7. The Holy Spirit

7. The Theology of the Holy Spirit
7.1 Rule of Faith

• A distinct person within the Trinity
• Especially associated with God's omnipresence
• Draws us toward salvation, convicts of sin
• A seal of ownership, guarantee of inheritance, down payment of coming age
• Unifier of body of Christ
• Basis of Spiritual power and gifts
• Instrument of spiritual cleansing and sanctification
• Leader into truth

7.2 The Spirit in the Old Testament

• Personhood is still ambiguous
• Present in creation (Gen. 1:2)
• Mediator of God's presence everywhere (Psalm 137)
• Occasional empowerment of specific individuals for specific purposes (Samson, Gideon)

7.3 The Spirit of God and Christ

• A person, referred to with a masculine pronoun in John 14:26
• Romans 8:9-11 floats smoothly between Spirit of God and Spirit of Christ--same Spirit.
• Distinct in Trinitarian expressions: 1 Cor. 12:3-6; 2 Cor. 13:14; Eph. 4:4-6; Matt. 28:18-20
• God is Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17-18). To say God is a Spirit both 1) suggests that his essence is transcendent and yet 2) suggests that he is everywhere here immanent.

7.4 Functions of the Holy Spirit
7.4.1 Revealer

• John 14:25-26 (he will teach you everything)
• John 16:13 - Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth
• Giver of prophecy (2 Pet. 1:20-21 and various)
• Convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8-11)

7.4.2 Deposit and Guarantee

• 2 Cor. 1:22--seal of ownership
• Earnest--2 Cor. 1:22; Eph 1:14
• Heb. 6:4-5

7.4.3 Ground of Unity

• Eph. 4:4
• Acts 15:8-10--unity between Gentile and Jew
• 1 Cor. 12:4, 13 (spiritual gifts)
• Phil. 2:1

7.4.4 Power and Purity

• "You will receive power" (Acts 1:8)--healing, boldness, tongues
• Spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 12)
• Sanctifier--2 Thess. 2:13
• Empowerment for righteousness--Gal. 5:16; Rom. 8:2; 2 Cor. 3:18

7.4.5 Advocate

• John 14:16 (cf. 1 John 2:1)

Previous "chapters"
Chapter 1: What is Biblical Theology?
Chapter 2: Theology of God
Chapter 3: Creation and Consummation
Chapter 4: Sin and Atonement
Interlude: A Theology of Israel
Chapter 5: Jesus the Christ
Chapter 6: Salvation

Wesleyan-Arminian Reflections on the Holy Spirit

I forgot to put up the summary last week of my posts on the Holy Spirit. Here are also the links to the first two parts of the series on theology from a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective, my "theology in bullet points" series.

Part 1: God and Creation
God and Creation (online)
God and Creation (book form)
God and Creation (Kindle book)

Part 2: Christ and Salvation
Christ and Salvation (online)

Part 3: The Holy Spirit and the Church
The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (pneumatology)
1. The Holy Spirit is a distinct person, but one in substance with the Father and Son.
2. The Holy Spirit enacts the will of the Father and Son in the world.
3. The Spirit sanctifies the Church.
4. The Spirit sanctifies the believer.

SP4. The Spirit sanctifies the believer.

This is now the fourth and final post in a unit on the Holy Spirit in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit had to do with God and Creation, and the second was on Christology and Atonement.
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The Spirit sanctifies the believer.

1. In terms of priority, the body of Christ is primary, and the individual believer is secondary. Yet every individual is valued equally, created in the image of God, male and female, people of every tribe and nation, people of every status. All are loved whether sinner or saint.

God is love, so he loves every individual. But there are many individuals in the Church. So it seems obvious that there is more love dispensed to the Church as a whole than to any one individual in the Church. The health of the whole Church takes priority over the liberty of the individual Christian (e.g., Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 10).

Accordingly, the way in which the Spirit engages the individual is a microcosm of the way he engages the Church as a whole. The Spirit sanctifies the Church and makes it God's own. So the Spirit sanctifies the individual believer. The Spirit purifies the Church and makes it righteous, and the Spirit purifies the believer and makes us righteous. The Spirit empowers the Church for mission and service. The Spirit empowers the individual for mission and service. The Spirit leads the Church into truth. The Spirit leads individuals into truth.

2. If Christ is the basis of atonement, all the grace relating to salvation is dispensed through the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that dispenses prevenient grace, the grace that comes to us before we are able to go looking for God. It is the grace that enables us to move toward God. It is the grace that empowers us to be able to repent and exercise faith.

It is the Holy Spirit that dispenses the grace that justifies us and acquits us of all our sin. The Holy Spirit is God's "seal" of ownership (2 Cor. 1:22), such that if someone does not have the Spirit, that person does not truly belong to Christ (Rom. 8:9). The Holy Spirit is an "earnest" of our eternal inheritance (2 Cor. 5:5; Eph. 1:13-14), which is both a guarantee of that coming promise and a down payment of what is to come, a "foretaste of glory divine."

The Holy Spirit is thus the central factor in the incorporation of a person into the body of Christ. You can be baptized and not have passed from death to life (Acts 8:16). You can have passed from death to life and not been baptized (Acts 10:44-48). You can have undergone significant change and movement toward a godly and righteous life. You can have prayed the sinner's prayer and agreed to all the creeds of Christendom with your head.

But unless a person has the Holy Spirit, he or she is not yet in Christ. [1] It is the Holy Spirit that gives witness to our spirits that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16). The Holy Spirit thus brings us the assurance that we are children of God. It is the act of the Holy Spirit whereby we become "in Christ" and when we speak of Christ in us, we are speaking of the Spirit of Christ, Christ's presence in us somehow mysteriously mediated by the Holy Spirit.

3. It is somewhat popular at the moment to speak of conversion as a long gradual process rather than an instantaneous one. [2] There is of course a good deal of truth in this claim. It usually does take a good deal of time for a person to change.

It's also a slightly different question from whether you will escape the judgment. Most believe that unbaptized children will escape the final judgment, and yet they have neither been baptized nor have they received the Holy Spirit. If so, then one can technically be "saved" in that sense without baptism, faith, or having even received the most crucial element of all--the Holy Spirit.

But the Holy Spirit comes in an instant, and in that sense, you become part of the people of God in a moment. There may be a long process leading up to that point, and there is almost always a long process thereafter. But this is a different issue than being baptized into Christ by receiving the Holy Spirit, which must thereby always happen definitively in a moment.

The disciples cannot be used as an example of gradual incorporation into the body of Christ, even if they changed gradually. The Holy Spirit simply was not given in the manner of the new covenant until the Day of Pentecost. In that sense, none of the disciples were "in Christ" until the Day of Pentecost, when they were baptized into Christ in an instant. [3]

4. How does one know that this baptism, this receiving of the Holy Spirit has taken place? There can and often have been noticeable signs. The book of Acts testifies to the sudden ability to speak in other languages, a sudden boldness to proclaim Christ's resurrection, the sudden ability to perform miracles and healing. In the American revivals of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, people often felt an overflow of emotions and might start shouting or even running the aisles of a church.

But did everyone in the early church experience these sorts of dramatic manifestations or emotions? Not likely. We can imagine that the most typical manifestation of the Holy Spirit is a sense of peace and assurance, a sense that, in fact, you are received by God and at peace with him.

No doubt there will be some who do not feel different. Some, perhaps because of their past, may not feel anything at all. But are you truly committing to God with your whole will to the extent you know how? Are you making a choice of faith for God? Are you willing to make that faith public, including a public confession of faith in baptism?

Then you should trust that your sins are forgiven and that the Holy Spirit has taken control over your life. Sometimes God uses others to give us an assurance in such cases. Seek out someone you trust. God often empowers others in the body of Christ, especially those he has called to minister, to proclaim to us that our sins are indeed forgiven (cf. John 20:23).

3. The Holy Spirit thus sanctifies us and sets us apart as belonging to God. He purifies us of our guilt of sins past and he overcomes the power of Sin present and future. The Holy Spirit is behind initial sanctification, the act of cleansing us of our past sins and setting us apart as God's children. The Holy Spirit is behind progressive sanctification, the increase of righteousness and godliness in our lives.

When we get to the point of complete surrender of all our lives in every way we know how, the Holy Spirit can sanctify us entirely, making it easy to do the good we want to do. But we will always have room for growth until the day when we are glorified, when our mortal, corruptible bodies, our flesh subject to Sin and temptation, is transformed into resurrected bodies that are made like Christ's glorious resurrection body.

The Holy Spirit thus empowers us for obedience. The Holy Spirit imparts righteousness and godliness to the believer so that we are not only legally in right standing before God, but the Spirit actually makes us good. We are not, as Luther taught, doomed always to be both sinner and saint, but the Spirit empowers us not only to do the good but even to want the good. [4]

3. The Holy Spirit not only empowers us for purity. He also empowers us for ministry. We have already mentioned the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in Acts. The Church is praying in an upper room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit comes on the Day of Pentecost. The Church is born. The Spirit brings everyone there into Christ.

Immediately we see a change. They are witnessing with boldness to the crowds, even in languages they have never learned. The next day, Peter and John heal a lame man. Later in Acts they and others will cast out demons.

The mission of the Church is the mission of God. The mission of God is the redemption of everything in the creation. The Spirit empowers the Church--both on an individual and corporate level.

The Holy Spirit sanctifies the believer. He purifies us. He incorporates us each individually into the body of Christ. He empowers us.

Next Sunday: E1. The Church is the body of Christ.

[1] We are not talking about tongues here, for not all who receive the Holy Spirit in Acts speak in tongues and the rest of the New Testament is practically silent on the topic, except for a couple chapters in 1 Corinthians.

[2] E.g., Richard Peace, Conversion in the New Testament: Paul and the Twelve (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).

[3] In this sense, Peace's book is inadvertently trying to address two quite different questions at once, one a question of change and the other a question of incorporation. Given this blurring of questions, it is no surprise that his book barely mentions the most important element in conversion of all--the Holy Spirit.

[4] Simul iustus et peccator, semper repentans -- "At the same time, righteous and a sinner, as long as we are always repenting"

SP3. The Spirit sanctifies the Church.

This is now the third post in a unit on the Holy Spirit in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first section had to do with God and Creation, and the second was on Christology and Atonement.
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SP3. The Spirit sanctifies the Church.

1. Those of us who live in "Western" Christianity are prone to think of our faith in individualistic terms. When Martin Luther centered Christian faith around the idea of justification by faith, he not only centered Christianity around humanity but he centered it around human individuals. John Wesley also tended to focus on salvation as the focus of Christian doctrine, with my individual salvation taking up a major part of his teaching. [1]

By contrast, the early church grew out of a group or "collectivist" culture, so we are not surprised to find that the Y-O-Us of the New Testament are primarily plural. In a familiar verse for Wesleyan circles, Paul does not express a desire for each individual to be "sanctified" but that the believers at Thessalonica as a whole, together, be sanctified as one body and in one spirit and be preserved blameless (1 Thess. 5:23). The correct priority within salvation and the Church is thus the collective body of Christ first and the individual believer second.

2. The Holy Spirit "sanctifies" the Church (cf. 2 Thess. 2:13). The predominant sense of sanctification is to "make holy." [2] To make something holy is to make it God's, to set it apart as belonging to the realm of the divine rather than the realm of the ordinary. An earlier article mentioned that to say that God is holy was tantamount to saying that God is God and thus set apart from the creation in awesomeness and glory.

The Holy Spirit sets the Church apart as God's and thus creates the Church, the collective body of Christ. The Holy Spirit is the spirit that inhabits the body of Christ, the Church. As we will see in a later article, the Church is the people of God, the collection of all those "in Christ" past, present, and future.

3. A second meaning relates to the first. When the Spirit sets apart the Church to belong to God, he purifies it. To be sure, impurity remains in the Church. The church at Corinth is sanctified (1 Cor. 1:2) and yet there are "fleshly," "unspiritual" people within it (1 Cor. 3:1). An unbelieving spouse similarly can be "sanctified," set apart as connected to God, and yet not as yet be "saved" (1 Cor. 7:14, 16).

Yet on the basis of the blood of Christ, the Holy Spirit washes the Church, like a bride being prepared for an ancient marriage. In the culture of the New Testament world, the bride was washed and presented to the husband "without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind" (Eph. 5:27). In the same way, the Spirit prepares the Church for Christ when he returns. The Spirit makes the Church into a "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people" (1 Pet. 2:9).

4. The Holy Spirit also empowers the Church. Perhaps nowhere do we see this dynamic better than in the early chapters of Acts. In Acts 2, the Holy Spirit gives birth to the Church as the collective body of believers on the Day of Pentecost receive the Holy Spirit for the first time in a way the Spirit had never yet come in history.

The pages that follow show the effects of the Spirit on the Church. The Church is immediately empowered for witness as the apostles begin to proclaim the good news to everyone present in Jerusalem. They receive the power of tongues, which in the case of Acts 2 seems to be the ability to speak in languages that they have never learned before, so that they can speak the good news to those present.

This event of tongues is the reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel, when God separated the people by giving them a diversity of languages. But the event of tongues on the Day of Pentecost signifies another extremely important effect of the sanctification of the Spirit--unity. The Holy Spirit brings unity to the Church in its diversity.

Ironically, the use of "tongues" later at Corinth would create a problem when individuals used it to highlight their individual gift over the unity of the congregation. Paul would attack this use of spiritual gifts as it pulled the church there toward individuality over corporate unity (1 Cor. 12-14). The church is full of individuals with different gifts from God, but the point of these gifts is to accomplish the mission of God and to edify each other.

These gifts point to the mission of God, not some individual mission I'm on. These gifts point to my service of others, not to how special I am as an individual to God or how great I am.

The Holy Spirit thus brings unity to the body of Christ. Where there is division and a dividing of the church into cliques and factions, the Holy Spirit is not behind it. Where the Holy Spirit is, there is unity. [3]

So the Holy Spirit incorporates us into the body of Christ, the Church, through sanctification. The Holy Spirit empowers the Church for unity and proclamation. The Holy Spirit empowers individual believers in a diverse number of ways that serve both the broader mission of God and that build up the body of Christ collectively.

5. The Holy Spirit also directs the Church and leads it to the truth. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth (e.g., John 15:26). John 16:13 indicates that one of the functions of the Spirit was to lead the first disciples into all truth. And since God has given these words in Scripture to the whole Church, we can have confidence that the Spirit is still leading us into all truth.

The Spirit first gave the apostles truth to speak before there was a New Testament. They did not always agree with each other, as we see in Galatians 2. We thus see that the leading of the Spirit into truth does not always come without some conflict and debate.

The Spirit had already "hovered over" the creation of the books of the Old Testament. The Spirit had breathed into them at first and the Spirit continued to breathe into them at the time of Christ. [4] In the writings that would become the New Testament, the Spirit continued to breathe words to his people and through the words to later generations.

It took hundreds of years for the books of the New Testament to come together into their current form, so if we accept them as our Scripture we must also accept that the Holy Spirit continued to inspire the Church to collect these books into their current form. This action of the Spirit, again, did not come without conflict or debate. It is by faith that we believe that the Spirit approved of the way those books came together.

The Spirit continues to reveal and lead into truth. The Gospels allude to this fact when Jesus tells Peter in Matthew 16:19 that he is giving him the keys to the kingdom and that whatever Peter binds or looses on earth will already have been bound or loosed in heaven. Similarly, Jesus tells the disciples in John 20:23 that, with the Spirit inside them, they will even have the authority to forgive or prevent the forgiveness of sins.

These are truths with regard to which Protestants have especially seen great danger. We must assume, for example, that it is only when a church is in sync with the Holy Spirit that its pronouncement of forgiveness or lack thereof is in fact valid. It is only when we ask in sync with the Holy Spirit that things are truly bound or loosed.

Nevertheless, these Scriptures seem to legitimate what in fact must be the case today. Since the apostles are no longer with us and the Scriptures will often not address directly the situations of our days, collections of Christians must "bind and loose" God's authority on earth in various ways. It is legitimate for collections of Christians, such as denominations, to follow the will of God as best they can on earth, humbly seeking and submitting to the voice of the Holy Spirit, leading them into all truth.

6. A final note is that the Spirit is the great equalizer in the Church. Since both men and women receive the Holy Spirit in exactly the same way, both men and women prophesy (Acts 2:17). Because both slaves and free, both Jew and Gentile receive the Spirit equally, then there is no differentiation of status in the kingdom of God (Gal. 3:28).

There is no gift of the Spirit that is particular to men or the free or the Jew. The Spirit leads men into truth and the Spirit leads women into truth. Men can lead in the Church and women can lead in the Church. The slave can lead the master into truth and the wife can teach the husband, if the Spirit is within them. Individual circumstances in history may complicate the application of these principles, but this is the way it is ideally in the age of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit sanctifies the Church. He purifies it and creates it by setting it apart as God's. He empowers it for unity. He empowers it for witness and gives individual manifestations and gifts for the mission and the edification of other believers. He leads it into truth.

[1] It is no surprise that the historic practice of infant baptism has fallen on hard times among individualistic American Christians, for with such a paradigm, how could my baptism take place at a time when I am not aware of it or when I cannot make my profession of faith?

[2] You can see this obvious dynamic in the Greek words. The verb "to sanctify" is hagiazo. The adjective, "holy," is hagios (the plural hagioi or "holy ones" is often translated as "saints). And the noun, "holiness," is hagiosyne. Obviously these words are all related historically, and their meanings remained intertwined at the time of the New Testament.

[3] Yes, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Cor. 3:17), but this is not a freedom for each individual to do what he or she wants (cf. 1 Cor. 10:23). Paul is dealing with the Jewish Law in this comment, which was not binding on Gentile believers.

[4] As we will see in a later article, the inspiration or "God-breathing" of meaning into the words of the Bible has never been static but is an ongoing, dynamic speaking.

SP2. The Holy Spirit enacts the will of the Father and Son in the world.

This is now the second post in a unit on the Holy Spirit in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first section had to do with God and Creation, and the second was on Christology and Atonement.
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SP2. The Holy Spirit enacts the will of the Father and Son in the world.

The Holy Spirit is God's presence in the world, and the Spirit acts for God in the world.

1. Christian tradition does not hold that God the Father is only beyond the creation (transcendent) and the God the Holy Spirit is only in the creation (immanent). Nevertheless, in terms of the predominant domains where we find the Father and the Spirit operating in Scripture, we find the Spirit overwhelmingly mentioned in relation to this universe.

"Spirit" thus indicates at least two features of the Holy Spirit. First, spirit suggests otherness in the sense of heavenly origins. The Spirit is "stuff" from beyond the creation that is present here in the creation. In this way, the Holy Spirit is the "heavenly gift" and a taste of the "powers of the age to come" (Heb. 6:4-5).

"Spirit" also suggests that God is not limited by embodiment. He is everywhere present in the universe. At the very beginning of creation, we find the Spirit of God hovering over the primordial, unformed waters (Gen. 1:2). The Holy Spirit is thus the primary manifestation of God immanent in the creation, the primary presence of God in the universe in this age.

2. As such the Holy Spirit is the primary agent of God's action in the world. When we read of God's word doing whatever God sends it out to do in Isaiah 55:11, we should think of the Holy Spirit as the one enacting God's will. In Genesis 1, when God speaks and his will is accomplished, we should think of the Holy Spirit as the one accomplishing the creation of light or living things in the waters or the creation of humanity.

When Proverbs 8 uses the metaphor of wisdom working alongside God in creation (8:22-31), we should more literally think of God's Holy Spirit as the one who enacted the will of the Trinity for the creation of the world. Although John 1 ultimately correlates the Logos or "Word" with Jesus, surely much of the biblical imagery about God's word acting in the world should technically be related to the work of the Holy Spirit. When we hear that "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword," we are hearing about the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.

3. In the next two articles, we will discuss how the Spirit works in the Church and in the individual. Yet we have also seen that the Holy Spirit also works in the creation and in the world. Here, the work of the pre-incarnate Christ and the Holy Spirit seem to blur into each other. For example, the hymn in Colossians 1:15-20 is clearly about Christ, but it is arguably based on Jewish traditions about God's word. So some of the poetry about Christ here may more literally relate to the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.

For example, in a poetic sense, Christ holds all things together (Col. 1:17). But in a more literal sense, the Holy Spirit sustains the creation. The different roles that the individual persons of the Trinity play are not always clearly distinguished in Scripture but blur into each other. [1]

Although Christ will come again to judge the world on God's behalf, in this present age the Spirit both convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:7-11). The conviction of the Spirit in relation to sin ideally leads to salvation, but perhaps most of the world ultimately rejects the prompting of the Spirit in "prevenient grace," God's reaching out to us before we even know it (Matt. 7:13-14).

The Spirit convicts the world of righteousness in the sense that he works with our consciences to move us to act in the right way. He is an "inner light" that shows us the right way but leaves the choice of how to go to us. To be sure, our consciences are overwhelmingly formed by our cultures and the environments in which we are born and raised. However, the Holy Spirit also reaches out to everyone who comes into the world with God's prevenient grace and prompts us to move in the right direction.

Those who do not respond to the Spirit's prompting may eventually "grieve" the Holy Spirit to where God gives us up on us (Heb. 10:29). Although the Spirit has made it such that we should know God and his power (Rom. 1:20), God may eventually "give us up" (Rom. 1:28). We should assume that those parts of Scripture that talk about God hardening someone's heart (e.g., Exod. 7:3; Rom. 9:18) relate to individuals who have already rejected the initial prompting of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit also enacts God's judgment in this current time. We see such judgment clearly in the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. Peter indicts them for trying to "lie" to the Holy Spirit (5:3) and they both drop dead. It is thus not only clear that judgment takes place in the age of the new covenant as well as the old. But the Holy Spirit is the primary agent of judgment at this time.

4. The idea of an "unpardonable sin" comes especially from Matthew 12:31-32 and Mark 3:28-29. In that context, it refers to attributing to Satan an act of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, Hebrews 6:4-6 and other passages in Hebrews also suggest there is a point of apostasy beyond which one cannot be saved.

Theologically, we must assume that the individuals involved in these passages are people who have decisively rejected the promptings of the Holy Spirit toward salvation. We must assume that the Holy Spirit has already reached out to them, offering them the possibility of reconciliation, but they have rejected the light given them. Therefore, these acts--of blaspheming the Spirit or committing final apostasy--are the embodiment of a pattern of rejecting God. It is not the act itself that is permanently condemning but the permanent condemnation is what results when the Holy Spirit stops prompting.

Repentance, a decisive turn from sin toward God, is only possible by the power of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, anyone who is drawn toward God has not been abandoned by God and thus has not committed an unpardonable sin. Yet there is no promise that the Holy Spirit will prompt indefinitely. Christianity, not even Wesleyan-Arminian Christianity, does not technically teach free will. It teaches that God gives everyone a chance to move toward him.

But there is no promise that this chance will always be present in our lives. We cannot assume that we can wait until our death bed to move toward God. The Holy Spirit may not be around to prompt us toward him any more. We may know we need to repent but not find the power to repent within. We may seek a place of repentance and not find it (Heb. 12:17). We thus need to seek God while he may be found (Isa. 55:6).

The Holy Spirit is God's presence in the world and enacts the will of the Trinity in the universe. He convicts the world of its sin, of what righteousness is, and he administers God's judgment in this current age.

Next week: SP3. The Spirit sanctifies the Church.

[1] This is an important reminder that God did not reveal most of the truths of the Bible systematically but situationally. This is why systematic theology is not only a valid enterprise, but a necessary one. It is also why we would be foolish to ignore 2000 years of Christian reflection on Scripture--surely the Spirit has continued to unpack in his Church both the significance of Christ but also the implications of Scripture.

SP1. The Spirit is a distinct person, but one in substance with the Father and Son.

I have now finished the raw material for two books I hope to self-publish soon. The first is material that covers God and Creation from one Wesleyan-Arminian standpoint. I hope to self-publish it by the end of the week. The other covers Christ and Salvation. Both are part of a series I started over a year ago called my Theology in Bullet Points. It is an attempt to provide some resources for those of us in the Wesleyan tradition.

Myself and a few others have started a new Wesleyan academic series with Pickwick Publishing, a series called the Wesleyan Via Media series. I am hoping to have a conference at IWU next year aiming to chart a future for Wesleyan thinking in the years to come. I'm hoping that one result of this series will be some classic resources for those of us in my corner of the Wesleyan tradition.

Don Thorsen, for example, has agreed to write something on the Reformation for the 500th anniversary of Wittenberg. I am writing a book on how to read the Bible. And I am hoping we will have a proper Wesleyan systematic theology come out of the series as well. More on these things to come.

Today, however, I start the third and final part of my overview of Wesleyan theology. This one might prove to be the most interesting of all, by the time it's done: The Spirit and the Church.

SP1. The Spirit is a distinct person, but one in substance with the Father and the Son.
1. The branch of Christian theology that studies the Holy Spirit is called pneumatology, from the Greek word for spirit, pneuma. As we saw in our discussion of the Trinity, the Spirit is fully God like God the Father and God the Son. The Spirit is "of one substance with the Father," for there is only one God.

But the Spirit is a distinct person, like God the Father is a distinct person and God the Son is a distinct person. This is a mystery. Christians believe there is only one God. But Christians believe God is three persons.

It would be easy to think of the Spirit as an "it" rather than a "he." The Spirit of God in the Old Testament is pictured like the breath or wind of God that comes over a person in power (e.g., Judg. 13:6). [1] It would be easy enough to think of the Spirit in this way in parts of the New Testament, such as on the Day of Pentecost, when a violent wind blows through from heaven (Acts 2:2).

Nevertheless, the New Testament moves beyond impersonal language and uses personal language of the Holy Spirit. "It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us," Acts 15:28 says. Here the Holy Spirit is seen giving directions to the early church. We should thus see the various things that the Holy Spirit does in the Old and New Testament as the actions of a distinct person within the eternal Trinity.

Nowhere is the personhood of the Spirit clearer, however, than in the Gospel of John, where the beloved disciple glides from the neuter pronoun for the Greek word spirit to the masculine pronoun implying, "he." [2] John 14:28 starts by using the neuter pronoun for spirit, following the nature of the Greek word. But before the verse is even finished, John slips into the masculine pronoun: "that one," masculine, "will teach you." John thus considered the Spirit to be a person.

2. All the divine attributes of the Father and Son are thus also the attributes of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is eternal. The Spirit is all-powerful. The Spirit is all-knowing. The Spirit is everywhere present.

This latter attribute of omnipresence is intuitive to us, for what is spirit as we think of it but an entity without a body that would locate or limit its location? As spirit, the Holy Spirit is both everywhere present and heavenly in origin. These are the two original ways that the biblical authors understood God's Spirit--God in his presence everywhere and God as other than the material creation around us.

3. One of the more regrettable conflicts in Christian history was a debate over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds only from God the Father or whether he proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque, in Latin). This seemingly minor point of debate was the flash point issue over which the Eastern and Western churches split in AD1054.

The real issue, as it often is, was really over power. Was the Pope the "first among equals," as the East thought, or was he truly the supreme authority in the Church? Did the Western church have the authority to insert this word, filioque, into the Nicene Creed on its own, without it being approved by an "ecumenical" (universal) council? The result of the conflict was the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox churches of the East. [3]

Even today, some in the Orthodox Church would say that the problem with filioque ("and the Son") is not the doctrine, but the fact that it has never been approved by the whole Church. We therefore should not consider this a point of core dogma, but a doctrine over which different parts of Christendom disagree.

4. Both sides of this debate probably are fighting for a truth. In the Old Testament, the Father sends the Spirit when there is no mention of the Son. The New Testament, however, speaks of both the Father and the Son sending the Spirit. John 14 speaks of the Father sending the Spirit in Jesus' name (e.g., 14:16). However, in John 15:26, Jesus says that he will send the Spirit, and Romans 8:9 calls the Spirit the Spirit of Christ and the Spirit of God.

Of course the debate today especially focuses on the relationship between the persons of the Trinity before creation. I have said before that it is unwise for us to think we know much about that. We are prone simply to project anthromorphisms on them and then call them God's will for us today. The truth is rather that God has revealed analogies to his eternal being that have everything to do with the way he has created this universe. It is unwise to think of them as part of God's literal "eternal nature" but as pictures to help us understand him in this creation.

Next Sunday: SP2. The Holy Spirit enacts the wills of the Father and Son in the world.

[1] The English word, pneumonia, captures this sense of the Greek word for spirit as related to breath.

[2] In Greek, words have what is called, "gender": masculine, feminine, or neuter. These genders are not the same as the "sex" of an entity. So a noun that is feminine in Greek is not necessarily female. Similarly, the Greek word for "spirit" is neuter without saying anything about the "sex" of the Spirit.

Of course, as we saw at the beginning of this series, God is not literally male. He has no penis. How much less should we think that the Holy Spirit has a sexual organ! To call the Spirit a "he" is to use a human image to try to understand "him."

[3] We cannot really speak of the Roman Catholic Church until 1054. Before that point, everything was simply the church catholic, the church everywhere. Even to this day, there are groups within Christianity that consider themselves Catholic without being Roman Catholic. Indeed, some in the Anglican Church consider themselves Catholic in this sense.

My Church Symposium Paper

If anyone is interested in seeing the paper I submitted for the Wesleyan Ecclesiology Conference, here is the link:

http://www.kenschenck.com/churchspirit.html

Introduction to Talk

As I thought about how to begin this talk, I asked myself what "pneumatology"--theology of the Holy Spirit--I grew up hearing as a young Wesleyan. I suppose most of the sermons I grew up with about the Spirit had to do with entire sanctification and were thus very individual in nature. Another image I remember is praying for guidance from the Spirit, also oriented around me as an individual.

So then I asked myself what I might have heard growing up about the Spirit that applied to more than just individuals. I came up with two images. One is again the idea of guidance. Perhaps the church was seeking God's guidance on whether to enter a building program. Perhaps the church board was praying to know the "mind of the Spirit" on whether to hire a certain pastor or not.

Or more commonly, a preacher might ask for the Spirit's guidance in relation to a sermon he or she was about to preach. While this prayer clearly had to do with the individual preaching, it was a prayer for the Spirit's guidance in the context of a gathered group of Christians (perhaps including some non-believers). This was a prayer that the Spirit would give the speaker the right words to say to the congregation assembled there.

A special kind of corporate prayer for the Holy Spirit's help was a prayer for God to send a revival. Prayer for a revival would include individual conviction and recommitment on a mass scale. Revival would be contagious and would be expected to spread beyond the walls of those gathered. Sinners would come to repentance. Lives would be rededicated. A new power over sin and urge to witness would accompany.

None of these images from my childhood seem incorrect to me, although I do think that they are not quite the priorities or way the early church processed these things. For one thing, we tend to see the corporate dimensions of the Spirit as the sum of all the individual ones. We tend to see the individual experiences of the Spirit adding up to make the experience of the church as a whole. By contrast, I think the New Testament assumed that almost all individual experiences of the Holy Spirit would take place in the context of a group of believers, with "two or three" as a quorum (Matt. 18:20).

In the recent volume we Wesleyans put out on The Church That Jesus Builds, I mentioned three intersections between the Spirit and the church: 1) the Spirit defines the Church, 2) the Spirit empowers the Church, and 3) the Spirit directs the Church. But rather than simply repeat what I wrote there, I want to reflect a little more deeply, particularly in relation to some of the current trends and issues in our church today.

How to know if you have the Spirit

After a discussion of the Spirit as the sine qua non of being a Christian, a Pentecostal student once asked, "And how do you know that you have the Spirit." I knew where this was headed. The student believed that a person could know they had the Spirit if they spoke in tongues. Of course the consequence of this belief is that, unless you see Pentecost as a second blessing, a person cannot even be a Christian if they do not speak in tongues.

The book of Acts plays fairly easily into this idea, because of the six times Acts says someone was filled with the Spirit in Acts, three of them also mention tongues. Further, if you take 1 Corinthians 14:18 to mean that Paul spoke in ecstatic tongues as well, then a person might suggest that even though Acts 9 doesn't mention it, he probably spoke in tongues when he was filled with the Holy Spirit as well.

However, the fact that Paul only mentions tongues in relation to a problem in the Corinthian church leads us to suspect that they did not likely play such a significant role in his theology as the very evidence of the Holy Spirit.

So what is the evidence of the Holy Spirit in the individual, and how does this relate to the church?

In Romans 8:16, Paul says, "The Spirit itself witnesses together with our spirit that we are children of God." What does this look like?

It is not the purpose of this study to explore the individual evidence of the Holy Spirit in an individual believer. I will just mention three in passing.

The first is the assurance of sonship, which is surely related to the fact that the justified "have peace with God" (Rom. 5:1). We do not receive a Spirit that allows for the continuance of the fear of coming wrath (8:15). God has poured out His love in our hearts through the Holy Spirit (5:5). What is this love a metonymy for, assuming that Paul is thinking of us feeling God's love? In the light of what follows, surely this includes the atonement provided by Christ's death (5:9). Surely it includes an avoidance of God's wrath (5:9).

Might it also include the fact that the Holy Spirit is an earnest of our inheritance? In other words, we should not think of receiving the Holy Spirit as some legal enactment. There is a real heavenly "infusion" involved here. The mind can certainly play tricks on us, but if there is no change, no recognition of any difference eventually, then something is awry.

Part of this infusion should be a power over sin. If a person does not find it much more possible to overcome temptation and live "righteously," we must again question whether the person has really received the Holy Spirit.

Finally, along with this empowerment over sin should be the visible presence of the fruit of the Spirit in a person's life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

But for this study, the question is how the church might relate to these dynamics of the individual and the Spirit. Let me suggest three:

1. The church's authority to exclude from the body of Christ implies some authority in relation to the witness of the Spirit.

Paul says in 1 Cor. 5:4-5, "In the name of the Lord Jesus, when you are gathered together and my spirit with the power of our Lord Jesus, deliver such a person to the Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit might be saved on the Day of the Lord."

Notice the ecclesial dimension to this explusion. It is not an activity of Paul alone but Paul with the church in Spirit. This action is the removal of this person from the visible, corporate "midst" of the church at Corinth (5:2). The putting of this person out of the physical gathering of this individual is his delivery over to the realm of Satan, which is outside of their physical gathering.

The importance of contiguity should not be overlooked. An unbelieving spouse, as well as the children, are sanctified by a believing parent (1 Cor. 7:14). Notice here that it is in connection with the believing one that the unbelieving spouse is sanctified.

2. Related to the power that the community has to expel sinners of a certain degree from its midst is the authority through the Spirit to retain or forgive sins.

In John 20:22-23, Jesus says, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of certain ones, they are forgiven. If you hold on to the sins of certain ones, they have been retained."

Certainly the disciples/apostles were a special group of believers, but the Gospel of John was not written for the apostles any more than Matthew 18:17-20 was:

"If he does not listen to them, speak to the assembly [church]. If he does not listen even to the assembly, let him be as a Gentile and tax collector to you.

"Truly I say to you: whatever you bind on earth will [already] have been bound in heaven. And whatever you loose on earth will [already] have been loosed in heaven. Again I say to you: if two of you concur on earth concerning any matter whatever he ask, it will happen to them from my Father in the heavens, for where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst."

These passages were written first, I would argue, with the local church rather than the universal church in mind. John in particular seems closely connected to a specific community in Ephesus. Matthew has a fairly clear Palestinian Jewish provenance. I do not believe they were written just for these communities, but the sense of the assembly is local assembly and not the metaphorical assembly of all the firstborn.

These words were written to apply to the local churches of all the ages and not just for the apostles or the localities of these communities.

If the Spirit gives the individual power over sin, there is a sense in which the community of saints empowers even further over sin. How can this not be the case when the realm outside the community is the realm of Satan? It is the realm of the Spirit that is the place of power over sin.

But we also see the role of intercession in overcoming sin. 1 John 5:16-17 tell of how the prayer of a fellow believer on behalf of a brother sinning a sin not to death can effect that brother's forgiveness.

3. We see from Acts and John that it is in fact the Spirit that empowers all the functioning of the church. It is the Spirit that gives the early church boldness to proclaim and suffer. It is the Spirit that brings unity of spirit and mind. It is the Spirit that directs, that leads into truth, that convicts of sin, righteousness, and judgment. This is the subject of my last post before I crank out a paper version of these ideas.

Partaking of the Spirit: The Threshold of Belonging

While Christian identity in the NT almost certainly was formulated in a collectivist sense, the fact that it was not ethnically linked surely begged for rites like baptism to make it clear who was a member of this new group, the assembly.

Nevertheless, the book of Acts indicates that being baptized did not automatically imply that one had the Spirit. The Samaritans of Acts 8 are baptized before they receive the Spirit. Similarly, the Gentiles of Acts 10 receive the Spirit before they are baptized. While baptism is the rite most associated in Acts with receiving the Holy Spirit, the laying on of hands seems even more closely related.

Acts treats receiving the Spirit as a natural consequence of true repentance and baptism: "Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, every one of you for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:36).

Again, we Western individualists probably need to be reminded that this is probably not simply an isolated individual experience. "You are the temple of God and God's Spirit lives in you" (1 Cor. 3:16)--the "you's" in this verse are plural. We are the temple, and the Spirit dwells in us. Perhaps the wording of Hebrews helps us conceptualize the relationship between the Spirit in the individual and the Spirit in the church: we have become partakers of Holy Spirit (Heb. 6:4).

To be sure, Hebrews is not here making the distinction between the Spirit in the individual and the Spirit in the church. Hebrews' point is that we are now partakers in part now of what is only fully to come in the coming age. But perhaps the language is helpful. No individual has "all" of the Holy Spirit in him or her. We all partake of Holy Spirit when our hearts are sprinkled clean of an evil conscience (Heb. 10:22; cf. Acts 15:9) and our bodies are washed with pure water (i.e., in baptism, Heb. 10:22). But there is in a sense "more" of the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ than in me as an individual believer, and there is more of the Spirit in the age to come than is available to us corporately now in this age.

What we have been suggesting throughout our discussion thus far is that the Holy Spirit, more than anything else, defines the church, the assembly of the firstborn. This is true both of us collectively and individually. Crossing from death to life means being "designated and made holy by the Spirit" (Rom. 15:16; 2 Thess. 2:13).

Thus in Romans 8:9, Paul says, "If someone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this one is not of him." This verse indicates that all true Christians and thus all true parts of the church have the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 1:21 implies the same: God "has sealed us and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts." Very similar is 2 Corinthians 5:5: "God is the one who has made us into this very thing, who has given us the earnest of the Spirit."

The NIV translates 2 Corinthians 1:21 with the idea of God putting his "seal of ownership" on us. This is an appropriate dynamic rendition of the idea of sealing here. It is not sealing as in sealing up a jar but sealing as in placing one's seal on something. It is like branding, thus indicating that we are in fact God's.

The notion of an "earnest" will be familiar to any who have bought a house. Earnest money does two things. It first guarantees that you will receive the house (rather than someone else) if the agreed conditions are kept by both parties. But it also is a downpayment toward the purchase.

Accordingly, the Holy Spirit in us is a "foretaste of glory divine," as we saw in Hebrews. Yet the Spirit is also a guarantee of our inheritance. It is not an absolute guarantee, for one can grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

So we see that more than anything else, the Spirit defines the assembly of God. It does so individually to be sure, but it does so individually in relation to its corporate definition of the church as well.

The Spirit inhabits the Church

In the last probe, we discovered that the church is "visible" in the sense that it is the embodiment of the Spirit. We also noted that it is not individualistic but as an assembly involves a plurality of people by definition.

Today we want to follow up briefly with some thoughts on Ephesians 4:4--"There is one body and one Spirit." To be sure, we each have the Holy Spirit individually (next post). But we are prone today to see the corporate Spirit in the "universal assembly" as simply the sum of the Spirit in the individual members. This is wrongheaded at least in terms of the perspective of Paul.

Paul and all the biblical writers and audiences were primarily collectivist personalities. What this implies is that they identified themselves as individuals primarily in conjunction with the groups to which they belonged. They did not see groups as a collection of individuals, but individuals as members of groups.

We can of course ask whether this is a cultural or timeless element of the biblical perspectives. But let's be sure to get the biblical perspective right. Paul's way of thinking would not have been "we each have the Spirit which adds up to the body of Christ which the Spirit inhabits." Rather, he would have thought, "we each have the Spirit because we are part of the body which the Spirit inhabits."

This raises a serious question. Is it possible for an individual to possess the Spirit and not be connected to the body? A severed finger might possess life for a few moments, but detached from the "spirit" of the body, it will soon die. This analogy seems true to the inner logic of Paul's thought as well. It seems more than possible that Paul would not thought it possible for an individual to have the Spirit in disconnect from the rest of the body of Christ.

And it is the body of Christ we are talking about here. Once again, we remember that a primary category for Paul is that believers are "in Christ." The logic of Galatians 3 is that the promise is not to seeds, as to many, but to the seed, which is Christ. We are thus, collectively in Christ as the singular seed. We thus do not have, strictly speaking, a one-on-one relationship with the Spirit. We have a plurality-on-one relationship with the Spirit through the singular Christ, who as head of the body nourishes it.

What is the Church in the New Testament

I'm writing a paper this week on the Spirit and the Church. I thought I'd do some thinking here.

First, in Paul's writings, we should really translate the word ekklesia more as an "assembly"--a local assembly in fact--than church.

[By the way, I have long assumed that the Assemblies of God Church took their name from some passage like 1 Corinthians 11:16 or 14:33--"the assemblies of God."]

The idea that the church are those who are "ek + kaleo"-ed, the "called out" ones, is rubbish from a linguistic and NT meaning standpoint, although it has some value as a sermon illustration. The churches of Paul are the local assemblies of people in house churches, primarily.

Paul can broaden the term, apparently. He speaks in Galatians 2:13 of persecuting the "assembly of God" where he must at least mean the believers of Jerusalem--a seemingly larger target than some sole house church. Here he refers to believers in a particular region, it seems.

Of course this broadening of the term reaches its fullness in Colossians and Ephesians, where the universal church is said to be the body of Christ (Eph. 1:23-24). This is a development from 1 Corinthians, where Christ is a part of the body, namely, the head (1 Cor. 12; but also Eph. 4:15).

An interesting parallel to Ephesians' use of "church" language is in Matthew 16:18, where Jesus tells Peter that he will build his "church" on the rock either of Peter or his confession of Jesus as Messiah or both. This of course does not refer to a local assembly but presumably to all who confess faith that Jesus is the Son of God.

Again, an interesting extension of this imagery is in Hebrews 12:13, where Hebrews refers to the "assembly of the firstborn" in heaven.

Some thoughts:
1. First, it is striking to me that this church imagery seems to presume embodiment and visibility. The local assemblies are clearly visible. The assembly in heaven of Hebrews, even if a metaphor of some sort, is a visual metaphor of people gathered in heaven.

And when Colossians and Ephesians extend the scope of the assembly metaphorically to include all Christians, the metaphor is visible and embodied. It is the body of Christ that is the church, not the Spirit of Christ! Indeed, "There is one body and one Spirit" (Eph. 4:4).

Here is where the relevance to my topic, the Spirit and the Church comes first into view. The Spirit inhabits the church. Here we see that the Spirit inhabits the church as the visible embodiment of the Spirit.

2. Second, we see that by very definition, the church is a collective concept, that is, it is plural. There is no such thing as an assembly of one. There are no instances in the New Testament where the church refers to anything close to one person. It implies both gathering and plurality.

When we come to appropriating this imagery today, new questions emerge that none of the NT authors might have imagined. Can there be a church of one? Is a person a part of the assembly of the firstborn without interaction or connection to the rest of the body?

This question is completely foreign to the Bible. When Paul removes a lone person from the assembly, he is delivering this person over to Satan. In the modern scenario, the ear doesn't talk down to the eye--it just leaves to go fishing. Paul's imagery of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 requires that all its believers be on the same body (hard to do when you're not in the same room).

And when Ephesians suggests that we have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all (Eph. 4:5-6), the theology doesn't work unless this is a unity expressed across a plurality of individuals, in this case, across the ethnic divide of Jew and Gentile. We are not to forsake the regular assembling of ourselves together (Heb. 10:25). Our forebears were of course way off in using this verse to make us feel guilty for not attending Wednesday night service... but if you are an Easter and Christmas nominal "Christian," the verse well suits.

In short, we might say of the lone Christian the same thing that Paul told husbands and wives: a believer should not stay away from the body of Christ except for a time, perhaps to devote oneself to prayer, then come together again so Satan will not tempt you (1 Cor. 7:5).