November 30, 2025

Advent Songs and Christmas Carols!

For your Advent and Christmas listening pleasure! #christmascarols

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3FYvwKIVYuSGEi34wRYujb?si=Bmfqf7c2SUamoZtihnH-HQ

[link:For your Advent and Christmas listening pleasure! #christmascarols

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3FYvwKIVYuSGEi34wRYujb?si=Bmfqf7c2SUamoZtihnH-HQ|

November 19, 2025

You are exhausted because corporate capitalism extracts unreasonable productivity from you

Sophia, the Holy Spirit of peace, offers rest and restoration.

Sophia is the Spirit of rest and peace. Life in the Spirit is active and engaged, growing and changing, always loving dangerously and never abandoning hope. That may sound exhausting. Indeed, we may want to take a break from her. But instead we can take a break with her, because God too enjoys rest.

After creating the cosmos, “The heavens and the earth and all their array were completed. On the seventh day God had finished all the work of creation, and so, on that seventh day, God rested. God blessed the seventh day and called it sacred, because on it God rested from all the work of creation” (Genesis 2:1–3).

On each previous day of creation, surveying the work of the divine hands, God had declared that work “good.” But after the creation of humankind on the sixth day, God had declared creation “very good,” because God has the company of persons made in the divine image. God has someone to enjoy that good work with.

So lovely is this sharing that God decides to forever dedicate a certain portion of time to undistracted co-celebration. God creates the Sabbath, dedicating one day of the week to rest instead of work, to enjoyment instead of production, to being instead of becoming. We should all be more like God, celebrating time as sacred.

Perhaps we consider ourselves more energetic than God, not in need of rest and recreation. Perhaps we are driven by the need for recognition because we fail to recognize our full recognition in the eyes of God. Perhaps the pressure to produce comes from outside forces that threaten reprisal if we fail them. In any event, the need for both productivity and enjoyment is woven into our being, because it is woven into God’s being, from which our being derives.

Jesus, God as human, rested a lot, most often to pray (Luke 5:15–16; see also Mark 1:35; Mark 6:46; Luke 4:42; Luke 6:12; etc.). He worked hard teaching, healing, prophesying, traveling, surrounded by crowds, arguing for kindness in a cruel world, trying to turn our endemic hardheartedness into compassion. Recognizing his human limitations, he remembered to love himself as he loved his neighbors and took time to recuperate, trusting God’s promise: “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (Exodus 33:14).

Jesus, being a good leader, wanted the same rest for his disciples that he himself needed. They traveled with him, worked with him, and became exhausted with him, much like those inspired by and working to implement his teachings today. After sending them into the countryside to minister, Jesus gathered them in again and, noting their weariness, advised them to escape to a deserted place, by themselves, to rest a while (Mark 6:31a). Today, he invites us to do the same: “Come to me, all you who labor and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon your shoulders, for I am gentle and humble of heart. Here you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30).

We have lost time. Sunday as Sabbath has disappeared from modern culture, and regular rest has disappeared with it. Economists once predicted that, as per worker productivity improved, we would be able to work less. Instead, we are working more. No one knows exactly why. We consume more; our houses and cars are bigger and our lives filled with more gadgets. Medical care can save lives that would have been lost half a century ago, but is very expensive. Increasing population on a finite planet makes resources more expensive. Whatever the cause, it feels as if life is perpetually accelerating, like an out-of-control treadmill threatening to exhaust then discard us. We don’t have time, but time has us.

This loss is significant. Stopping and resting helps us notice the beauty that we otherwise overlook. Finding that the world continues without our effort frees us from the anxiety produced by self-importance. Sabbath reminds us that, without our effort, the waves still lap the shore, the wind still rustles the leaves, the stream still makes its way to the sea. The Sabbath clarifies our spiritual vision, making a temple out of time, helping us to see God’s activity by ceasing our own.

Within this temple we find surprising abundance, an abundance that puts the lie to our scarcity mindset. The Sabbath is Spirit as time, and the first step to perceiving her work is to see time as sanctuary. We may doubt the availability of such experience in our age of busyness and distraction, but there is “still a rest reserved for God’s people—the Sabbath rest. For all those who enter God’s rest also rest from their own work, just as God did. Therefore, let us strive to enter into that rest” (Hebrews 4 –11a).

Sophia hallows time because Sophia is a Spirit of peace and joy (Romans 14:17). Indeed, Jesus associates her arrival with the arrival of peace: “The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit whom Abba God will send in my name, will instruct you in everything, and she will remind you of all that I told you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; but the kind of peace I give you is not like the world’s peace. Don’t let your hearts be distressed; don’t be fearful” (John 14:26–27).

The arrival of Sophia, after the ascension of Jesus, is the arrival of Wisdom and the arrival of Peace, because Sophia is the Inner Reminder that God’s covenant of peace cannot be removed (Isaiah 54:10). Secure in steadfast love, we can cast all our anxieties on God, in the confidence that God cares for us (1 Peter 5 ).

Sophia does not resolve the ambiguities of life for us, which would deny us our freedom. She is the Spirit of activity and rest, celebration and lament, freedom and responsibility, desire and satisfaction. Seeking certainty, we may want these tensions resolved in favor of an absolute—annihilating one pole of the relationship to create an artificial and unreliable simplicity. But Sophia denies us this resolution because she is the Spirit of life, and life thrives within generative tensions.

God is not pure simplicity; God is perfectly harmonious, maximal complexity. We are made in the image of God, for balance and harmony, to which Sophia leads us. As our inner guide, she is the uncreated grace of life, the great compassion who is sensitive to our deepest longings. At Pentecost, she enters the church like fire, granting the fledgling community a seething desire for justice, the courage to speak truth, and the hope needed to manifest God’s vision. Today, as we exert ourselves against humanity’s stubborn tendency to self-destruction, even as we are tempted to despair in our efforts, Sophia assures God’s co-creators of our inherent victory, whispering, “The kingdom will come.” (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 173-175)

For further reading, please see:

Heschel, Abraham. The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. Boston: Shambhala, 2003.

Sanders, John. The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence. Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1998.

November 10, 2025

The Holy Spirit Sophia is a Spirit of Self-Surpassing: a religious identity is a growth identity

The Trinity—Abba the Creator, Jesus the Christ, and Sophia the Holy Spirit—charges us to Create in Love with Wisdom. “Now our God is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of our God is, there is freedom,” declares Paul (2 Corinthians 3:17). God is a God of abundance, not of scarcity, so Sophia the Holy Spirit inspires us to live lives of abundant freedom. With Sophia, we do not need strict rules and regulations that keep us on the narrow path in a dangerous world (Galatians 5:18). Instead, we need the Trinity—Abba the Creator, Jesus the Christ, and Sophia the Holy Spirit—through whom we Create in Love with Wisdom.

This Trinitarian charge, to Create in Love with Wisdom, is our most basic calling as it fulfills Jesus’s commandment to love God and neighbor. For this reason, Augustine interpreted love as the root of freedom: “Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”

Sophia does not displace our personhood or will; she fulfills our personhood and will. Sophia reasons with us, acts with us, and bears consequences with us. Our spiritual transformation is like that of a person transformed by a book, or someone who recovers from childhood trauma, or someone who overcomes an addiction; we feel that the new self is our more authentic self, and when we look back upon our old self, we are thankful for self-surpassing.

Sophia, as the power of the ever-increasing Trinity, is the Holy Spirit of self-surpassing. She grants us the discontent we need to begin the journey, the energy we need to continue the journey, and gratitude that we are on the journey. We are entering an age of increased receptivity to Sophia, in which we seek the alignment of our inner life and outer conduct. Previous generations were expected to power through, to endure rather than heal, to fulfill their duties no matter how scrambled they felt on the inside. Combat veterans came home after seeing their best friends shredded by shrapnel and were expected to be “strong”. So, they repressed their trauma, held down jobs, and started families; only their wives knew they woke up in the middle of the night screaming. Badly matched couples met their responsibilities to one another in loveless marriages, having been pressured into such by their elders. The children of farmers inherited and worked the farm even though they hated farming.

Increased freedom and awareness produce increased flourishing, and Sophia increases freedom and awareness. Therapy matches the wounded with the wise to produce healing; a variety of talking cures have replaced the obligation to suffer without complaint. Marriages are expected to be fulfilling, not just functional; assistance is available to make them so. And a panoply of vocations allows young people to match their calling to the world’s needs. In the past, religious people may have been satisfied with indoctrination, with being told what their religion thinks, which is so much better than what the other religion thinks. If our tribe is good and their tribe is evil, then certainly our creed is holy and theirs is demonic. But this contrast simply reduces theology to ideology, a belief system that unites us against an enemy rather than uniting us with God who, after all, created and continually sustains our enemies.

Today, people don’t want to be told what to think. They want to feel the enriching truth of faith. They want thinking, feeling, and acting to be triune, three aspects of one united person. Religious people today want to be whole. Sophia, as the harmonizing power within personality, works to grant this wholeness.

Sophia is a spirit of love, power, and justice. We are continually transformed “because God’s love [agapē] has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us,” writes Paul (Romans 5:3b). Some critics of the Christian emphasis on love, disturbed by how unloving some Christians can be, have dismissed it as luff. This wordplay associates love with fluff, an airy insubstantiality that does nothing. We fluff up a pillow to make the stuffing take up more space; we fluff up an argument because we have three pages written and need to hand in a six-page paper. Fluffy love produces words about words and activity that enacts nothing.

In sailing, the useless flapping of a sail in the wind is also called luff. Hollow words deny the church purpose and direction; luff denies the pilot all power of navigation. The boat with luffing sails drifts with the current. The pilot must immediately trim the sails to get rid of the luff and regain control of the boat.

To the extent that Christian love is luff, it is not agape. Agape is not fluffy, trivial, or useless. Agape changes everything. Sophia grants the agapic love that empowers us to become agents of change. She is not meek; she is determined. Sophia herself declares: “I have good counsel and sound judgment; I have understanding and power as well” (Proverbs 8:14).

Through our inhabitation by Sophia we see with God’s eyes, hear with God’s ears, and act as God’s hands. Now, we see what was previously invisible and irrelevant. We see starving children so we can feed them, we see unhoused persons so we can shelter them, we see exploited workers so we can advocate for them, we see persecuted minorities so we can involve them. Just as God heard the Israelites’ cry and freed them from Egypt, so we now hear the world’s cry and liberate it from injustice: “Only they who hear with the ears of others can speak with the mouth of God,” observes German theologian Dorothee Soelle.

Sophia’s work does not begin on Pentecost, with the foundation of the church. She, like Christ, is active at the beginning and from the beginning, in creation. Her inspirational work occurs in all times and places so that Jesus’s continuing ministry of presence can occur in a particular time and place. For this reason, we can discern her activity before Christ, in Christ, and after Christ, especially in the work of the prophets, through whom God reveals the divine vision to humankind: “Prophecy never comes through an act of human will, but comes as people have spoken for God under the power of the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). Because Sophia acts in all times and all places, we can find her activity throughout the world, wherever people have worked for an expansion of love.

Sophia’s activity places within humankind a general knowledge of the good and the freedom to choose, for good or evil, so our lives are filled with moral consequence. We see the activity of Sophia wherever we see the activity of love. Simone Weil writes, “Every time that someone has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light—and in the best of cases the fullness of light—in the heart of that same religious tradition.”

According to Weil, where there is love, there is God, not in any one religious tradition, but in all religious traditions, so long as they are inspired by the “woman clothed with the sun” (Revelation 12:1). The most superficial acquaintance with human history reveals a tenacious darkness in our collective soul. Ours is a long history of cruelty, murder, lies, domination, exploitation, hoarding, arrogance, and scorn. Yet we can always find resistance as well, those saints who have worked to increase joy and reduce suffering, who have advocated compassion and rejected cruelty, who prefer truth to lies, who voluntarily and generously give more than they receive. Pockets of this resistance are everywhere, consisting of every race and gender and nation, formed by people of all religions and no religion, persevering despite the dangers of perseverance, acting in hope when reason counsels despair. This resistance, so apparently diverse, constitutes one holy family, “for all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” (Romans 8:14). (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 170–173)
*****

For further reading, please see:

Augustine. “Homily 7 on the First Epistle of John (1 John 4:4–12).” Translated by H. Browne. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff, 1st ser., 7. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1888. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/170207.htm.

Soelle, Dorothy. The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Translated by Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001.

Thomasson-Rosingh, Anne Claar. Searching for the Holy Spirit: Feminist Theology and Traditional Doctrine. London: Taylor & Francis, 2015.

Weil, Simone. Letter to a Priest. Routledge Great Minds. New York: Routledge, 2014.

November 2, 2025

The Spirit of Sophia grants us holy desire

The Holy Spirit Sophia blesses the cosmos with eros. Desire is a gift from God. It quickens us, providing both direction for our activity and energy for our movement.

Desire can get a bad rap, because so much desire is unrequited. Whether we desire an easy life, perfect love, or a just society, to desire is to experience frustration. For this reason, some wisdom teachers have advocated the complete transcendence of desire, which (so they say) would be a life unstained by frustration. Even if such transcendence were possible, the eradication of desire is not natural to the Christian tradition since Christ desired the inclusion of the excluded, reconciliation between enemies, and justice in society.

Certainly, we can become consumed by petty desires for power, prestige, and recognition, those selfish cravings that make our lives small. But the Holy Spirit Sophia instills in us a holy desire for more of all that is good—more love, more beauty, more peace, more hope, more justice, more faith, and more joy. These are the sacred desires that lift us into the life of God.

The Greek word for desire is eros. Now, we can define “erotic” in the broadest sense of the term, as the pervasive desire that animates the cosmos. Desire provides a goal, then bequeaths the energy needed to attain that goal. Desire thereby pulls us forward through time, granting life direction and purpose. Without desire there would be no frustration, but no motivation either. Without desire there would be none of the vitality evinced by Jesus of Nazareth, whose life was eros for the kingdom of God.

Unfortunately, in English eros has become associated solely with sexual desire, or the erotic. But here we are defining eros as the desire that animates the cosmos, including but not limited to sexual desire. Eros and desire are aspects of the divine love upon which the universe is founded. Faith should bless eros rather than denigrate or ignore it, because eros is most basically the desire for relationship, the desire not just to be, but to be with. Eros is the attraction of one entity toward another and their movement into everdeepening bonds.

As relational and attractive, eros expresses, resonates with, and lures us toward the interpersonal love within the Trinity. Eros invites us into the life of God. And God has declared creation to be “very good” (Genesis 1:31). When we who are made in the image of God recognize divine creation as desirable, we reap an affection toward reality itself. This affection is mystical; the mystic feels fondly toward all that is. Hence, mysticism is the opposite of aversion. It marvels at life, seeks unity with life, and plunges deeper into life.

As always, our embodiment will complicate this intensification; even the greatest of saints will prefer the smell of flowers to dung. But recognizing that all contrasts originate in God, and that God is beneficent, grants us openness to the spectrum of experience. Through such openness we appreciate the warmth that follows the cold, just as we appreciate the divine healing that follows all suffering.

Eros invites us into intimacy with all things. To feel intimate with all things is to feel open to them, to participate in them and they in you, to derive energy from them and to grant them your own in a ceaseless process of mutual increase. If we are open, then we are intimate with the universe. If we are closed, then we separate ourselves from its magnificence. Through intimacy, we find ourselves alive in a world that is itself alive. At this point, observes Thomas Merton, “The gate of heaven is everywhere.”

I do not want to overpromise here. Eros inevitably produces frustration. To desire God is to oscillate between absence and presence, disappointment and fulfillment, yearning and satisfaction. But this oscillation itself frees us from our spiritual inertia by granting us a foretaste of the more that is available. Through holy desire we are offered unending spiritual discovery. Paul writes:


For Paul, salvation is not an event but a process within which one “presses on” and “strains toward.” Since the process is never ending, our development is never ending as well.

Gregory of Nyssa called Paul’s concept of “pushing on” epektasis. Epektasis is the perpetual progress of the finite toward the infinite, drawn by the beauty of the infinite itself. This process denies any resolution or satiety since the soul can never fully encompass God. We can stretch forever into the limitless, placing us in an everlasting tension between frustration and advance, thirst and celebration.

In this schema, God is not unknowable; God is endlessly more knowable. Sin is complacency and virtue is thirst: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink,” declares Jesus, promising his followers that the Spirit of Sophia would flow out of their hearts like living water (John 7:37–39). Faith begins in discontent yet ends in joy. Along the way, it shatters all the idols that pretend to ultimacy, that declare themselves triumphant, that craftily lure us into spiritual arrest. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 168-170)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Coakley, Sarah. God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Holtzen, William Curtis. The God Who Trusts: A Relational Theology of Divine Faith, Hope, and Love. Lisle, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2019.

Merton, Thomas. Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master; The Essential Writings. Edited by Lawrence Cunningham. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1992.

October 22, 2025

Sophia the Holy Spirit brings us to fullness of life

The Holy Spirit, Sophia, is active throughout time and throughout the cosmos. Within the Trinity, Abba is the person most responsible (but not solely responsible) for the creation and sustenance of the universe. Nevertheless, all three persons create and sustain together so the cosmos may bear the imprint of agapic love. For this reason, we find Bible passages that describe the participation of each Trinitarian person in creation. Here, we will concern ourselves with the contribution of Sophia.

Reading the Trinity back into the Hebrew Scriptures, we find Sophia present in the very beginning: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2 KJV; see also Proverbs 3:19–20; 8:22–31; Psalm 104:30).

At the outset, God the Trinity intended the universe to be more than dead matter. God intended the universe to be full of Spirit, which is to be full of Life. For Spirit to be present, not just at the beginning, but in the beginning, God embeds Spirit within every aspect of the universe, revealing the divine commitment to richness of experience. Self-organizing matter isn’t enough; the cosmos must host a great expanse of feelings, desires, dreams, and decisions. The cosmos must provide a topography of affects that grants import to existence.

Sophia fulfills matter by lifting it into the heights of Spirit. She does not neglect material existence; she consummates it. In so doing, she rejects any language that implies existence is “nothing but” matter. We hear such language frequently: love is “nothing but” the neurotransmitter oxytocin, consciousness is “nothing but” a neurological illusion, morality is “nothing but” an evolutionary adaptation of social animals. To materialist assertions that “spirit is nothing but matter,” Sophia replies, “Yes, spirit is matter . . . and more. Spirit is abundance.”

We can discern this abundant quality within the universe: “God’s Spirit adorns the heavens,” states Job (26:13a). Due to this adornment, things are not mere things; they are ensouled, they are sacred, they are beautiful. Sophia as Spirit is the superfluous boon in the universe, the net positive that we never earned but always enjoy. She is embedded in reality as its source of significance, weaving meaning into the cosmos and turning life into instruction.

Sophia’s presence is the presence of life itself, therefore it is the presence of grace itself. Knowing Sophia is a gift: “Happy are you when you find Wisdom, when you develop discernment. For she is more profitable than silver and brings yields greater even than gold. . . . Her paths are pleasant ones, and all her roads lead to peace” (Proverbs 3:13, 17).

Sophia’s specific divine charge is the unification, harmonization, and enchantment of our interior life or subjectivity. “Subjectivity” is a philosophical term that refers to our private thoughts, feelings, memories, and desires, to which only we have direct access, but which we can share with others through various forms of communication. Our human subjectivity finds its precedent in the divine subjectivity of each Trinitarian person, just as our intersubjectivity (deep relationship to one another) finds its precedent in the Trinity.

God is the ground of being, and not just physical being, but all being—emotional, moral, spiritual, rational, aesthetic, mathematical, etc. God is maker of all things, visible and invisible, and God embraces all that God has made. We, made in the image of God, are made for fullness of being, to embrace all that God has made. We are matter and spirit, body and soul, reason and emotion.

To neglect any aspect of ourselves diminishes our personhood. Sophia neglects nothing. She sees beneath appearances and teaches us to do the same, granting us interior awareness, helping us to recognize the interior awareness of others, then connecting everything and everyone to generate a living communion. Through this unceasing process, she frees us from the impoverishing illusion that we are the only important thing alive. She connects depth of self to depth of self, soul to soul, bringing to experience what was always true and helping us to live plumb with creation as intended.

“The glory of God is a human being, fully alive,” writes Irenaeus, and Sophia within us secures this glory. As our inhabitant, Sophia empowers the process of theosis, through which we draw ever closer to God, taking on God’s nature (John 10:34; following Psalm 82:6). Sophia transforms us according to the likeness of God (Ephesians 4:24) and clothes us in Christ, granting us adoption as the children of God (Galatians 3:26–27). Through the work of Sophia, we become increasingly divine until our petty egotism dies to the fullness of Christ, which is the fullness of life. We cease to be hovels of the self, becoming instead temples of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19).

Such internal transformation changes everything around us, placing us in a new cosmos, more beautiful and promising than the previous. We are becoming one with ourselves, one with God, and one with the cosmos. Falling ever deeper into love, we are becoming agapic, hence nondual.

Jesus’s revelation of agapic love is limited by his sheer humanity—the finitude of his this-worldly work. One human life, even a divine human life, cannot exhaustively reveal the infinitude of divine potential. The inherent limitation of Jesus’s teachings, their limitation to one culture and one language in one time, coupled with the imperially enforced brevity of his ministry, leave space for us to learn more. Sophia teaches us more.

As the Spirit of the universe, Sophia acts throughout the universe. Jesus the Christ plays the role of absolute participant, acting in a particular time and particular place with particular people, sanctifying our particularity. Sophia acts everywhere so that Jesus can act somewhere; Sophia acts in all times so that Jesus can act in one time. Hence, Sophia continues revelation, infusing agapic love into all times and all places through inspired people, of every religion and no religion, guiding the cosmos toward the divine love that Jesus so perfectly revealed. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 163–164)

*****
For further reading, please see:

Matthews, Caitlín. Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, Bride of God. Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 2013.

Irenaeus of Lyons, “Against Heresies,” §7: Gloria enim Dei vivens homo. Literally: “For the glory of God is the living person.”

Elizabeth Johnson. Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit: Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1993.

October 13, 2025

Theology that denies a feminine aspect to God is unbiblical. So, let's start calling the Holy Spirit "Sophia".

Theology that denies a feminine aspect to God is unbiblical. The Bible ascribes multiple characteristics to the Holy Spirit, linking her to the Sustainer and the Christ while ascribing to her a particular function. The baptism of Jesus, in which the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove and Abba endorses Jesus’s ministry, conveys the uniqueness and harmony of each person within the Trinity (Luke 3:21–32). In this passage, each divine person is in a unique location with a unique perspective and a unique role to play, while their activity is perfectly harmonized for the coming story of salvation.

But why refer to the Holy Spirit as feminine? Biblical texts and biblical language repeatedly affirm this designation. So numerous are these references that, to avoid tedium, we will list but a portion below.

We can note that the Greek word for dove, peristera, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, is a feminine noun (see also John 1:32). Indeed, the Spirit is frequently associated with feminine aspects of the divine.

For example, the Spirit is associated with the wisdom that God (read: the collective activity of the Trinity) grants us. She is a Spirit of Wisdom (Deuteronomy 34 ). In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom (her name, a proper noun, hence capitalized) is a character who acts and speaks, raising her voice in the open squares and declaring: “Surely I will pour out my spirit [ruach] on you; I will make my words known to you” (Proverbs 1:20–23 NKJV).

The prophet Isaiah says that the spirit of God will rest on the coming Messiah, enabling him to govern with wisdom and justice (Isaiah 11:2). And after Pentecost, the early church felt empowered by the wisdom of the Spirit, which allowed them to preach boldly and argue skillfully (Acts 6 –10).

The Hebrew word for wisdom is hokmah, a feminine noun. For this reason, the Hebrew Scriptures most often refer to Wisdom in the feminine gender: “Grow in discernment! Grow in Wisdom! Don’t you give up on her, and she will never give up on you; if you love her, she will protect you. Wisdom is supreme—so acquire Wisdom!” (Proverbs 4:5–7).

Proverbs, a collection of Hebrew wisdom sayings, may have been collected in the eighth century BCE. Approximately seven hundred years later, the book of Wisdom, written in Greek, states: “I called for help and the spirit of Wisdom [Greek: Sophia] came to my aid. I valued Her above even my throne and scepter and all my great wealth was nothing next to Her. I held no precious jewel to be Her equal, because all the gold in the world was just a handful of sand compared to Her” (Wisdom 7 –8). That author goes on to associate Wisdom with Spirit again, declaring: “In Wisdom there is a spirit of intelligence and holiness that is unique and unmistakable . . . pervading every intelligent, pure, and most subtle spirit” (Wisdom 7:22b–23). Finally, the author asks, “But who has ever mapped out the ways of heaven? Who has ever discerned your intentions unless you have given them Wisdom and sent your Holy Spirit from heaven on high? It was because of Her that we on earth were set on the right path, that we mortals were taught what pleases you and were kept safe under Her protection” (Wisdom 9:17–18).

The grammatically feminine Hebrew Wisdom figure continued into the Greek and Latin translations of the Bible. In the Greek translation (the Septuagint), hokmah was translated as sophia, a feminine noun and the root of the contemporary English word philosophy (philos: love, sophia: wisdom; hence, “the love of wisdom”).

In the Latin translation (the Vulgate), hokmah was translated as sapientia, a feminine noun and the root of the contemporary scientific classification for humankind, homo sapiens (homo: human, sapiens: wise; hence, “wise humans,” a somewhat generous appellation).

We have already discussed the maternal imagery for God in the Bible, citing such Hebrew texts as: “You deserted the Rock who gave you life; you forgot the God who bore you” (Deuteronomy 32:18), “From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven?” (Job 38:29 NRSV), and “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15 NRSV).

This feminine imagery for God continues in the writings of the early church: “Like newborn babes, be hungry for nothing but milk—the pure milk of the word that will make you grow into salvation, now that you have tasted that our God is good” (1 Peter 2:2–3).

And one of the most defining texts of the Newer Testament, 1 John 4:8b, asserts that God is love (Theos agapē estin). In this passage, Theos is a masculine noun and agapē is a feminine noun, a grammatical fusion that shatters any gender essence and places the omnipresent God everywhere on the gender spectrum.

Although never literal, these gender diverse metaphors are powerful because they find their source in their prototype, the all-encompassing nature of God. Made in the image of God, we are called to gender equality and the celebration of all gender difference.

What we say influences who we are. Gender imagery is metaphorical yet consequential. Exclusively masculine imagery for God divinizes masculinity and profanes femininity. Moreover, the false binary itself marginalizes nonbinary persons. Nevertheless, the Western Christian tradition has generally used exclusively masculine language for all three persons of the Trinity as well as the Trinity itself. This exclusivity was always patriarchal, never biblical, and begs correction.

Thankfully, the feminine metaphors for God in the Bible, plus the uniquely Christian doctrine of the Trinity, present an opportunity to embed gender diversity within our concept of God. This theological move will allow us to divinize gender difference. Then, we can transfer the inherent divine equality to society.

To embed femininity within God, to celebrate the Wisdom of God, and to recognize the personality of the Holy Spirit, we will henceforth refer to the Holy Spirit as Sophia and assign her a feminine pronoun.

Many traditionalists, accustomed to an exclusively male God, may reject any insinuation of the female into the divine as heretical. But the association of Sophia with the Holy Spirit is not an innovation; it is a retrieval of tradition. The early church was rich in feminine imagery for the Spirit. For example, the lost Gospel of the Hebrews was an early second-century account of Jesus produced by Jewish Christians (Jewish followers of Jesus who retained their Jewish customs). In that Gospel, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as his Mother: “My Mother (mētēr), the Holy Spirit, took me just now by one of my hairs and carried me off to the great Mount Tabor,” he states.

The noncanonical (didn’t make it into the biblical canon) Apocryphon of John refers to the blessed One as Mother-Father and states, “I shall praise and glorify . . . the three: the Father, the Mother, and the Son, the perfect power.” Likewise, as John wanders grief stricken after the crucifixion, the Trinity appears to him and says, “Why do you doubt, or why do you fear? . . . I am the One who is with you always: I am the Father; I am the Mother; I am the Son.”

In the noncanonical Gospel of Philip, the author declares that Mary could not have been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, because “when did a woman ever conceive with a woman?” Around 340 CE the Syriac theologian Aphrahat writes: “As long as a man has not taken a wife, he loves and reveres God his Father and the Holy Spirit his Mother, and he has no other love.” And the early church theologian Jerome (c. 347–c. 419), in his commentary on Isaiah, writes:



In the early fourth century, the Syriac theologian Ephrem writes of Jesus’s double birth from two wombs, that of divinity and that of humanity: “If anyone seeks Your hidden nature, Behold it is in heaven in the great womb of Divinity. And if anyone seeks your revealed body, Behold it rests and looks out from the small womb of Mary.”

In the later fourth century, an Egyptian preacher (perhaps Symeon, whose writings were falsely ascribed to the monk Makarios) writes about “the grace of the Spirit, the Mother (mētēr) of the holy.”

The Holy Spirit is a female person with the proper name “Sophia”. Patriarchy erased the tradition of calling the Holy Spirit “Sophia” and assigning her a female gender. We retrieve it as a biblically accurate, theologically astute metaphor.

Sophia is a metaphorically female person. Because she is the Spirit who animated Jesus, she cannot be reduced to the presence of Christ. She is full of Christ, just as Christ is full of her, because Truth expresses Wisdom just as Wisdom expresses Truth. But she is not an adjunct of Christ any more than Christ is her adjunct. They are unique and equal persons, offering unique and equal gifts to the story of salvation.

In other words, the persons of the Trinity have unique functions, but these functions overlap due to the perfection of their cooperation. The Creator creates through Christ and Sophia, while Sophia is the Holy Spirit of the Creator and Christ, and Jesus serves as an emissary to creation from Abba and Sophia. Just as the double helix of our DNA produces one person, so the triple helix of Abba, Jesus, and Sophia produces one deliverance.

Now, with one further move, we can have a gender-balanced Trinity. Jesus is male, Sophia is female, and Abba the Creator and Sustainer is nonbinary, nondual, gender inclusive, transgender, or omnigender. In this way, God expresses the full spectrum of gender identities that God creates, sustains, and loves.

Again, traditionalists may deem this move to be innovative or heretical, but tradition has already declared that the Creator transcends gender. We have considered biblical depictions of God as Father and Mother. God is also associated with nongendered metaphors like a rock (Psalm 18:2), the sun, a shield (both in Psalm 84:11), the One (Deuteronomy 6:4), and light (1 John 1:5). We are retrieving a gender-inclusive tradition that patriarchy erased.

Trinitarian language is inclusive language. Henceforth in this book, whenever discussing the Trinity in constructive, creative terms, we will utilize gender-balanced or gender-neutral language for God (the Trinity) and the three persons who compose the one God. Often, when discussing the Trinity historically or biblically, we will use the old masculine language for the sake of clarity. But whenever proposing how we can think about the Trinity today, we will use omnigendered language.

This theological transition necessitates new language. Different formulations can emphasize different perspectives on the healing work of God that traditional terminology has overlooked. For example, alternative Trinitarian formulations might include Parent–Son–Daughter, gender neutralizing the Creator/Sustainer and preserving the male gender of Jesus, while ascribing a female gender to the Holy Spirit. We could refer to YHWH–Jesus–Sophia, emphasizing the proper name, hence personality, of each person. We could refer to the Trinity as Fidelity–Love–Power, which emphasizes the steadfast faithfulness of the Sustainer, the powerful love of the Redeemer, and the vivifying energy of the Spirit. The formulation Sustainer–Participant–Celebrant highlights the ongoing activity of the Creator, the continuing participation (with risk) of the Christ, and the consummating lure of the Spirit.

These formulations are gender neutral, hence gender inclusive. Each tripersonal formulation provides a different insight into our tripersonal salvation, thereby expanding our understanding of the work of God for us. Although these formulations may prove disorienting at first, they are worth the intellectual effort since they expand our understanding of God’s ongoing activity.

Trinitarian language should be an arena of playful experimentation, not dogmatic restriction, as churches search for language that best communicates God’s ever-unfolding love and exuberant creativity in our multicolor universe. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 157–162)

*****
For further reading, please see:

Johnson, Elizabeth. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Herder and Herder, 2017.

Van Oort, Johannes. “The Holy Spirit as Feminine: Early Christian Testimonies and Their Interpretation.” HvTSt 72 (2016) 22–45. DOI: 10.4102/hts.v72i1.3225.

Pagels, Elaine. “What Became of God the Mother? Conflicting Images of God in Early Christianity.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (1976) 293–303.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. 1979. Reprint, New York: Random House, 2004.

October 7, 2025

The Trinitarian God is love that unifies difference

The Trinity possesses a capacity for sympathetic joy. “If you have two people in a room, you have a conversation. If you have three people, you have politics,” an old lawyer once said to me. In my experience, this statement has proven itself true many times.

This validation reveals something problematic about human nature, but it also reveals the audacity of Trinitarian theology. As mentioned earlier, the Jewish tradition interprets the spirit of God as an aspect of God, not as a person, not even as a functionary in the heavenly court. But the energized Jewish community centered around the risen Jesus experienced this Spirit as a unique power that was inextricably related to the Creator and Jesus, but also distinct from them. In a way, this interpretation continues the Hebrew tradition, because the Hebrew Scriptures do not assert that Wisdom receives her knowledge and power from elsewhere, from any male figure; she has it of herself. She is her own person, and strong (see Proverbs 1:20-33).

Problematically, Christian theology has rarely treated the Holy Spirit as an actual person, but rather as an impersonal force binding the two other persons together. In our view, the Holy Spirit must be personal because a third person suggests the divine capacity for sympathetic joy. Sympathetic joy is the ability to experience someone else’s joy as our own. God’s capacity for sympathetic joy is also a human possibility, present in humanity because preexisting in God, of whom humankind is the earthly expression.

The three persons of the Trinity are co-equal. Historically, Christians have sometimes designated the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity, implying rank between the persons, but such inequality is impossible within divinity. The presence of three persons is imminently consequential, but it doesn’t make any particular person the third. Instead, each person is third to the other two. This status is important because it exemplifies the openness of divine love.

The meaning of the third person of the Trinity struck me one day while driving my two young sons to school. They were in the back seat playing with each other, tickling each other, laughing, giggling, and singing. I listened to them, occasionally glancing in the mirror to watch, and was flooded with joy at their love for each other. I then became aware of the ecstatic power of my third party, sympathetic joy. There was a buoyancy to it that came from observation without participation. This delight accompanied a willing selflessness that celebrated their love without envy or jealousy. I did not want to interrupt their relationship or even join their relationship at that moment. I simply wanted to revel in it—in my perception of it, as third party—more fully.

A cliché description of human purpose claims that we are “to love and be loved.” This description is inadequate because it does not recognize our call to celebrate love that is not our own, nor does it recognize the potential riches implicit in that call. Free of ego investment, third person love offers a kind of spiritual weightlessness. It is a love that we do not participate in yet celebrate wholeheartedly. Thus, the third person of the Trinity symbolizes the infinite openness of the sacred. The Trinity revels in all relatedness, not just their particular relatedness. They consecrate universal interdependence, not just their own network of interdependence.

The third person of the Trinity, as third person, is the symbolic window through which the light of infinite relatedness flows. As C. S. Lewis notes, if John, Mary, and Pat are friends, and Pat dies, then Mary has not just lost Pat. She has also lost how Pat relates to John, and all the aspects of John that Pat brought out of him that Mary couldn’t. We are multifaceted, and different people bring out different aspects of each other.

If we want to see the whole person, then we need to relate to them with others. Someone else may bring out their quirky humor, or oddball interests, or rambunctious adventurousness. If we are not jealous, then we can enjoy these facets of our friends that we cannot elicit, but our other friends can. If we are jealous, then we will know less of the person we seek to control. The larger our circle of friendship, the deeper our knowledge of one another will be. Heaven is other people.

Trinitarian love is open. Love overflows, always seeking to draw more participants into its community. It rejects all exclusive, tribal love. Were tribal love divine love, were God a nationalist god, then the Christian symbol of God would be a closed love that excludes the other. We have all known lovers who loved each other and no one else. They treat one another ethically and support one another, but do not extend that treatment to anyone outside their closed system. Their ethics are particular (for each other) rather than universal (for all). In their worldview, only they can be the victims of injustice, because outsiders do not deserve to be treated justly. Such exclusive love is capable only of self-righteousness and indignation. It locks others out and locks us in.

To love the outsider, as the Hebrew scriptures and Christ command, implies a love of difference. Such love is a godsend, because difference amplifies love. If love within homogeneity sufficed, then the same could simply practice self-love and find satisfaction there. For love to be Trinitarian, for love to be of God, difference must be loved.

As love unifying difference, the Trinity is a great symbol of hope. Power can repress the frictions of difference, creating a superficial peace by force, but true unity is achieved only when difference voluntarily unites. In this Trinitarian worldview, the human rejection of difference is morally wrong because it is ontologically askew—it rejects the diverse reality that God sustains and celebrates.

We will celebrate gender difference. All worldviews that exalt uniformity and control create an artificial chasm between human and human, a chasm that fills with disgust and fear. Unity cannot just tolerate diversity; unity must sanctify diversity, including gender diversity, as an expression of God’s differentiated, relational being. To sanctify gender diversity, all aspects of gender must be expressed in God—those at the ends of the spectrum, those in the middle, and those not on the spectrum at all. To sanctify this diversity, for the remainder of these essays, we will refer to Abba, God our Mother and God our Father, as “they.” (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 155-157)
*****
For further reading, please see:

Baker-Fletcher, Karen. Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective. Nashville: Chalice Press, 2006.

Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Translated by Paul Burns. 1988. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005.

Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. Reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.

September 29, 2025

The Holy Spirit of Christ is a Holy Spirit of Love

We yearn for the Spirit like we yearn for fulfillment. When the Hebrews fled Egypt, they found themselves alone in the wilderness, no longer under Egyptian law. Societies need law to function, so God provided the Israelites with a new legal code governing both social and religious life. This new law code was remarkably egalitarian for the time, if also occasionally severe.

Even though the law is interpreted differently by different Jewish denominations, some of which favor evolving religion and some of which favor tradition, it structures Jewish life to this day. Ideally, habitual observance of the law transforms the practitioner, so that fulfillment of the law becomes spontaneous rather than forced. This ethical spontaneity had long been a dream of the Jewish people, a dream that God shared. According to the Hebrew Scriptures, God doesn’t want automatons obeying an external code; God wants persons animated by God’s own compassion:



The Jews were experiencing the law within, not as a set of rules but as an internal guide. This moral calling always competed with everyday fears, practical expediency, and mundane advantage. But having glimpsed the warmth that faithful social life could offer, and the spiritual abundance that God intended, they ached for its realization.

In response, their prophets promised this realization, but as an act of God rather than an act of the people. Jeremiah, writing in the voice of God, declares:



Jeremiah’s promise is extravagant—an innate knowledge of God so perfect that religious education is unnecessary. This transformation would make everyone a prophet, someone who discerns God’s hope for humankind and cannot help but to act out that hope, leading society into the fullness of social life.

Jewish prophets hoped to be animated by the Spirit of God. Jeremiah’s vision began with Moses, who lamented, “If only all of God’s people were prophets! If only YHWH would bestow the Spirit [ruach] on them all!” (Numbers 11:29b). In Hebrew grammar, ruach is a feminine noun. To Moses and the Israelites, the spirit of God (ruach Elohim) was a grammatically feminine, spiritually animating presence. It motivated the prophets, but only long enough for them to complete their mission, at which point it departed. They yearned for a day when the spirit of God would permanently inhabit and inspire all Jews (or all people, depending on interpretation).

In contrast to later Christian interpretation, the spirit was not a unique person within a tripersonal God. Instead, it was one aspect of a unitary God, like the charisma of a skillful leader or the intelligence of a noted genius. For this reason, most Jewish translations of the biblical ruach leave it in the lowercase (spirit) while most Christian translations put it in the uppercase (Spirit), in anticipation of the Holy Spirit of the Christian Trinity.

The term Holy Spirit (ruach ha’kodesh) itself occurs three times in the Hebrew Bible, once in Psalm 51 and twice in Isaiah 63. Still, from a Hebraic perspective, even this term refers to an aspect of the one God, not to a person within the Trinity. Both traditions agree on the effective power of the spirit, which God would pour out onto all (Isaiah 44:3), replacing their hearts of stone with hearts of flesh, empowering them to walk in the ways of God (Ezekiel 36:26–27).

According to some prophets, such as Joel, this inspiration would not be limited to the Jewish people, but would transform all humankind: “I will pour out my Spirit on all humankind. Your daughters and sons will prophesy, your elders will have prophetic dreams, and your young people will see visions. In those days, I will pour out my Spirit even on those in servitude, women and men alike” (Joel 3:1–2).

Around 30 CE, in occupied Judea, the followers of an itinerant rabbi crucified by the Romans experienced this outpouring.

The disciples received the Holy Spirit from Jesus. Jesus, the itinerant rabbi, was a Jewish prophet inhabited by the Holy Spirit of God, like all Jewish prophets. According to the Christian tradition, Jesus is unique in transferring this Spirit to his disciples, thereby fulfilling the Hebrew prophecies. In Acts, certain detractors had insinuated that the spirited behavior of the rabbi’s followers was caused by spirits—alcoholic spirits. But Peter defended them: “These people are not drunk, as you think, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning!” (Acts 2:15). He then went on to quote the above passage from Joel and argued that this new inspiration was the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy.

Peter’s argument was continuous with the teachings of Jesus. Jesus had predicted his own death and resurrection, as well as his assumption into heaven afterward. Naturally, his disciples wanted him to stay with them forever, to continue his teaching and healing ministry, to save them from the pain of bereavement. But Jesus denied them the comfort of his ministry, instead calling them to become his ministers: “Peace be with you. As Abba God sent me, so I am sending you,” declares the resurrected Jesus to his disciples (John 20:21), indicating their impending promotion into the role he had once played alone.

We can only imagine the mixed emotions the disciples felt upon receiving this charge. Their charismatic leader, the one they experienced as the Son of God, the preacher who drew crowds and the healer who worked miracles, told them that they would do what he had done and more, for in fact they would do “greater works than these” (John 14:12).

In case they felt a flush of pride, they had to remember his pre-passion question, which he posed to them as they competed for pride of place: “Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?” (Matthew 20:22), to which they had enthusiastically replied in the affirmative. He assured them that they would indeed drink from his cup, then he was flogged and tortured to death on a cross.

Christ had to depart for the disciples to receive the Spirit of Christ. For the transfer of power from Jesus to the disciples to occur, Jesus had to depart. Just as the Spirit had animated Jesus’s body on earth, empowering him to teach, heal, and prophesy, that same Spirit would animate the disciples, making them the body of Christ and empowering them to continue his mission. But the Spirit would not only ratify Jesus’s message; the Spirit would expand upon it, revealing to the disciples what they had not yet been ready to hear, guiding them from truth into all truth (John 16:12–13), teaching them everything (John 14:25–26).

The Holy Spirit arrived fifty days after Passover, on Pentecost:



Previously, Jesus had been the light of the world (John 9:5). Now, the disciples were called upon to be the light of the world, a tall task for a motley crew of peasants, widows, fishermen, marginal women, and tax collectors. These disciples would become the church. Over two millennia, the church has spectacularly succeeded and miserably failed in its mission, making peace and waging wars, feeding the poor and groveling to the rich, expanding scientific knowledge and perpetuating superstition.

What will the church be over the next two millennia? That is the question we are considering in this series of essays. The Spirit of Christ is a Spirit of Love. Recognizing this truth, may the church become a fountainhead of agape in a love-starved world. May we make it so. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 151-154)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. Spirit and Salvation. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1919. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1965.

September 22, 2025

The universe is a womb for religious consciousness, and the Holy Spirit is our host.

I was a very confused young man. In January 1996, I became interim co-director of Programa Nogalhillos, a Presbyterian Border Ministry site based in Nogales, Arizona. The purpose of the program was to foster cooperation between the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the National Presbyterian Church in Mexico, that country’s second largest Protestant denomination. Each site had two co-directors, one Mexican and one American. I was a returned Peace Corps volunteer who had never been to Mexico, hadn’t spoken Spanish in three years, and had no theological training. I liked challenges. This would be a challenge.

The previous American co-director of the program had brought some Pentecostal (Holy Spirit-centered) pastors into the program and was trying to integrate them into the more staid Presbyterian system. The integration presented certain difficulties, as the Pentecostals had a few practices that the Presbyterians were suspicious of, like exorcisms.

My Mexican co-director was a traditional Presbyterian and licensed medical doctor who had taken up a second career in ministry. He considered mental illness to be a medical problem that should be treated by a psychiatrist while the church provided love and support. The Pentecostals believed mental illness to be caused by demon possession. This disagreement was fairly minor until one of my co-director’s parishioners began to struggle with mental illness.

My co-director referred him to a psychiatrist and offered him pastoral support, but the parishioner believed himself to be possessed. His family called the Pentecostals, two of whom traveled down to Hermosillo to exorcise the demon. They told me about the exorcism beforehand, without telling me that it was my co-director’s parishioner. I must have gotten a look of wild-eyed excitement when I heard about a potential exorcism, because they gently declined to invite me: “When the demon leaves the body, it looks for someone weak in their faith to possess,” they explained. “It would be dangerous for you to be there.”

They performed the exorcism, which was successful—for a while. Unfortunately, the parishioner got repossessed during the next Sunday’s worship service and began throwing chairs around their little church, causing a bit of a disturbance among the rest of the congregation. My co-director found out that the Pentecostals had performed the exorcism and drove six hours from Hermosillo to Nogales to confront them. He asked me to moderate, since I had come to know them quite well, being in the same town.

What ensued was one of the most fascinating conversations I have ever been involved in. By “involved in” I mean “listened to in a state of uncertainty and dread.” It covered the relationship between science and religion, with my co-director arguing that mental illness was a brain disease that required medical treatment and the Pentecostals arguing it was a spiritual curse that required exorcism. It covered the theology of the Holy Spirit, with my co-director arguing that Christians couldn’t be possessed by evil spirits because they were already filled by the Holy Spirit and the Pentecostals arguing that evil spirits were more attracted to Christians because they wanted to drive out the Holy Spirit.

As the conversation continued, I had the startling realization that I was completely out of my depth. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure what the Holy Spirit did. The Father created and the Son saved, but what did the Holy Spirit do? I knew that it was part of the Trinity, and that it came to the church on Pentecost, and that it was supposed to be in all Christians, but I still didn’t really know why it was necessary or important. I had the vague feeling that it made you feel good. My Presbyterian tradition valued doing things decently and in order, so an uncontrollable Holy Spirit placed a distant third to the Creator and Savior within the Trinitarian pecking order.

Over the years, I have come to see the Holy Spirit as a life-giving power, coequal within the Trinity. I still believe that mental illness is a medical problem, and I remain suspicious of exorcisms. But the Holy Spirit has a distinct and necessary role to play in faith. I will share my interpretation of her work below.

The Holy Spirit is a divine promise. “Is it possible to live on this earth with a generosity, abundance, fearlessness, and beauty that mirror Divine Being itself?” asks Cynthia Bourgeault. Her implicit answer is that we can, if imperfectly. As the perfectly living person, Jesus of Nazareth is the portal through which divine communion flows into the world. Jesus runs with the grain of the universe and teaches us how that grain runs. In so doing, Jesus lets loose a new Spirit in the world, an enlivening Spirit who quickens us toward abundance. Hence, we do not become Christlike by imitation but by empowerment, not by will but by inspiration.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an evolutionary scientist and Jesuit priest, observes, “There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.” To him, the universe isn’t a collection of surprisingly well-organized, dead matter. The universe is a womb for religious consciousness. Every evolution—the evolution of stars into elements, of elements into chemistry, of chemistry into biology, and of biology into consciousness—every evolution has led to increased complexity and increased capacity, culminating in the twin blessings of self-awareness and God-consciousness. The evolution of matter culminates in the generation of Spirit.

We can interpret this sprawling, magnificent process as a glorious accident that inexplicably produced us, or we can interpret it as a divine gift that begs gratitude toward the Giver. If there is a Giver, then our evolution into ever increasing enjoyment is no accident. It is God’s plan, mediated by matter.

Material evolution has instilled in us a great metaphysical hunger, a hunger that can be satisfied only by the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, a hunger that can be satisfied only by God. For those of us overawed by the graciousness of this process, we can only conclude that the universe is an invitation, and the Holy Spirit is our host. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 150-151)

For further reading, please see:

Bourgeault, Cynthia. The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message. Boston: Shambhala, 2008.

Evers-Hood, Ken. The Irrational Jesus: Leading the Fully Human Church. Eugene, Oregon: United States: Cascade Books, 2016.

Meyers, Robin R. Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2009.

September 14, 2025

Jesus reveals the fullness of divinity as the fullness of humanity

Jesus reveals the fullness of divinity as the fullness of humanity

Jesus always outwits identity. Like the plus symbol in LGBTQ+, Jesus’s meaning is never defined, hence always open to expansion. Jesus becomes new things in new places for new people, so that he can always be healing anew. Over the ages, Jesus has been rabbi, rebel, messiah, prophet, martyr, dissident, friend, healer, preacher, philosopher, ancestor, guru, peasant, spirit, liberator, feminist, womanist, Dalit, Black, White, Asian, African, et al. The meaning of Jesus changes in every context, so that Jesus is always becoming more, always surpassing himself, always transforming in new ways.

Jesus invites us, we who are made in the image of God, to become more. We too must outwit identity if we are to become citizens of the Reign of Love. We can do so by tethering ourselves to the Dynamic One who never ceases to surprise.

To remain open to Jesus’s dynamism, our concept of him must overflow thought the way Jesus overflows understanding. Jesus is always more than. For this reason, as the early Christians began to reflect on Jesus and the impact he had on them, they increasingly came to see him as more than they had thought.

In his lifetime, they recognized him as a prophet, rabbi, Son of God, and even Son of Man. But more reflection produced ever higher estimations. The earliest writings of the church interpret him as “the reflection of God’s glory, the exact representation of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3), the one in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19), the “image of the unseen God” (Colossians 1:15) who, like the Father, has “life in himself” (John 5:26).

Why was the church’s concept of Jesus ever increasing? Because Jesus is a superabundant person, absolutely free, perfectly present, and radically open. According to Revelation, he is the great Amen, the one who says yes to life in its entirety (Revelation 3:14). Jesus personifies a spontaneous resonance with the living God and offers that resonance to us, through him, as one prong of a tuning fork animates the other.

Thus, our encounter with Jesus offers more than a perfect example of human life, more than an opportunity to imitate, by force of will. Instead, Jesus’s activity activates us because Jesus’s Spirit activates our spirits. Jesus is not an external ideal that we copy; Jesus is an internal power that we receive. For this reason, Jesus is not just Friend, Teacher, and Healer. Jesus is Savior. Jesus is the Christ. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 146-147)

*****

Annan, Kent. After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011.

Loughlin, Gerard. “What Is Queer? Theology after Identity.” Theology & Sexuality 14 (2008) 143–52. DOI: 10.1177/1355835807087376.

Sanders, John. Theology in the Flesh: How Embodiment and Culture Shape the Way We Think about Truth, Morality, and God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.