CHAPTER 8
“. . . AND THE FELLOWSHIP
OF THE HOLY SPIRIT”
The Relational Nature of the
Spirit in God and Humans
ESTHER E. ACOLATSE
SOMETIMES I THINK WHATEVER Christians may conceive and debate about what constitutes “the sin against the Holy Spirit,” surely it must be or include the fact that the communion-forming, relationship-desiring aspect of the Godhead is thought of as one who strikes dread and portends division among Christians. It was not so long ago that Christians could easily pass for “Binitarians,” a notch above Unitarians in the way they think of and speak about God. In ecclesial settings Christians talk about God the Father, express gratitude to and for Jesus our Savior, and then shuttle between the two in worship. Even when at Pentecost we bid the Spirit come, he seems a third wheel. It is almost as if the third person of the Trinity, the eternal gift and giver and of the gifts of God’s people, was not from the beginning. Even now I fear that he has moved from the margins of our afterthoughts to the foreground in a most inappropriate way. He has become the “new show” in the theological town.
If I am honest, my presentation is probably one more attempt to do inadequate pneumatology. But perhaps there is a sense in which our inabilities to capture and frame what should be a proper theological aesthetic of the Holy Spirit is in order. It is rather difficult to paint an adequate picture of the Holy Spirit and perhaps appropriately so because the seeming elusiveness of the third person of the Trinity is forewarned in the Scriptures. The Spirit blows where it wills and shows up in various ways shape and form in the Scriptures. But at least we can try not to misrepresent the Spirit and thus do bad theology, and I am afraid that some of the works on the Spirit in our day is veering in that direction. In exploring the relational nature of the Holy spirit in God and humans, I am attempting to call attention to the ways in which we might already be doing some bad theology because we paint a false picture of the Spirit, especially in our account of how the Spirit works in and relates to human beings.
First I will explore the relational nature of the spirit within the triune God in Scripture by attention to aspects of Trinitarian and christological thought arguing for a Trinitarian pneumatology and christocentric pneumatology in tandem as the properly way to understand and speak about the relational nature of the Spirit in God. I will then ask questions of how that relationality allows us, if at all, to know how the Spirit relates to human beings. In this my primary conversation partner beyond Scripture is John Levison, who has written comprehensively about the Holy Spirit and the human spirit and about the Spirit’s presence in the world. Levison is also my theologian of choice because he speaks from and to many sides of the theological aisles and has been engaged, especially by Pentecostal theologians,1 which is key to locating him on any and everything pneumatological.
Before I continue to lay out what I hope to share in our time together, or better still what I hope you will hear and come to know, I want to borrow from Augustine, whose language—or attempts to put into language—about the nature and substance of the triune God speak to my own attempts. Condiffidence (at the border of confidence and diffidence) is the operative word here. This is what Augustine says:
From now on I will be attempting to say things that cannot altogether be said as they are thought by a man—or at least as they are thought by me. In any case, when we think about God the Trinity we are aware that our thoughts are quite inadequate to their object, and incapable of grasping him as he is; even by men of the caliber of the apostle Paul he can only be seen, as it says per speculum in aenigmate (I Cor 13:12). Now since we ought to think about the Lord our God always, and can never think about him as he deserves; since at all times we should be praising him and blessing him, and yet no words of ours are capable of expressing him, I begin by asking him to help me understand and explain what I have in mind and to pardon any blunders I may make. For I am keenly aware not only of my will but of my weakness. And I also ask my readers to forgive me, wherever they notice that I am trying and failing to say something which they understand better, or which they are prevented from understanding because I express myself so badly; just as I will forgive them when they are not able to understand on account of their tardiness.2
NATURE OF GOD IN TIME AND SPACE
Time, space, and essence/substance is how we refract relationship and relationality, and it makes sense to think of God from whom we acquire personhood and relationality as occupying time and space and having essence.3 In the beginning we observe this time and space as the bookends within which God operates even if we think of eternal time and limitless space. One cannot say anything substantive about the nature of God without speaking about God as person and what is meant by persona and substantia. Thankfully we have two chapters that have fleshed out this concept at length.4
In both the Old and New Testaments, there is a sense that no real conversation about “the spirit,” whether in relation to God or to humans, is without the three, so we cannot talk about the Spirit without reference to the Trinity. I begin this conversation, or conversation starter, then with a recap of what I think the church from millennia has been teaching about the Trinity. For the church, God is three persons, and the third person, the Holy Spirit, might be seen as the third term that holds the relationship of the Godhead together. What does it mean or look like when the church declares in her creedal statements that we believe in God the Father Almighty and in his Son, and then we add on belief in the Holy Spirit? How is the Holy Spirit related to the Father and Son within the one Godhead? What does it mean when we say that the Spirit is gifted to the world or the church from the Father and the Son? How are we to read Jesus’s words to the disciples about the Spirt he will send, who at the same time is himself coming back to them to be with them. If this is the salvific presence of the second person, we might be speaking about the Son again, and maybe practically speaking (and you might throw your Bibles at me if you like), we are, as I have already suggested, “Binitarians” rather than “Trinitarians,” but that is for another time.5 These are legitimate questions that hide in the corners of our ecclesial psyches that we may elide for now because we also know the scriptural testimony is of Father, Son, and Spirit. How they are related, especially how the Spirit relates to the two and even what we mean by “spirit” of God, may continue to exercise our theological muscles.
READING THE SPIRIT IN THE TRIUNE GOD: PITFALLS AND FALLACIES ALONG THE WAY
Approaches to the study of the Holy Spirit in the past have been fraught with two problems. One problem has to do with ignoring a deep Trinitarian basis of the work of the Spirit in the world. This omission is, I think, usually an attempt to accommodate religious pluralism and to understand the work of the Spirit beyond ecclesial spaces and beyond the Christian religion. But in doing so, we almost elide the Christian notions of God as “triune” and as “person.” We come dangerously close to panentheism in a bid to see the Spirit of God everywhere often collapsing the divide between Creator and creation. I’ll say more about this later.
The second problem that we have in how to understand the Holy Spirit is that we forget that we cannot properly speak about the Spirit without grounding the work of the Spirit christocentrically—that is, a strong Christology is required for a good pneumatology.
While I invite us to ground pneumatology in both the Trinity and Christology, I am aware of the questions that such a move can raise. For instance, the whole church6 does not agree on the understanding of the Godhead as three in one, recall here unitarians as well as strands of the apostolic denomination, which are yet a part of the church if we are not to dabble in the murky waters of the “invisible and visible church.” Secondly, our Christologies are also not so clean cut—we are still those who debate and divide over the nature of Jesus, whether he is one or two natures.7 Additionally, even when we have overcome the tensions between Logos Christology8 and Spirit Christology9 and see both in tandem as the properly way to conceive the relation of the Son to the Father, our theology still stalls. The very notion of the Son as birthed of the Spirit, from the Spirit, undergirded by the Spirit in his earthly life and ministry, troubles the idea of the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son “worshiped and glorified,” as our creedal statement stands. Never mind that now we have the Spirit here in the world, the Son a glorified body with the Father where . . . well, where God is, which is also everywhere. But we will not linger here. For now I just raise the issues to suggest that even when we speak about God and God’s inner relationality from what we assume to be the perspective of true and tried orthodoxy (whatever that may be), and when we do so with faithful persuasion, we intuit that we do so as those who indeed see through a glass dimly, until we see and are seen face to face.
Yet we probe these ideas as an act of obedience as those who seek after God, to know and to love and to serve. So we keep searching and speak tentatively yet courageously. What I share is part of what and where I have been excavating. The terrain is large, so I draw insights largely from Scripture and how the Scriptures have been utilized to uncover the relationship among the Godhead and how the Holy Spirit relates to humans and operates in the world. In this task I speak as an African Christian who has lived half my life in Africa and the other in the West—Ghana and North America in particular. I speak thus from and to the theologies of these ecclesial spaces with an eye to what we can learn about life in the Spirit and the work of the Spirit in the world and in our day. In spite of these many caveats offered about the limits of Trinitarian and christological basis of the relationality of the Spirit in God and humans, however, I reiterate, the way to avoid the double pitfalls of pneumatology mentioned earlier is to ground pneumatology in Trinity as well as in Christology. Let me explain.
THE RELATIONALITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD IN THE SCRIPTURES
There is a Trinitarian concept of the work of the Spirit in the world throughout the Scriptures. The work of the Spirit in the world is seen in both creation and incarnation. Long before the church, the relationality of the Spirit with the Father and the Son is circumscribed by the work of creation and redemption. The Spirit of God is from the beginning seen birthing the cosmos out of chaos and is at one with the triune God as the world is called forth into being with the Word without whom nothing was made that was made. We need to understand that the Trinitarian basis of the work, according to the Scriptures, transcends the bounds of Israel and the church. Yet we have to be careful that in our bid to accommodate a theology of religions and pluralism, we do not speak in ways that circumvent Christ, undercut the Trinity, and make nonsense of our pneumatology.
The procession and mission of the Spirit in the world is in the incarnation, in salvation and sanctification, and in final consummation. So when we speak from a Trinitarian basis about the work of the Spirit in the world in time and space, which is our starting point according to the Scriptures, we see the work of the triune God in its cooperation and in appropriation.10 In creation and salvation and transformation of the whole world, it is the Spirit of God and of the Son “gifting” the creation with life and new life, respectively and together.
The relationality of the triune God is seen in God’s relationship with the material world.11 The Spirit of God has always been in cooperation with the material, never repudiated nor set aside but always with.12 But this “withness” is, in the same way as the inner relationality of the triune God, present with yet distinct from. Father, Son, and Spirit are always present with each other and yet distinct in function from each other in their work and their relation to the world.
As Catholic theologian Jacques Dupuis notes, when we ground the work of the Spirit in the world in the Trinity, we avoid three common errors.13 Two are pertinent to our discussion. The first is that which puts Christ and God in opposition, thus rendering either a theocentric or christocentric approach to pneumatology, and the second, a pneumatology that valorizes the role of the Holy Spirit over that of Jesus Christ as if the Holy Spirit is not, in Johannine theology, the salvific presence of the risen Christ. One only has to attend to the liturgy of much charismatic/Pentecostal worship to encounter this anomaly. Thus not only do we require a pneumatology grounded in the Trinity, but we also need to ground it in Christology. When we do, we uncover the relational nature of the Spirit in the Godhead.
A CHRISTOCENTRIC PNEUMATOLOGY
The relational nature of the spirit in the Godhead is not only embedded in the Trinity but in many ways a matter of the relationship between the Son and the Spirit. The incarnation is the primary point of the relationship between the Son and the Spirit. The Spirit of God, not an independent spirit, overshadows Mary. In our creedal statement, conception takes place of the Holy Spirit. God thus through God’s Spirit incarnates the Son, and even when we try to speak of the relationship of the Spirit to the Son, it is impossible to do so without thinking and speaking Trinitarian language. From birth to the resurrection and beyond, Jesus is both the gift and giver of the Holy Spirit. The inseparable unity of the Father and the Son is also with the Son and the Spirit. At the same time the incarnate Son was also spirit so that we have a relation of Son and Spirit. The insights of The Shepherd of Hermas are helpful here:
The Holy Spirit which pre-exists, which created all creation, did God make to dwell in the flesh which he willed. Therefore, this flesh, in which the Holy Spirit dwelled, served the Spirit well, walking in holiness and purity and did not in any way, defile the spirit . . . for the conduct of this flesh pleased him, because it was not defiled while it was bearing the Holy Spirit on earth. (Herm. Sim V, 6:5–6)
Clearly what we see here is an intimate and inseparable union between the Son and the Spirt fashioned by God. Notice that the Spirit dwelt in the flesh, the spirit enfleshed in the incarnation. This concept of the unity of Son and Spirit is extended in the work of Bishop Theophilus of Antioch (c.169) in his three books to Autolycus.
For Bishop Theophilus, Logos—the eternal Word that in the beginning (John 1)—combines with the Spirit of God (Gen 1) and Sophia (Prov 8:22) together with the power of the Most High (Luke 1:35) imbue and speak through the prophets about God’s acts in creation.14 Thus in God, pneuma and logos exist in inseparable unity, and this pneuma is also sophia, the Spirit of wisdom, and in Johannine theology, the Spirit of truth who returns to the church and the world the truth who is Jesus. Always the Spirit and the Logos eternally coexist, the Son incarnate by the power of the Spirit, the same Spirit in turn is the gift from the Father whom the Son requests for us, and at the same time the Spirit is for the Son to give to us. So how are they related again?
THE RELATIONAL NATURE OF THE SPIRIT IN HUMANS
So far, we have indicated the proper way to understand the relational nature of the Holy Spirit in the Godhead is to think both in terms of Trinity and Christology. Our explorations indicated that if we are wise, we speak with muted tones and never dogmatically about this inner relationality because we know only in part. As Anselm ponders, speaking of the relation of Father and Son,
For the Father and the Son are so distinct that when I speak of both I see that I have spoken of two yet, what the Father and the Son are is so identical that I do not understand what I have called two. For although the Father, considered distinctly, is completely the supreme spirit, nevertheless the spirit who is Father and the Son are not two spirits but one. Thus, just as the properties which are unique to each do not admit of plurality because they do not belong to both, so what is common to both constitutes an individual oneness even though the whole of it belongs to each.15
In this regard, we are in the realm of mystery, notes Anselm.
The same Trinitarian and christological considerations need to be brought to bear on the relationship of the Holy Spirit in humans, including the idea that even here we might be in the realm of mystery. And yet not mystery in the sometimes opaque way that it presents in the relationship with the Godhead. We are not in the same semidarkness about how God relates to human beings, and we can take the existence of such relationship for granted, as well as take for granted that the Spirit of God communes with humans since we have various proofs.
First, if we know anything about God and the inner workings of the Godhead laid out in Scripture by the prophets and apostles, we owe it to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And we understand inspiration regarding the Scriptures and their reception as emanating from the corporation of the Holy Spirit and the human spirit. If we can have knowledge ad extra from the Scriptures about the Godhead as explored and taught by the abbas and ammas of the faith—and even as we gathered here at the conference seek—we owe it to the presence and fellowship of the promised Holy Spirit to lead into truth. (John 14ff)
Second, what we have is based on promise. Jesus promises the Holy Spirit to his disciples before his death and underscores. If we read John correctly, this in fact was himself in Spirit (John 16:12–24). Pentecost ushers in the Holy Spirit and by doing so the inception of the church as we know it. Acts 2 sets the tone to envision what the presence of the Holy Spirit and his relationship with humans would be. A powerful and active spirit that collapses hierarchies (unlike what is depicted in the Old Testament where he graces kings, priests, and prophets) and binds all humans together as recipients of God’s grace. At the least we come to understand that everyone can be addressed by God and respond to God. The Spirit is not an exclusively Christian possession as we well know (there is no such thing as Christian flesh; flesh is flesh), for “the Spirit blows where it wills.” But in what way is the Spirit of God in relation with humans, Christians or otherwise, and should such a distinction be even considered? What is the nature of that relationship? To ponder . . .
If to date we are still finding our way in the terrain of the relationality of the Holy Spirit in the Godhead via the Scriptures and theological explorations, at least we are not scratching our heads as we do so. I find that it is an entirely different matter to walk the terrain of how we talk about the nature of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and humans. Some of the pneumatology in our day and seeing how the relationship of the Spirit with the human spirit is to be construed makes for rather troubling reading. The kind of ineffable plurality we find in the relationship of Father and Son and in Son and the Spirit, where we cannot quite tell where one begins and the other ends, which can be ascribed to mystery, becomes almost confusion bordering on idolatry in how we speak of the relational nature of the Spirit in humans. Some of our pneumatology, whether in popular culture, church, and the theological academy, both in Africa and the West, lacks a thoroughgoing biblical perspective. What we have, across the board among the numerous “theologies of the Spirit” in our day, describes anything but the Holy Spirit of God. In many instances the conversation runs along denominational lines and theologies or along North-South lines,16 a signal that we are talking about anything but the communion forming Spirit of God. The expression of what is assumed to be the presence of the Spirit of God operating in humans, under the guise of “led by the Spirit,” goes beyond biblical literalism to bizarre behaviour that causes harm to self and others.17
THE SPIRIT IN POSTMISSIONARY AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY
Nowhere more than in the church in Africa, where church historians valorize numerical growth and the church celebrates the explosion of Christianity, do we encounter what amounts to a divisive spirit of divination touted as the Spirit of God. The emphasis is on signs, sounds, and wonders. And since congregants seek this, the need of pastors to supply what seems more like voyeurism accounts for some of the growing numbers. There is a demand for what amounts to divination, in the form of “visions” and “word of knowledge” from individual members to indicate that the pastor (often referred to as the “man of God”) is filled with and operates with the “Spirit of God.” There is insatiable demand for pastors who can indicate a direct line to God. Many of them act as covert comediators with Jesus, and sometimes may wield more power than him for access to God. We need to sound a cautionary note and ask that people hold the “Hallelujahs!” on the explosion of Christianity on the continent. In our day, the turn to pneumatology in the theological guild may be a sign of hope for a needed corrective (this conference is one such sign), but how do we ensure that it does not become one more academic exercise where we dabble in theologology (talking about talking about God) rather than talking about and relating to God and, in this instance, the Spirit? I find it amazing and quite lamentable that in Africa, where life is refracted theologically and everything operates at the level of “spirit,” little has been written about pneumatology of or for the church. On the other hand, all over the place on the Western academic front we see theologies of the Holy Spirit abound with hyperattention to the third person of the Trinity, even when the need or evidence of such attention is not indicated in our ecclesial spaces.
In a recent book, Anthony Thistleton has given us a useful sketch of pneumatology from various authors ranging from biblical times through the epochs of the church to today.18 While his comprehensive survey covers numerous authors and themes about the Holy Spirit, I think the scholar who has attended most to the spirit in the twenty-first century is John (Jack) Levison. He paints for us what I see as a new aesthetics of the spirit.
THE NEW THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF THE SPIRIT: ENGAGING THE WORK OF LEVISON
Everything we know about the Spirit of God in the Scriptures indicates that there can be no exact description of who he is and no way to paint an adequate picture of the acts and signs of his presence for all time.19 The Spirit blows where it wills (John 3:8) and shows up in various ways, shapes, and forms both in the Scriptures and in the work of various theologians today. Some theologians, however, suggest that they have down pat what and who he is and how one should think about the Spirit, while noting the ineffableness of the Spirit and his work. John Levison is one theologian who has written extensively on the spirit and has engaged theologians across the ecclesial aisles as he tries to help people grasp what the spirit is doing at the personal private and corporate public spheres. This makes his work available to many and one can easily see him as the go to modern theologian for all this on the Spirit, and rightly so.
Levison is to be commended for wresting the Holy Spirit from Pentecostalism and its ecclesial expression, where sometimes pneumatology is freighted to the point of making Jesus otiose. His careful exegetical work on the language of the Spirit and spirits, including the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the human spirit, spans Old Testament, New Testament, and intertestamental periods. It is rather troubling that with such laborious exegetical work, his insights and conclusions leave us wondering whether the Spirit he offers us bears any real resemblance to the Holy Spirt, the third person of the Trinity. In spite of how close he stays to the biblical narrative in his analysis of the Spirit, which covers Israelite, Jewish, and early Christian ideas, and has received acclaim from Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals alike, he demonstrates that he is a product of his time. Excavating the foundational, postfoundational, nonfoundational, and postmodern approaches to analysis and interpretation of the Scriptures, many of us land right back at the large feet of modernity, with its insistence on weeding the supernatural from biblical accounts.20 Such is the case with Levison’s aesthetic of the Holy Spirit.
At first blush, Levison’s description of the Holy Spirit, which he offers through painstaking exploration of both Old Testament and New Testament Scriptures and extra biblical historical data as presented in Filled with the Spirit, helps us overcome the extreme dualism of the Holy Spirit especially as it is conceived in the churches in the Global South. Yet the way he refracts the work of the Spirit in and through us ultimately conflates the two moments of the work of the Holy Spirit and eventually conflates the human spirit and the Holy Spirit.
Since Levison’s analysis on this important theme of the Spirit and the relational nature of the spirit in human beings (and it is not quite clear to what he refers here, whether human spirit or Holy Spirit as in the third person of the Trinity) has had acclaim from Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals alike, he deserves careful consideration because his work could have far reaching consequences for the whole church in their understanding of the Spirit, I think, in the way that the long arm of Bultmann’s demythologizing tugs at how we hear and interpret Scripture today.
His exegesis and interpretation of the work of the spirit in humans draws on key biblical antecedents as in the examples of characters like Daniel and Joseph and their rare gift of dreams and dream interpretation, as well as the differing but great prophetic gifts of Micah and Isaiah, to name a few. We know these characters and their stories—I don’t have to fill you in. The presence of the spirit in these characters, Levison avers, is not something that comes from outside of them. It is rather a reifying of what always existed in them when the occasion called for it.
There is no doubt that humans are spiritual beings, have spirits though they are not spirit as in the third component of their being, and that God’s Spirit undergirds humans as embodied souls. This spirit thus allows for facility in how humans live. Additionally, there are charisms, and in both theological and psychological parlance we speak of grace-given gifts, some of which certain individuals wield to perfection. Levison gives us examples from well-known characters in the Bible as evidence of this point: Daniel and Joseph in their gift of dream and interpretation are notable examples. For Levison, what is going on with Joseph and Daniel in their giftedness is definitely the work of the spirit, but it is not the working of the spirit that comes upon them from outside of them and who then exits the scene and returns, it is not an imbuing with but a residing in. The difference between Daniel and Joseph (and he would later refer to some prophets) and other humans, it seems, is the extent to which individuals have allowed for the cultivation of the particular skill with which they have been gifted and which the spirit (sometimes holy spirit in all lowercase letters) stirs in them. The question we need to ask is whether the breath of God in humans is the same as the Holy Spirit, the third person of the triune God? What exactly is this spirit sometimes described as holy with a lowercase h? Levison is clear that Israel’s literature does not make any such distinctions, so we should not either.
When one carefully examines Levison’s work, one is left wondering about several holes in his argument and exegeses of key passages, as well as his exploration of events dealing with the spirit. Of special concern is his understanding of Luke’s account of Pentecost in Acts as well as the meaning and evidence of what being filled with the spirit entails or what is going on with the slave girl with whom Paul has a confrontation and out from whom he subsequently casts a spirit of divination. While most mainstream Evangelicals and Pentecostals would see two differing spirits and powers at work in this confrontation, Levison sees the same spirit at work in different ways in the two key players and eventually interprets the imbuing with power at Pentecost and the glossolalia through the lenses of the Delphic cult.21 For him it is mainly ecstatic behavior not uncommon to the region. At the end, we are left with a Holy Spirit that is not supernatural and that we cannot distinguish from the human spirit. Of course, he is right in cautioning against the tendency toward both rationalism (West) and extreme supernaturalism (Global South). We have to be vigilant against falling into either of the traps set for navigating the hermeneutical issues attendant to what the Scriptures mean by the work of the Spirit. Yet the way Levison is framing the questions, and the vision he is casting for theological engagement with the world picture painted in the strange world of the Scriptures, is in real danger of expelling the supernatural completely from the character and account of the Holy Spirit. He is thus in some ways closer to Durkheim than to Bultmann, whom we can be certain most evangelical theologians would normally critique and blame for the legacy of demythologizing the Scriptures, which still dogs biblical interpretation to date.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that the way we do systematic theology has left us thinking quantitatively about the Godhead; the Trinity as three persons in one has us in a bind. So whether we are doing Christology or pneumatology, we find ourselves stuttering around how to say what we mean because the terminology is bound up in the doctrine of God, which we have already parsed quantitatively. That problem and its ramifications loom large in Levison’s account of the Holy Spirit in Filled with the Spirit. It is such that while his analysis and insights that cover this important theme in Christian theology is intriguing, he assimilates things that are not there as such, and in the end we are offered at best an ordinary mysticism of the Holy Spirit in association with the human spirit. But this offering is not adequate to the biblical data in which the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit in the Old Testament (that is, the Spirit of God), breaks in upon people and gives them power to do extraordinary things, such as the apostles’ miracles, exorcisms, and the preaching of the gospel with signs and power after Pentecost in Acts. Indwelling and miraculous acts still accompany the work of many a preaching of the gospel in the Global South.22
Ultimately, as I argued and articulated earlier,
Levison’s account offers us an ordinary notion of the Spirit, at once common, real and indefinable and what leads to a domesticated ordinary mysticism, generic and thus problematic. It seems appealing and gentrified to fit the mood of the age. This account of the Holy Spirit seems appealing and updated to fit the mood of the age: a Spirit that bothers no one and whom no one really need bother with if they do not want to—even though always somehow present.23
It allows people to be spiritual and not religious and especially to eschew Christianity and the demands of the gospel in their lives yet hold themselves out as Christian in the public sphere if need be. The real far-reaching implication of his conclusion is that refining the human spirit with the presence of the Spirit at work in humans is all that is required to fulfill God’s purposes.24 It would imply then that redemption is not really necessary. A stretch maybe, but perhaps not. It is for this reason that an inadequate pneumatology ultimately makes for bad theology, because we would not have the Son. How then do we account for the Father in the economy and therefore speak of the God we know?
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE HOLY SPIRIT: GENERAL AND PARTICULAR
If the way Levison narrates the relationship of the Holy Spirit with the human spirit is not theologically adequate, what is the nature of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and humans? No doubt there is Trinitarian theology of the Spirit at work in the world, and Levison is right in calling our attention to the ways in which God acts through peoples across time to fulfills God’s purposes. We note that in the Scriptures even across religions if we are paying attention.
There is legend about a Sufi mystic: Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, “I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.”25
But why would a theologian like Levison, who might be assumed to be even bibliocentric, draw the kind of conclusions he comes up with, those which seem to go against the Scriptures. I think there are likely two reasons: one is modernity and the critical method of interpretation of Scripture. In this regard we have all drank the Bultmannian Kool-Aid (or draft of beer). Embedded in Levison and approaches like his is the problem of modernity. While we eschew the extreme supernaturalism of the Global South, there is the loathing to acknowledge that there is another spirit in the world opposed to the Holy Spirit. There is the loathing to own and account for personal evil or sin for which atonement and therefore the Son was necessary. It is to refuse to acknowledge as that there are four dramatis personae in the theatre of the world’s stage. Somehow it may even mean that the Spirit won’t have much to do. But is not the Spirit to cause us to fall in love with Jesus and thereby to be drawn to God because of the Son’s task to draw us to the Father? Is it also possible there is a fuller desired end of the work of the Spirit in humans that is more than the sanctification of believers for their sake but for the ultimate end of returning all peoples to Edenic communion anticipated in the second creation account?
Second, in our day, diversity and pluralism has birthed a political correctness and civility that I think is hurting the church. Sure, we need to pay attention to the religious other and even learn from them, but we cannot tiptoe around the clarity of the Scriptures about chosenness and election and God’s personal relationship with specific groups and peoples within larger groups. Not even the failure of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western missionary enterprises should cause us to cower and not say that there is an intimate, promised fellowship between the Holy Spirit and the called people of God to which others are not and cannot be privy and that their relationship is predicated on mutual giving and receiving of love emanating in obedience on the part of the believer (John 14:23). So while there is the general Trinitarian work of the spirit in the world, there is a particular communion of the Holy Spirit, an intimate supernatural fellowship of the Spirit with believers. The nature of this relationship looks like everything the Son the giver promised. If we follow the promise of the Johannine farewell discourse, we know that he is both comforter and sanctifier and that his life in us separates us from the world. He convicts us of sin, of righteousness, and of judgement so that we do not do these on our own and act more harshly with ourselves than God would. He is sanctifying to ease the way of recovering sinners so they can raise their eyes Godward. He is the one who carries us in prayer when we cannot know even how to pray aright (Rom 8:26). Above all, he is our seal (2 Cor 1:21–22; Eph 1:13–14) for the day when we are drawn finally into God. Our life with him now is practice time for eternal presence of God. Meanwhile, the in-filling, as Jesus promised, is like a well that can last us for the long haul. Our spiritual hunger and thirst organs are attached to a wellspring that is self-generating. Our work is simple: get close, drink deep, and find it true. Now that’s a doxological moment.
NOTES
1. See conversations between John Levison and Pentecostal theologians on the Spirit in Pneuma 33, no. 1, Brill (January 2011).
2. Augustine, De Trinitate 5.1.1 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 50, p. 207; Edmund Hill translation, p.189), cited in F. B. A. Asiedu, From Augustine to Anselm: The Influence of De Trinitate on the Monologion (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 265.
3. Theologically, to speak of God in se is to speak of a being outside and above time. The immanent God, the God we know, however, has shown himself to us in time, “In the beginning” (Gen 1:1), and then in a particular time and place in the Son in the fulness of time.
4. The chapters in this volume by Fred Sanders and Lucy Peppiatt give attention to what can be known about God as triune persons.
5. Unitarians and some strands of Apostolic tradition come to mind in this regard.
6. I note here the old understanding of the “visible and invisible” church in Augustinian theology and ecclesiology and even the push back against this way of viewing the church by people like Collin Gunton who situate the doctrine of the church in the communion of the Trinity. See his Theology through the theologians: Selected Essays 1972-1995 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996).
7. For example the Eastern and Western churches differ on how they see how the divinity and humanity of Christ coinhere.
8. Here we conceive the Son as proceeding in the eternal Word of the Father.
9. The Son emanates from the Spirit: “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man”. (Nicene Creed)
10. We allude here to the Thomist Doctrine of Appropriation in which all three persons are involved in the acts within the economy while cognizant of the personal mode of each Trinitarian act by a particular person of the Trinity.
11. When Paul speaks of the resurrection and describes the one and the other as a sowing in the ordinary body but rising as spiritual body, he places spirit and body together not in opposition.
12. It is in Gnostic thought that we find the break between God, conceived as spirit, and the world not in Hebraic thought. Even in indigenous religions such as African Religions, the Supreme Being and the spirits are almost at one with all creation.
13. Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 206.
14. Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autoclycum, trans. Robert M Grant (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 39ff (2:10).
15. Anselm, The Monologion 1.59–60, in A New Interpretative Translation of the Monologion, trans. Jasper Hopkins, pp. 157–59, cited in F. B. A. Asiedu, De Trinitate in From Augustine to Anselm: The Influence of the Trinitate on the Monologion (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 359.
16. See a fuller account in Esther Acolatse, Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism in Africa and the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018).
17. Appalachian snake handlers come to mind here.
18. Anthony Thiselton, The Holy Spirit—In Biblical Teaching, through the Centuries, and Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013).
19. In much of this section, I draw on my previously published work, Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit.
20. Acolatse, Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit, 216.
21. John R. Levison, Filled with the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 321, 325–35.
22. This is indicated with a caveat that there are many charlatans and much Simonism going on that plagues Christianity in the Global South.
23. Acolatse, Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit, 6.
24. I think part of the problem with our understanding of the nature of the relationship of the Spirit in humans may be due to a faulty anthropology. The concept of the tripartite being inherited perhaps from Hellenistic thought is peripheral to the New Testament, but we have erroneously given it a central place in our theology. When we talk about the human spirit, we talk as though it were a tangible reality on its own, as the Spirit is a tangible person of the triune God. This is a large issue with the notion of the human spirit and the Spirit in African Christianity as well, which I have tried to address elsewhere. See Acolatse, For Freedom or Bondage? A Critique of African Pastoral Practices (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).
25. Cited in Patrick J. Ryan, SJ, Amen: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Dialogue (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 40.