With the spoken and written Word is always coordinated as a constitutive element of the Church the ministry of the Sacraments, in which Our Blessed Lord and His Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit Who is the personalized Bond of Love between Them comes to us and abides with us and enlightens us and fortifies us and incorporates us into Himself. -- Piepkorn, *The Sacred Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions* p. 88
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4 comments:
Pastor Weedon,
Do you have an idea what Piepkorn meant by the Holy Spirit "Who is the personalized Bond of Love between Them"? I have not heard of this notion that the Holy Spirit is this Love personalized. I always saw the Love of God in the Trinity more like an "electron cloud"--personalized in all Three Persons. But I admit I am not well studied in this area.
Thanks
Whoops...forgot to add Congrats on the wedding and you playing your role so well! Thanks for sharing the pictures. Many years to the newlyweds!
Thanks, Dixie.
This is the classic Western way of speaking of the Holy Spirit, and we find it expressed very fully in Augustine's De Trinitatis. It was part of the common patrimony of the West. Thus, Martin Chemnitz in his Loci Theologici also speaks of the Holy Spirit as the personal Love and Joy that exists between Father and Son. This also explains a little bit about what is meant by filioque in the sense that the Holy Spirit as Personal Love and Joy flows back and forth between Father and Son. A passage that was very important in establishing this idea of the Spirit as the bond of love is from Romans 5, where the love of God is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who is given to us.
I just checked where Augustine treats of this and it is in Book IX of On the Holy Trinity. Basic idea is that an image of the Trinity is in the Lover, the Beloved, and Love, and Love is that which binds Lover and Beloved together.
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