Pentecost as the Church’s Birth

The Church is commonly called the creation of Pentecost, and the phrase is right if it is not made to mean that she did not exist before. This file sets out what the descent of the Spirit constituted, why the Church calls Pentecost a birthday and in what sense, how the day is not a past event but a permanent condition, and how the Church’s hymns for the feast say all of it before any theologian does.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What Was Constituted

Before Pentecost there is a company: the Twelve, restored to number by the election of Matthias, together with the women and the Mother of Jesus and his brethren, about a hundred and twenty persons, gathered in one place at the Lord’s own command to wait (Acts 1:12–26; 2:1). They have received the Lord’s teaching, his commission, and his breath (John 20:22). What they do not yet do is anything.

After Pentecost this company preaches, is understood by strangers, baptizes three thousand in a day, holds all things in common, breaks bread from house to house, and is added to daily (Acts 2:41–47). Within chapters it is making decisions about admission, appointing ministers, being persecuted as a body, and settling a doctrinal question in council (Acts 6:1–6; 15:1–29).

What the Spirit’s descent constituted, then, is not a religious idea or a memory of Jesus but a body that acts — one that can speak, judge, admit, exclude, and suffer as one thing. It is this that the Church means when she calls Pentecost her birthday. St. John Chrysostom puts the change bluntly: the same men who had denied and fled now preach in the city that killed their Master, and the difference is the Spirit (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles 4; trans. NPNF I/11).

In What Sense a Birth

The claim needs qualification in three directions, and Orthodox theology has always given them.

The Church has a prehistory. The Fathers speak freely of the Church as existing from Abel, from the patriarchs, from the assembly in the wilderness; the Shepherd of Hermas has the vision of the Church created before all things (Hermas, Visions II.4.1). Israel is not a preliminary sketch discarded at Pentecost but the same people, into which the nations are grafted (Romans 11:17–24). What happens on the fiftieth day is the coming of the promised Spirit upon the community that already exists, not the manufacture of a community out of nothing.

The Church is founded by Christ. The Body is his Body, the Head is his; the Church is constituted by the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection, and the Spirit is sent to what the Son has already made. To say that the Spirit founds the Church, if it meant that the Spirit founds her instead of Christ, would be exactly the error that section 03 of this collection exists to identify (see The Spirit of Christ and What the Filioque Costs).

And the Church is eschatological before she is institutional. Pentecost is described by St. Peter as the beginning of “the last days” (Acts 2:17, quoting Joel). The Spirit given is an arrabōn, a down-payment on an inheritance not yet received (2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:14). The Church is thus constituted as a community that lives out of its own future — which is why her central act is a meal that anticipates a kingdom (see Liturgy as Eschatology).

Held together, these give the accurate formula: at Pentecost the Spirit fills the body the Son has assumed and constitutes it as the place where he dwells. The birthday language is the Church’s own and is not wrong; it names the day the Body began to breathe.

Babel Undone

The Church’s first commentary on Pentecost is her hymn for it, and it reads the day against Genesis 11:

“When the Most High came down and confounded the tongues, he divided the nations; but when he distributed the tongues of fire, he called all to unity, and with one voice we glorify the All-holy Spirit.”
(Kontakion of Pentecost, tone 8; Pentecostarion.)

The parallelism is exact and the difference is the point. At Babel a united humanity is scattered by being made unintelligible. At Pentecost a scattered humanity is gathered — and the gathering does not abolish the languages. Parthians remain Parthians and Medes remain Medes; each hears in his own tongue. The unity the Spirit gives is not the erasure of difference but its reconciliation.

This is the ground of everything the Church says about catholicity, and of her ordinary practice of translating her services into the languages of the peoples who receive her. It is also the ground of her judgment against ordering the Church by ethnicity, since Pentecost gathers nations without making them one nation. The ecclesiological substance of both belongs to the sibling treatment of the Church (see Ecclesiology).

The Divided Tongues

The narrative detail the Fathers return to is that the tongues were “divided” and that the fire “sat upon each one of them” (Acts 2:3). One flame; many tongues; each person receives.

The Church’s hymnography makes this its own theme. The Pentecost troparion has the Lord making the fishermen “all-wise, by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit”; the feast’s stichera speak of one Spirit distributed and undivided. Vladimir Lossky built on the same verse his account of the Spirit’s personalizing work: what is given at Pentecost is not a collective endowment averaged over a crowd but grace received by each person as his own, so that the Church’s unity is a unity of persons and not a fusion (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957, ch. 8). The reading is his, and it is reported as his; but the verse is the Church’s, and the practice built on it — that every Christian is chrismated singly, sealed on his own body, and called by his own name — is older than any theology of it (see Chrismation and the Seal).

Not a Past Event

The strongest thing the Orthodox tradition says about Pentecost is that it has not stopped.

The Church does not commemorate the descent of the Spirit as an anniversary of something concluded. She asks for it, continually, in the present tense: “Send down thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts here set forth” at every Liturgy (see The Epiclesis); “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit” at every chrismation; “Send down thy most Holy Spirit and sanctify this water” at every baptism; “The divine grace, which always healeth that which is infirm…” at every ordination. Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s formulation is that the Church’s whole sacramental life is the continuous actualization of Pentecost, and that the epiclesis is where this is most visible (Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988, ch. 11).

The liturgical year says the same thing structurally. The feast of Pentecost does not close the paschal season by returning to ordinary time; the whole period after it is reckoned from it, and the weeks of the year are numbered as weeks after Pentecost until the cycle begins again. The Church counts her time from the day the Spirit came.

And the Church marks the transition in a way easy to miss. From Pascha until Pentecost the prayer “O Heavenly King,” addressed to the Holy Spirit, is omitted from the services; it is restored at the kneeling Vespers of Pentecost itself, when the Church kneels for the first time since Pascha and hears the three long prayers attributed to St. Basil. The Church spends fifty days praying without the invocation of the Spirit, and then receives it back on the day he came. The point is made by the calendar rather than by argument (see The Liturgical Witness; Pentecost).

The Feast of the Trinity

In Russian usage the feast is called Troitsa, Trinity, and the day is understood as the completion of the revelation of the Trinity: the Father sends, the Son ascends and gives, the Spirit descends and remains. The Rublev icon of the Hospitality of Abraham is the temple icon of the feast in much of the Slavic tradition. The Church, on the day she receives the Spirit, worships the Three.

This is not a competing interpretation of the day but the same one stated from the other side. The Spirit’s coming is the last thing that had to happen for the Trinity to be confessed, because until the Spirit came there was no one able to confess him (see The Liturgical and Iconographic Witness).

See Also

References

  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles 4–5. Trans. NPNF, First Series, vol. 11.
  • Shepherd of Hermas. Visions II.4.1. Trans. ANF, vol. 2.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957, ch. 8.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988, ch. 11.
  • Florovsky, Georges. “The Catholicity of the Church.” In Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Collected Works, vol. 1). Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972.
  • Pentecostarion: Kontakion and Troparion of Pentecost; the kneeling prayers of Pentecost Vespers.
  • Scripture: Acts 1:12–26; 2:1–47; 6:1–6; 15:1–29; Romans 11:17–24; 2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:14; John 20:22.