The story of Jesus is what the eternal trinitarian life of God looks like when it is projected upon the screen of history, and this means not only on the screen of human history but of sinful human history. The obedience of Jesus to the Father, his obedience to his mission, is just what the eternal procession of the Son from the Father appears as in history. His obedience consists in nothing else but his being in history. Jesus did nothing but be the Son as man. His crucifixion was the dramatic manifestation of the sort of world we have made, the showing up of the world, the unmasking of what we traditionally call original sin. There is no need for theories about the Father putting his Son to death once we know that he was human in our world. Jesus died in obedience to his Father’s will simply in the sense that he was human in his obedience to his Father’s will.

Just as the crucifixion/resurrection is what the eternal procession of the Son from the Father looks like when projected upon sinful human history, so the sending of the Holy Spirit (so that we share in the life of God, so that the mystery of the church exists) is what the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit looks like when projected on to that sinful human world. And the Holy Spirit appears in our world as the transforming force making the world new, or the church new, the individual new, by reducing all the obstacles to its new creation.

The Holy Spirit of the Father and Son is our given capacity for God in our divinization. It is a given equality/communion with God. To lose sight of that would be to make ourselves God, to divinize ourselves. It is the mystery we encounter when we try to speak of the relationship of Jesus and the Father. There is an equality between them, yet evidently there can be no such thing as two individual Gods. Jesus is indeed from the Father, owes his being to the Father, but is nonetheless not a creature but wholly equal with the Father. The traditional word for this is “procession”: Jesus proceeds from the Father but not by being created.