold psychological principle in his anthro-
pology—that human consciousness is made up of memory, reason,
and will—reflects the structure of the Trinitarian life.
In our day, “footprint” sounds a little too physical, a little too lit-
eral, and in Beloved Dust I suggested that “resonance” and “current”
were better ways to get at the “imprint” of the analogia entis. I hope
you all are familiar with the experiment, which involves two tuning
forks of the same pitch. Strike one, and the other will begin to sound
as well, even more loudly if they touch. Similarly, take a resonating
tuning fork and touch it to a container of water and ripples become
evident. More unknown to most of us, and still mysterious even in
science, is the way in which at the quantum level particles are able to
exchange information with each other across huge gaps in the space/
time continuum. So, our first task is to explore what it might look like
to suggest the existence of an analogy between the very structure of
life as we know it, the double helix or twisted “ladder” of DNA, and
the source of life as we Christians confess it, in the manner in which
the inner Trinitarian life is expressed in the external missions of Word/
Wisdom and Spirit in the giving of life to creation. Should we be sur-
prised that there is such a correspondence, that creaturely life is a
kind of resonance of divine life without in any way being identical to
it or a chip off it?

14 The definitive work on theological analogy remains David Tracy, The Analogical Imagina-
tion: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
222 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

Even a current inspection of any diagram or model of the now

familiar double helix of DNA in its standard B-form reveals suggestive
features. In this structure, the two long pieces, the vertical elements
of the twisted ladder, called strands, run in opposite directions (anti-
parallel) and wind about a common axis in a right-hand twist. The
repeating unit on each strand, termed a nucleotide, is composed of a
sugar15 and phosphate chain; the horizontal rungs on which we find
the actual genetic coding are one of four chemical compounds, called
bases.16 One unit of one strand of the “ladder,” called a nucleotide, is
composed of a sugar, a phosphate group, and one of four bases, each
of which is attached to the sugar. The phosphate groups link sugars
of adjacent nucleotides, thus building the long polymeric chain that
makes up one side of the DNA “ladder.” Each base comprises half
of one of the horizontal rungs, and their order along each strand is
responsible for the encoded genetic information. Further, the bases
form hydrogen bonds in predictable pairings with counterparts on
the other strand, giving rise to the term “base-pairs.” The double
helix, or “twisted ladder,” is formed as two complementary streams
nucleotides join together through these hydrogen bonds. The emerg-
ing structure has the bonded base pairs on the “inside” of the helix,
while the sugar-phosphate chain forms a kind of negatively charged
skeleton on the outside. All the observable biological action involves
the information encoded by the order of the bases, though the flexibil-
ity of the sugar-phosphate skeleton contributes to the distinct shapes
DNA can take.17
The first thing I propose is that we see the character of the strands as
a vestige or resonance of the inseparability of the economic missions
of Word and Spirit that has become a touchstone of contemporary

15 A 5-carbon deoxyribose.
16 Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, abbreviated as A,C,G,T.
17 Simply for the sake of completeness it should be noted that in our cells the DNA, when
not being used, does not form a linear and exceedingly elongated structure; rather, it is
compacted by a factor of approximately 10,000, first by being wound around a protein core,
forming what are called nucleosomes. The resulting structure gives the appearance of beads
on a string, where the beads are the nucleosome particles joined by the continuous DNA
double helix. In other words, the double strand chains bend sufficiently to form nucleo-
somes. This “string of beads” is then further compacted through coiling and supercoiling
within the structure of chromosomes in the cell.
 DUST AND DNA 223

pneumatology. As ECLA theologian Robert Jenson puts it, the issue

is to see how the external acts of the Trinity are undivided but distin-
guishable. That is exactly what we see in the strands of DNA.18 First,
they are, in a sense, inseparable. True, they “unzip” and put some
distance between the two strands in brief regions of the DNA chain
when they are working, either in transcription or replication,19 a fact
to which we shall return, but then they re-entwine when the process
is complete. If they are unwound from each other by various chemical
means in experiments, when “released,” they also intertwine again
if they remain intact. There is in life as we know it no way one func-
tions without reference to the other. Thus, they are not absolutely
inseparable, as space does open up between them in specific regions
when work is being done; but they are functionally inseparable and in
fact, in nature, never fully come apart. They are tightly joined, inter-
twined, connected in a very stable way, and always related to each
other through attraction. I shall continue to use “inseparable,” but
in this relative sense. I hope in future work to expand the theologi-
cal analogy further by examining the fact that in DNA the work gets
done precisely when a bit of space opens up between the strands in
a limited section or bubble. Does even this tell us something of how
Word and Spirit work with each other in the economy?
In addition, as previously noted, the two strands are not exactly
identical. The base pairs are not homogeneous, and have a determined
directionality and sequence determined by the shape of the sugar
molecules (dictated by their chemical structure), and the strands are
not parallel but anti-parallel in this directionality; that is, the order

18 My original presentation of the science, including the preceding paragraph, contained

a number of factual errors. I am grateful to the Rev. Daniel E. Hall, M.D., of the Episcopal
Diocese of Pittsburgh, the Episcopal Church, for pointing out these errors. I have corrected
as many as I can, relying heavily on an excellent general introduction to the subject, Chris
R. Calladine, Horace R. Drew, Ben F. Luisi, and Andrew A. Travers, Understanding DNA: The
Molecule and How It Works, 3rd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2004). I am
grateful to Dr. Hall and most especially to my brother-in-law John David Puett, Ph.D., Chair,
Biochemistry Department, University of Georgia, emeritus, for checking the science and
making many helpful suggestions, most of which I have adopted. I remain responsible for
any remaining errors and for drawing the theological analogies.
19 In transcription, a messenger RNA, encoded on the basis of a stretch of a DNA strand,
is biosynthesized and in turn carries “instructions” to another part of the cell for manufac-
turing a protein. In replication, the DNA reproduces itself prior to chromosome doubling
leading to cell division or reproduction.
224 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

of the nucleotides in them runs opposite; if one runs from what the
scientists call three prime to five prime (denoted as 3' to 5'), the other
strand runs from five prime to three prime (5' to 3');20 and this may
indeed be a reflection or cause of their inseparable intertwining. The
strands are identical, however, if read from the same direction (3' to
5'). This resonates with the idea that the persons of the Trinity are of
the same substance (homoousios), but distinguishable by the taxis
or order of their origin.
The directionality and complementarity of the DNA strands also
reminds me immediately of the classic rhythm of exodus/reditus in
theology, or of what our Spirit-christology theologians call the taxeis
of bestowal and return. One thinks even of Irenaeus’s theology of reca-
pitulation. What we see in the DNA is a simultaneity and inseparabil-
ity of the strands, which can nevertheless be distinguished because
they are indeed distinct. This seems to me a good way to understand
how the Word is the light that enlightens every human, and is the life
of humans (John 1: 4–5), and yet the Spirit is confessed as Dominum et
vivificantem, to Kyrion, to Zõopoion. The gift of life, of evolving life, the
DNA analogy suggests, is one act of two inseparable but distinguish-
able actors. Note how this fits the most fundamental points of Del
Colle’s exposition of Spirit-christology, the temporal missions of the
Word and Spirit being distinguishable but inseparable, full hypostatic
or personal engagement in the economy reflecting the originating pro-
cessions within the immanent life of God who is triadic unity. The rela-
tive inseparability of the DNA strands deriving from their distinction
and directionality is an insight that would deepen our understanding
of how Word and Spirit interact in Christology and the other great mys-
teries of the faith. It certainly helps counter any threat of modalism,
of collapsing one into the other as if there were no true distinction.
The inseparability is not in tension with the distinctions, but actually
caused by them. This could, I believe, be the source of very fruitful
further theological reflection, especially when we view the Spirit as
the mutual love of the Father and the Son, from the eternal beginning.

20 Parallel strands can be imagined and even produced artificially, but are less stable and
hence do not occur in nature. On this issue of directionality and anti-parallelism see Cal-
ladine et al., 8, 27–28.
 DUST AND DNA 225

Second, however, there are other features of DNA from which we

can learn and draw theological analogies. However crucial the sugar-
phosphate skeletal strands are, we really don’t know much about what
they do except that by their intertwining helical structure they pro-
vide an architecture for the bases, the rungs of the ladder, which in
sequence form the genes whose effects we can study. The relation-
ship between these genes and the phenotype of the organism is far
more complex than once thought. Even at the cellular level, each gene
sequence—in “conversation” with various regulatory bits of DNA and
what can occur post-transitionally—may produce a variety of proteins.
Some of these seem to respond to the environment, giving Lamark (the
Russian biologist who argued for inheritance of acquired characteris-
tics) and acquired characteristics new life in evolutionary theory. This
complex interaction among proteins, the genes that encode them, and
the metabolism of the cell may be analogous to the great economic
mysteries of the Christian faith, and it is only with the eyes of faith
that we can see the analogy between these complex processes and the
Trinitarian mystery. The point I wish to make, however, is that despite
all we have learned, within the cellular economy the strands have
a kind of ineffability by themselves. It is where they come together,
where they interact along the rungs, that we can actually see what
is happening. Here again, the analogy to Word and Spirit is exact.
We know little of the divine persons, energies, or missions in isola-
tion. What we know best is their interaction in certain key mysteries,
and for Christians the archetypal mysteries are the Incarnation and
the Resurrection, both mysteries in which we also see precisely the
bestowal of life by the Spirit on the Word in a manner that is definitive
for us also, as we find life in Christ, in the flesh and body of Christ, by
the indwelling of the Spirit in us as well.
It is worth pausing for a brief look at these two mysteries. Lind-
beck’s proposal that the two great Christian dogmas are the grammar
of the Christian conversation is now enshrined in the theological con-
versation.21 What I propose is that the great Christological mysteries

21 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age
(Philadelphia, now Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/Knox, 1984, 2009). The two great dogmas
are the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the union of two natures (human and divine)
in the one person, Jesus the incarnate Word.
226 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

are the bases, the fundamental genetic structure at the center of the
DNA of the entire divine/human conversation and interaction, the
Rosetta Stone that allows us to “crack” the rest of the code and read
the whole “theological genome.” This, of course, moves us more
deeply from science into theology.
I take them in reverse order because it is the reality of the Resur-
rection that allowed the disciples of Jesus in their time, and now us
in ours, to see Jesus enough in depth to contemplate the reality of the
Incarnation. As the early apostolic preaching asserts, it is by raising
him from the dead that the Father manifests Jesus as both Lord and
Messiah.22 Jesus does not first become these at the Resurrection, but
perhaps as per Pannenberg, Schoonenberg, and Macquarrie,23 among
others, he only fully becomes them there. Certainly, only there are
his divinity and messianic anointing fully apparent in a manner that
has caused believers to read everything that came before and after in
that light. And the power by which the Father raises Jesus from the
dead is the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit whom we can now receive in
baptism, and thus be joined to the Church as Jesus’s new, resurrected,
pneumatological body of flesh in the church as community and on
the church’s tables as sacrament. I do, however, want to emphasize a
truth we have rediscovered through the liturgical renewal movement
in the West, in our recovery of Easter as the Great Fifty Days. Pentecost
is not what comes after Easter; it is not subsequent to it. Pentecost is
rather the climax of the paschal mystery, the outpouring on all flesh,
all animated dust, of the resurrected life we see most intensely in the
resurrection of Jesus itself. We also see this in the way the Johannine
evangelist telescopes the two realities in his account of Easter eve-
ning.24 This, along with the inseparability and complementarity of
the divine missions, warns against any scheme like that of Joachim of
Fiore in the twelfth century in which in a final age of the Spirit we can
leave cross and resurrection behind. There is no age of the Spirit not
also marked by cross and empty tomb, because it is there that we first

22 Acts 2:14–36. This is, of course, the fundamental point of C. H. Dodd’s classic, The Apos-
tolic Preaching and Its Developments: Three Lectures, with an Appendix on Eschatology and
History (London and New York: Harper, 1954, and many subsequent editions).
23 See Del Colle’s appendix on Schoonenberg and van Beeck, 217–226.
24 Jn 20:19–23.
 DUST AND DNA 227

find the Spirit as Christians. From that point only we read back both
Incarnation and the gift of life itself as theological.
We turn next, in the light of the experience of the Holy Spirit in the
Resurrection of Jesus and its aftermath, to consider the mystery of the
Incarnation as symbolized in the Annunciation. Eugene Rogers has
done such a splendid job on this mystery in particular that I simply
refer you to what he wrote in After the Spirit,25 if you have not yet
read it. The DNA analogy we are exploring requires that we confront a
couple of very specific theological questions. One, as Del Colle has so
helpfully shown, can be stated very precisely in neo-scholastic terms.
Surely, the Holy Spirit is involved in the Incarnation, even though
only the Word is personally incarnated; Mary of Nazareth conceives
Jesus by the Holy Spirit, who comes upon her as the shekinah cloud
of divine glory comes upon the Holy of Holies in the temple, so that
God the Word tabernacles in her womb just as in and around the ark
of the covenant. But, especially in the Western Catholic tradition, the
external works of the Trinity are undivided. No act of God is ever an
act of just one person of the Trinity; all three are always involved and
precisely in their unity. We have already noted one addition or cor-
rection of our time: “The external works of the Trinity are undivided,
but not indistinguishable,” Here above all we see the “distinct and
distinguishable but inseparable” highlighted by the DNA analogy.
Second, we must allow our conversation with the Christian East to
correct a Western tendency to view the divine essence as primordial
in its unity, which then gets expressed in the three hypostases. In
this aberration, the divine essence becomes the fount of all being and
activity rather than the Father. The more Eastern view that the divine
essence is known and indeed “exists” only in the triadic unity of the
three hypostases is surely correct.
But that still leaves us with a question of the level of the Spirit’s
involvement in the Annunciation, and, indeed in the other great
Christological mysteries, which can be stated technically as follows:
Are the acts of the Spirit in these mysteries only “appropriate,” that
is, expressing the Spirit’s participation in the one divine essence
and will, or are these acts “proper,” that is, also expressive of the

25 Rogers, After the Spirit, 98–134.

228 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

hypostatic properties of the Spirit that distinguish her from the other
persons in the Trinity? As Del Colle has shown clearly in his work on
Spirit-christology, the old answer was that these acts were appropriate
only.26 More recently, however, theological opinion has shifted: Even
though the acts of God remain undivided, though distinguishable,
the Spirit is fully involved personally, hypostatically, “properly” in
the Christological mysteries. Certainly theological reflection based
on DNA as a vestige or resonance of the Trinity, specifically of the
divine missions and perhaps the Trinitarian processions, would sug-
gest that: Both Word and Spirit are fully, personally, hypostatically
involved in the Christological mysteries, which precisely so express
the one divine essence and will. If this sounds overly technical, I hope
we will be able to see its importance when we turn in conclusion to
pneumatology proper.
The theological use of DNA points to further problems we must tag
in thinking about the Incarnation and Annunciation and the role of
the Spirit in them; one comes from the shift in our scientific under-
standing of the human biological realities on which the analogy of
begetting is based. Aristotle expressed the common view of his time
that the entirety of the human person was in the male sperm or seed,
the female womb being only the passive ground in which that seed
is planted and from which it draws its nourishment, its material sub-
stance. The discovery of human ova in 1827 by Karl Ernst von Baer
and subsequent discoveries about the nature of human reproduction,
including its basis at the level of chromosome and gene, have indel-
ibly altered the way we must now think about “begetting,” as we now
recognize the much greater contribution of the woman and her genes.
Neither our understanding of the virginal conception of Jesus nor of
the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father in the inner life of the
immanent Trinity have been adequately rethought in the light of this
shift in the human ground of the analogy. Traditionally, Mary provides
the full enfleshed humanity of Jesus, though current Spirit-christology
emphasizes the role of the Spirit resting in the womb of Mary in the
creation of that sacred humanity, sanctifying it, and then uniting it
to the Word. Must we not now transcend this and think instead of

26 See esp. Del Colle, 64–90, but continuing to wrestle with this issue in post-scholastic
terms is much of the backbone of chapters that follow.
 DUST AND DNA 229

the Spirit as somehow providing Mary with DNA from the Word to
combine with her own DNA in Jesus’s human begetting? This must be
done carefully, however, if Jesus is not to emerge human on the X chro-
mosome but divine on the Y! We cannot do more with this now with
regard to Annunciation and the human birth of the Word, but I file
the question as relevant to one to which we shall return, namely the
role of the Spirit in the first nativity of the Word, the eternal begetting.
These considerations may also bear on a pneumatological retrieval
of the Immaculate Conception. Poullart des Places is known especially
for his devotion to the Holy Spirit and Mary the Theotokos, the God-
Bearer. This particular conjunction is especially evident in the Incarna-
tion and its historical symbol, the mystery of the Annunciation, which
is one reason I chose Eugene Rogers’ superb chapter on the Annun-
ciation as one of the colloquium readings. We seek to grasp from the
traditional interpretations of this mystery new ways to envision the
interaction of the Holy Spirit with the historical reality of the flesh of
the Blessed Virgin as in her and with her consent the Spirit gratuitously
provides the Word with a human body, immersed not just in human
nature as an abstract substance, but in all of human history and of
the covenant history with Israel in particular. For Mary is not just any
woman, as the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception struggles to say.
Above all, and of note for our considerations, she is Bethulah Israel,
the Virgin Daughter of Israel, precisely in her flesh the icon of all the
covenant history of God with Israel up to that point.
I would also like to pick up on the devotion of des Places and Liber-
mann to Maria Immaculata by suggesting a pneumatological interpre-
tation of the Immaculate Conception. Before my evangelical Anglican
friends object, let me refer all of us to the work of Anglican evangeli-
cal theologian John de Satgé who pointed out that though Anglicans
cannot accept as dogma this teaching that Mary is conceived by her
parents (traditionally Sts. Joachim and Anne) without taint of original
sin, that is an argument over the nature of dogma, not the truth of
the teaching, which Anglicans are free to accept. He argues a specifi-
cally evangelical reason for accepting it: Only so is Mary’s “fiat mihi”
a graced act rather than one of supererogation.27 If we understand the

27 John de Satgé, Down to Earth: The New Protestant Vision of the Virgin Mary (Wilmington,
N.C.: Consortium, 1976).
230 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

Holy Spirit’s creation of the sacred humanity as the creation of a fully

historical reality rather than an abstract essentialist one created in
heaven and dropped down into history, then the Immaculate Concep-
tion is the penultimate stage of the creation of the sacred humanity
of Jesus precisely within Covenant history. The emphasis is on Mary
as the bearer of the priestly and remnant-prophetic aspects of that
history, as the story of her marriage to Joseph will add the royal; that
would have been fully reasonable to both Jewish and Roman hear-
ers of Luke’s telling of the story; after all, Octavius Augustus was the
adopted son of Julius Caesar. In flesh and history the actual, historical
humanity Mary embodies then already carries the offices of priest and
king, and the full Messianic office lacks only the prophetic anointing
that comes, for Luke at least, at the Baptism in the Jordan. Prophet-
hood is in any case not inherited but always bestowed, and as Rogers
argues, Mary is both prophet and patriarch in Luke’s tale anyway.
Thus, by the incarnational anointing through the flesh of Mary, the
engaged, future wife of Joseph, Jesus is already by flesh priest and king
and his messiaship awaits only the prophetic anointing in the Jordan.
But the essential point here is that the sacred humanity created by
the Holy Spirit is not an abstract human nature but a very specific
human animated (ensouled) body in a very specific human context,
the womb of a very specific woman of priestly descent who is virgin
but betrothed to a man of Davidic descent. This understanding of Mary
as the penultimate climax of the covenant history, and precisely as
such the place where the Spirit rests in gratuitously providing the
Word with a human body, opens the door, I believe, to a pneumato-
logical understanding of the Immaculate Conception free from any
nineteenth century Romantic or Mariolatrial overtones: The same
Spirit who is about to create in her a sinless sacred humanity, and
will in baptism free all from original sin, is perfectly free to grant that
grace to her preveniently, and thus prepare not so much an “untainted
vessel” as a spunky young daughter of the covenant with the courage
to receive and respond to a further grace of the Spirit with “fiat mihi,”
“OK, I’ll do it.”
Laying aside some of the technicalities, the point is this: In the
great Christological mysteries we see both the Word and the Spirit as
fully and personally present, as not merely appropriately but properly,
 DUST AND DNA 231

hypostatically active in their intertwined missions. In particular, in

both great mysteries we see the creedal mission of the Holy Spirit as
Zõopoion, life-giver, both as full hypostatic presence, activity, mis-
sion, and also as always intertwined with the Word who is likewise
fully, personally, and hypostatically present in his proper mission.
These two missions are always intertwined, and at every moment
also the perfect expression of the love and will of the Fount, who is
also fully present in the undivided external acts, but precisely in the
missions of the other two as the one who sends. By extension, we
read this DNA model of “Spirit-christology” back into the narrative of
creation and covenant, and forward into ecclesiology, sacramental
theology, and spiritual theology of the salvation and sanctification
of the believer through the indwelling of the Spirit and union with
Christ, and precisely as such, with the Fount. In this light we look
even further to the great eschatological mysteries of the communion
of saints (Commonwealth of God), the forgiveness of sins, resurrection
of the body and eternal life; then ultimately, because even these acts,
though distinguishable in their Trinitarian structure, are neverthe-
less undivided, we read the Beatific Vision as a loving knowledge of
the Triadic Unity of God, and theosis as participation in that very life.
The theanthropic principle itself—that in the God/human Christ all
humans are invited to share the divine life—consistently expresses
the hypostatic presence, distinguishability, and yet indelible inter-
twining of Word and Spirit at every moment. I hope we can all learn
to say theanthropic rather than theandric, by the way. It is not only
more sensitive to gender issues; it more accurately reflects the creedal
language and intent.
How does this discussion of DNA as a footprint or resonance relate
to the traditional analogy of Word/Breath? In the economic order,
the realm of God’s external acts, this is relatively easy—the Word is
always vocalized on the Breath, but is the Breath always breathed
as a vocalization of the Word? Does the Spirit/Breath have her own
mission apart from the Word, apart from Christ? It is tempting to say
“yes” as a means of hospitality to persons of other faiths, but in the
end I believe that is a mistake, and would invite our guests of other
faiths into an empty room. Kirsteen Kim and Del Colle come to very
similar conclusions in their own work, though Kim challenges us in
232 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

her very fine book on the subject to make room for considering the
reality of other spirits;28 this is another issue to which more attention
must be given than is possible here. It is vital in both Asian and African
contexts, where questions of ancestors and witchcraft still predomi-
nate among theological issues surrounding the enculturation of the
gospel. I believe these questions will be best resolved by theologians
from cultures where they are of first importance. But, in the end, I
think we shall not find a Christian theology in which the Spirit has a
mission separate from that of the Word, but where Word/Wisdom and
Spirit together have intertwined missions beyond the covenant and
its communities, and hence with less obvious connection to the his-
torical Jesus, though in the end, as Christians, we shall be discerning
all spirits in his name. If this is largely correct, then in the economy
there is no Breath that is not also a vocalization of the Word, and the
congruence with DNA as a vestige or resonance is exact.
When we turn, however, to the immanent Trinity, or even to the
Divine Energies prior to the economy, we reach the more vexed ques-
tion of what Augustine calls the inner Word: What is the role of the
Breath in the formation of the inner Word or Wisdom? Is that formation
“inspired”? Does God “inhale” before speaking? Or, to state baldly the
problem to which we must return in our third major consideration,
does the Spirit have a role of some kind in the eternal begetting of the
Son by the Father within the Trinity? If so, what does this say about the
taxis or order of origin or procession? We must return to this question
in the third consideration in this lecture.

SPIRIT, DNA, AND HISTORY

But first, we must notice a vitally important aspect of DNA: It is a
product of a unique history, and it carries much of that history in its
own code. We cannot avoid the question of history in exploring DNA
as a vestige or resonance. Ian Barbour puts it well:

28 Kirsteen Kim, The Holy Spirit in the World: A Global Conversation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis,
2007; London: SPCK, 2008). Kim was a colloquist on this occasion. See also my “Christian
Theology of Interfaith Dialogue: Defining the Emerging Fourth Option.” Sewanee Theologi-
cal Review 40, no. 4 (1997): 383–408.
 DUST AND DNA 233

Stored in the DNA is a wealth of historically acquired infor-

mation [emphasis original] including programs for coping
with the world. . . . Even at low levels, reality consists not
simply of matter and energy, but of matter, energy, and
information.29

And, as Barbour has pointed out, the actual content of this informa-
tion has been acquired in a history that, precisely as historical, is
opaque to scientific method. Consider, for example, Caesar crossing
the Rubicon. Science can speak of wetness, human skin, etc., but has
nothing to say about the historic importance of that man crossing
that river on that day. Science studies the repeatable, what can be
replicated in experiment; but it is precisely the unrepeatable that is
important to history. Caesar cannot go back and recross the river if his
director needs another “take.” The agreement with Pompey is broken
only by the first crossing. Freedom, final causality, all those things
that make the event historical drop out in a scientific analysis, where
they become either determinate or random. That is why the methods
of history as a discipline are perfectly reasonable and rational, but
quite different from those of natural science.
The issue of history gets more complicated when we enter the realm
of “natural history.” The fact that Sally dinosaur met Harry dinosaur
and he lit up her Christmas tree before Tom dinosaur got there may
well determine the whole course of evolution by being imprinted in
the DNA of the offspring of Harry and Sally. From a scientific point of
view, the meeting is only the result of random chance, but to Harry,
Sally, and their offspring it is an event fraught with historical mean-
ing. History as a natural history of evolution is not ephemeral; it is
actually carried as a physical record in the DNA itself. Many of the
historic bits have been thought of as “junk” until recently, when we
have begun to find out that this “junk” often has complex regulatory
functions. The point is that these aspects of DNA are present as the
result of an evolutionary history that, precisely as history, is opaque
to biology as a science.
It is opaque to more than natural science, however. History as
we now think of it is a late modern concept, arising with historical

29 Barbour, “Five Models,” 430.

234 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

consciousness somewhere in the eighteenth century in Europe. As

such, it is also opaque to the language of classical Greek metaphys-
ics and the later Christian scholasticism based upon it, which “in its
conceptual formulation . . . expressed being in preference to becom-
ing. The result,” as Salmon and Schmitz-Moorman put it, “was an
explanatory system that took little account of the interpersonal, the
historical, and the evolving process of growth and development.”30
This is one of the forces driving all theology beyond the boundaries of
scholasticism, Catholic or Protestant. Although Roman Catholic schol-
arship had many important historians, it was, according to Hans Frei,
Protestant theology that brought the gift of historical consciousness
to theological thinking, a consciousness he so keenly expressed in his
own narrative theology. By this I do not point to any lack of Church
history or history of theology in Catholic or Orthodox communities,
but specifically an awareness of history and historicity as a theologi-
cal problem in its own right, of the need for a theology of history, of
human being as temporal, historical being, including the humanity
that the incarnate Word, in the power of the Holy Spirit, inherits from
Mary through her historically derived DNA and cultural heritage.31
Here is where we must go beyond even Chalcedon. We now share a
sense that it is not just human nature in the abstract, but Jesus the Jew,
the rabbi from Nazareth, son of the daughter of the little people, who
is decisive for our salvation. We mean something now by “person”
and “personality” that formed in response to the gospel and was not
yet present in the conceptual framework of the framers of Chalce-
don. Without it in our picture of Jesus, we feel as if we were facing
a new Alexandrian heresy, with something important about Jesus’s
humanity left out. The problem will be deciding how to fill that lacuna
in Christology without falling over into the crypto-Nestorianism that
Jenson believes haunts all Western theology.
This sense of history is also one of the great differentiating features
from the milieu in which classical pneumatology was formulated. As

30 Salmon and Schmitz-Moorman, “Evolution as Revelation,” 855–856.

31 Del Colle treats this theme throughout Christ and the Spirit, but especially, as previously
noted, in the Appendix.
 DUST AND DNA 235

I read Moltmann, Coffey, and Del Colle in Advents of the Spirit,32 this
really stuck out—both Eastern and Western pneumatological formulas
and the whole issue of the three orders or taxeis in the Trinity exist in
a milieu in which being is defined as perseverance, as Robert Jenson
puts it.33 We must at least ask how to re-envision these issues in the
light of historical consciousness in which being is defined by becom-
ing, and also note, this is key to understanding the cultural pluralism
Kim calls for.
In earlier work, based on the philosophy of Paul Weiss and the
theology of history of W. Taylor Stevenson and Moltmann’s more
mature eschatology,34 I suggested that only a revived pneumatology
can make history translucent, providing both God and creatures with
a meaningful and effective past and a hopeful and significant future. I
proposed seven theses, which I shall simply revise here as a possible
way through. They make use of a concept from Paul Weiss, the “his-
toric ought-to be,” an historic ideal, or ought-to-be, which is at once a
critical principle allowing the historian to determine what of the past
is relevant for the present, and an actual causative factor that allows
the accumulated past to be present. It has real ethical content,35 even
though it is neither the absolute Good (which is larger and includes
private as well as public life) nor simply the desired outcome of any
age (Zeitgeist).36 For history as written to be true, Weiss believes, the
past must also exist outside the present, and, he insists, it is God’s role
to be the one who re-members, and preserves the past, making histori-
cal truth claims possible. God is also the one who always presents the
historical present with the ought-to-be, providing history with a mean-
ingful future grounded in the past, and guaranteeing that History as

32 Hinze and Dabney, 302–346.

33 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: I, The Triune God (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 159.
34 “The Historic Ought-to-Be and the Spirit of Hope,” in A Heart for the Future: Writings on
Christian Hope, ed. Robert B. Slocum, 109–120 (New York: Church Publishing, 2004). The
principal works referred to are Paul Weiss, History: Written and Lived (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1962); W. Taylor Stevenson, History as Myth: The Import for Contem-
porary Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969); and Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming
of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).
35 Weiss, 18.
36 Weiss, 16.
236 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

written (Geschichte) will bear some resemblance to the fullness of his-

tory as lived (Historie).37 Indeed, without taking account of the historic
ideal and God, the historian will not even be able to do the work of
history properly, let alone know why what is written could be true.38
Here are my theses, applying contemporary pneumatology and
even more now the DNA model to the problem of history:
(1) History as written confronts us with texts. The Spirit brings the
Word to life in the process of hearing, reading, and interpretation. It
is not the text that brings the presence of a previously absent spirit to
a reader, but rather an already present Spirit who presents the reader
with the text (the Spirit gives the text as a present, brings it into the
present, makes it a vehicle of presence and re-presentation of the
living Word/Wisdom). This is supremely true of Scripture, but also
true of all meaningful text. The issue is the reality of the helix of the
Spirit/Word missions in the process of interpretation. Indeed, Taylor
Stevenson argued that it is neglect of the Spirit that opens the late
modernist chasms between word, referent, and hearer or reader.39
(2) The Spirit is also the sanctifier of human culture as a means of
grace, and the resolver of the ambiguities of history as the presence
of unambiguous life, albeit in fragmentary ways in this world, as the
theology of Tillich has so powerfully shown.40 This, too, is always
related to Word and to Jesus, specifically as the Spiritual Presence
re-members the New Being manifested in Jesus as the Christ in new
concrete situations.
(3) The Spirit fills the gap between Resurrection/Ascension and
Parousia by creating those structures of koinonia that bind the people
of God into the church as Body of Christ as a sacramental reality; this
is not just a metaphor, but a sacrament of the Commonwealth to come
as well as of the Jesus who has inaugurated it. Here the intertwined
missions give new, resurrected life to the people of God. The church
and its time and its actions become part of the account of salvation,

37 Weiss, 217–230.
38 Weiss, 230.
39 Stevenson, History as Myth, 80-92.
40 ST III; Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press,
1959).
 DUST AND DNA 237

not merely a vehicle of memorial and proclamation “in the mean-

time.” See here especially Hinze’s Spirit-ecclesiology.41 Without this
sense, nothing truly meaningful takes place between Pentecost and
Parousia, except perhaps one’s own conversion, an ahistoricism that
haunts many versions of evangelical Christianity.
(4) In short, only the intertwined Spirit/Word helix bridges the gap
between Geschichte and Historie; Word, referent, and hearer/reader;
faith and knowledge; the “yield of the past” and “the meaning of the
future”;42 between the living and the dead, this life and eternal life.
This is not to make the Spirit a “God of the Gaps,” which may be filled
by later scientific inquiry. These gaps are never actually there. They
arise when we attempt the human historical or theological enterprise
in denial of the Spirit as the “Go-Between God.”43
(5) The Spirit carries out her missio by inhabiting or indwelling
the present moment, re-presenting the graceful past of the Word as
precisely the ground by which the historic-ought-to-be is presented
to the present as both real ideal and real hope, as a possible future of
God and world in the Word by the power of the Spirit. As the Spirit of
covenant and Sabbath holiness44 the Spirit presents this ought-to-be
within history in propria persona, definitively as the incarnate Word,
Jesus. This is one of the ways in which the Spirit is another advocate,
another Christ.45 The Spirit continues to present and re-present the
Word, now with the humanity of Jesus as a permanent feature, to the
world as both its meaningful past and viable future. This is the Spirit as
covenant partner executing what we may call the objective, historical
dimension of the missio as hope, and again, always intertwined with
the Word as now carrying the DNA of Jesus in full historical humanity.
(6) The Spirit provides this hope not only to church and world on
the objective side, but also to individuals and communities on the

41 “Releasing the Power of the Spirit in a Trinitarian Ecclesiology,” in Hinze and Dabney,
347–381.
42 Stevenson, 80.
43 John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission (Philadel-
phia: Fortress Press, 1973).
44 Abraham J. Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1951).
45 Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI, Anchor Bible 29A (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), appendix on “The Paraclete,” 1135–1144.
238 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

subjective side by the gift of the theological virtues, specifically the

virtue of hope. This personal indwelling in the form of the three theo-
logical virtues of faith, hope, and love, notably, in this case, as hope
(the virtue which resonates with the Spirit’s own proper missio) is the
personal, subjective, and even epiphanic dimension of the eschato-
logical missio. Here I can only file by title what I said about the theo-
logical virtues in Beloved Dust.46 The virtues are the direct, immediate
effect in believers of the uncreated grace of the indwelling of the Spirit
in person, in full hypostatic reality. The purpose is to make us more
like Jesus, conformed to Christ in the process of theosis. Hence again
the intertwining.
True hope must thus be grounded not merely in a utopian apoca-
lyptic commitment to the future. It must remain grounded in faith
in “the yield of the past,” the entirety of past history read under the
signs of covenant and cross, and read realistically in the fullness of its
ambiguity and fragmentation as illuminated by those symbols.47 True
hope thus requires humility as its mother, in an ongoing practice of
repentance in the face of the proclamation of the gospel which is the
“yield of the past” as that proclamation ruthlessly exposes the failure
of the human community at every moment fully to live up to the ought-
to-be with which the Spirit presents it. Hope is thus never optimism.48
True hope must also be grounded in the praxis of love in the pres-
ent, as the Spirit creates the church as beloved community through
concrete sacramental structures of koinonia, binding faithful, loving,
and hopeful individuals into the body of Christ. The Spirit then
empowers that body for its mission of proclamation of the yielded
past of the gospel, calling all persons into membership in the people
of God, in loving service to all (the classic dominion of charity in all
traditional spiritual theologies, based on 1 Cor. 13). This love is also
unsentimental, realistic, and unromantic. It, too, stands under the
signs of covenant and cross, ministering to the deep wounds caused
by sin in past and present, including the church’s own sins.

46 pp. 131–150.
47 See Tillich on the ambiguities of life and history in ST III, 138–277, 362–426.
48 Moltmann, lecture in Cambridge, Mass., 1967.
 DUST AND DNA 239

This manifestation of love terminates in a prophecy of liberating

hope that holds before the world and all its people a true historic
ought-to-be of justice and peace for all in the divine Commonwealth.
This latter allows the believer to see the Spirit at work in the present
manifestations of love in juncture with the yielded gospel past and
the hopeful future. True eschatological hope is thus fully Trinitar-
ian, grounded solidly and realistically in past and present as well as
future, in the fullness of the Trinitarian economy.49 It must be true
hope for all humanity, not merely those within privileged enclaves
of the covenant. As such, it must face all the issues raised by Kim in
her work.
(7) This awareness of the “helix” of the divine missions—their
inseparable complementarity—as the historic ought-to-be is, I believe,
the only solution that holds together the notion that the present
moment, the here and now, the Dasein of humanity, is of ultimate theo-
logical significance; it is so precisely as the Spirit builds the beloved
community into the sacrament of the coming Commonwealth, while
maintaining its grounding in the Christ-event (recalling the words and
deeds of Jesus) and yet assuring that the end, when it comes, indeed,
as it comes, will be an irruption of God’s graciousness, and not the
mechanistic working out of some optimistic trend inherent in human
nature and the world. If we think otherwise, we have failed the test of I
Constantinople—we have not confessed that the Spirit is both distinct
from the Father and the Son, and is yet fully God. Without the Spirit
and her missio in the present, the eschaton is either pure apocalyptic
or mere religious metaphor for a historic ought-to-be that is really to
be explained better in worldly causal terms. Only in the Spirit, and
hence in Christ, is the eschaton truly the historic ought-to-be; only in
these terms can the historic ought-to-be be recognized as both truly
historical (the apex of the myth of history and yet also truly active in
the present) and justifiable in terms of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty
as precisely an “ought” and not merely a terminus ad quem. History,
then, from a Christian point of view, is not the history of the Spirit but

49 The debt here to David Tracy’s three modes of theology in The Analogical Imagination
(New York: Crossroad, 1981) is, I trust, obvious. For a closer analysis see my “A Critical
Note on Two Aspects of Self-Transcendence,” Sewanee Theological Review 46, no.1 (2002):
112–132.
240 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

the history the Spirit provides the world by re-presenting to it at every

moment the Word/Wisdom as meaningful past and viable, hopeful
future, gospel past and historic ought-to-be.50 It is the double helix of
life writ large in nature and human society.
Bringing our first two parts together: Evolution, cosmic and bio-
logical, and “natural history” as “written” in the DNA itself can be
seen as a place between random chance and determinism, alongside
systems theory. This has been a largely neglected topic in both sci-
ence and theology until very recently. For our purposes, how do we
see the resonances between the Holy Spirit as giver of life and the
Holy Spirit’s role as Lord of history (again the double helix, since the
Messiah is Lord of the Sabbath, the purpose of history), that is, the
Holy Spirit as giver of life precisely as co-Lord of “natural history?”
Because DNA is the bearer of history—specifically natural history—
and the flesh of Mary bears also the covenant history to that point, the
flesh Jesus inherits from his mother (by the gratuitous provision of the
Spirit) bears both the natural history of the species, and, by being born
“under the law,” also the covenant history, even as that interlocks
with all other human histories and cultures. I hope the model of the
double helix as an analogy for the interplay of the divine missions has
helped us see the Spirit’s role in all that, as she gratuitously provides
the Word with precisely that body, that dust, that flesh, by resting on
the Word in precisely that womb and no other.

THE TURN TO PNEUMATOLOGY PROPER

We now turn to pneumatology proper, to ask if we have learned
something from our pursuit of DNA as an analogy for the intertwining
missions of Word and Spirit in the gift of life and in human history that
might apply to God’s own immanent triadic life. Del Colle provides us
with a good summary of the methodological commitment we share
in common with so many others at this point: “Spirit-Christology is
revelatory of the being of God who communicates the divine self in
these two missions. This underscores that the relation of the divine

50 See Del Colle, Christ and the Spirit, 207–210 for a highly sophisticated account of the
relationship of the Word and the Spirit in their intertwined missions to history and hence
between salvation in God and human emancipatory action in history.
 DUST AND DNA 241

persons to one another in the divine being [the inner life of God or
the immanent Trinity] is the basis for communion with the other—i.e.
the creature—that is actualized in the incarnation of the Son and the
sending of the Spirit.”51 We do need to proceed with some caution at
this point. All Trinitarian theology in some sense begins with what
is revealed to us in the economy, harvests what by analogy can be
learned about God’s own life, and then returns to the economy with
still further insights. There are, however, great tectonic divides about
just how much of the inner life of God is knowable even on the basis of
God’s self-revelation in the economy. These also have to do with how
detached our knowledge of the immanent Trinity can become from that
revelation in the economy.52 Those issues are much too large to chew on
in this lecture. But, if Rahner’s Trinitarian Grundaxiom on the Trinity
means anything—that the Economic Trinity is the Immanent Trinity
and the Immanent Trinity is the Economic, that is, we are not talking
about two separate Trinities, two gods, as it were—then surely we can
learn something by applying the DNA analogy to the Immanent Trinity,
to God’s own personal life, as it were, and prescind from the debate
about just how deep into that life we have been taken by this move. As
with all theological language we are dealing with analogy at best, and
at some point will need to say where the analogy does not hold and
breaks down; but it is our theological task to say first as much on the
positive side as we can. It is also important to say that we are plowing
some new ground here, which always risks falling into some heresy
or other. So, this is a trial balloon, floated for the purpose of seeing
what works and what does not, and where it is in error we must either
confess the analogy has broken down, or perhaps even withdraw the
suggestion.
Most of the discussion over the ages about this level of the Trini-
tarian reality has been about the filioque, that is, the classic debate
between Eastern and Western Christianity about the role of the Son
in the procession of the Holy Spirit by spiration. Coffey, Del Colle, and
others in the Catholic Spirit-christology camp have attempted to make

51 Del Colle, Christ and the Spirit, 183.

52 See the excellent discussions by Elizabeth Johnson in She Who Is, 191–223 and Quest,
202–225.
242 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

some room for the traditional view of Augustine, that the Holy Spirit
is the bond of love between the Father and the Son, by returning to
a model of the Spirit as the mutual love of Father and Son. In most
cases they have tried to move away from the interpretation that this
involves either a double procession, or even a procession from the
Father and the Son as a single principle. Common ground with the
Eastern view that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, though
perhaps per filium, through the Son, or always accompanied by the
Son53 (Staniloae) is usually now explored, and nearly everyone (and
I am firmly in this camp, as is the Episcopal Church officially) now
agrees that the text of the Nicene Creed which is authoritative is the
one tradition holds was passed at I Constantinople in 381, without
the filioque. Does the DNA analogy shed light on this issue, and if so,
what might it mean?
I believe it does, but only by raising up for further discussion a very
vexing problem that has had much too little exploration in either East
or West, a question that the analogy of the divine missions as a double
helix must inevitably raise: What is the role of the Holy Spirit in the
eternal begetting of the Son within the Trinity? Can we really assert
the co-equality and co-eternity of the Holy Spirit as one of the three
divine hypostases if the answer continues to be “none?” Even though
we know we speak as fools, we have talked as if, in the order of proces-
sion or origin, the generation Son is properly first, and then comes the
Spirit, either in a second but subordinate procession from the Father
alone (East) or from the Father and the Son or from the Father through
the Son as their mutual love for each other (West). I suggest that the
DNA analogy does make real, if dangerous progress here.
First, the helix model would suggest that the two processions,
if they reflect at all what we see in the economy, must be eternally
simultaneous, eternally distinct and hence distinguishable, but
always inseparable, not merely alongside each other, or eternally

53 See the classic defense of this particular Eastern position by Dumitru Staniloae, “The
procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and his relation to the Son, as the basis of our
deification and adoption,” in Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the
Filioque Controversy (Faith and Order Paper No. 103) (London: SPCK; Geneva: World Council
of Churches, 1981), 174–186. For some important reservations about the Eastern view, see
Jenson, Systematic Theology I, 146–161, where we also find his views on the role of the Spirit
in the generation of the Son.
 DUST AND DNA 243

accompanying each other, or even as closely related as two hands,

but as inseparably intertwined as DNA. This suggests the following
picture: The self-communication of God is truly monopatristic, of the
Abba-Fount alone—here we agree with the East. There is one, great
eternal act of self-expression from the Father alone as the Fount of all
being, which takes the form of the helix, two simultaneous, co-eternal,
co-equal processions, one of generation and one of spiration, Word
and Breath always perfectly together, intertwined but distinguishable,
inseparable and complementary, in the one act of self-donation and
self-communication. From one side, that of the second person, the
Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son, and in that sense
in their mutual love they eternally mutually spirate the Spirit, and
the order of that strand, of that procession, is Father-Son-Spirit. We
can still view this as monopatristic in that the ultimate source is the
Father, though from this side when the Father spirates the Spirit it is
always as Father of that Son and the Spirit as the Spirit of that Son.
So far, so good.
Now we get to the risky part. The analogy of the double helix
demands we ask the question from the perspective of the other strand,
the procession of the Spirit. From that perspective, can we say there
is a role of the Spirit in the eternal generation of the Son? Our method
demands that the answer be “yes,” not only by the analogy of the
double helix and the complementarity of the strands, but at a more
certain level. We have touched upon the way that all Spirit-christology
now emphasizes the proper, hypostatic role of the Spirit in the Incar-
nation. I have put on the table some of Del Colle’s own work on that,
and also the chapter on the Annunciation in Eugene Rogers’ book. In
layer after layer of contemporary theological analysis we see how pow-
erful and omnipresent is the personal role of the Spirit in the second
nativity of the Word, the one in time and space and history, in short,
in the economy of covenant and grace. However gratuitous this is, that
is, dependent only on God’s free will and graciousness, it is inescap-
able in the story: The Holy Spirit tabernacles in Mary’s womb just as
the shekinah of glory tabernacles in the Holy of Holies in the Temple.
Can we any longer tolerate an assertion that what we learn here in the
economy from the second nativity says nothing about the first, the eter-
nal begetting of the Word by the Father within the immanent Trinity?
244 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

Not, I submit, without entirely abandoning Rahner’s Grundaxiom and

all its corollaries. Not without abandoning the very principle of revela-
tion that the one true God has truly given and revealed the divine self
in the great narrative of the economy of grace.
So, here we go, way out on a limb. There must be a role for the Spirit
in the eternal begetting of the Word, an order or taxis on the strand
of the Spirit that reads Father-Spirit-Son, always deeply entwined
with the other strand. Can we envision this? Is there any evidence in
the tradition? Well, there is Prudentius’ Christmas hymn Corde natus
ex parentis, translated in the Episcopal hymnals as “Of the Father’s
love begotten.” There are the clues in Rogers’ work on the Spirit rest-
ing on the Word in the womb of the Father. Robert W. Jenson’s work
on the Trinity also provides clues. There is the question we raised
tonight about the “inspiration” of the formation of the inner Word,
the question, “does God inhale before speaking?” My own doctoral
work on theology of parenting also suggests a consideration. I know
a lot of children are conceived casually or unintentionally but still
then loved, at least by somebody. But let’s consider as ideal a case as
we can in the economy that includes the Fall. When a deeply in love
married couple choose to have a child, they do not first conceive her
and then love her when she arrives. Instead, the child is conceived
in love, and loved personally and hopefully from the very start. It is,
as I have written, a wonderful moment when at birth we finally meet
her, but part of the phenomenology of the moment is “I have always
loved you.” There was a wonderful moment of what I would call theo-
logical insight when my grandson said: “You loved me even before I
was born!” reflecting, of course, Psalm 139 among other biblical texts.
Then begins the adventure of the actual concrete history of that love.
So, I suggest, in the Trinity, the Father does not first beget the Son and
then love him and in turn is loved by him. Rather, the eternal motive
for the eternal begetting is itself the Love who must be the Holy Spirit.
What else or who else could it be? Only so can the two nativities of
the Word, so key to the teaching of II and III Constantinople,54 be truly
analogous.

54 In the ongoing effort to show that the council of Chalcedon was not Nestorian, these
two councils virtually ceased to talk about two natures of Christ and instead spoke almost
exclusively of two nativities of the Word, one within the Trinity before all time and a second
by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary in history.
 DUST AND DNA 245

The picture that emerges then, is one great act of self-communi-

cation with two eternal processions, one by generation in the taxis of
Father-Son-Spirit, and one by spiration in the taxis of Father-Spirit-
Son, always distinct and distinguishable but inseparably intertwined
and acting together, each with a conceivable role in the procession of
the other but only as eternally simultaneous, fully intertwined. Notice
that the one act is truly monopatristic, protecting the deep theological
concerns of the Eastern Church. But the Spirit is always not merely
accompanied by the Son/Word/Wisdom, but inseparably intertwined;
so also, the Son/Word/Wisdom is always intertwined with the Spirit.
This protects the legitimate theological concerns of the West that the
Spirit never be separated from the Son, though it holds open the pos-
sibility in the economy of distinct missions of the Spirit beyond the
boundaries of the covenant community, deeply affirmed by many pas-
sages of Scripture, not least “I have other sheep that are not of this
fold.”55 It also affirms the Western tradition of the Spirit as mutual
love without challenging the monopatristic character of the one great
act of self-communication. And, it is truer to the real depths of both
human parenting and filiation.
Then something else happens as we move from the sphere of the
divine hypostases to that of the divine energies. Just as there is a self-
emptying, a kenosis of the Word going forward, so also there is one of
the Spirit. The Spirit gives up her own taxis of origin, Father-Spirit-Son,
and instead, I suggest, following hints from McDonnell, takes on the
taxis of return, Spirit-Son-Father, so that in what we see of the helix,
the two strands are indeed anti-parallel. This is the deference, the reti-
cence, the gratuitousness of the Spirit, Rogers so powerfully depicts.
The Word/Wisdom keeps the taxis of procession or origin proper to
himself, but yields or self-limits some of the divine attributes, while
the Spirit yields even her own proper taxis of origin to take on the taxis
of return. It is the two, together, I think, in their eternal anti-parallel
intertwining that are the taxis of bestowal.56
55 Jn 10:16.
56 Dr. Hall subsequently made an observation that bears further reflection (slightly edited):
“And even more so, the information on either strand (Son or Spirit) is released by [the DNA]
analogy only when the love of God the Father [analogous to the hydrogen bonds between
the bases holding the strands of the helix together] kenotically releases them from that
love just long enough for the information to be transcribed. An eternal procession of love
and release.”
246 IT IS THE SPIRIT WHO GIVES LIFE

Although I do not propose an amendment to the Creed, I think

there is here a possible deeper solution to the filioque debate than
we have yet seen. Just as the Spirit is worshipped “together with” the
Father and the Son, so also the Spirit proceeds always “together with”
the Son, and vice versa. Con in Latin, syn in Greek. Perhaps “conproc-
edit?” Anyway, I hope the proposal is clear. It draws the deepest anal-
ogy between the two nativities of the Word and the role of the Spirit
in them, and is more faithful to the depths of human begetting at our
best. This is in addition to making clearer what we mean by calling the
Holy Spirit Lord and Life Giver, Dominum et vivificantem, to Kyrion, to
Zõopoion, in the Creed, as we see the very structure of life as we know
it resonating with the intertwined life-giving processions at the heart
of the divine life.
This model also asserts that history matters from the beginning,
even at the very heart of the monarchy of the Father. DNA bears his-
tory. The economy is not something added on extrinsically to the
eternal Trinitarian life, but flows naturally out of it, is intended by
it from the beginning. God’s creating is not necessary to God, but it
is in character. Eternity must thus be timefull, not timeless; trans-
historical, embracing all history, not ahistorical. Process theology is
right thus far. So is Jenson. The Trinitarian identities are the identity
of the God who is those characters in that story. One vestigial clue in
the DNA, then, is that the strands of the double helix are differentiated
by the anti-parallel order of the nucleotides, which also appears to be
a “cause” of the intertwining. It is precisely in the intertwining of the
two energies and thus the two missions, of mediator and mediation,
of bestowal and return, and the taxis appropriate to each, as played
out in the one story of salvation we know, that we shall find the clues
to understanding the taxis of origination.
This far I think we have come: Whatever the priority of the Son as
second after the Father, and hence of begetting and filiation, there
must be some role of the Holy Spirit, and thus of spiration, in the eter-
nal begetting itself if history, that history, matters; also if begetting, as
we now understand the human side of that analogy, takes two equal
partners to tango. The eternal begetting of the Word by the Fount must
itself be “inspired,” but only by God’s own love, which is always Trini-
tarian love, and is itself always God. The procession of the Holy Spirit
 DUST AND DNA 247

is not subsequent to the generation of the Son, not even logically, but
properly part of it. The Father does not first generate the Son and then
decide to love him, but generates the Son eternally precisely as the
Beloved, with—I believe the Dust intended from all eternity, Fall or no
Fall (here I am a Scotist) —love being the “motive” for the eternal gen-
eration and the Incarnation alike. So, the spiration of the Spirit arises
solely from the Father, but always and already as within and eternally
contributing to the generation of the Son. Generation is in-spired, and
so is filiation, and yet the procession of love is clearly distinguishable
from the generation/filiation relation and perhaps, in some sense (I
speak as a fool), subordinate to it, if this is where the analogy begins
to break down, but I wonder even about that. The Father ex arche loves
the Son as his own future in the history he intends for Word and Spirit
with their distinguishable but intertwined missions.
Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus, and Veni, Creator Spiritus, are, in the
end, not two prayers, but one with distinguishable strands, for it is the
Spirit and the Bride who say to the Incarnate Word, Come.
And so, for now, Amen.