Personal vs. Person

In general, in reading Stanley Grenz's Theology for the Community of God I have very often been unimpressed and only rarely disappointed. I did find one rather predictable occasion of unnerving theology, however, in his explanation of the personhood of the Holy Spirit. Grenz is part of that venerable tradition of Western theologians whose reductionist pneumatology equates the Holy Spirit to the bond of love between the Father and the Son. This is, so far as I'm concerned, an essentially binitarian view of God where the two person of Father and Son constitute God with the Spirit as an unintended consequence of their relationship. David Bentley Hart is more generous when dealing with the tradition in general. He writes:

There is a long, predominantly Western tradition of speaking of the Spirit as the vinculum caritatis between Father and Son, which - if taken to mean that in the divine life the indiscerptibility of love and knowledge is such that God's generation and procession enfold one another, the Spirit acting as the bond of love between Father and Son, the Son as the bond of knowledge between the Father and Spirit, the Father being the source of both - is a good and even necessary term. But it can also be misleading, in various ways: as Orthodox theologians occasionally worry, it can give the appearance that the Spirit is not irreducibly "personal" as Father and Son.

Correctly understood, however, it does none of this; and it depicts the Spirit as not simply the love of Father and Son, but also everlastingly the differentiation of that love, the third term, the outward, "straying," prodigal second intonation of that love.

Whatever the merit may be of Hart's evaluation of the tradition in general (and stricken as I am by intellectual hero worship, I doubt I could ever flatly disagree with him), Grenz's pneumatology seems to fall far short of Hart's "correctly understood" application of the tradition. Instead, Grenz sums his position up thus:

The personhood of the Spirit arises from the personal character of God as well. The love that binds the Father and the Son is the essence of the one God, for "God is love." God is also personal. Therefore his essential nature - love - is likewise personal. This essence is also the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who as the "concretization" of that essential divine character must be person.

I would like here to point out merely the most obvious flaw with this line of reasoning: simply because something is person does not mean that it is a person. The adjective "personal" in general usage - and, it would appear to me, in the above usage - means that object of the adjective involves persons. The love of the Father and the Son is personal because it involves the hypostases Father and Son. The love in my marriage is arguably personal on the same grounds, that it involves two (and hopefully only two) persons. By Grenz's logic, this makes the love in my marriage a person in its own right. Grenz argues, and I certainly agree, that God is personal, but it is because he is "constituted" of persons. I likewise agree that his love is personal, but again it is personal because it is "shared" among persons. None of this demands that the love is itself a person distinct from the persons who share the personal love.

In short, simply calling something personal does not logically demonstrate that it is a person. PC owners everywhere can sleep easy tonight.

Hell and the Love of God

I read something wonderful the other day in Stanley Grenz's Theology for the Community of God about the nature of hell:

The final outworking of the rejection of God's love is a never-ending experience of the wrath of the eternal Lover. Hell, therefore, is not the experience of the absence of God's love. God loves his creation with an eternal love. Therefore God's love is present even in hell. But in hell people experience the presence of the divine love in the form of wrath.

Most of my life I have had the reality of hell justified to me on the basis of God's justice or holiness or righteousness but never on the basis of His love. It isn't to say that God's justice or righteousness or holiness would be insufficient to explain hell, it is just that the standard emotion-laden argument against hell sounds something like, "But how can a loving God condemn people to hell!" Justice and holiness in response to this became ways to explain away hell as an unfortunate necessity not incompatible with God's love but not expressive of it either. Hell took on the character of a necessary evil.

In Grenz's understanding hell is not only compatible with God's love but - given a correct understanding of hell and love - is actually the necessary expression of a loving God. Grenz notes (in a way similar to G. K. Chesterton) that true love is not expressed only in a kind of rosy, bubbly haze of joy. Instead, he writes:

Genuine love, therefore, is positively jealous. It is protective, for the true lover seeks to maintain, even defend, the love relationship whenever it is threatened by disruption, destruction, or outside intrusion. Whenever another seeks to injure or undermine the love relationship, he or she experiences love's jealousy, which we call "wrath." When this dimension is lacking, love degenerates into mere sentimentality.

God's love for His creation is expressed as much in His wrath as in His kindness. When the beloved spurns the love and seeks to sever the bond love is not experienced in casual acceptance of that alienation but in intense "jealousy."

Seeing hell explained in this way was exciting, but the excitement was somewhat abated when I read that Vladimir Lossky had already drawn much the same conclusion in his Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church

The love of God is an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves.

Worse still, Lossky quoted from St. Isaac the Syrian in defense of this proposition.

...those who find themselves in gehenna will be chastised with the scourge of love. How cruel and bitter this torment of love will be! For those who understand that they have sinned against love, undergo greater sufferings than those produced by the most fearful tortures. The sorrow which takes hold of the heart which has sinned against love, is more piercing than any other pain. It is not right to say that the sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God...but love acts in two different ways, as suffering in the reproved, and as joy in the blessed.

It would appear (again like Chesterton) that I went seeking something new and, when I found it, was shocked and encouraged to find that it was in fact old. If the doctrine of hell as the full and necessary expression of love has been lost in modern times, I hope we can recover it.