Orthodox and Lutheran Perspectives on the Filioque : Sixteenth-Century Correspondence and a Constructive Proposal

This article examines the sixteenth-century correspondence between the Tübingen Lutheran theologians and Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople on the Filioque in order to advance a constructive proposal for contemporary Orthodox-Lutheran dialogue. It argues that their disagreement was rooted not only in competing doctrinal formulae but in differing metaphysical and methodological presuppositions. The Lutherans interpreted the Spirit’s temporal mission through the Son as evidence of an eternal hypostatic procession from the Son. They grounded this inference in an account of divine simplicity, according to which receiving from another divine person is receiving being, and in an explicitly Augustinian framework. Jeremiah, by contrast, distinguished eternal procession from economic mission, invoked the distinction between the divine essence and its operations, and upheld the Father as sole cause while acknowledging an eternal relation between the Son and the Spirit. Building on this analysis and recent retrievals of the “Greek Filioque ,” the article argues that an eternal, non-causal relation between the Son and the Spirit grounds the Spirit’s mission through the Son without entailing procession from the Son. It then considers whether this model is compatible with Lutheran confessional commitments.