Flame of Love

A Theology of the Holy Spirit

Clark H. Pinnock

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781514001318
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

In what may be regarded as his magnum opus, Clark Pinnock explores the vital Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Writing out of wide learning and deep personal passion, he points the way to restoring the oft-neglected Spirit to centrality in the life and witness of the church. Pinnock's book is both catholic—respecting the beliefs and worship of the historic church—and evangelical—drawing particularly on the heritage of the Reformation. Always in sight is the mission of the church, because "people want to meet the real and living God and will not be satisfied with a religion that only preaches and moralizes." For this second edition, theologian Daniel Castelo draws from his experience using Flame of Love in the classroom to add notes with helpful commentary and brief reflections on each chapter's main themes and contributions. While the classic text is preserved, the book becomes even more accessible to contemporary readers.

CHAPTER ONE

Spirit and Trinity

IN PRESENTING A VISION OF THE SPIRIT, let us begin with the doctrine of God and focus on the liveliness of the Trinity and the identity of the Spirit within a loving relationality. Let us consider the Spirit as One who bonds the loving fellowship that God is and creates access to the Father through the Son (Eph 2:18). The Spirit reaches out to creatures, catches them up, and brings them home to the love of God.

Almost everything else I will have occasion to say will spring from this ontology. Spirit is essentially the serendipitous power of creativity, which flings out a world in ecstasy and simulates within it an echo of the inner divine relationships, ever seeking to move God’s plans forward. The Spirit is bringing God’s plans to completion in the direction of new creation and union with God through the participatory journey of Jesus Christ. Spirit also makes Christ’s work of redemption universally accessible and fosters unity amidst diversity in the midst of the segmented body of Christ.

We begin with the identity of the Spirit as a divine Person in a social Trinity and with the sheer liveliness of God. According to the gospel the nature of God is a communion of loving Persons, the overflowing shared life that creates and upholds the universe. Early theologians spoke of the divine nature as a dance, a circling round of threefold life, as a coming and going among the Persons and graciously in relation to creation.a We start with the identity of the triune God and with the face of the Spirit within this community as the ecstasy of its life.1

WHY BEGIN HERE?

This is not an easy topic; one might ask why I would begin with it. I do so because God’s triune identity and the Spirit as the bond of love within it underlie so much else that I want to say. It is also a practical truth, for clarity concerning Being (ontology) helps us understand not only who God is but who we are and what kind of world we inhabit. The Christian understanding of God as pure relationality is such a stunning contribution to human understanding about ultimate matters that it must come first.2

Theology must break certain habits surrounding this theme. Often, having defended the doctrine of the Trinity against its various denials, theologians become complacent and fail to go further and make the belief intelligible. Theologians stare, as it were, at a priceless treasure, an expression of the relational essence of God, yet do not perceive its immense value in terms of proclamation. To miss it is to overlook a major aspect of the fair beauty of the Lord.3

Because the matter has often been left enigmatic, we need to reflect theologically on the meaning of the Trinity. I hope to counter the impression that while the Trinity is an important belief that must be embraced by anyone who would be orthodox, it is not a belief one should expect to understand. There is an aphorism along these lines: “Try to explain the Trinity and you’ll lose your mind; try to deny it and you’ll lose your soul.”4 This sends a bleak message regarding the intelligibility of faith and invites the criticism that the Trinity is a piece of outdated mythology. Effective communication requires that doctrine not be left unintelligible if light can be shed on it. I think some light can be shed on it, though the mystery remains great. Revelation of the triune God is both significant and limited.

Nevertheless, the truth of the doctrine is meaningful and quite marvelous. From the Trinity we learn that the Creator is not static or standoffish but a loving relationality and sheer liveliness. It informs us that creation is grounded in God’s love and that grace underlies the gift of life itself. If God is a loving relationality, grace is primary, because it is rooted in the loving divine communion. Creation as well as redemption flows from the Trinity as pure gift. God did not invent grace when sin entered the world. What happened then was that grace abounded all the more (Rom 5:20). The goal of redemption as union with God was not thought up later on but is the outworking of God’s original purpose.5

As loving communion, God calls into being a world that has the potential of realizing loving relationality within itself. God projected a created order in which he delights and to which the Spirit gives life (see chapter two). When things went wrong through the misuse of freedom, God sent forth the Spirit on a mission of restoration through incarnation, so that injury and brokenness might be healed from within our nature by God’s power (chapter three). Healing continues to happen through the power of the Spirit, who indwells the body of Christ, and that power is present and real both sacramentally and charismatically, so that justice and salvation may be brought to all the nations (chapter four).

Relationality features also in the understanding of salvation as union with God. Spirit is moving humanity toward personal communion and participation in the divine nature, which was God’s everlasting purpose (chapter five). And just as the work of the Creator is the source of all that exists, so the scope of reconciliation has a universal tendency. God has the whole human race in view in his desire to save, and the Spirit everywhere draws sinners from the far country to the Father’s love (chapter six). And, because the church is so important to God as his dwelling place, anointed servant, and beloved bride, Spirit ceaselessly strives within the community through time and space to bring us deeper into unity and truth (chapter seven).

GOD AS SPIRIT

Spirit is a subtle word and is used in different ways in Scripture. The diversity of usage makes it natural for readers to ask whether the term refers only to God’s presence or to the third Person of the Holy Trinity. Here I hope first to show that both usages in fact obtain and then turn to the question of the face of the Spirit. How does Spirit fit the triune figuration? What is the Spirit’s identity?

As to whether God is spirit or has a Spirit, it is not an either-or but a both-and. There are texts that say God is spirit and that God has Spirit. The term can refer to God in a general way and also to the third Person of the Trinity. This double pattern is reminiscent of the way the term wisdom is used in the Bible also, both in a general way to refer to the wisdom of God and in a specific way to refer to the Son, who is God’s wisdom in person. Wisdom both symbolizes God’s power to order the world (Prov 1:20) and is identified with the Word made flesh (1 Cor 1:30).

Similarly, spirit refers both to God’s presence in a general sense and to the third Person. As to the general meaning of Spirit, Jesus states it plainly: “God is spirit” (Jn 4:24). Obviously the term can be used to define the divine essence. However, this kind of usage is rare. Scripture does not usually speak abstractly. It prefers to put emphasis on God as an agent and avoids giving the impression that God is any kind of impersonal absolute. Hegel liked to call God absolute Spirit, which for him came close to an impersonal force. The Bible prefers to take the risk of anthropomorphic speech. This may be why it rarely says “God is spirit” or similar things, lest the impression be left that God is ethereal and not a dynamic, personal agent.

So what does Jesus mean? He does not mean that God is immaterial. His point is that God is like a powerful wind, not like a frail creature that is easily pushed around. To say God is Spirit is to say God is mighty wind, power of creation, reservoir of inexhaustible life. What Jesus is saying is like what Isaiah had said: “The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit” (Is 31:3). When Jesus says that God is spirit, he is saying not that God is ghostly but that God is the power of creation, the incalculable energy that can give life to the dead and call things that do not exist into being (Rom 4:17).

It is easy for us to be misled about the meaning of spirit, since in Western languages and philosophies we think of it standing in antithesis to matter. So when we hear that God is spirit, we think in terms of Platonic ideas of incorporeality.b But spirit in the Bible has to do less with immateriality than with power and life—the invisible, mysterious power of a gale-force wind that we cannot begin to track (Jn 3:8). Spirit is the Bible’s way of speaking of what we would call the transcendent power of creation.6

In saying that God is spirit, the mighty power of creation, I am referring to what Wolfhart Pannenberg calls the field of deity. Spirit here refers to the power of Godhead and to the divine field in which Persons of the Trinity exist in the fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit. In this use of the term all the Persons are spirit, and it refers to the deity common to them. All three Persons exist in the field that Jesus calls spirit and constitute eternal forms of that field.7

Spirit may sometimes refer then to the presence of God in the world, not to a third Person distinct from Father and Son. Spirit in this sense denotes the power that creates and renews the world. This is the sense of many passages, especially in the Old Testament, where trinitarian reflection has not yet arisen, since the incarnation has not yet taken place. In such texts spirit (wind) is an image like power, fire, light, water—an image about God that bypasses the issue of Trinity. Spirit does often refer to God’s presence in a quite general sense.

Nontrinitarians are right to say God is spirit and that when we encounter spirit we encounter God himself. Spirit can refer to divine immanence, as opposed to a reference to a distinct Person in the Godhead. Liberalism was right to associate spirit with the general presence of God in the world, because it often refers to precisely that and to our experience of communion with God. As spirit, God inspires, motivates, and empowers people everywhere.

GOD ALSO HAS SPIRIT

It would be a mistake, however, to deny other texts that use Spirit in a trinitarian way.8 For in addition to evidence that God is spirit, there is evidence to support the claim that God has Spirit in a trinitarian sense. It is a little confusing for one term to refer to two related realities, but it is so. Perhaps there is a reason for this rooted in the Spirit’s chosen identity in the history of salvation. Perhaps Spirit wishes no other name than the generic ascription for God. The others are called “Father” and “Son,” but Spirit takes no special name and chooses to remain anonymous. Deferentially he turns away from himself and graciously points to the others.

The idea of the Trinity lies at the core of and indwells the narratives concerning Jesus Christ in the New Testament. The Gospels give insight into the trinitarian structure of the divine nature. This witness forces us to go beyond an understanding of spirit as God’s presence to the truth of Spirit also in fellowship with Father and Son. The triadic pattern first becomes visible in the story of Jesus, which we take to be God’s self-communication and the source of trinitarian developments in theology. To see God as relational Trinity is not human speculation but an insight arising from the narrative of salvation, which is God’s self-revelation.

The economy of salvation history affords insight into the being of God, that God is the Father, revealed by the Son, through the Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is the product of reflection on God’s activity in history and is the explanation of what happened. Leonard Hodgson remarks, “The doctrine of the trinity is an inference to the nature of God, drawn from what we believe to be the empirical evidence given by God in his revelation of himself in the history of the world.”9

God does not reveal himself mostly in an abstract way, through propositions. God causes revelation to happen in human history, particularly in the events surrounding Jesus Christ, where we glimpse the threefoldness that characterizes the nature of God. Jesus is conscious of being the Son of God and proclaims the nearness of the kingdom of his Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. The story of Jesus does not yield the dogmatic formula of the Trinity as such, but it yields the foundations of trinitarian thought. The insight arises from observing Jesus’ relationship with God.

At his baptism in the Jordan, Jesus was conscious of his sonship as the Father’s beloved and experienced the power of the Spi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword: A Testament to a Pilgrim
• Introduction
• 1 Spirit and Trinity
• 2 Spirit in Creation
• 3 Spirit and Christology
• 4 Spirit and Church
• 5 Spirit and Union
• 6 Spirit and Universality
• 7 Spirit and Truth
• Conclusion
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Flame of Love
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright