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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: ON LEARNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
This is a book about the being, identity, and activity of the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? Who is the Holy Spirit? How does the Spirit do things? And what does the Spirit do? These are the central questions. The Spirit’s abiding interest is to bind us to Christ and to his Father, our Father, thereby leading everyone back to the Father through the Son. But why is this? Why does the Spirit act in this way? This book answers these deep questions. My contention is that God’s being is reliably expressed in God’s acts, given God’s covenant faithfulness. However, Holy Scripture teaches us that God’s acts cannot contain God’s being any more than Israel’s temple could contain the immense majesty of God. The being of God is what grounds the missions of Son and Spirit. God’s great acts of creation, reconciliation, and perfection have a source. That source is God’s being, complete in itself. This book is an unfolding of that life and of how we share in that life through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKING OF GOD
The church confesses that it believes in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In so doing, it has never denied that the description of God will take us to the very limits of speech, indeed beyond them. This is not to say, however, that we are simply reduced to silence before God the Holy Trinity. The Trinity is a mystery that wills to be known, loved, served, and spoken of as that mystery truly is. The Trinity is a knowable mystery. The Trinity would have us talk of the Trinity as the Trinity truly is.
Karl Barth — about whom you will hear much in this study — spoke eloquently of how the God of the gospel “commandeers” our speech.1 Rather than letting us think we know in advance the content of the name “Holy Spirit,” the biblical testimony teaches us to speak faithfully and truthfully with respect to the being and identity of the “Holy Spirit.” In other words, Scripture commandeers the names “Father” or “Holy Spirit,” teaching us how to speak of the name of God with proper reverence. Just so, the name “Holy Spirit” is a revealed name; the same is true of “Father.” These names are given their content by Scripture. This study is an exercise in how sacred Scripture teaches us to speak of the Spirit’s person and work in a way that would honour Thomas F. Torrance’s statement that “the Spirit is not just something divine or something akin to God emanating from him, not some sort of action at a distance or some kind of gift detachable from himself, for in the Holy Spirit God acts directly upon us himself, and in giving us his Holy Spirit God gives us nothing less than himself.”2
This volume is also concerned with mapping the being of the God whom Scripture gives us to know and love. The God of the Bible — as scandalous as this may seem — really is “actually and unreservedly as we encounter him in his revelation.”3 That is why it is appropriate and necessary to speak with confidence about God’s life on the basis of the missions of Son and Spirit. God’s inner life is encountered, revealed, and disclosed in God’s outward life, God’s saving acts. It is these acts that point us to their origin, that teach us of a profound unity of being between the Father, Son, and Spirit. Our joyful task ahead is to recognize in the idiom of Scripture rich metaphysical teaching about the one being of the triune God. In other words, the Old and New Testaments encourage us to talk with sobriety not only about what God does but also about what and how God is. The Testaments taken together promote reflection on the shape of God’s inner life as revealed in Israel and Jesus.
THE SPIRIT’S BEING AND NATURE
When Christians call on the Spirit, we are calling on the Spirit of the risen Jesus. Rather than being directed away from Jesus Christ, the Spirit deepens our fellowship with him and his people, all to the glory of the Father. The Spirit does not replace Christ or take over from him. Rather, the Spirit’s work “is to carry forward the divine philanthropy begun in the incarnation.”4 The Spirit does not detract from Christ, supersede Christ, or act as his substitute. As we will see, the Spirit is primarily at work in relation to the Word (incarnate, written, and proclaimed), strengthening baptized children of God to remain true to Christ. Indeed, the mission of the Holy Spirit is coextensive with the mission of the Word (the Lord Jesus Christ).
But why does the Spirit act this way? Why is the Spirit other-directed? Herein lies the key idea of the volume. There are basic reasons the three do what they do in creating and, in turn, reconciling and perfecting humankind for a life of blessedness. Those reasons have to do with how the three are. Such talk of how the three are is necessary if we are to understand why God’s work toward the outside has the shape that it does.
THE SPIRIT’S ECONOMY
God’s work toward the outside — what I will call the economy — has assumed disproportionate significance in contemporary theology. Talk of God’s inner life (in se) is assumed to be abstract, lacking any kind of immediate theological or pastoral purchase. Does not such talk discourage us from taking seriously Luther’s advice to seek God where “true theology and recognition of God” is to be found, that is, “in the crucified Christ”?5 I do not think so. In this book, I offer a calm statement of the deity and identity of the God who wills to be found there. This is important because of the reality that God is. In God essence and existence are one. This is what it means to speak of God as one who lives from himself. God does not need anyone or anything outside of God in order to be God. Explanation of this life that is utterly complete in itself requires first principles. First principles describe the reality that God is, that this life exists from itself. Without talk of first principles, we miss out on understanding the rationale for why the Son is sent and the Father is the one who sends. Scripture’s content is metaphysical. We also do not know why it is the Spirit who is breathed by the Son, poured out by the Father. We do not learn the principles of intelligibility for why the saving economy of God has the shape that it does. Many contemporary thinkers are indebted to Luther for urging us to take seriously the cross as key to knowing God. Much contemporary theology has heard Luther on this point, understanding him to eschew Trinitarian metaphysics. I think that there is some good in that, but it is not a path that I take.
The present text seeks to make a contribution to the contemporary discussion around the divinity, nature, identity, and acts of God the Holy Trinity and specifically of God’s Spirit. God’s outward work has the shape that it does because it reveals the life of one who is wholly complete from eternity. God’s life is perfect in itself. God’s life is pure act, a life in which the Son is begotten of the Father in a perpetual eternity, the Spirit comes forth or proceeds as the Love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father from eternity. Talk of what God does, which is the basis for how God is known, has a foundation. That foundation has to do with the being of God.
THE OTHER-DIRECTED SPIRIT
In this volume, I talk about the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ. That is not to reduce the Spirit to an appendage of Christ or to collapse the Spirit into him. Rather, it is to say that the Spirit demonstrates profound boldness in promoting another, Jesus Christ. The Spirit’s actions are directed to Christ to the glory of the Father. This is what it means to talk about the Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus. Whether it be the Spirit’s casting down of Saul on the road to Damascus or the conceiving of Jesus in Mary’s womb, the Spirit is other-directed, Christ-directed.
The “of” makes all the difference for the approach that I champion. The Spirit never departs from the Son. The Spirit works tirelessly in the economy of grace to expand the community of those baptized into the Son, the living Lord Jesus. Emphasizing this point makes it far more difficult to think of the Spirit apart from Jesus Christ and his Father, our Father. In keeping the Spirit tethered to the Son, as indeed the biblical testimony encourages, the Spirit does not float free of the Son and his Father. The indissoluble bond that exists between Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, between the Father who sends him and the Son who breathes him, is thereby honoured.
The Holy Spirit is the other-directed third person of the Holy Trinity. We know the Spirit, Yves Congar writes, “not directly in himself, but through what he brings about in us.”6 The “us” in whom the Spirit brings about the Spirit’s gifts is the Christian community. The Spirit who gathers to Christ is constantly working to grow the community of Christ. The Spirit sends out those gathered to Jesus to witness to Jesus’ work of promoting his own environment. The “environment of Jesus Christ,” to use Barth’s language, is not static.7 The Spirit is in the process of drawing people everywhere to Christ and his community. This is good news because the community of Christ to whom the Spirit leads is always in process. The community’s dynamism is proper to Christ and the Spirit.
It is important to consider this at the beginning of the book. Because the Spirit is a person, the Spirit has unique work to do. Perhaps the most radical and far-reaching biblical example is that of the inclusion of the Gentiles. The Spirit bears witness to Christ by drastically expanding the parameters of his mission. No longer is Jesus the one who is “sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matt 15:24). The Spirit whom Christ breathes and who is poured out onto many at Pentecost completely reconfigures expectations. The dimensions of the church’s sphere become “very different from what we know them to be.”8 In Luke-Acts, for example, but also in Romans and Galatians, the good news of Jesus Christ is understood not only to be for the Jew but also for the Gentile. In ways that the disciples prior to Jesus’ resurrection could not understand, Moses and the prophets testify anew to him in whom salvation for the Jew and for the Gentile is to be found.
The Spirit is ever extending the borders of the Word’s sovereignty. The Spirit is other-directed, that is, Christ-directed, but the Spirit is not simply a principle in relationship to Christ. The remarkable independence of the Spirit — the Spirit’s blowing where he wills (cf. John 3:8) — is a function of the remarkable interdependence of the two. The Spirit works tirelessly to declare the “I” of another, Jesus Christ. Therein we receive a glimpse of the Spirit’s hypostatic uniqueness in God. We see a person who is so secure in himself that he can be entirely given over to declaration of another. The Spirit’s actions encourage us to contemplate their rationale. This is the work of Trinitarian metaphysics.9
THE THIRD PERSON
We might think that the designation “third person” suggests that the Spirit is of a rank below the first and second persons, Father and Son, respectively. Nothing could be further from the truth: the Spirit is consubstantial with Father and Son, of one essence with the Father and Son. There is unity of being between the three, from eternity. The Spirit points us to Jesus Christ, knits us into life with him and his people, all to the glory of his Father in order that we might share in their life to all eternity. The Spirit has no interest in pointing us to the Spirit’s self. That is not because the Spirit does not have a self. Rather, the personhood of the Spirit — the Spirit’s hypostatic uniqueness — is expressed in the Spirit’s binding us to Christ and in him to the Father. This work does not constitute the Spirit. Instead, the Spirit’s work displays the Spirit’s hypostatic uniqueness that is in fact constituted by his eternal procession.
I do not approach such a presentation of the Holy Spirit from an objective or neutral vantage point. Knowledge of the God of the gospel is unlike any other kind of knowledge. It is radically self-involving. In other words, to know the God of the Bible is to be transformed. Knowledge of the one who encounters us in Israel (the Old Testament) and Jesus (the New Testament) through the prophets and apostles is self-authenticating knowledge. The God the Bible attests to us creates hearers of his Word ex nihilo. Therefore, the tone of this work is one of confidence: confidence that this God works with “clay jars” such as ourselves (2 Cor 4:7) in order that we might be made to testify to the one who is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.
Let us consider for a moment Paul’s famous statement in Galatians 4:6: “And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ ” The cry of “the Spirit of his Son” is a cry to the Father, the God of Israel. The pattern here is Trinitarian. Paul recognizes that the Old Testament — the only Bible he had to go by — is Trinitarian. Paul receives the Hebrew Scriptures in the Spirit. Accordingly, he hears their testimony as radically Trinitarian. The Spirit uncovers what is there, although his doing so may ...
