Covenant, Community, and the Spirit

A Trinitarian Theology of Church

Sherman, Robert

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781441227799
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

This comprehensive textbook by a well-respected Reformed theologian brings together two perennial issues in Christian theology: the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and ecclesiology. It demonstrates the importance of the Holy Spirit in empowering the being and mission of the church and shows how the church's identity and calling are embedded in the larger covenantal purposes of the triune God. Accessibly written with pastors in training in mind, the book probes the classic rubrics of the church as the people of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit, igniting readers' ecclesiological imaginations and reclaiming a more biblical, theological, and pastoral vision of church.

1
The Story Begins

Communion: Human Being Is Social Being

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the adam should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” (Gen. 2:18)

We yearn for community because we were meant for community: it is built into our very nature as human beings. Created in the image of the Triune God, we are made to be in relation to God, to one another, and to God’s good creation. Our very existence is a gift from God, who, although self-sufficient in the eternal, loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, extends that communion by creating that which is not God. This is one of Christianity’s basic affirmations: the fact that anything exists at all stems from God, who has freely and graciously chosen to create a cosmos and to be in continuing relation with it. We truly exist. And we exist distinct from God, with our own being and ability to act. Creation is not merely an extension of God, an emanation from the divine being that has no true individuality. Neither is creation a kind of divine cloning that is at root an expression of divine egotism or even narcissism. Creation is truly different and unique, the result of divine graciousness that does not fear or begrudge or compete with the existence of beings other than God. To the contrary, God delights in having brought into existence a reality other than himself—and is even gracious enough to grant an analogous power to the creatures of that reality rather than make them depend always and only immediately upon him.

While God remains the fundamental and final source of all that is, we have also been made to depend upon one another. In any given moment, we depend upon one another through society and our interconnections with the natural world. And God has made these forms of interdependence to extend over time. The fact that any one of us exists derives from God’s granting living creatures the power to exercise their own agency, including the capacity for procreation. As individuals, we do not make ourselves, and in an immediate sense neither does God make us. Rather, God exercises that power through the mediation of our parents, and we in turn become the means by which God brings about the next generation.

And while God has made us and desires to remain in continuing relation with creation, we humans have also been made in such a way that that relation is not automatic. God has embedded us in a fecund and malleable creation and in a relatively open-ended time. The future expands before us, and we cannot see over its horizon. We have been given freedom and power to choose from among multiple paths. Indeed, God grants and sustains us in the power even to turn away from him and his purposes for us. To be sure, given such a creation, with such agency and embedding, it should come as no surprise that Christianity also affirms that just as our origin is truly understood only in relation to God, so too is our end truly realized only through embracing in particular ways the divine and diverse creaturely connections that give us our lives. This contrasts with the modern Western emphasis on individualism. As Barry Harvey states it: “In place of the universal man posited by Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum, therefore, the church proposes a radically different starting point for all thought and action: Deus amat, ergo sumus. From this ecclesial standpoint we learn that the purpose of our very being is to love as God loves.”1 At the heart of our being stands not the egocentric “I think, therefore I am,” but the theocentric “God loves, therefore we are.” Our truest fulfillment, both as individuals and in community, comes when we recognize and align ourselves with that depth and breadth of fellowship with one another and with God that God has intended for us from the very beginning.

Indeed, the Church has recognized this was God’s intention even before “the beginning,” in that this divine desire for communion was what motivated and structured God’s very creation of the cosmos. This is the point to which the doctrine of election speaks: God’s determination from before time to be with and for the humanity he would create. Described in technical intratrinitarian terms, it was the Father’s will that creation be structured and oriented in this manner, which he accomplished through his “two hands” of Son and Spirit, the former being the Logos, the organizing principle, and the latter the Pneuma, the animating power of the one divine work of creation. In one strand of the Reformed theological tradition, this is understood as the pactum salutis (“counsel of peace”), the covenantal “work plan” established among the persons of the Trinity before creation itself.2 Recall Jesus’s saying from Luke 14:28–30 (RSV): “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build, and was not able to finish.’” These words take on a whole new meaning and depth when we consider the cost God would gladly accept to enable his purpose to reach its fulfillment.

The Communal Nature of Human Nature

So while each of us is a discrete person, with his or her own innate and individual dignity and worth, we are also irreducibly social beings, in our origins, our ongoing existence, and our end. This will be a fundamental assumption of this book, grounded in the scriptural narratives that have formed Christian theology for millennia. The first of those narratives is the creation accounts in Genesis, and the last is a vision of a heavenly city at the end of Revelation. But it is also an assumption that a mere cursory reflection shows to be self-evident, even without appealing to explicitly religious presuppositions. Just consider: each of us is placed within a particular historical and cultural ecology, upon which we depend for our individual lives and to which we contribute for good or for ill. Our physical existence derives from a long chain of progenitors. Our psychological, linguistic, and spiritual existence is nurtured by family, friends, teachers, indeed, a whole cultural matrix rooted in the past and extending into the future. Our fears and concerns, our hopes and aspirations, are always fostered by and exercised within a particular communal context—itself typically a mix of subordinate and varied social networks—that we simultaneously receive and further. We did not give birth to ourselves, nor did we raise ourselves. Each and every one of us has a mother and a father, two sets of grandparents, four sets of great-grandparents, and so on back into the recesses of time. We are the offspring of complex, and by us largely unknown, webs of relationship. And none of us would have survived our infancy unless we had been raised by others: mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends. Those not raised in communities of caring—perhaps neglected in impersonal institutions, caught up in dysfunctional families or dangerous neighborhoods—typically suffer psychological and spiritual damage, which sometimes also manifests itself in a physical failure to thrive.

Even as we each increase degrees of self-sufficiency moving into adulthood, we remain more dependent than not upon the choices and labors of others. None of us do all of the following: grow our own food; make our own clothes; educate ourselves; manufacture our own tools; build our own houses; establish our own employment; care for ourselves medically; construct our own roads, bridges, or social infrastructure; provide for our own safety and security . . . This list could continue indefinitely—and so far includes only tangible aspects of our common life. It is just as true to say that none of us invent our own language, create our own worldviews, develop our own values, or are the sole author of any of the various elements of our intellectual, emotional, or spiritual landscapes. We may modify them as we grow older—or even reject them—but such changes always have the character of fine-tuning or resisting something already given. With only brief reflection, we recognize how our lives are inextricably intertwined with and depend upon those around us and those who have come before us.

And in the same way, those who will come after us depend utterly upon us. It is an inescapable biological fact that we are always only one generation away from extinction. And it is not just a matter of the sheer fact of existence. Continued existence is, of course, the necessary presupposition for anything else, but surely mere survival is not our only concern. Indeed, it is probably not our driving concern. For good or for ill, we must ask ourselves: what is the function or goal of human life? Human beings can survive just about anything other than the loss of meaning or purpose. What drives us? What will we bequeath to latter generations? Will we do our best to leave things better than we found them for our children? Or will we assume, either consciously or unconsciously, that the posterity about which previous generations were concerned somehow culminates and ends with us?

The New York Times Magazine once featured an article examining the writing of Jodi Picoult, a novelist who specializes in what the magazine described as the new “children in peril” genre.3 After opening with a summary list of the relentlessly gruesome variations in which Ms. Picoult has developed this genre (“terrible things happen to children of middle-class parentage: they become terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents, molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence”), the article concludes with these words—words that are all the more chilling because the article’s author seems oblivious to their logical implication: “In so many of her books children seem like more work than most ordinary people can handle. If Picoult’s fiction means to say anything, it is that parenting undoes us perhaps more than it fulfills, and it makes a thousand little promises it can never keep.”4 If this is so, then the obvious response becomes: “So then why bother?” The fact that birthrates in many Western European nations have fallen below replacement levels suggests that for some, having children is indeed too much of a bother. Will we succumb to such generational hopelessness—or is it narcissism mixed with nihilism? Or will we transcend it? If the former, what explains such myopia and selfishness? If the latter, what are the ideas, habits, and structures that will enable us to think beyond ourselves?

Complemental Origins

The obvious answer to this last question is to look where God has placed us and what he has given us. We are social creatures, dependent upon God, upon the fecundity and predictability of the natural world, and upon the intricate interrelations of human society. This is how we were made, and, more to the point of this theological exercise, this is how we are supposed to be. The majestic cadences of the Bible’s opening account of the world’s creation describe the rich and varied natural context in which humanity is given life. That context abounds with a variety of inanimate and animate beings. Thus will the wild profusion of creaturely life expand and grow, with the creatures connected to one another in being (“according to their kind”) and through time (“be fruitful and multiply”). And the Bible’s opening account also makes clear how humanity at its most fundamental is not singular but plural: “male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). That is, we are “social” from the start—and not just with one another, in splendid species isolation. Rather, God establishes our humanity in relation to the rest of the earth and in so doing charges us with a vocation, to be responsible stewards in exercising dominion over that earth (1:28), to till and keep the earthly garden (2:15). We alone among God’s creatures have been entrusted with a moral responsibility in our relationships, rather than being left to merely natural interactions. And in this we are also an image of the Triune God: we are given freedom to choose, just as God himself freely chose to create the cosmos in the first place.

In light of all this, it is worth noting that according to the biblical accounts of God’s good creation, the first thing mentioned as “not good” was “that the human should be alone” (Gen. 2:18 NRSV modified). Having already established in Genesis 1:27 that humanity comprises female and male together, this second story functions as a negative way of saying the same thing: it is not good to construe human beings in isolation. This is said of the adam, the generic “human” made from the adamah, or “humus”—or, in another way of translating the Hebrew play on words, the “earthling” made from the “earth.” At this point, the word is not so much a proper name as it is a generic description or label—and God recognizes that this creature needs a partner. First, he creates various animals to see if they can fill this role, but that is unsuccessful (2:19–20). So God causes the human to fall into a deep sleep and takes a rib from which to form a true partner. When the adam awakes and encounters this other, he calls her “woman [ishah], for out of man [ish] this one was taken” (2:23). In effect, the story implies, it is only after this divine surgery that the sexual dimorphism of humanity appears, as that is reflected in the changed Hebrew terminology: the single adam becomes woman and man. In other words, this story reaffirms the message of Genesis 1:27 that humanity’s full being is fundamentally social, as originally and most basically represented in the complementary nature of male and female.

Of course, men and women have much in common, sometimes to the extent that individual women and men will have more in common with one another than they do with other members of their own sex. This may be due to nature or to nurture, or some combination thereof. If I need a transfusion, I obviously would prefer to receive it from a woman who matches my blood type rather than from a man who does not! Alternately, it is easy to imagine how a man and a woman from one time and place could have far more in common than either would with a member of his or her own sex from a different culture from a different era speaking a different language. And yet fundamental differences between men and women remain, both biologically and cross-culturally, which common experience confirms and ideologically driven agendas to the contrary cannot finally negate. True, those differences can be construed in ways that are in practice dysfunctional and inhumane (on which more below, when we discuss human sinfulness). And yet those differences are also an instance and sign that humanity is far more than the sum of its parts. When living as God intended, men and women bring the best out in one another: strengthening here, moderating there, balancing and completing one another’s beings in ways that cannot be accomplished by either in isolation. Together, women and men create something more than just themselves. The most obvious example is offspring, but such creativity and fruitfulness also extends far beyond the merely biological.

Something mentioned above helps confirm this point. It is self-evident that all human history, all human achievement, all human creativity has as an unavoidable prior condition th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Story Begins
• 2. The Spirit’s Covenantal Role in the Work of the Trinity
• 3. The Body of Christ
• 4. The People of God
• 5. The Temple of the Holy Spirit
• 6. A Pilgrim Community of the New Heaven and the New Earth
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover