On the second day of Jimmy...

1. Baptism in the Holy Spirit was James Dunn's first book. It was also the book that first drew my attention to him and was the spark that led me to ask to study with him. It came out the year that he started teaching at the University of Nottingham in 1970, two years after finishing his PhD at Cambridge. In the intervening two years he had served at Edinburgh as a chaplain to overseas students.

He had quite an impressive doctoral lineage. Dunn did his doctorate under C. F. D. Moule at Cambridge. I had thought that Moule studied with C. H. Dodd there as well, but now double checking. I'm afraid the doctoral line ends there on my branch, unless Cambridge wants to hire me for the last couple decades of my career. :-)

I remember Jimmy telling of a time when Moule had him and Meta over to his house with Dodd also present. Apparently Dodd was a very short man and sat at the head of the table. What exegetical giants were the stuff of his daily life! One of the benefits of studying at Durham was the chance occasion to meet other retired giants Kingsley Barrett and Charles Cranfield. What a tremendous privilege!

2. In this very first book, Dunn showed from the start his ability to wed scholarly excellence with the clarity needed to address popular trends. The sixties were a time of charismatic renewal and controversy. The phenomenon of speaking in tongues was rapidly spreading across the English-speaking world.

Dunn was right there at the right moment, speaking with great clarity, using sound historical-cultural exegesis, to meet a strongly felt-need of the culture.

My own interest in the book came from my exposure to it at Asbury Seminary, where Bob Lyon had presented his own succinct version of the evidence from Acts. When I wrote to Dunn, I indicated that the ideas of his book had been very significant in my own pilgrimage, since I came from the holiness tradition. A key element in the history of that tradition was a particular understanding of entire sanctification in relation to Acts 2. This connection may have been one element in him accepting me as a student.

Jimmy was, by the way, a lay Methodist preacher both in Nottingham and then later in 1982 when he moved to Durham as Professor. Professor in England is almost the reverse of its connotations in the States. In the States one might be a professor without a doctorate. In England, Professor is a distinguished position above that of a mere lecturer/reader.

Jimmy used to say that he was Presbyterian north of the border and Methodist south of it. Of course it was possible to be a little more Calvinist as a Methodist in England. These two fit together more easily theologically in England than in the States. The fact that we were both Methodist was another point of contact we shared. [1]

3. I had been troubled in seminary by one aspect of the doctrine of entire sanctification with which I had grown up (which was much more nineteenth century holiness than John Wesley, by the way). But this one aspect even bothered me with regard to Wesley. If the doctrine of entire sanctification was the right interpretation of the Bible, why was it pretty much absent for some 1600 years of church history?

I made a similar comment just last week in a class in relation to the United Pentecostal Church's claim that 1) the Trinity is wrong and God is just one person changing roles, 2) combined with the belief that one must speak in tongues when you receive the Holy Spirit. If this is the right interpretation of Scripture, why did this synthesis only really appear around 1916?

These sorts of questions gnawed at me in my seminary days. There was a volume put out by the Nazarenes that traced Christian perfection in the early church fathers and medieval authors to Wesley, but it did not satisfy me. My training in the scientific method ultimately wouldn't let me settle for just an answer. It had to be a compelling answer. Tribal scholarship was quickly becoming anathema to me.

I would eventually work out my own logical basis for affirming the doctrine of entire sanctification, not unlike the logic John Wesley himself used. And I will soon enough mention what I consider the greatest blot on Dunn's Romans commentary, namely, his interpretation of Romans 7. Meanwhile, I consider the core features of entire sanctification--the power of the Spirit over willful sin and a mind renewed according to love--to be completely biblical.

But I do not think the biblical authors would recognize the specific form this doctrine took in the hands of John Wesley or Phoebe Palmer. In college and seminary I was learning how to read the Bible in its literary and historical contexts rather than defining the words from the dictionary in my head, based on my inherited traditions. The meanings of verses like Matthew 5:48 and Hebrews 6:1 began to take on their contextual nuances rather than their traditional ones.

4. The nineteenth century holiness movement followed John Fletcher in connecting entire sanctification with the Spirit-fillings of Acts. It is a testimony to the breadth of Dunn's knowledge that he actually mentions this fact in his introduction (1-2)! This was not the way Wesley promoted Christian perfection, by the way. But it was an incredibly powerful connection, for it provided a ritual, narrative model for becoming entirely sanctified. The late Mel Dieter once mourned that Bob Lyon's paper on the Spirit-fillings of Acts marked the beginning of a marked decline in the holiness movement. There is some truth to this claim.

However, I believe a person with fresh eyes will see that Acts connects the Spirit-fillings primarily with conversion. [2] Acts 4:31 is the only exception, and it does not use the language of baptism with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit-fillings in Acts are not connected with love or perfect love (although unity is a result). The word sanctification is not used in Acts in relation to it. [3] Its primary manifestation is power, with only one side-statement in Acts 15:9 mentioning purification of heart as an element in the equation. [4]

But this post is supposed to be about Dunn so I will stop there. Let me simply say that the nineteenth century understanding of holiness would make a fascinating case study in pre-modern hermeneutics! It is not unlike the hermeneutics of dispensationalism where 1) words are re-defined in terms of a particular theology, 2) passages across the Bible are spliced to each other into an ideological system, and 3) that system is directly related to present circumstances and events.

5. Dunn indicates from the outset what I believe is clear in the book of Acts if one comes to it with fresh eyes. Baptism with the Spirit in Acts is understood as an initiatory experience. He has two main conversation partners in this book. The one is the Pentecostal who says that baptism in the Spirit is an event subsequent to conversion. The second is the "sacramentalist" who fuses baptism with the Spirit into water baptism. Neither perspective is that of the New Testament.

• "Baptism in the Spirit was not something distinct from and subsequent to entry into the Kingdom; it was only by means of the baptism in Spirit that one could enter at all" (22).
• "Baptism in Spirit does not refer to water baptism." 

As I look through the book, I see the same arguments I have made in similar conversations. Here is just a sampling from chapter 4:

• Luke-Acts is a coherent literary unit. Its story world does not include the breathing of Jesus on the disciples in John 20:22. These are separate exegetical domains. In the story world of Luke-Acts, Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promise of the Spirit in Luke 3. "The appeal to John's Gospel raises a basic methodological issue: Are we to approach the NT material as systematic theologians or as biblical theologians and exegetes?" (39).
• "Pentecost is a new beginning--the inauguration of the new age, the age of the Spirit--that which had not been before" (44).
• "Pentecost inaugurates the age of the Church" (49).

6. Chapters 5-9 then proceed through Acts, covering the same data that I went through in my honors thesis at Southern Wesleyan University. In that project, I argued for the "second, later experience" perspective, but there was also that gnawing inside that it could be interpreted a different way. At Asbury I conceded to the other way of reading Acts.

The event at Samaria (chapter 5) is the crux of the issue. Was the failure of those baptized at Samaria to receive the Holy Spirit a problem to be solved or a normal distance in time between conversion and a second experience of the Spirit? In seminary I came to think it most natural to see that Samaria was atypical and problematic in Acts. The normal pattern is for baptism in the Spirit to parallel water baptism as two distinct moments that are associated with each other. Acts 2:38 is paradigmatic: "Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the Holy Spirit."

Dunn ends chapter 5 on Samaria with an appropriate conclusion: "It is God's giving of the Spirit which makes a man [sic] a Christian, and, in the last analysis, nothing else" (68). He states the same in his conclusion: "That man is a Christian who has received the gift of the Holy Spirit by committing himself to the risen Jesus as Lord, and who lives accordingly" (229).

7. Let me say that I grew up associating the Holy Spirit almost entirely with a second work of grace. I have no animosity toward that teaching. But there are important aspects to New Testament teaching that you may miss with that emphasis. In college I did learn that the Wesleyan tradition believes in an initial sanctification at conversion. However, it is ironic that the emphasis on a later work actually blinded me to one of the richest and most central features of New Testament pneumatology, namely, that the Spirit is the key identifier of Christian incorporation into the people of God!

Dunn proceeds through Paul's letters in chapters 10-13. What a rich theology I missed here growing up! Romans 8:9 is blatant--"If someone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not a Christian" (paraphrase, see Dunn 148). In 2 Corinthians 1:22 and Ephesians 1:13/4:30, the Holy Spirit is that which seals God's ownership of us. [5] The Holy Spirit is the arrabon which both guarantees our future inheritance and gives us a down payment, a foretaste of glory divine, an "earnest."

A few years ago I marveled at Richard Peace's book, Conversion in the New Testament. He hardly mentions the Holy Spirit at all in this book. Yet the Holy Spirit is the sine qua non of being a Christian in most of the New Testament! What a massive and essential omission! Repentance and faith are precursors. Baptism is corollary but the Samaritans realized was insufficient. When Cornelius has the Spirit, his heart is cleansed and he is in the people of God, even though he is not yet baptized.

8. I suspect this post has been more personal than ones to come. The level of my engagement reflects Dunn's uncanny ability to address the felt-needs of a moment in history, to do so with immense clarity, and to do so with a penetrating objectivity.

[1] The closest Wesleyan Church was hours away in London or Birmingham. So I was known as a Methodist in Durham, even preached once in a country Methodist church outside of Durham once. I attended the evangelical Anglican services of St. John's College during the week and on Sundays attended the United Reformed Church on Claypath, which was also evangelical. Of course "evangelical" in England meant nothing like what it has come to mean in the US right now.

[2] I use the term conversion in its popular sense, without delving into debates over whether these were more callings than conversions, as in Stendahl's approach.

[3] This is one of the fascinating features of pre-modern interpretation. The core and fundamental language of such interpretations can be completely absent from a biblical text and yet be considered the key topic of the text.

[4] The distinction between purifying hands and purifying hearts (cf. James 4:8) is sometimes applied to two works of grace. However, this is a distinction inferred in the text rather than stated. It seems far more likely that these are parallel and synchronic rather than events separated in time.

[5] Occasionally, the holiness tradition interpreted this verse as a seal on a container, that as it were completes the jar. The seal is rather that of a seal on a scroll that authenticates and indicates the author of the letter. It is closer to a branding or a seal embossed on a book, not a seal on a jar.