In Genesis 1:2, the spirit of the LORD seems to be the breath of God (ru'ach). The breath or the wind of God hovers over the chaotic waters of pre-creation (cf. NRSV). It is not clear whether the spirit of God is personal or how it relates to God himself.
In Judges, the "breath" or "spirit of God" comes on people like Jephthah and Samson (Judg. 11:29; 14:6). These are not particularly righteous people, by Christian understanding. The spirit of the LORD comes on Jephthah right before he makes his famous vow that ends with him sacrificing his daughter. The spirit of the LORD comes on Samson enabling him to rip a lion apart as well as kill hoards of people. In each case the spirit involves empowerment to do various tasks.
In Samuel, the "moral neutrality" of the spirit is very clear when the spirit comes on Samuel as he in the process of trying to kill David (1 Sam. 19:23). The spirit of God in such cases seems to be an empowerment or, in Samuel's case, the ability to prophesy.
The connection between the Spirit of God and prophecy is also apparent in Isaiah 61, a passage that Jesus quotes in Luke 4 about himself: "The Spirit of the Lord GOD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted..." In its original context, this is a word from the prophet to the discouraged in Jerusalem after their return from captivity. They are told that God will "build up the ancient ruins" (61:4), a statement that indicates a great deal of time has passed since Jerusalem was destroyed in 586BC.
Yet what the Spirit is here is ambiguous. It is something that issues from God to be sure. In Joel 2:28-29, God promises that He will pour out His Spirit on all flesh after He restores Israel. On the Day of the LORD, the nations that have persecuted Judah will be destroyed, but those who call on the name of the LORD will be saved. Afterward all that remain will experience the Spirit and will prophesy, particularly those who escape in Zion.
The parallelism of Psalm 51:11 is helpful: "Cast me not away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me." The spirit of God is thus God's presence with the psalmist.
The picture that emerges is that the spirit of God is one of the ways in which He acts in people. He empowers through His spirit and prophesies by way of it. It is His presence in the creation. For the OT, it is not clear that the idea of God's spirit makes sense apart from the existence of a creation. Even in Genesis 1:2, it is present over the primordial waters.
In the New Testament, the nature of the Spirit is not much clearer, although the NT at points uses personal language in relation to the Spirit. Paul can speak of both the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ, but he is unclear whether these two are the same thing. My hunch is that they were slightly different for Paul.
There is the intriguing passage in 2 Corinthians 3 where Paul says, "The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2:17). I personally do not think that Paul is equating Jesus and the Spirit here. Rather, I think Paul is engaged in an allegorical comparison of Exodus 34 to the new covenant. The LORD in that story of the old covenant represents the Holy Spirit in the new covenant. Just as the LORD came to Moses with a glory that faded in the old, the Spirit of the Lord Jesus comes on believers in the new with a glory that doesn't fade.
If I were doing more research on this topic, I would look at Gordon Fee's new book on Pauline Christology and in Dunn's chapter on the Spirit in Christology in the Making.
The Spirit of course does many things in the NT, but our focus is on the "pre-existent" Spirit in this post. We have little to go on in this regard. Certainly Paul in more than one place speaks of God the Father, Christ, and the Spirit in a way that points to three distinct things (e.g., 1 Cor. 12:4-6; 2 Cor. 13:14). But if scholars debate whether Paul saw Christ as literally pre-existent, we could also debate whether he saw the Spirit as pre-existent.
One key question is whether the NT yet understands God to have created the world out of nothing, a topic we will visit next Sunday. It makes sense to suppose that as long as the material of the creation has existed, chaotic or not, Jews would have understood the Spirit of God to be present in and around it.
We have already noticed that John more than any other NT author makes the pre-existence of Christ explicit. Christ was there before the creation (John 17:5). John also is (I think) the only NT author to use masculine pronouns in relation to the Holy Spirit (e.g., 14:26). What is striking about this masculine reference is that the word for spirit itself is neuter, pneuma. We would thus expect grammatically for John to refer to the Spirit by way of neuter pronouns.
While John specifically states that the Spirit will not come until Christ ascends, this certainly does not mean that the Spirit did not yet exist at that time. We can probably infer that, for John, as long as there was "stuff" apart from Him, there was a Spirit to be His presence there.
Perhaps the dynamics of the Spirit of God being God in relation to the other can be extended in the manner of the western church to suggest that the Spirit does indeed proceed from the Father and the Son, by way of their very relationship. Such thoughts seem light years beyond the New Testament, but they do not seem to contradict it.
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4 comments:
I thought (possibly wrongly) that Constantine was reigning during the Council of Nicea when the Western Church decided about the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, thus protecting the "Church's" "right to power". Because it was Christ who was the "head of the Church", individuals must summit to the human authoriites that represented the Church...an imperialistic Church...that combined political power with God...
The Bible has become "christ" in that sense in Protestant Christiandom...it has been used as "a hammer and a sickle" by fundamentalist...a hammer to beat into submission and a sickle to cut up those who are not deferring to the fundamentalist interpretation...If one does not "eat the Word" then it is forced upon them until they begin to choke and vomit and then they are disciplined for not subordinating their "sin nature" to "the Word"...which has replace the spirit altogether. There is no "freedom of spirit".
My sense is that most of the hype about Constantine forcing the church to be a certain way is wrong. Athanasius had more influence on the shape it took in those years than Constantine, with whom he was sometimes at odds and indeed by whom he was actually exiled. Constantine wanted stability, but I don't think cared exactly what form it took. Frankly, he would have been happy with Arianism. So most of the hype about Constantine and the church out there right now (e.g., Da Vinci code) is a load of tosh.
The "and the son" controversy didn't come to a head until 1054 when East and West split. This line wasn't in the original Nicene Creed, if I remember correctly. Also, the Nicene Creed in its current form (still minus the filioque) didn't come out of the 325 council but the 381 council of Constantinople.
Thanks for correcting my "ignorance".
It still leaves in my mind the "reason" for the split...Arius' understanding Jesus of Nazareth as "perfect man" endowed by the spirit is more "in line" with Wesley and the sanctification "understanding", which leads me to question how the NPP "fits" that measure/model..."Aristotle's ethic"
The West maintaining a more hierarchal structure, where submission was important because of the importance of "order" was what the Western Church and the Pope
maintained...It was understood and is still understood as Jesus as substitionary sacrifice...not moral model...and in this sense, we "need" Jesus...(and the Church)...
I believe that each person is created innately in the image of God and that each person must find a way to come to maturity in understanding, discipline, and "work"...that is the freedom of the spirit, which is innate "reason"..and it is not based on biological "systems" thinking, where those who don't "fit" into the ordered structure are "emergent" (scapegoated)...
Angie, you are very good at finding points of similarity between very diverse things. The key is not to see cause-effect relationships between them. If you were to pick up randomly two things from opposite sides of the globe, there would be similarities, but they would be random similarities.
I think you should think of yourself as an artist making a quilt. It is your picture--don't think of it as the historical picture but as your picture (very postmodern). But you are taking the patches you sow together from the whole gamut of history.
Have you ever thought of starting a blog? Tell me if you do so I can link it...
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