The Holy Spirit is God who Makes Love Possible
Without the Spirit, there would be no way for us to be with one another without domination or dissolution
Pentecost
“The triune God is love in that the Father gives himself to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Spirit is this mutuality—as their life and ours”
— Robert Jenson
Seldom do we dwell on the fact that Pentecost marks not just the outpouring of the Spirit upon the body of believers, it finally creates the possibility of love. In his essay “Thinking Love” from On Thinking the Human, Jens offers a trenchant account of love, one that is both theological and metaphysical.
Love is the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and this is so both for us and the God in whose image we are made.
Neither sentiment nor action, love is the ontological grammar of God's own being— love is how God does God to God. And thus love is the condition for our participation in the triune life. As it is true across his mature work, in “Thinking Love” Jenson insists that love is neither a generic good nor an abstract (narrative-less) ideal. Rather love is concretely identified with the triune God’s life; specifically, love is the event of mutual self-giving among the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As 1 John 4.8 posits, God is love in that God is the eternal event of love happening between three persons.
To think on love is to reckon with love as the grammar through which both God and humanity must be thought. Consistent with his revisionary metaphysics, Jens rejects the religion of Plato, which poses love in terms of eternal ideals. Love is not best defined as altruism, eros, or agape as discrete categories. Against Aristotle, Jenson argues that love is not even a human virtue to be cultivated independently of the divine life.
Love is instead revealed as God’s triunity.
He writes:
“To say that “God is love” is to say that God lives by mutual self-giving among Father, Son, and Spirit; the sentence is a description of the Trinity.”
The triune life is not a closed circle— Pentecost.
The triune life is open to others by the Spirit.
This is the point at which the Spirit becomes essential for a Christian account of love. For Jenson, the Spirit is not an afterthought to the Father and the Son, but the very possibility of love—both within the Godhead and within the world. The Spirit, as the tradition holds, is the bond of love between the Father and the Son. The Spirit is the third who makes the love between the two not only mutual but also eternally communal.
He writes:
“The Spirit is the love of the Father and the Son: their mutual delight, their mutual freedom, the music they together make.”
This musical metaphor is neither sentimental nor ornamental. It drives to the heart of his point. Love is neither static nor solitary. It requires communion, which is to say, love requires the Holy Spirit.
Just so, the Holy Spirit is God who makes love possible.
As Jenson writes, “Love occurs where freedom is given and received, and such mutual freedom is the work of the Spirit.” In our relationships with one another, love cannot merely be the projection of will or the absorption of another into oneself though relationship always carry that risk. True love is only actual if it sustains the other creature’s freedom. This possibility comes from participation in the Spirit’s own relationality. In other words, the Spirit more than the divine agent in love; the Spirit is the one who constitutes love. The Holy Spirit is neither a principle nor a power; he is the person whose being is communion.
Jens again:
“Without the Spirit, there would be no way for us to be with one another without domination or dissolution.”
Jenson’s insight is especially helpful given that, aside from celebrations of Pentecost, many Christians tend to sideline the Holy Spirit in favor of a Christologically-centered theology. But, as Jenson makes clear, the Spirit is not only the enabler of human love but the one who opens the triune life of God to creatures. Love, for Jenson, is eschatological because it is the Spirit who binds together the past (the Father’s begetting), the present (the Son’s mission), and the future (the Spirit’s drawing us into final communion). Love is not merely a fact of the past or a law for the present; it is the future that summons us.
As Jenson puts it:
“The Spirit is God’s own future, made available to us, and so the hope of our communion.”
Just as the love of which Paul sings in 1 Corinthians 13 names Jesus, love as the fruit of the Spirit is concretely defined according to the triune life. Love is not first of all an ethical demand or a human emotion. It is the being of God, and as the being of God love is the ground of all being. As the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is not merely the result of the love between Father and Son. The Spirit is the enabling agent of love itself.
Without the Spirit, love collapses into coercion, sentimentality, or individualism.
You always hurt the one you love— apart from the Spirit.
With the Spirit, love becomes actual: the freedom of communion, the joy of difference held in unity, and the promise of life that is more than our own.
Or, as Jenson insists:
“To love truly is to live by the Spirit, and thus to live already in God’s future.”
image: “The Pentecost” by Jacob Lawrence
