Life in the Spirit

A Post-Constantinian and Trinitarian Account of the Christian Life

Snavely

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270632
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What would the church look like if Christians saw their lives as constituted by the Spirit's presence to live as Jesus lived? In a time when being "led by the Spirit" is defined more by achieving the "American Dream" than by Jesus's life, answering this question rightly seems all the more critical for the church to survive in a culture increasingly hostile to Christianity. Building upon the work of post-Constantinians John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas and upon the Trinitarian Spirit-Christology of Leopoldo Sanchez, this account of the Christian life provides a framework for seeing one's Christian life as one transformed by the Spirit to live in the resurrection reality of Jesus's sonship with the Father in the Spirit. In the process, one will discover that, for Jesus, being led by the Spirit meant trusting his Father to the point of death on a cross, trusting God to resurrect him even if he did not save him. Should it mean the same for Christians today? If so, this would require the church to reimagine its ministries for the Spirit to work repentance and faith rather than simple agreement. For Christians living in the Spirit, their lives might look very different.

1

The Christian Life as Life in the Spirit

Introduction

This work will give an account of the Christian life as life in the Spirit. This should be obvious enough from the New Testament witness and especially Paul’s description of the Christian life as the Spirit’s work of making people into the image of Jesus Christ. However, we should not take it for granted that we have and in fact live by such an account for two reasons. The first reason is that the kind of life Jesus lived is not taken seriously for what it means for a Christian to live a life in the Spirit, or even for just living their life as a Christian. The second reason is that the Spirit’s indwelling presence is not taken seriously as what led Jesus to live the kind of life he lived; which obviously fails to be the reason for his followers living the kind of life Jesus lived. Simply put, this account will show life in the Spirit as the basic way to describe a Christian’s life, as a disciple of Jesus, and which, by the Spirit making people disciples of Jesus, also produces a life that looks like Jesus’ life—a life lived in the Spirit.

The first reason recognizes how modern theology has distorted the nature of the Christian life by it not taking Jesus’ life seriously. As John Howard Yoder pointed out in The Politics of Jesus, modern theology has in various ways denied or ignored the thesis that the life of Christ speaks to the shape and direction also of the life of the Christian.1 Yoder accompanied his “post-Constantinian” critique of modern theology with a “post-Constantinian” account of the life of the Christian that follows Jesus, and he justified it on christological grounds. As Yoder would put it, his account worked out the practical implications of a “more radical” Chalcedonian Christology.2 What this working out consisted of was Jesus Christ’s life prescribing the shape and direction of the Christian life. The way Jesus lived obediently unto God prescribes how Christians are also to live unto God.

The second reason is a characteristic of much of Western theology, that is, a distorted view of the Spirit in which a Christian remains in control of their own life rather than the biblical view which shows the Spirit as the indwelling presence that led Jesus to live the kind of life he lived that led to the kind of death he died—intrinsically—and which produces in his followers the same kind of life Jesus lived that might just lead to the kind of death he died. This biblical view sees the Spirit as what “kills” one’s flesh so a person can be “raised” with Christ by the indwelling presence of the Spirit, making a Christ-centered life possible by the Spirit controlling one’s life by producing Jesus Christ’s life as one’s way of life. While this characteristic of Western theology and its impact upon the Christian life is much more difficult to recognize or explain, it will nevertheless be more apparent once a proper account of the indwelling presence of the Spirit is understood as central to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, a more complete description of this theological misunderstanding, its manifestations, and corrections must come later. What must come first is an account of the Spirit’s presence within the life of Jesus as the “constitutive ingredient” in how he lived the kind of life he did that led to the kind of death he died on a cross; not only that he lived in the Spirit but that he died in the Spirit. This account shows Jesus’ life as descriptive of a life lived fully in the Spirit as the Son of God the Father. As Jesus lived in the Spirit, his life not only prescribes his life as what it means to be a disciple, his life describes a life lived fully in the Spirit. His life in the Spirit is not simply a prescription (to take or not to take, in one’s own ability) as in Yoder’s account, but the actual description of what a life looks like that has the Spirit as the “constitutive ingredient” in their living as an adopted son of the Father. However, this account shows transformation by the Spirit, upon hearing the gospel, as the necessary condition for having and living in the Spirit, a transformation from being a son of “this age” in “this world” to being a son of God in his eternal kingdom to come. In this view, Jesus’ followers do not just have “sonship,” like an added quality or substance; they are adopted sons of the Father—by the indwelling Spirit of the Father that he gives through his only begotten Son Jesus Christ.

These two features of modern theology show that an account of the Christian life as life in the Spirit might still be an important task. Any tentativeness to such a pursuit is eliminated when we further consider that post-Constantinian accounts of the Christian life cannot actually yield a rich account of the Christian life as life in the Spirit precisely because its account of the person of Jesus Christ has no clear place for the Spirit’s indwelling presence in his own life. Still yet, the move to relate the life of Christ and the life of the Christian in any account of the Christian life is correct and should be followed. What is therefore desirable for this kind of project—one that accounts for the Christian life as life in the Spirit—is an account of Christ in terms of the Spirit, that is, a Spirit-Christology of a certain sort.

This sort of Spirit-Christology is one that not only shows Jesus’ life as what constitutes the Christian’s life, as Yoder’s account does, but shows, in a descriptive fashion, the kind of life Jesus lived as life lived in the Spirit—as an actual reality—in a way Yoder’s account cannot. In doing so, I will follow a path laid out by Leopoldo Sánchez in his published dissertation, Receiver, Bearer, and Giver of God’s Spirit.3 Sánchez provides an account that establishes the life of Christ in the Spirit as constitutive for the proclamation of the gospel and for further reflection into the intra-divine life of the Trinity. Following Sánchez’s account, I will further develop an account of Jesus Christ as he lived obediently unto the Father in the Spirit, showing his life to be life as the Son of God. As believers in Jesus as Lord, his followers are made fellow participants in Jesus’ life as the Son, “caught up” into the life of sonship as “other sons” of the Father by the same Spirit in which Jesus lived his life. This account follows a post-Constantinian account of the life of Jesus as what constitutes the Christian life, but, since the post-Constantinian accounts do not offer a clear place for the Spirit’s indwelling presence that constitutes such a life, this Spirit-Christology will explain how the Christian life is life in the Spirit. My thesis then is this: as Jesus lived the kind of life he lived as the Son of the Father in the Spirit, the Spirit also makes other sons of the Father in the image of Jesus Christ who then, as a result of this actual transformation by the Spirit, gladly follow him in the kind of life he lived—in the Spirit.

As for methodology, this Spirit-Christology will proceed upon the basis of Pauline theology that sees the Spirit as making other sons of the Father. Whereas this might be obvious to most readers, the necessary corollary to understand Paul’s dependence upon the work of the Spirit is the presupposition of the life Jesus lived in the Spirit and especially his death on a cross (Rom 6), which is never obvious to anyone (1 Cor 1:21; 2 Cor 4:4), that is, by identifying with a man who died on a cross one is actually given life. This way of making Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection constitutive for the Christian life was the lasting contribution of John Howard Yoder. Following Yoder, my plan is to also provide an account of Jesus’ life but one that sees the Spirit as the “constitutive ingredient” in Jesus living as the Son of God the Father. This account, in turn, will show how it is through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ that God pours out his Spirit of life (and thus, Jesus’ kind of life) upon and through his church, making other sons of the Father who live like Jesus lived.

In order to accomplish this, I will first provide a certain reading of Jesus’ life as he lived in the Spirit that opens up space for a more faithful reading of Luke’s account in Acts of the Spirit’s work of making and shaping people into the people of God, in the image of Jesus Christ, beginning at Pentecost and continuing until the end of this age. Chapter 1 will detail the post-Constantinian accounts of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, which show the significance of Jesus’ life for the Christian life, but which are also limited by their neglect of the Spirit’s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Christian Life as Life in the Spirit
• Chapter 2: A Spirit-Christology That Works for the Christian Life
• Chapter 3: A Trinitarian Spirit-Christology
• Chapter 4: God Gives His Spirit by Working Jesus Christ in Others
• Chapter 5: The Shape and Direction of the Christian Life
• Chapter 6: Concluding Summary and Implications
• Bibliography