Love Shed Abroad: The Holy Spirit, Charity, and the Sacrifice of Christ’s Body

Christology tends to be — rightly — front and center in most soteriological reflection, and particularly in theologies of atonement. However, a properly trinitarian account of soteriology, one which affirms the pro-Nicene commitment to inseparable operations, must also accord a significant role to the Holy Spirit in the redemption. To this we get hints in the scriptural witness, which speaks of Christ offering himself to God through the eternal Spirit as a perfect sacrifice (Hebrews 9:14), or in the so-called Johannine Pentecost, whereby the crucified Christ gives up the Spirit. This paper considers at least some of those pneumatological dimensions of redemption through a particular focus on what Bernard Lonergan called “the just and mysterious law of the cross,” with an eye towards the subversion of notions of redemptive violence.

Two principal theological resources undergird this reflection. First is Lonergan’s trinitarian theology, particularly as developed by Robert Doran, wherein the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds and is economically given as Notional Love. In particular, Doran posited a revised psychological analogy of the verbum spirans amor drawn not from the natural order of human intentionality, but from the supernatural experience of receiving divine love and loving in return. Lonergan posited a four-point correlation of the supernatural order with the real divine relations of the Trinity (such that the secondary act of existence of the Incarnate Word is a participation in Paternity, sanctifying grace is a participation in Active Spiration, habitual charity is a participation in Passive Spiration, and the light of glory is a participation in Filiation). Doran developed this further by suggesting that just as the Father and the Son breath out Love in the spiration of the Holy Spirit, so sanctifying grace (as the recalled reception of God’s unqualified love in and for the sake of God’s beloved Son) breathes forth our own love in turn. This divine intervention results in a renewed interpersonal situation, with the state of grace construed in social terms — the mystical body of Christ, bound together by charity.

This brings us to the second principal resource. Lonergan’s fullest discussion of the mystical body of Christ is found in his discussion of the redemption, and specifically in his account of the law of the cross, whereby one returns good for evil, bearing with evils, rather than inflicting them in return. This non-retaliation is intrinsically rooted in Christ’s own disposition throughout his life and ministry, but especially its culmination in his death and resurrection. In this way, Christ converted the evils of the human race into a supreme good, which Lonergan identified as the mystical body of Christ.

In this way, redemption is a matter of conformity to Christ, conversion away from our sinfulness and to collaboration with God’s solution to the problem of evil: the reversal of evil through selfless love. This conformity to Christ is particularly associated with the Holy Spirit, who accompanied and empowered Jesus in his historical life and ministry, who now binds us together with one another and with Christ as members of his body, and through whom the love of God is poured into our hearts (Romans 5:5).

Following the Augustinian and Thomistic traditions, which Lonergan also received, the fundamental meaning of Christ’s sacrifice — whether enacted at Calvary, offered at the altar of the Mass, or reproduced in the lives of individual Christians and the church’s corporate life — is charity, that same love of God that is given to us through and participates in the Holy Spirit. Thus, the relationship between redemption and Christ’s sacrifice is not extrinsic, as if it merely resulted as an effect of something that Jesus has done. Instead, it is intrinsic, as that redemptive act is reproduced in and bears fruit in the lives of the redeemed, that very fruition is redemption and shares an identity of meaning to Christ’s one sacrifice (all this is can be borne out by City of God 10, the Summa Theologiæ, the Council of Trent’s 22nd session, and Lonergan’s essays on the law of the cross and “The Notion of Sacrifice,” though my treatment shall not be primarily exegetical).

It is precisely in this manner that the Holy Spirit functions as the anima ecclesiæ, for the animating principle of the church is the divine love as which the Holy Spirit notionally proceeds, and into which that same Spirit initiates and recruits humanity.

Finally, Shawn Copeland has recently refined this conception even further, calling for a love that takes the form of solidarity, recognizing that Jesus’s was fundamentally a stance of solidarity with those who are oppressed by imperial violence, and which calls the members of his body into an all-encompassing eucharistic solidarity, which keeps alive the dangerous memory of not just Christ crucified, but the lynched Jesus, who embraces and makes his own all the bodies of those lynched throughout history.

This recognition at once calls us away from any and all accounts of a sacralized violence — for love and solidarity call us not to inflict violence nor to acquiesce to it (for ourselves or others), but rather to shoulder it for the sake of its healing — while also refusing to sanitize our understandings of Jesus, his crucifixion, or of history as if they were in fact free of violence after all. Instead, led by the same Spirit that led Jesus, the same Spirit by whom the divine love is poured into our hearts, the same Spirit who binds together Christ’s one body, we honor all who have suffered violence, while also refusing to endorse any violence, and solidaristically working to alleviate and eliminate the remnant violence as we venture into the future.