Most Speaking Speaker

Slusser ends his article on prosopological exegesis by noting that the Spirit “does not appear as an interlocutor within the texts we have examined by prosopological exegesis.”  But that is because “the Spirit is the source of all the utterances of Scripture, even those in which the Father or the Word express themselves ‘in their own person.’”

He elaborates: ”As the one who speaks all the words, including those spoken as by the persons of Father, Son, the people of Israel, and everyone else, the Spirit never attains the personal definition of the others; and yet, if by prosopon is meant ‘the one who speaks and concerning whom he speaks and to whom he speaks,’ the dignity, if not the clear definition, cannot be denied to the Holy Spirit. That lack of definition contributes heavily to the often-lamented underdevelopment of theology and piety concerning the Spirit. The most immediate and existentially significant model for prosopological exegesis may have been Christian experience of prayer under the impulse of the Spirit, of which Stephen’s cry in Acts 7:55-56 is a moving example . . . . There two persons are recognized, and the declaration springs from a divine impulse somehow distinct from them both. A prosopological exegesis of that account of Stephen’s prayer would give us Trinitarian distinctions like those which early Christians found in Scripture. It is difficult to say which came first, the exegesis of experience or the exegesis of Scripture.”