Spirit and Substance

Calvin intriguingly says that the Spirit is the power of persistence and growth and life in creation: not merely the agent for the formation of things, but for their persistence. Spirit ensures the temporal endurance of the creature. As Barth summarizes, ?Both the existence of things, created for as chaos (inordinata moles, massa indisposita), and also their nature or form (pulcher ac distinctus ordo), in order not merely to be created but also to be, to persist, needed an arcana Dei inspiration, a vigor imparted to them by God.?EThis vigor is the gift of the Spirit. Thus, what maintains the creation and the individual creature in its identity through time is nothing within the creature itself, no “substance” that endures. Its persisting identity is entirely dependent upon Another, the Spirit. This is why, as postmodernists have found, any search for the substance of identity in the creature must end by dissolving the subject. Postmodernism thus sharpens the choice: Either identity is an illusion and the subject is really a thousand fragments of a subject; or identity is grounded in something other than the subject, something outside the creation.