ABSTRACT
One of the fundamental biblical affirmations about God is that God is Spirit (John 4:24; 2 Corinthians 3:19). The original biblical terms for Spirit, ruach and pneuma, have rich metaphorical connections to natural and material phenomena such as breath, wind, fire, water, energy, life-force, and winged creatures. At the same time, in close connection with other biblical terms often representing Spirit, hochmah/sophia and dabar/logos, they capture what are normally considered “spiritual” phenomena such as consciousness, language, intellect, reason, and wisdom.1 Given that the latter phenomena presuppose a sense of focus, centered activity, and coherence, unity (or unicity) here becomes a prominent interpretive category for the notion of Spirit, reinforcing the monotheistic impulse of the entire biblical tradition, epitomized by the traditional rendition of the Shema – “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4).2 Yet the natural and material connections of Spirit contextualize and spatio-temporally “incarnate” its connotation of unified activity as the reflective, interpretive, passionate, and vital responses of a self to its relational environment. The biblical idea of Spirit – and, by implication, the biblical idea of God – can therefore be adequately explored only when the categories of unicity and unity, on the one hand, and multiplicity and difference, on the other, are employed. It has been the function of the doctrine of the Trinity in Christian theological traditions to serve as a reminder that God is not merely One – that reality on both the metacosmic and the cosmic planes is both one and many, as the dynamic triadic structure of the “immanent” Trinity and the “economic” Trinity indicates. Especially in the Augustinian reading of the Spirit, the Third Person as the loving union of the First and Second presents a picture of the agency of Spirit that bridges one and many (i.e., embraces unity and difference, in order to produce the divine Whole as a harmonious, not discordant, patterning of divine relations).3 However, this delicate pneumatological balance between one and many, rooted in the biblical pneumatological tradition, is obscured, by and large, in the Christian monotheistic development of the doctrine of Trinity. Under the essentialist-substantialist rubrics of classical Western thought, with asymmetrically
binary and excessively dualistic constructions of one and many, transcendence and immanence, ideal and material, mind and body, spirit and nature, eternity and time, permanence and change, and substance and phenomena, the unity of God is seen as originary and self-subsistent while divine multiplicity is regarded as derivative and dependent. The First Person of the Trinity, God the Father, is understood as a unified and singular agency that eternally “begets” the Second Person, God the Son, who acquires a body in the unique historical event of incarnation. The being of Spirit is conceptualized as “spirated” or breathed into the world by the Father and the Son as their mutual relational love, one pole of which is originary and the other derivative.4 Given that the Father is the unoriginate origin and the Son the eternally derived Word or Logos, the Spirit as their love comes to represent the ultimately – if not explicitly – subordinate mode of being of the essentially immaterial, self-sufficient, unitary, unrelated, impassable, unchanging, omnipotent sovereign Father who freely begets His divine counterpart and creates the material world ex nihilo.5 A notable consequence of this subordination of the Spirit to the essentially disembodied and unrelated unitary God of classical Western theism is that the Spirit in the world is sacramentally confined to the Christ the incarnate Son and the church as his body, all in the name of their unity. One of the important theological tasks today, then, is to recover the balance between one and many found in the biblical intuitions of Spirit and retained, however dimly, in the doctrine of Trinity. The question is how to articulate and affirm the dynamic, liberating, immanent, historical, earthly, fluid, processional, relational, and pluralistic character of Spirit’s being in the world and its all-inclusive universal reach as the intrinsic being of God who is at the same time a unitary agency. Appeals have been made to a wide range of resources in answering this question, from the pioneering nondualistic constructions of spirit by Hegel and Tillich to contemporary liberationist, feminist, ecological, process, scientific, postmodern, and postcolonial thoughts.6 In this chapter, I turn to the nondualistic traditions of thought within the so-called “Eastern” religions, in this case Neo-Confucianism.7 More specifically, I propose that the Neo-Confucian notion of ultimate reality, the Great Ultimate (太極 taeguek/taiji),8 offers a thoughtprovoking relational and dynamic vision of Spirit that is both one and many, and that in so doing can serve as a transformative critic of the bias toward oneness prominent in classical Western theism and show us a way to reconstruct the trinitarian doctrine. To argue this, I focus on the way two Neo-Confucian thinkers, Zhu Xi and Yi Hwang, interpret the famous Neo-Confucian dictum widely seen as a commentary on the symbol of the Great Ultimate – “Empty and tranquil, and without any sign, and yet all things are already luxuriantly present.”9 I argue that the Neo-Confucian debate on this dictum, especially the way it unfolds among these two thinkers, presents helpful conceptual resources for Christian theology in exploring the possibilities of the kind of Spirit-centered trinitarian panentheism that does justice to both the unifying and the pluralizing motif found in the biblical pneumatological tradition.
