The question is now posed: If institution and charism can only partially be considered as a dialectical pair, and thus provide only partial answers to our question, are there perhaps other theological viewpoints that are better adapted to it?

The dialectic between the christological and pneumatological view of the Church is increasingly being pushed to the forefront in contemporary theology. In the light of this dialectic, it is asserted that the sacrament belongs to the christological-incarnational aspect of the Church, which then has to be supplemented by the pneumatological-charismatic aspect.

It is true, of course, that a distinction has to be drawn between Christ and the Pneuma. On the other hand, just as the three persons of the Trinity should be treated not as a communio of three gods, but as the one triune God, so the distinction between Christ and Spirit can be rightly understood only when their diversity helps us better to understand their unity. The Spirit cannot be rightly understood without Christ, but the converse is equally true.

«The Lord is the Spirit», Paul tells us in the second letter to the Corinthians (3:17). That does not mean that the two are simply the same thing or the same Person. It means that Christ as the Lord can only be among us and for us because the incarnation was not the last word. The incarnation was fulfilled in Christ's death on the cross and in his resurrection. That means that Christ can only come because he has preceded us in the order of life of the Holy Spirit and communicates himself through that Spirit and in it. The pneumatological christology of St. Paul and the farewell discourses of the Gospel of John have not yet sufficiently penetrated our view of christology and pneumatology. The ever new presence of Christ in the Spirit is the essential condition for the existence of sacrament and for the sacramental presence of the Lord.

This consideration, too, helps to throw light on the «spiritual» ministry in the Church and its place in theology, which tradition has defined with the term successio apostolica. «Apostolic succession» means precisely the opposite of what it might appear to mean: It does not mean that we become, as it were, independent of the Spirit through the continuous chain of succession. The bond with the line of succession means quite the reverse: it means that the sacramental ministry is never ours to dispose of, but must be given each time by the Spirit. For it is the Spirit-Sacrament we can neither create nor institute ourselves. Professional expertise, functional skill, is not in itself sufficient for this: the Lord's gift is necessary.

In the Sacrament, in the Church's vicarious symbolic action, the Lord has reserved for himself the permanent institution of the priestly ministry. The quite specific link between the «once» and the «always», that holds good for the mystery of Christ as a whole, is here made visible in an exemplary way. The «always» of the sacrament, the presence in pneumatical form of the Church's historical origin in every age, presupposes the link with the «ephapax» (εφαπαξ), with the unrepeatable event from which the Church derives her origin. This link with the origin, this stake planted in the ground of the once-only and unrepeatable event, can never be repudiated. Never can we take refuge in a free-floating pneumatology; nor abandon the solid ground of the Incarnation, the historical action of God.

But, conversely, this unrepeatable event is communicated to us in the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Risen Lord. It does not vanish, like something dead and gone, into the forever irretrievable past, but bears in itself the power to make itself perpetually present, because Christ has passed through the «curtain, that is, through his flesh» (Heb 10:20) and hence made accessible to us what is eternally renewable in the unrepeatable event. The Incarnation does not stop with the historical Jesus, with his sarx (cf. 2ª Cor 5:16)! The «historical Jesus» has eternal significance precisely because his flesh is transformed in the Resurrection, so that He can make himself present in all places and at all times in the power of the Holy Spirit, as wonderfully shown by the farewell discourses of Jesus in John (cf. especially 14:28): «I go away, and I will come to you». From this christological-pneumatological synthesis it may be inferred that a closer examination of the concept of «apostolic succession» will be of real help in resolving our problem.