PH11 X2M.131 Power GALACTIC PROGENY

As Kingfishers Catch Fire
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

We have already seen that there are two processions or internal activities in God -- knowing and willing. The NT and the Teaching Authority of the Church say that the Son proceeds from the Father by an act of intellect. The Holy Spirit also proceeds from the Father (and the Son) but the NT does not specify precisely how or in what way he proceeds. The common teaching of the great theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas is that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the will or from the mutual love of the Father and the Son. Accordingly, there is a special relationship between the Holy Spirit and acts of the will, especially the act of love which proceeds from the will and not from the intellect.

A reverse ordering of these two persons of the Trinity obtains when they are viewed in terms of the eternal generating of the Son - proper account being taken of what we have been observing about the Endoxation of the Spirit and its relation to the Incarnation of the Son. It is not simply that in this economic relationship there is a temporal priority of the Endoxation of the Spirit to the Incarnation of the Son, but that the endoxate Spirit performs a fathering function with respect to the incarnate Son. It is by the Holy Spirit that Jesus was conceived, the Glory-Spirit, the Power of the Most High, coming upon Mary and overshadowing her Luke 1:35).

The Father begets the Son through the Spirit. In this process the Spirit is the second person and the Son the third. And as in the spiration of the Spirit so in the begetting of the Son the economic relations of the divine persons are to be seen as analogues of their eternal immanent relations. The fathering of the incarnate Son by the endoxate Spirit warrants inclusion of the Spirit along with the Father as a subject in the eternal divine begetting the generating process of which the Son is the object. It is a desideratum, therefore, that a reference to the Holy Spirit corresponding to the filioque phrase in the creedal account of the spiration of the Spirit find a place in our confessional formulation of the eternal filiation of the Son.

Supporting this proposal, there is another economic analogue for the immanent order of Spirit and Son, with the Spirit as subject and the Son as object. This analogue is found in the messianic sonship of Jesus (cf. Ps 2:7; Matt 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22; Rom 1:3,4). The Spirit performs the anointing of Jesus whereby he is constituted the Christ-Son of God (cf. Isa 61:1-3; Luke 4:18,19), a process manifested in the avian descent of the Spirit on Jesus at his baptism (Matt 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32-34) and the transfiguring overshadowing of Jesus by the Glory-Spirit on the holy mountain (Matt 17:1-5; Mark 9:2-7; Luke 9:28-35)

Kline, Meredith G. God, Heaven and Har Magedon: A Covenantal Tale of Cosmos and Telos. Eugene, Or: Wipf & Stock, 2006, 14-15.

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