

“Nothing has transcended our Western theology so decisively as has the Holy Spirit, for even if it is affirmed in our creeds and dogmas above all in the dogma of the Trinity—the Holy Spirit always eludes such formulations and does so precisely as Holy Spirit. As the doctrine of the Trinity develops in Christianity, it ever more comprehensively veils the Holy Spirit, a Holy Spirit that here remains truly subordinate or secondary to the Father and the Son. Not even the Christian imagination can envision the Holy Spirit, despite its full envisionments of the Father and the Son. Inevitably such subordination led to a calling forth of an ecstatic Pentecostal Christianity, the most rapidly growing Christianity today, one witnessing to the primacy of the Holy Spirit and thereby witnessing to a resurrection occurring even now.

Indeed, the Holy Spirit is most integrally related to resurrection—a resurrection of the dead—yet this resurrection is subordinated by the proliferation of a pagan immortality in Christendom, disguising or eclipsing resurrection itself. Despite the fact that it is resurrection, not immortality, that is affirmed in Christian creeds, Christianity can be said to have forgotten resurrection or so merged it with immortality as to lose it altogether. Hence nothing is more difficult theologically than a recovery of resurrection, and this is inseparable from an opening to the Holy Spirit, for Holy Spirit is an eschatological Spirit, a Spirit only wholly released by apocalypse itself. This is the Spirit that dominates New Testament language of the Spirit, yet it soon becomes peripheral in Christianity, a process inseparable from a radical Hellenization. Now a truly pagan ‘Spirit’ comes to dominate Christianity,one that can be understood to have actually reversed biblical Christianity, so that Spirit itself becomes an absolute challenge to everything that is simply given or manifest as Christianity.

Hence it is virtually impossible to serve or give witness to the Spirit apart from an ultimate rebellion against Christianity; this rebellion occurs throughout all the truly major imaginative and intellectual expressions of Christianity, or at least it does so after the closure of the Middle Ages. One can be nostalgic about an Aquinas or a Dante, but one knows that such orthodoxy can never occur again, just as we have forever lost a Luther or a Calvin, for nothing is deader than Christendom—as Kierkegaard was the first to know—and once this is known there can never be a recovery or renewal of Christendom. But that is just the condition making possible a renewal of the Spirit, a renewal of the eschatological Spirit that was eclipsed by the advent of Christendom and buried in the triumph of Christendom, a triumph whose ending makes possible a genuine renewal of Spirit.”

Full Interview with Thomas J. J. Altizer