The Progressive Mystery

Tracing the Elusive Spirit in Scripture and Tradition

Myk Habets

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781683592792
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Myk Habets carefully explores the progressively revealed identity and mission of the Holy Spirit as revealed throughout Holy Scripture and then interpreted by the Church. As a work of biblical theology, the focus of Parts 1 & 2 is on how the identity of the Spirit has been revealed, understood, and interpreted throughout the sweep of Holy Scripture. As a contribution to historical theology, the focus on Parts 3 & 4 is on the ways in which the orthodox understanding of the mission of the Holy Spirit has developed. This study offers graduate students the ideal entrâee into the study of pneumatology as it opens the windows on Scripture and Tradition in ways which allow others to see what is going on. Taking its place among other introductions to pneumatology, this study is a readable and reliable guide to what is often considered the elusive Holy Spirit of God.

Chapter 1

Introduction

It is a well-known and often stated maxim in Christian theology that the identity and mission of the Holy Spirit is consistent throughout the canon of Scripture, and yet at the same time, it is known that the Holy Spirit is revealed progressively throughout that witness. This is not to imply that there is not development within the canon on this theme or that what we now know of the Spirit is all there is to know. Both assumptions are wrong. Rather, the continuity and development of the identity and mission of the Spirit must be closely examined and understood if Christians today are to have any understanding of, and any intimate relationship with, the Holy Spirit of God.

As we near the end of the current renaissance of the Trinity, as it has often been called, a late twentieth, early twenty-first century phenomenon, we are now entering a time where the fruit of that renaissance—good and bad—is being felt across the other theological loci. Pneumatology is not immune to this development. In fact, in light of the focus on the Spirit in contemporary theology it may not be an exaggeration to say that in the early twenty-first century we are facing a renaissance of pneumatology. This is certainly the assessment of at least one significant survey of the Spirit, that of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen.1

Many treatments of the Holy Spirit focus on specific themes, or experiences, of the Spirit, and are helpful. However, by not dealing in-depth with the biblical material, pneumatology often suffers caricature and misapplication. In this work, I have sought to linger over the biblical text long enough to see the progressively unfolding revelation of the identity and mission of the Holy Spirit. As such, a biblical theology in Parts 1 and 2 will occupy our attention. Here I take particular notice of the semantic range of the terms ruach and pneuma before looking at the locus of activity of the Spirit in both Old and New Testaments.

Having taught pneumatology for many years, I often encounter the idea that the Spirit is not really present in the Old Testament and as such we need to wait for the New Testament before we can know anything of who the Spirit is and what he does. This is a grave mistake and we are impoverished by it. The Spirit saturates (anoints) the Old Testament. The ruach YHWH is variously presented in the Old Testament as a personification of God’s power exercised in judgment or blessing, it empowers leaders, gives life to creation, is a creative force, is the medium of divine revelation and wisdom, and mediates God’s presence with his people and all creation. The Spirit’s work is pervasive.2 But who is this Spirit? What is it? Sin and faithlessness grieve the Spirit, sometimes causing the Spirit to withdraw his presence from people. Can this really be a personification? An impersonal force? Not likely. The mission of the Spirit is revealed in the Old Testament in ways which prepare God’s people for a fuller revelation of his identity in the New Testament; but already in the Old Testament the Spirit is a person, fully at work, and fully God.

To concisely order the vast amount of material on the Spirit in the Old Testament, I have chosen to present the work around the ideas of creation, community, and consummation. These three areas are ones in which the Spirit is intensively active and revealing. These three areas are also picked up on and developed in the New Testament. An understanding of the Spirit’s work at creation prefigures the spiritual new creation Jesus offers; and knowing the ways in which God’s Spirit breathes life into creation, and with the Son, brings all things to fulfillment, is a dimension of depth required to understand the New Testament.

Seeing the ways in which the Spirit forms, leads, and indwells the community of Israel; its leaders, artisans, and others, forms the platform for understanding the ways in which the Spirit continues to call people out and form them into the Body of Christ, the Church. What it means to be full of the Spirit is initiated here, in God’s dealings with his first peoples, the Hebrews.

Hearing the growing number of prophecies and anticipations of what lies ahead for the people of God prepares the way for the Messiah, and with him the fullness of the Spirit poured out on all flesh. As the Spirit was active at creation he is active throughout world history, including its consummation. Indwelling these texts from the Old Testament alerts us to what is going on in the New when John the Baptist announces the fact that the Coming One has arrived, or when Paul confesses Jesus as Lord, or when John of Patmos sees the Lamb on the throne of God and waters of living water streaming from the throne for the healing of the nations. In short, the Old Testament revelation of the identity and mission of the Spirit prepares us for the continued ways in which God reveals himself as the triune Lord of glory in the New Testament. To miss this is to miss the main thing.

In Part 2 the New Testament portrayal of the Holy Spirit is presented by looking at the different books in clusters: Matthew and Mark, Luke and Acts, John and the Johannine Epistles, the Pauline corpus, Hebrews, and Petrine Epistles. Each book has a distinctive contribution to make to our understanding and experience of the Holy Spirit, and yet each book contributes seamlessly to a united whole, a coherent picture, a canon of faith.

What is especially important to notice in the New Testament are the ways the Spirit is united to the work of the Son in an act of mutual mediation. With many other scholars, I tend to think of the Son’s mission as subsequent to that of the Spirit’s, in that the Messiah appears in the Gospels in the midst of the Spirit’s work in the world. Indeed, it is the Spirit who prepares the way for the Son; he prepares a womb, a tomb, and an upper room.3 What began in the Old Testament is here in the New fulfilled as we read of the Spirit of life, the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Power, the Spirit of Prophecy, and the Spirit of Christ.

In the Synoptic Gospels, we witness a Spirit Christology at work, as the Spirit is associated with the person and work of Christ, in anointed Jesus and equipping him for ministry, indwelling and filling him, being the power of his miracles, and the unction behind his words of life. Jesus is so associated with the Spirit that he is known as the Messiah—the Spirit anointed One who would pour out the Spirit on all flesh, just as Joel had prophesied. In John, we have a complementary vision but this time a Logos Christology, one in which the Spirit is the “other Paraclete,” the one sent by Jesus to continue his work in the church and the world.

Luke-Acts gives us a window into the world of the earliest Christians and they ways in which God’s presence was experienced by them in Word and Spirit. The Spirit here continues to be poured out on the people enabling them to prophesy and understand, to work and serve, and to witness to the work of the triune God of grace and glory. “And many were added to their number.” And what has begun in the Gospels is continued in the Epistles, as Paul and Peter and the other canonical writers further explicate the life of faith lived in devotion to Christ, before the Father, and in the power of the Spirit. Finally, John presents us with a vision of the future, of the consummation of time and history as we know, where Jesus is Lord and the Spirit fills the renewed creation without measure.

In Parts 3 and 4 our attention turns from the canon to the ways in which the faithful have sought to make sense of what God has revealed and then apply it to faith and practice. It is beyond the limits of a concise introduction to offer a comprehensive survey of Church history, and so in Part 3 I have limited the focus to the establishment of pro-Nicene orthodoxy as it relates to the Holy Spirit. Likening these developments to the construction of a house, first the foundations are set for the homoousion, or the teaching that the Father, Son, and Spirit are of one substance and so are one God, equally divine and worthy to be worshipped. Three Fathers are central here; Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen. A brief survey of these three foundational fathers shows the considerable differences between early Christian thinkers, and yet at the same time, the emerging consensus on who the Spirit is in relation to the Father and the Son. These foundations were then built upon by Athanasius as he sought to establish the orthodoxy of the homoousion from Scripture and subsequent theology. It becomes quickly evident that these general theological convictions were the necessary development of biblical portrayals of the Spirit. Here the economic and ontological aspects of God’s being were clearly represented and coordinated.

No teaching of the church has ever gone unchallenged, and the identity and mission of the Holy Spirit has been no different. Heresy threatened to weaken the foundations of the church’s pneumatology and we briefly explore the most important of these. A tactic of the pro-Nicene theologians of the time was to associate opponent’s views with a known heresy; in this way, the charge of ‘Arianism’ took on polemical force. What Arius and his follows argues is canvassed here before we turn to the completion of the house of pneumatological orthodoxy with Nicaea in 325 and then Constantinople in 381. In this story, the three Cappadocians loom large as they each contributed to an orthodox Christology and then pneumatology. Before concluding this section, we mention the profound influence of Augustine on the establishment of pro-Nicene theology and the ways in which he built upon the foundation set by the other fathers.

Part 4 explores a number of influential movements and thinkers that have contributed to contemporary pneumatology. The inclusion of topics here is idiosyncratic, given the range of material one could choose from.4 I have decided to look at those aspects of the tradition that have most impacted the Evangelical church today and so there is a focus upon Reformed thinkers in the first part and then Pentecostal and charismatic thinkers in the second. From Reformed theology, we inherit a robust and welcome theology of Word and Spirit, one in which the two hands of God, as Irenaeus would have it, work together.5 From Renewal sources, we are reminded that we not only know the Spirit, but we experience him and his fullness too. Along the way, views of several significant thinkers are presented in order to signal the ways in which the church is where it is today.

What is the future of Spirit-talk? While none of us has the definitive answer, I suggest in the conclusion that a Third Article Theology is a timely and faithful next stage for pneumatological discourse. As the church reflects upon and seeks to be obedient to the Holy Spirit, we recognise that God is at work amongst his people, drawing them into his future and his purposes. May this survey be simply another faithful servant to achieve such ends.

Part 1

An Old Testament Pneumatology: Tracing the Elusive Spirit of God

Long before the Spirit was a theme of doctrine,

He was a fact in the experience of the community.

EDUART SCHWEIZER

We would do well to return to our biblical roots on this matter,

if the church is going to count for anything at all in the new millennium

that lies just around the corner.

GORDON FEE

Not by might, nor by power,

but by my Spirit says the Lord of hosts.

EZEKIEL

Chapter 2:

The Semantic Range of Ruach

This is an Old Testament theology of the Spirit of God—ruach in Hebrew.1 Unlike the approach often taken, we must resist the temptation to read back into the Old Testament our New Testament paradigm at this stage of biblical theology; that does and must come later.2 First we must learn to see what the biblical record progressively reveals to us about the Holy Spirit. It is our aim to trace the understanding of the Spirit of God through the pages of the Old Testament taking particular notice of the developing idea of the ruach of God and how the people came to experience and understand that experience of God’s presence and activity.3 We shall then be in a position to survey and then comment on the New Testament’s veritable saturation of Spirit talk and their understanding of the pneuma of God.4

The Spirit in the Old Testament forms no easy pattern of interpretation; he is spoken of very differently in Judges than, for example, in the Psalms.5 In the Old Testament he is less central than in the New and in the Old Testament the term “Holy Spirit” appears infrequently (Ps. 51:11; Isa. 63:10–11).6 Nevertheless the Old Testament is the place to start our investigation as it offers us an indispensable insight into the world of ideas, world-view, and expectations which lie behind the New Testament itself. Here are the Scriptures which formed the belief and understanding of Jesus and his fol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Abbreviations
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part 1: An Old Testament Pneumatology: Tracing the Elusive Spirit of God
• Chapter 2: The Semantic Range of Ruach
• Chapter 3: The Spirit in Creation
• Chapter 4: The Spirit and the Community
• Chapter 5: The Spirit, Christ, and Consummation
• Chapter 6: The Spirit as Person
• Chapter 7: Intertestamental Progression: From Ruach to Pneuma
• Part 2: A New Testament Pneumatology: Confessing the Holy Spirit
• Chapter 8: The Holy Spirit in the New Testament
• Chapter 9: Spirit in Matthew and Mark
• Chapter 10: Spirit in Luke-Acts
• Chapter 11: Spirit in Johannine Literature
• Chapter 12: Spirit in Pauline Literature
• Chapter 13: Spirit in Hebrews and Petrine Epistles
• Chapter 14: Conclusion: Confessing the Holy Spirit
• Part 3: The Spirit and the Early Church: Towards Orthodoxy
• Chapter 15: Three Foundational Fathers
• Chapter 16: The Homoousion Framework
• Chapter 17: Heresy Threatening the Foundation
• Chapter 18: Completing the Homoousion Framework
• Chapter 19: Building upon the Foundation
• Part 4: The Spirit and the Contemporary Church: A Third Article Theology
• Chapter 20: Reformed Theology
• Chapter 21: Roman Catholicism: The Ecclesiological Spirit
• Chapter 22: The Renewal Mosaic: Pneumatological Power?
• Chapter 23: Evangelicalism & the Future of Spirit Talk
• Chapter 24: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Scripture Index