God the Spirit

Introducing Pneumatology in Wesleyan and Ecumenical Perspective

Jones

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630871260
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Who is the mysterious Holy Spirit, and why does it matter for the Christian life? How do we know when the Spirit is working? This book introduces the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Wesleyan theological tradition and within the greater church. It covers key biblical bases for thinking about the Spirit, and it seeks to inspire confidence in the Spirit's power.

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The Lord, the Giver of Life

What then is the charge they bring against us? They accuse us of profanity for entertaining lofty conceptions about the Holy Spirit. . . . We, for instance, confess that the Holy Spirit is of the same rank as the Father and the Son, so that there is no difference between them in anything, to be thought or named, that devotion can ascribe to a Divine nature. . . . But our opponents aver that He is a stranger to any vital communion with the Father and the Son; that by reason of an essential variation He is inferior to, and less than they in every point. . . . He is Divine, and absolutely good, and omnipotent, and wise, and glorious, and eternal; He is everything of this kind that can be named to raise our thoughts to the grandeur of His being. . . . He is Himself Goodness, and Wisdom, and Power, and Sanctification, and Righteousness, and Everlastingness, and Imperishability, and every name that is lofty, and elevating above other names.4

Gregory of Nyssa wrote these words against the Pneumatomachi—fighters against the Holy Spirit—a group who denied that the Spirit is truly God. Gregory insisted, to the contrary, that the Spirit is equal to, “of the same rank as,” the Father and the Son and that this is the clear testimony of Scripture. Gregory is likely thinking of many aspects of Scripture, among them the remarkable testimony that “the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:10). We see Gregory offering a litany of praise to the Spirit, identifying the attributes of the Spirit with the Spirit’s very nature in a way that can only belong to God.

Late in the fourth century, leaders from across the church came to renewed affirmation of belief in the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These ecumenical leaders shared Gregory’s teaching above and explicitly recognized the Spirit’s divinity. The church reaffirmed the teachings of the Nicene Creed, a confession of faith that is still used across the church—in Eastern Orthodox practice, among Roman Catholics, and in many Protestant traditions. I begin with the Nicene Creed, then, as an ecumenical starting point representing the most widely shared pneumatology of the universal church. The ending of that creed treats the doctrine of the Spirit:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,

who has spoken through the prophets.

The creed affirms that the Holy Spirit is both “Lord” and “giver of life.” It recognizes the eternal relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit as we see those relationships testified to in Scripture, and it proclaims that the Spirit “with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.” These creedal statements form the great affirmations of ecumenical pneumatology. The rest of this chapter will begin to explore those affirmations in two movements. First, the Spirit as “Lord” and “giver of life” is none other than the true God, fully divine. Second, the Spirit is personal both in relationship to the Father and the Son and in relationship to human beings.

The Spirit Is Truly God

The truth that the Spirit is God is the most important claim about the Spirit in the early ecumenical creeds. Against detractors who would have demoted the Spirit to some quasi-divine status, the church recognized that the scriptural story of God’s work in the world entails the Spirit’s full divinity. Put differently, the story of Scripture makes no sense if the Spirit is not truly and really God. The creed affirms the Spirit’s divine nature by granting the titles “Lord” and “life-giver,” titles that Scripture demands we give to the Spirit, titles that can only properly belong to God.

At this stage of the book, I wonder: Ought I to try to sketch out the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine that houses the claim that the Spirit is God? For the sake of attending to pneumatology as fully as possible in a short volume, I have decided not to attempt such a sketch here, trusting my reader to other volumes in this series, but I do want to give some context for the creedal claim about the Spirit’s divine nature. We need that context in order to get a sense of the astounding beauty reflected there. I will proceed, then, by laying out some reasons that it seemed, in the time leading up to these ecumenical councils, impossible that the Spirit might truly be God. Then, I will describe some of the logic that the councils accepted as refutation of those arguments.

Before the third and fourth ecumenical councils, the problem that Christians saw with the divinity of the Spirit was that of the oneness of God. It seemed impossible to affirm, at the same time, that (a) there is only one God and (b) that the Father, Son, and Spirit are all truly God. The same strange Trinitarian math puzzles Christians today. The simplest solutions involved denying the divinity—the god-ness—of the Son and the Spirit. This seemingly obvious answer, though, caused more problems than it solved. In denying the divinity of the Son or the Spirit, Christians came to see that they were violating the logic of the scriptural story of salvation. Only God is to be worshipped. Only God can save. Since Father, Son, and Spirit are all to be worshipped, since Christians are baptized in the name of all three, since all three are integral to salvation, all three must truly be God. Through painstaking work, the Christians who shaped the creed saw this clearly. Because the Spirit is “worshiped and glorified,” because the Spirit gives life and salvation,5 the Spirit is God. No watered-down version of divinity will do.

The title “Lord” respects the Spirit’s divinity by placing human beings under the direction and power of the Spirit and by identifying the Spirit with the Father and the Son. The recognition that this Lord is the “giver of life” also respects the Spirit’s divinity by acknowledging that the Spirit, together with the Father and the Son, does what God does. The Spirit, in giving life, works what only God can do. There are many biblical bases for these two affirmations. Both are found together when Paul tells believers that they are living letters of recommendation, letters written by the Spirit on human hearts, and he reminds us that we find our competence and confidence, not in ourselves, but in God, clearly identified as the Spirit who “gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). Later in the same chapter, Paul presses believers to act “with great boldness” as we witness to God’s glory, a boldness that is legitimated by the Lord, again clearly identified with the Spirit. “The Lord is the Spirit,” Paul preaches, “and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (3:17). In the freedom of the Spirit of God, we are transformed and thus able to truly reflect God’s image and glory. Again, “this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (3:18). Here, Paul rejoices in the life-giving power of God the Spirit, power that no mere creature can claim. In recognizing the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, the Wesleyan tradition stands in continuity with the ancient creed and with Scripture. This continuity is clearly displayed in the fourth of the Articles of Religion, which Wesley adopted verbatim from the Anglican articles: “The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty and glory with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.”

When we confess that the Spirit is Lord, we are also recognizing the unity of the three persons of the godhead, the intimate connection between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. In the Old Testament, the title Lord, written just so, in all capital letters, serves as a stand-in for the holy name of God that was revealed to Moses at the burning bush:

But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.” (Exod 3:13–15)

That name was held in such reverence, recognized as so holy, that it was not to be spoken, and so the title Lord stands in, in the text, for God’s holy, transcendent, divine being. The church father Gregory of Nazianzus wrote that the names revealed in the third chapter of Exodus “are the special names” for God’s essence, names appropriate for “a nature whose being is absolute . . . being is in its proper sense peculiar to God and belongs to him entirely.”6 In other words, this holy name indicates that God is God. When the creed makers recognized that the title “Lord” belongs not to the Father alone but to Father, Son, and Spirit, they were recognizing that all these three are the one God. All these three are of the divine essence. When the creed asserts its continuity with the prophets, it is asserting that the one God known to Israel and revealed in the Old Testament is the same one God further revealed in the New Testament as triune. The Spirit who came upon the prophets of old is the same Spirit who came to the early church at Pentecost and the same Spirit who works in the church today. The one God, who we know in both the Old and New Testaments, is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This recognition does not solve the problem of triune math. Instead, it lives with the problem and rejoices in the holy mystery it contains.

The life-giving work of the Spirit is seen throughout Scripture. It begins with the first chapter of Genesis, where Christians have traditionally seen the Spirit at work as God hovers over the waters. That life-giving work continues throughout the story of salvation, and this is affirmed in the creedal language that identifies the Holy Spirit as the same Spirit who spoke through the prophets. In the New Testament witness, the life-giving work of the Spirit is seen in special ways in connection to Jesus; it is the Spirit who is at work in the life-giving conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb, who descends on Jesus at his baptism, and who, at the end of Jesus’ life, works in raising him from the dead. The Spirit’s life-giving work extends to us as well, both in the present, as we receive new life, and in the future, with the promise of everlasting, resurrected life. To “set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Rom 8:6). The birth that Jesus told Nicodemus about is a birth “of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5), and “what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Here, the beautiful imagery of life-giving birth is connected to the new life the believer receives in the Spirit.

The Spirit’s Personal Status

In thinking about the three persons of the Trinity, it seems obvious that the Father and the Son are personal. Father and Son are clearly relational terms. In fact, when we are talking about the Trinity, these terms ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Lord, the Giver of Life
• Chapter 2: The Spirit in Unity with the Father and the Son
• Chapter 3: Being Spirit, Being Spiritual
• Chapter 4: Life in the Spirit
• Chapter 5: The Spirit and the Wesleyan Via Salutis
• Chapter 6: The Sanctifying Spirit Will Perfect Us in Love
• Chapter 7: Pentecostal Power, Global Revival, Wildness, and Order
• Chapter 8: Inspiration, Illumination, and the Spirit in the Church
• Chapter 9: Testing the Spirits
• Bibliography