Based on Todd Burpo’s #1 New York Times bestseller (for forty consecutive weeks), the 2010 movie Heaven Is for Real recounted a three-year-old boy’s alleged glimpse of heaven during an emergency surgery. Deceased grandparents were described in detail. So was Jesus. Sitting on his lap, the boy, Colton, discovered that Jesus—with “sea-green-blueish eyes”—had a rainbow horse. Even Gabriel was described in full color along with God the Father (also with blue eyes)—apparently a larger version of the famous angel. Yet the Holy Spirit was “bluish, but hard to see . . .”
“Bluish, but hard to see”: that description may be a fitting way of opening our exploration. Who exactly is the mysterious third person of the Trinity? Why does he seem to possess less reality or at least fewer descriptive features than the Father and the Son? Is this only a problem in popular culture—and, by implication, in the churches that have helped to shape it? Or is the Spirit’s profile blurry in the broader faith and practice of mainstream Christianity? According to Puritan divine John Owen, we enjoy “distinct communion with each person of the Trinity,” including the Holy Spirit.1 But do we? Or is our tendency to think of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as one person with three different names or “faces”? Perhaps we think of the Holy Spirit as a divine force or energy that we can “plug into” for spiritual power. Or as the kinder and gentler—more intimate—side of God. But a person—in fact, a distinct person of the Godhead?
It is always the right time to give sustained reflection on the Holy Spirit’s person and work—known technically as pneumatology. Yet it is especially appropriate in our contemporary climate. “Until recently,” notes Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, “it was commonplace to introduce pneumatological treatises with a lament over the Spirit’s neglect.” However, “one of the most exciting developments in theology has been an unprecedented interest in the Holy Spirit.”2 This interest has come from and reached across various traditions. As with the renewed interest in Trinitarian theology more generally, there are opportunities for discovery as well as distortion. Crucial insights abound from a variety of Christian traditions in recent years, along with criticisms (sometimes exaggerated) of ostensible neglect of the Spirit throughout the vast tracks of Christian history and consequent overcorrections.
Theology should attain to the highest (legitimate) academic standards, but it is done ultimately for the church and not for the academy. And it seems to be fairly evident that in our churches there is a serious polarization with respect to the Holy Spirit. Reacting against Pentecostal/charismatic movements, some Christians are suspicious of the topic. Many of us still remember the “Holy Ghost” from the old King James Version. For most modern people, a ghost is associated more with All Hallows’ Eve (a.k.a. Halloween) than with Pentecost Sunday. Especially in our age, the Holy Spirit is regarded (when taken seriously at all) as the “spooky” member of the Trinity. If you’re into that sort of thing—the paranormal and sensational—then the Holy Spirit is for you.
I want to challenge this association of the Spirit merely with the extraordinary. This is unfortunate all around, because it distinguishes his work too sharply from that of the Father and the Son and also because it distracts us from the vast range of his activity in our world and in our lives. On both sides of the Pentecostal divide, we too easily treat the Holy Spirit as a placeholder for the “extra” things in Christianity. Sure, we have the Father and the Son, but we also need the Holy Spirit. You may be redeemed, but have you been baptized in the Spirit? The Word is vital, but we must not forget the Spirit. Doctrine is important, but there is also experience.
Consequently, the Spirit becomes typecast into predictable roles—mostly cameo appearances, especially from the book of Acts—that provoke debates over whether we should expect the same signs and wonders today. We think of him when we are talking about regeneration and sanctification and when we are arguing about his more controversial gifts. Otherwise, he is out of sight and out of mind since the extraordinary gifts are seen as no longer in operation.
At the same time, Pentecostal theologian Frank Macchia observes, “For all their talk about the importance of pneumatology, Pentecostals have yet to couch their narrow pneumatological interest in charismatic/missionary empowerment within a broader pneumatological framework.”3 At this point, the major area of difference is over what one thinks about these “extras,” their centrality, and their continuing role in the life of the church.
Debates over signs and wonders have narrowed the Spirit’s repertoire. The role of the Holy Spirit in our faith and practice shrinks to the extent that he is associated exclusively with that which is spectacular, unmediated, spontaneous, and informal. When this happens, we easily settle for a false choice between formalism and enthusiasm. And when his significance is reduced to the inner experience of the individual, we miss some of the most interesting and essential features of his person and work.
Though a generalization, Benedictine theologian Kilian McDonnell puts the matter well:
In both Protestantism and Catholicism, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, or pneumatology, has to do mostly with private, not public experience. In Protestantism, the interest in pneumatology has been largely in pietism where it is a function of interiority and inwardness. In Roman Catholicism, its dominant expression has been in books on spirituality or on the charismatic renewal, or when speaking of the structural elements of the church. In the West, we think essentially in Christological categories, with the Holy Spirit as an extra, an addendum, a ‘false’ window to give symmetry and balance to theological design. We build up our large theological constructs in constitutive Christological categories, and then, in a second, nonconstitutive moment, we decorate the already constructed system with pneumatological baubles, a little Spirit tinsel.4
Similarly, Abraham Kuyper lamented at the end of the nineteenth century, “Even though we honor the Father and believe on the Son, how little do we live in the Holy Spirit! It even seems to us sometimes that for our sanctification only the Holy Spirit is added accidentally to the great redemptive work.”5
If the Spirit is too often an afterthought in our theology, it is not surprising to see sometimes a subtle demotion of the Spirit creep into our prayers, discourse, praise, and other aspects of daily piety. Obviously the Father is God, and faithful Protestants have battled mightily for the Son’s full divinity. However, the Spirit can easily be seen merely as a facilitator of our relationship with the Father and the Son. But is the Holy Spirit fully God in the same sense as the Father and the Son? Does the Nicene Creed sometimes give us pause when we say that the Spirit “together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified”? If the tendency of some is to see the Son as inferior to the Father, then surely the third person can be easily seen as even lower on the scale of divinity, most obviously indicated by the impersonal pronoun “it” often used to refer to him.
Even short of these errors, usually implicit, we can bring in the Spirit too late in the story. One of my central concerns in these chapters is to explore the Spirit’s distinctive role in every external work of the Godhead. The Spirit is neither “shy” nor a freelance operator; his work is not merely supplemental to the creating and redeeming work of the Father in the Son but is integral to the divine drama from beginning to end. In short, I want to widen our vision of the Spirit’s work.
The Father is the source of the Son and the Spirit—and of all good in creation and redemption. Christ is the lead character of the biblical drama: the Alpha and Omega, from Genesis to Revelation, creation to the consummation. “All things were created through him and for him” (Col 1:16; cf. John 1:3, 10; 1 Cor 8:6; Heb 1:2). Yet the Spirit is also introduced in the Bible’s second verse, carrying out his own distinct role in creation. We cannot even talk about Christ’s person and work apart from the Spirit’s role in the incarnation, ministry and miracles, obedience, death and resurrection. The Spirit’s work cannot be introduced for the first time under “the application of redemption.” Any authentically biblical doctrine of creation, providence, Christ’s person and work, Scripture, preaching, the sacraments, the church, and eschatology must include a robust account of the Spirit’s agency.
Before summarizing the main emphases of this book, it might be helpful to address two questions related to our context: First, why has the Spirit’s person and work (pneumatology) become front-and-center in recent decades? Second, what are some of the challenges as well as opportunities of this renewed interest?
Theologians would like to think that their tomes trickle down to the masses and shape Christian discourse and prayer. However, it is often the case that theological trends emerge more in response to the actual life of the church and the insights and experiences of the faithful. Long before the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, the faithful were being baptized, praying and living as Trinitarians. Knowledge of the Father in Christ and by the Spirit was first of all an experienced reality, albeit revealed by God in history and preserved in canonical Scripture, which gave rise to a high view of Christ and the Holy Spirit as fully divine with the Father.6 Subsequent theology was an attempt to wrestle with the drama (what God had done in history) and the doctrines (God’s interpretation of those events) as well as the doxology and discipleship revealed in Scripture.7 A classic example of this in the postapostolic church is Basil’s fourth-century treatise On the Holy Spirit. Hilary of Poitiers and Augustine of Hippo contributed rich reflections on the Spirit as the personal love and gift of the Father and the Son.
In subsequent centuries, especially in the West, it was frequently the case that the Spirit’s work receded from view to the extent that his work was transferred to ecclesiastical control. Catholic theologian Yves Congar notes that, instead of being seen as means of the Spirit’s operations, the sacraments often were regarded as efficient in and of themselves, rendering the Spirit somewhat irrelevant. The pope, the saints, and the Virgin Mary also could become “substitutes for the Holy Spirit.”8 In reaction, various spiritualist movements arose that set the Spirit in opposition to the church and its ministry of Word and sacrament. A cleavage developed between a hierarchical institution filled with abuses and charismatic individuals who sought a direct and personal experience of God through visions, miracles, and ecstasy even apart from the ordinary ministry of the church.
It is not saying too much, with B. B. Warfield, that the Reformation constituted a major rediscovery of the Holy Spirit. Whereas medieval theology emphasized grace as a created substance infused into the soul to aid its upward ascent, the Reformers proclaimed that the uncreated Spirit is the gift who unites sinners to Christ with all of his benefits. Despite Luther’s vehement criticism of the “enthusiasts,” Luther’s Small Catechism states, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.”9
It is widely recognized that among the magisterial Reformers, John Calvin especially contributed the richest pneumatological reflection. Of the Reformers, observes Pentecostal theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Calvin’s theology was the most thoroughly pervaded by pneumatology, although he was as critical as Luther of “enthusiasm” that separates the Spirit from the Word.10 Roman Catholic theologian Brian Gaybba goes so far as to say that “with Calvin there is a rediscovery—in the West at any rate—of a biblical idea virtually forgotten since patristic times. It is the idea of the Spirit of God in action.”11 The great humanist Desiderius Erasmus wrote a scornful letter to Calvin’s elder colleague Guillaume Farel reproaching Geneva: “The French refugees have these five words continually on their lips: Gospel, Word of God, Faith, Christ, Holy Spirit.”12 Yet Calvin was hardly alone in this regard when one recalls the names of other Reformed leaders: not only the well-known such as Bucer, Vermigli, Cranmer, Knox, Jan Łaski, and Beza, but women writers such as Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, and Olympia Fulvia Morata. Without any loss of Christ-centeredness, the Reformed confessions and catechisms give a prominent place to the person and work of the Spirit. In fact, mention of the Holy Spirit appears in the first answer of the Heidelberg Catechism.
Engaging Scripture as well as patristic and medieval sources, the era of what is often called Reformed orthodoxy reopened grand vistas on the Spirit in liturgical and devotional forms alongside more scholarly explorations. John Owen’s lengthy treatises on the Holy Spirit are merely examples of the enormous influence of Puritan writers like William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, and Thomas Goodwin. One thinks of Scots such as Gillespie and Rutherford as well as Continental contemporaries such as the Czech Jan Komenský (Comenius), Voetius, Witsius, and à Brakel, Pierre du Moulin and Jean Taffin, to name only a few. The influence of such sources as these, as well as Abraham Kuyper’s The Work of the Holy Spirit, will be apparent throughout this study. Whatever forgetfulness of the Holy Spirit may be evident in Protestantism generally and in Reformed circles particularly must be part of a forgetfulness of the rich treasures of our own past.
Just as the Reformation would have remained a university debate apart from the groundswell of popular concern, widespread interest in the Spirit today has been driven significantly by Pentecostal and charismatic movements over the last century. It may not be overstating things to suggest that groups that were considered sects in previous eras are now the mainstream of Christianity’s explosive growth in the majority world. While Pentecostalism was seen typically by mainline Protestants as an alien tradition rooted largely in an extreme form of Wesleyan revivalism, the charismatic movement swept through Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. However one judges this impact, there can be little doubt that these movements have influenced and even altered the faith and practice of global Christianity in a variety of ways.
Consequently, a new generation of Pentecostal theologians reflects sophisticated engagement with the ecumenical movement, eschewing the more anti-intellectual tendencies of the past. More significant perhaps is the number of Roman Catholic and Orthodox as well as mainline Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian and Reformed, and Baptist scholars who are identified as “renewal theologians.” Methodist theologian D. Lyle Dabney, for example, encouraged a number of other non-Pentecostals, such as Baptist theologian Clark Pinnock, to consider giving primacy to the Spirit across all of the loci of systematic theology.13 However, many who do not identify themselves with these labels nevertheless reflect this widespread interest today in the Holy Spirit.
And yet, as with the revival of interest in the Trinity, renewed interest in the Spirit does not always mean clarity or consistency with respect to historic Christian teaching. It is not to be assumed that the Spirit whom people have in mind is the Spirit identified in Scripture. Nevertheless, once theologians start talking again about Jesus as God incarnate, they inevitably become interested in the Trinity—and sooner or later, the Holy Spirit’s person and work. This was precisely the course of development in ancient theology that led to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
The apostle Paul upbraided the Corinthians for tolerating false teaching: “For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough” (2 Cor 11:4 ESV). The super apostles proclaimed not only a different Jesus and gospel but a different spirit—someone or something other than the Holy Spirit. All who are committed to the evangelical faith recognize the Scriptures not as the revelation of our pious experience—either as individuals or communities—but as the revelation of God from God, leading us to the Father in the Son by the Spirit. Our churches and Western culture share much in common with the world inhabited by the first recipients of Paul’s letters. One concern that I have is that many contemporary treatments move in the direction of depersonalizing the Holy Spirit. Since this concern is more implicit until the final chapter, I would like to explain what I mean.
It seems to me that we are living less in an atheistic era than in a pantheistic or at least panentheistic one.14 Stoicism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism bequeathed to Western thought the idea of a world soul or spirit, the divine heart of the cosmos that animates lifeless matter. With strong parallels in Eastern religions and philosophies, this has been a stubborn dogma that radical mystical traditions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have found difficult to shake—or to square with their fundamental texts and teachings.
For the idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, the third person of the Trinity was depersonalized as “Absolute Spirit,” indistinguishable from the process of history moving toward an entirely immanent consummation. Renewed interest in pneumatology among mainline theologians has gone hand in hand with renewed fascination with Hegel’s conceptual resources. I will interact with this challenge more directly in chapter 2.
Beyond this direct influence, a more generally Romantic-pantheistic attitude is evident in academic as well as popular culture in the West. One might even say, “We’re all ‘enthusiasts’ now.” In various non-Christian religions and philosophies, “the Spirit” or generic “Spirit” becomes central precisely because it avoids the particularity of the incarnate Son, Jesus of Nazareth, much less a Father who is seen as transcending the world as sovereign creator, ruler, and judge. In other words, the Holy Spirit is the person of the Godhead most likely to be assimilated to the world, either to one’s own spirit or to the spirit of the community (i.e., the church), or to the World Spirit as in Buddhism, Gnosticism, and New Age thinking. For those scandalized by the gospel’s specificity, (the) Spirit becomes the preferred deity for those identifying as “spiritual but not religious.”
The “universal fatherhood of God” was the central dogma of an earlier phase of Protestant liberalism. Here the emphasis was on universal morality and the feeling of absolute dependence. Jesus may have been divine “in some sense,” but not in the sense confessed by Christians for two millennia as one in essence with the Father. However, confidence in “God the Father Almighty” has suffered at the hands of various theological schools, alleging that it is the font not of every blessing but of hierarchical (especially male) oppression. Furthermore, it is argued the Father-Son relationship—especially in traditional atonement theology—represents “cosmic child abuse.” We are told increasingly that even Christ-centered theologies raise the specter of creedal divisions between religions and within the professing Christian religion in particular. Besides, the Christ of the creeds is the product substance metaphysics, we are told, which we all know or should know is wrong for some reason. It all seems a tangle, better left behind than sorted out, at least in the view of some notable theological projects today.
So the Spirit seems like just the right person of the Trinity for a pluralistic age. Nearly everyone today is “spiritual.” Furthermore, the Spirit—or just “Spirit”—is everywhere, empowering everyone for what they could do themselves but with greater difficulty. There are no vehement debates about the search for the historical Spirit. If Christ has been made into a wax figure by some Jesus scholars, the Holy Spirit seems even more susceptible to ideological and subjective manipulation and abstraction. So the Spirit becomes the obvious choice for a culture that eschews the particularity of the Father and the Son and the historical associations attending this particularity.
Depersonalized and universalized, the Spirit becomes immanentized—that is, confused with creation. Assimilated to the world or to one’s own inner spirit, such “Spirit”-centered movements drift easily into neopaganism. In short, exuberant talk about the Spirit may become just one more way of talking about ourselves. Yet it is precisely the job description of the Holy Spirit to keep this from happening.
Even in broader Christian piety, there is a tendency to treat the Holy Spirit as a force or source of power more than a person who is powerful. People are looking for “empowerment.” We still want to be in charge, but we would like to know where we might find additional resources for physical and spiritual health so that we may fulfill our dreams. In Christian circles we speak of “appropriating the Spirit,” drawing on the Spirit as if he were something like an electrical outlet or a generator that we “switch on and use,” as Packer puts it.15 No doubt, this tendency is part and parcel of an age obsessed with human autonomy, in which we try to find a place for God in our story of personal meaning, success, and achievement rather than allow ourselves to be written and cast into God’s story of the cross and resurrection.
A common temptation is to collapse the hypostases of the Trinity into one person: the heresy known as modalism. If we tend to confuse the persons in our thinking and praying, the danger is especially apparent with respect to the Holy Spirit. Even when we hold the distinction between the Father and the Son clearly in our hearts, it is easy to collapse the Spirit into “God” (a generic essence) or to consider the Spirit a divine something (the power or energy of God) rather than a divine someone (“the Lord and giver of life”). Do we sometimes halt when we confess that the Spirit “is worshipped and glorified” together with the Father and the Son? It is the strength of good prayers—said and sung—to train our hearts in the Trinitarian faith.
It is in the public service—the weekly gathering of the communion of saints—where this faith is won or lost. Whatever is received, done, or said there shapes our personal relationship with the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. In the fourth century Basil of Caesarea revised the liturgy then in widespread use to more intentionally inculcate a full Trinitarianism, calling pastors “to keep the Spirit undivided from the Father and the Son, preserving, both in confession of faith and in the doxology, the doctrine taught them at their baptism.”16 One example was Basil’s introduction of what we know as the Gloria Patri: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,” which stirred no small controversy among those who denied the appropriateness of worshiping the Spirit. It is not only a creedal rule that the Holy Spirit is to be “worshipped and glorified” together with the Father and the Son; these liturgies lead us to actually invoke the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit.
However, in many churches today prayers and songs have been stripped of Trinitarian references that had in earlier generations been woven into the warp and woof of worship. Not surprisingly, the result is often extemporaneous prayers that reflect our default setting of modalism. Even in doctrinally orthodox circles, one hears prayers that are confusing, as if the persons of the Trinity were interchangeable—perhaps even the same person. At least it seems that the person being addressed shifts back and forth without any specification. Sometimes the Father is thanked for coming into the world to save us, for dying for our sins, for indwelling us, or as the one who will return again. Very frequently, prayers conclude with “in your name, amen.” In whose name? Scripture teaches us to pray to the Father in the name of Christ: it is not the Father or the Spirit but the Son who is our mediator.
Some contemporary praise choruses reflect and reinforce this confusion of the persons, with praises directed to the Father for specific acts of the Son or to the Son for specific acts that Scripture attributes to the Spirit, and so forth. For example, in the popular chorus, “You Alone,” believers are led to pray as if they were Arians: “You alone are Father / and You alone are good. / You alone are Savior / and You alone are God.”17
Worship songs are intended not merely to facilitate personal expression of one’s feelings but to sing the truth deeply into our hearts: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” Paul exhorts, “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col 3:16 ESV). Luke reminds us that the early Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42 ESV). Anyone reared in the synagogue would have known what “the prayers” meant. Like a trellis, the formal prayers (said and sung) were a way of not only directing public worship but of shaping informal worship in the family and when alone. We are baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We pray to the Father, in the Son, by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. This does not require a particular book of liturgies, but it at least suggests that we are as intentional as our forebears about inculcating the Trinitarian faith in the hearts of today’s generation not only through explicit teaching but through our communication with the triune God in prayer and praise.
The Holy Spirit is the easiest person of the Godhead to depersonalize—and not only because of cultural forces. Even if we do not take things in a pantheistic direction, it is easy to lose sight of the Holy Spirit precisely because of who he is and what he does as revealed in Scripture.18 One might even say that, for the Spirit, being somewhat forgotten is an occupational hazard. In other words, some of our confusion about the Holy Spirit arises from a distortion of genuinely biblical truths.
First, God is an incomprehensible mystery. He has revealed enough about himself for us to apprehend him in faith, but we do not know his inner essence. Even the term “person” in Trinitarian discussions is used analogically and anthropomorphically. The subsistences of the Godhead are not persons in the way that three human beings are persons, with separate centers of consciousness, wills, and so forth. Scripture provides us with sufficient revelation of the Spirit’s identity and mission, but it is often difficult for us to remain within these bounds.
Second, even when we embrace the incomprehensible revelation of God as Trinity, it is not easy to connect the Holy Spirit to our experience. We know what a Father-Son relation is in human terms, but where does the Spirit fit? Rounding out the familial image, Mary has sometimes been given something close to the status of the third person in popular Roman Catholic piety. Some recent theologians have even referred to the Spirit as Mother to make the triad more resonant with our familial experience. However, this move lacks exegetical foundation. Even if the Spirit is likened to a mother or a hen in a few verses, this is in the Spirit’s relation to creation, not within the immanent Godhead. Furthermore, theologically, such a notion renders the Son a procession of the Spirit. Quite different, but no less problematic, is the comparison of the relations of the Son and the Spirit to the Father to those of a wife and child, respectively.19 Notwithstanding bold attempts to identify the Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and the Son, we simply do not have many passages about the Spirit’s role in the immanent Trinity. Even in John’s Gospel where we find the bulk of our Lord’s teaching about the Spirit, the emphasis falls on the relation of Jesus as eternal Son to his Father. Nevertheless, we have a great deal of revelation concerning the Spirit’s mission in the economy of creation and redemption—and it is that theater that will be the focus of our exploration.
Third, the Holy Spirit is so actively involved in our lives, subjectively, that we can take his presence for granted or identify him with our own inner self. Domesticating the Spirit to an individualistic mysticism, the Holy Spirit becomes one’s inmost voice. But again, this is a distortion of a truth. The Holy Spirit is the person who works within us, even to the point of indwelling us and interceding in our hearts. But the Holy Spirit is not our spirit, and his voice is not to be confused with our own. The Spirit is a divine person within us, not a divine part of us.
Fourth, from a proper focus on Christ we may improperly infer that the Holy Spirit has a minor part in the biblical drama. As in the other dangers, this error is a distortion of the truth rather than an outright contradiction of it. After all, Jesus taught us to read Scripture with himself at the center (Luke 24:25–27; John 5:39). Jesus himself taught us that the Spirit “will bear witness about me” (John 15:26 ESV; cf. 16:14–15). J. I. Packer compares the Holy Spirit to a spotlight that illumines a glorious cathedral at night.20 One does not stare into the light but beholds the Savior by that light. You can therefore be sure where the Spirit is active: wherever Jesus Christ is held up as the Savior of sinners. Therefore, even when we turn the spotlight on the Spirit, we find him engaged always in something related to Christ. Not only in the biblical drama but even in our own lives, our first experience of God is with the Holy Spirit. Yet it is he who makes us aware of and unites us to Christ through whom we meet a gracious Father. Precisely to the extent that the Spirit is active in our lives, we are focally aware of someone else!
The apostles exhibited this Christ-centered focus in their sermons recorded in Acts and their use of the Old Testament in the epistles. In fact, the efficacy of the Holy Spirit’s mission is measured by the extent to which we are focused on Christ, “the author and finisher of our faith” (Heb 12:2 KJV). Throughout Paul’s letters, the Holy Spirit is “the Spirit of Christ” because the Spirit’s mission is inextricably bound to Christ’s. The Holy Spirit wants nothing to do with a Spirit-centered Christianity. It is therefore understandable that precisely because of his success, the Spirit’s ministry in our lives would bring more attention to Christ than to himself. In short, we can take the Spirit for granted precisely because we are depending on him while we are focusing on Christ.
And yet this same history of promise and fulfillment includes the Holy Spirit as well. The promise is not that the Spirit would become our incarnate Redeemer; yet, the incarnation did come about through the Spirit’s activity. Together with the Father and the Son, the Spirit is at the center of the action from Genesis 1:2 all the way to Revelation 22:17. Christ is indeed the one who leads us to the Father, but it is only by the Spirit that this is possible. Ignoring the Spirit not only deprives us of encountering a person of the Godhead, but a weak pneumatology (i.e., a theology of the Spirit) inevitably encourages distortions of other important doctrines, including the person and work of Christ.
If we dare not depersonalize or marginalize, we should be wary also of overreacting by giving precedence to the Spirit over the Father and the Son. The very fact that the Holy Spirit indwells us may lead us to assume that he is the intimate and approachable person of the Trinity. Is the Father remote, perhaps even the angry parent who has to be coaxed into relating to us personally? Is the Son himself too distant and unconcerned, especially since he has ascended to the Father and will only return bodily at the end of the age? Does this mean that the Holy Spirit becomes the accessible, relevant, and friendly person of the Godhead?
Again we have a distortion of a biblical truth. The Holy Spirit’s intimate relationship to us, even to the point of indwelling us, can be interpreted wrongly in a direction that gradually separates him from the Father and the Son. We must walk a tightrope—Scripture does underscore the Spirit’s role in regenerating us; of uniting us to Christ and, in him, to the Father; of indwelling us and interceding within our hearts; of stirring us to love and fellowship with the Father and the Son as well as each other. Since our first contact with the triune God is with the Holy Spirit, who raises us from spiritual death and indwells us, we can wrongly conclude that the Spirit is the approachable person of the Trinity. Instead, we should see this work of the Spirit as initiated by the Father and purchased and mediated by the Son. Through the Spirit’s operation, all three persons come near to us and bring us into their fellowship.
For all of these reasons and more, we need to take a step back every now and again to focus on the Spirit himself—his person and work—in order to recognize him as someone other than Jesus or ourselves, much less something, such as a divine power or resource. We need to explore the vast territory of the Spirit’s operations. And then, hopefully, we obtain by this contemplation a fresh dependence on the Holy Spirit in every area of our lives.
1. John Owen, Communion with the Triune God, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 95.
2. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Holy Spirit and Salvation: The Sources of Christian Theology, ed. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), xi.
3. Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 18.
4. As quoted by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Holy Spirit: A Guide to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 82, from Killian McDonnell, “The Determinative Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” Theology Today 39.2 (1982): 142.
5. Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri De Vries (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), xii.
6. Gordon Fee elucidates this point helpfully in God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).
7. I am alluding here to the coordinates I mention in The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 13–15.
8. Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit: The Complete Three-Volume Work in One Volume, trans. David Smith, Milestones in Catholic Theology (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1997), 1:160–66.
9. Theodore G. Tappert, ed., “The Small Catechism (1529),” in The Book of Concord (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), 329.
10. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Pneumatology: The Holy Spirit in Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 46.
11. Brian Gaybba, The Spirit of Love: Theology of the Holy Spirit (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 100. With Matthew Levering (Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016], 321n43, from whom I discovered this reference, I think Gaybba overstates the point. Nevertheless, the richness of Calvin’s pneumatological reflections is exhibited throughout his theological reflections and exegetical commentary in ways that were not typical in late medieval treatises.
12. Quoted in Emile G. Leonard, The Reformation, vol. 1 of A History of Protestantism, ed. H. H. Rowley, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 306.
13. D. Lyle Dabney, “Why Should the Last Be First? The Priority of Pneumatology in Recent Theological Discussion,” in Advents of the Spirit: An Introduction to the Current Study of Pneumatology, ed. Bradford E. Hinze and D. Lyle Dabney (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001), 240–61. I appreciate Dabney’s argument that every locus should be enriched by pneumatological reflection, and in fact I set out to defend and exhibit this in this book. However, a sound pneumatology must be an outworking of Trinitarian theology, since the Spirit and his work are inseparable from the Father and the Son. Consequently, it is only by recognizing the Spirit’s relation to the other persons in both the processions and the missions (hence, across all theological loci) that our pneumatology remains biblical and tethered to the economy rather than a separate criterion that is more susceptible to speculation.
14. While pantheism holds that “all is God” and “God is all,” panentheism teaches that all is in God. Unlike pantheism, panentheism claims that God is more than the world, but unlike traditional theism maintains the interdependence of God and the world. For an excellent treatment of the subject, see especially John W. Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006).
15. J. I. Packer, Keep In Step with the Spirit, 2nd rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 26.
16. Basil, On the Holy Spirit 10.26 (NPNF2 8:17), emphasis added.
17. David Crowder Band, “You Alone,” The Lime CD (Six Step Records, 2004).
18. I will be referring throughout to the Holy Spirit with the masculine personal pronoun, not of course because I consider him to be literally gendered but in keeping with the language of Scripture and tradition.
19. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 257.
20. Packer, Keep In Step with the Spirit, 57.