Filoque

Barth has some excellent things to say about the Filioque (CD 1.1, 477ff):

1) He notes that Greek theologians as late as the 5th century explicitly affirmed the filioque.

2) He argues compellingly that the original form of the creed not only does not exclude the filioque. The procession of the Spirit is stated as coming from the Father to respond to “Macedonians, who denied the deity of the Holy Spirit, but who affirmed His procession from the Son too, although in an Arian sense, i.e., as the procession of a creature from a creature.” He suggests that if the creed excludes the filioque, it becomes internally contradictory, because it would be saying that the Spirit’s procession from the Son “implies less” than the procession of the Spirit from the Father. But if Father and the Son are consubstantial, then the Spirit’s procession from the Father must be open to the filioque. (Though the historical context is important, this is not a convincing argument. The Father and Son are, after all, consubstantial, and yet the Son is begotten of the Father, not self-begotten; begottenness is not a shared personal property. There is thus no reason why one could say a) Father and Son are consubstantial yet b) the Father alone has the personal property of “breathing out” the Spirit. But Barth is surely correct that the original Nicene in no way excludes the filioque.)

3) He recognizes that one of the key issues is whether or not the economy reveals the ontology: “Even supporters of the Eastern view do not contest the fact that in the opus ad extra, and therefore in revelation (and then retrospectively in creation), the Holy Spirit is to be understood as the Spirit of both the Father and the Son.” but “statements about the divine modes of being antecedently in themselves cannot be different in content from those that are to be made about their reality in revelation. All our statements concerning what is called the immanent Trinity have been reached smply as confirmations or underlinings, or materially, as the indispensable premises of the economic Trinity.”

4) The soteriological implications are profound: “‘And the Son’ means that not merely for us, but in God Himself, there is no possibility of an opening and readiness and capacity for God in man – for this is the work of the Holy Ghost in revelation – unless it comes from Him, the Father, who has revealed Himself in His Word.” Thus, “The intra-divine two-sided fellowship of the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, is the basis for the fact that there is in revelation a fellowship in which not only is God there for man but in very truth — this is the donum Spiritus sancti — man is also there fore God.” Without the filioque, “the fellowship of the Spirit between God and man is without objective ground or content.”

5) Without the filioque, there is a tendency to regard the Spirit as the Spirit of the Father even in the ad extra . Thus, “the relation of God to man will be understood decisively from the standpoint of Creature and creature” and thiswill set aside the Son or Word “as the basis and origin of the relation, and it will take on the nature of a direct and immediate relation, a mystical union with the principium et fons Deitatis .” He suggests that denial of the filioque is behind the tendency of “Russian theologians and religious philosophers” to allow theological to collapse into philosophy.

5) Eastern theologians charge that the filioque undermines the unity of God positing two sources in God. Barth says that denial of the filioque destroys the unity of God. First, if the Spirit is not the property of both Father and Son, then they “do not have all things in common, the one being the origin of the Spirit in hte primary sense and the other only in a secondary sense.” Second, “Even the unity of God the Father is called in question if implicitly He is not already the origin of the Spirit as the Father of the Son, the origin of the Spirit from Him being a second function along with His fatherhood. Third, the Spirit does not mediate between Father and Son, and thus the Father and Son lose their “mutual connection in the Spirit.” He thus links the Eastern tendency toward tritheism with the denial of the Filioque.