Divine Eloquence and Human Transformation by Fulford Ben

Author:Fulford, Ben [Ben Fulford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4514-6960-8
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2013-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

The Letter and the Holy Spirit

One more example of Gregory’s use of the letter/spirit distinction adds an important dimension to his hermeneutics. In Oration 31, Gregory confronts the charge that teaching that the Spirit is God is unscriptural. Gregory introduces it by saying he will not repeat the labors of those who have already shown the Holy Spirit in both Testaments; those who “have read the divine Scriptures, not with ease or as a hobby, but have gone into the letter and stooped to peer within.”[76] They, he says, “were worthy to see the hidden beauty and be illumined by the light of knowledge.”[77] This description of those who have demonstrated the divinity of the Spirit from Scripture matches closely Gregory’s description of the difficult passages of Scripture and the character of those who may understand them in Oration 2, and seems to convey the same sense of Scripture as composed of exterior and interior, letter and spirit, where the latter denotes something that must be divinely disclosed to the reader. What, then, can we learn from the argument in which Gregory uses these terms here?

Christopher Beeley draws our attention to the significance of the wider argument in Oration 31 to which this discussion belongs. He notes that Gregory begins in Oration 31 by establishing the basis for the divinity of the Spirit in baptismal deification before returning to the question of the biblical witness to the Spirit’s divinity that he had raised at the outset.[78] It is only in this light that Gregory expects his readers to see how the scriptural texts he cites show that the divinity of the Spirit is a scriptural doctrine. “From the perspective of Church’s faith-experience of the Holy Spirit, the Bible does indeed declare the Spirit’s divinity—according to the Spirit, that is, not the letter.”[79] Exegesis of Scripture according to the Spirit, then, “means interpreting it on the basis of the presence and work of the Spirit in the life of the Church and one’s own life of purification and illumination.”[80] Beeley’s argument clearly implies that the experience makes a material contribution to exegesis of these texts on this question (at least). For, he argues, apart from the experience of the Spirit’s deifying work in baptism, we could not be sure that biblical attestations of the Spirit doing the work of God do not merely describe the Spirit as an nondivine or semi-divine intermediary through whom God acts rather than as a divine agent. Thus for Gregory, “it is the Christian’s actual knowledge of God through the presence of the Holy Spirit within the life of the Church that enables him or her to identify the Spirit as God in the biblical text, and to practice theology at all.”[81] Hence the appeal to scriptural texts is only an element in his argument. Thus Gregory charges his opponents with being full and far from the Spirit in Oration 31.30. Their resistance to the Spirit prevents them from recognizing his divinity. This feature of Gregory’s

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