CHAPTER 10
HOW THE SPIRIT GIVES
Along with exploring the distinctness of the Spirit’s person and operations in the external works of the Trinity, my goal in this study has been to highlight the ways in which the Holy Spirit is identified in Scripture with not only—or even primarily—that which is extraordinary, spontaneous, and chaotic, but with creating faith, beautiful order, knowledge and wisdom, and love with its fruits even through ordinary creaturely means. Taking up the relationship of the Spirit to the means of grace, this chapter is an important link between the gifts that the Spirit gives to us as individual believers by uniting us to Christ and his role in simultaneously uniting us to his body, the church.
On no other point, in my view, is the Spirit’s work more misunderstood than with regard to the manner of his operation in the life of believers. Anything can happen when the Spirit shows up according to common perception, and we may especially expect the Spirit to throw the institutional church into disarray with his extraordinary and spontaneous activity. Restricting the Spirit’s agency, power, and presence to the “fireworks,” however, deprives us of the joy of recognizing his role in our everyday lives. As we have seen, God sometimes works directly and immediately, as in the fiat command, “Let there be light!” but he also is at work within creation to bring about its appropriate response to his declaration, “Let the earth bring forth. . . .” The Spirit is at work within creation in both ways, by commanding life out of death in regeneration but also by empowering us daily to bring forth the fruit of the Spirit. And as in all of his works, the Spirit ordinarily uses creaturely means to accomplish both types of operations.
We have seen recurrently how the Spirit’s work is associated with ordering, structuring, building, growing, and maturing. Far from being the antithesis to order, discipline, and institutional structure, it is the Spirit who indwells creation and turns a chaos into a cosmos. It is the Spirit alone who makes these weak creaturely vessels his means of reordering human existence. They are his beachhead for the ground campaign—or, to use a more domestic analogy, it is through them that the Spirit turns a condemned building into a lavishly furnished home. His renovating work is often disruptive but always ultimately constructive. He divides and separates, cutting us away from this dying age, but only to unite us to Christ and his body. The Spirit is at work in these last days not to stir people to ecstasy and spontaneous convulsions but to put things right in a world of violently competing wills and aversion to the good, the true, and the beautiful. He reorders our loves, so that we will set our hearts on the Giver rather than his gifts. He gives wisdom and understanding, illuminating our hearts to receive, proclaim, and obey his word.
The Spirit apportions the spiritual gifts won by Christ according to the Father’s map, just as he apportioned the inheritance of Canaan according to each tribe—indeed, as even he divided creation into ordered realms and placed each under its own creature-king, with Adam as his viceroy over all. Rule, subdue, bring order, defend, guard, and keep the sanctuary: these recurring job descriptions given to Adam and Eve and to the priests of Israel are now perfectly fulfilled in Christ, and we share in his royal and priestly anointing by the Spirit who empowered Christ in his vocation. It is not a top-down ordering, like the despotic or bureaucratic powers of our age, but inside out. Curved in on ourselves “in Adam,” we are made by the Spirit ecstatic in the proper sense “in Christ,” filled with awe and delight and the power to truly live in and as part of his new creation.
Chaos is not a sign of the Spirit’s presence and blessing. The Spirit establishes order and unity, building the church up into Christ through preaching and teaching, baptism and the Supper, and he gives a diversity of gifts for the church’s common life, discipline, worship, prayer, and witness. It is the Holy Spirit who appoints elders in the church (Acts 20:28). He authorizes specific elements of public worship through inspired apostolic injunctions. “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints,” Paul reminded the chaotic and immature Corinthians (1 Cor 14:33 KJV). The Spirit delivers Christ to us not just anywhere and in any way but where and how he has promised. Although he is free to work outside of his covenanted mercies, we are assured of his saving blessings and presence only where he has been promised to us. If we identify the Spirit only with the unexpected and irregular, we will miss most of the times and places where he actually meets us.
THE SPIRIT VERSUS THE MEANS OF GRACE
The Reformers identified the church as “a creature of the word.”1 They did so over against the late medieval church’s explicit reversal: the word is the creature of the church. Yet they also deployed this maxim against the Anabaptists. If Rome reduces the Spirit’s work to its magisterial agency, the radicals separated the Spirit’s work from the ordinary ministry of the visible church. For the Anabaptists, the Platonic dualism between matter and spirit was mapped onto the New Testament contrast between the flesh and the Spirit.2 Everything external, ordered, ordinary, structured, and official was “man-made” as opposed to the internal, spontaneous, extraordinary, informal, and individual testimony of the Spirit within. The secret, private, and inborn “word” was contrasted with the “outer word that merely beats the air.”3
As soon as Origen in the early third century, the anthropological dualism of spirit and body cuts all the way down: Spirit and letter, inner and outer, eternal and temporal, kernel and husk.4 Going beyond Origen, the early Anabaptist leader Thomas Müntzer promised “a higher knowledge than other people” of the truth.5 Lacking new revelations, he said, ministers “gobble whole the dead words of Scripture and then spit out the letter and their inexperienced faith (which is not worth a louse) to the righteous, poor, poor people.”6 Instead, “The office of the true shepherd is simply that the sheep should all be led to revelations and revived by the living voice of God. . . .”7 The true, secret, and inborn “word” (in contrast to the “outer word” of Scripture and preaching) “arises from the abyss of the soul” and “springs from the heart.”8 Thomas Finger’s conclusion is clear enough from these examples that “Müntzer proclaimed a kingdom of the Spirit that no longer relied on the external Word or church.”9
Sebastian Franck said he considered the Bible an “eternal allegory.” Searching for contradictions in the text, he argued that “the ‘outer word’ of the historical narratives of the Bible demonstrated its own absurdity,” notes Florian Ebeling.10 “In the Protestant understanding of scripture, in its maxim of sola scriptura, Franck thus saw a ‘paper pope.’ For him, ‘inner word’ alone was the basis of faith and the unobjective and thus undogmatic foundation of human affairs,” leading to “a radical eclecticism.”11 Scripture is needed by children, he said,
until, as adults and those advanced in Christ, we can turn our backs on everything external, understanding no one and knowing nothing according to the flesh, but being already carried over into the Spirit, we have the Holy Spirit as the living Book of God, and are instructed of God by the one true teacher of the godly. . . . The solid food of the perfect does not come from Scripture. . . . For Scripture is only a witness or testimony to truth for those who are taught by the Spirit. . . .12
With the church fathers, the magisterial Reformers held the Word and Spirit in the closest relation. The Spirit is necessary, not only in inspiration but in arriving at the conviction of its truth, they argued. Yet over against the view of the enthusiasts, Reformed theology never conceived of this inner testimony of the Spirit as another source of revelation alongside Scripture. The Spirit’s witness adds nothing to the content of revelation; rather, the Spirit inwardly illumines the heart to understand its meaning and convinces people of its truth. Just as Christ’s saving person and work are outside of us (extra nos) while the Spirit works within us, the external Word proclaimed is never to be set over against the Spirit’s work in our hearts to cause us to cling to Christ by his Word of promise. We require both, since we are not only condemned objectively but are in bondage subjectively to spiritual death, incapable of embracing the truth apart from regeneration.
“However,” notes Kuyper, “this testimony does not work by magic.”
It does not cause the confused mind of unbelief suddenly to cry out, “Surely the Scripture is the Word of God!” If this were the case, the way of enthusiasts would be open and our salvation would depend again upon a pretended spiritual insight. No, the testimony of the Holy Spirit works in an entirely different way. He begins to bring us into contact with the Word, either by our own reading or by the communication of others. Then He shows us the picture of the sinner according to the Scripture, and the salvation which mercifully saved him; and lastly, He makes us hear the song of praise upon his lips. And after we have seen this objectively, with the eye of the understanding, He then so works upon our feeling that we begin to feel ourselves in that sinner, and to feel that the truth of the Scripture directly concerns us. Finally, He takes hold of the will, causing the very power seen in the Scripture to work in us. And when thus the whole man, mind, heart, and will, has experienced the power of the Word, then He adds to this the comprehensive operation of assurance, whereby the Holy Scripture in divine splendor commences to scintillate before our eyes.13
Minus the ecstasy, the radical Protestant spirit continued into modern (liberal) Protestantism, for the most part indirectly, in the privileging of personal experience over doctrine; the authority of an internal word over the external canon; moral earnestness over evangelical proclamation, and setting divine and human agency in opposition.14
But the same contrasts have long been evident in non-Pentecostal evangelicalism. For example, Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz encouraged a retrieval of the movement’s pietist roots over against the Reformation and post-Reformation emphases. “In recent years,” he wrote, “we have begun to shift the focus of our attention away from doctrine with its focus on propositional truth in favor of a renewed interest in what constitutes the uniquely evangelical vision of spirituality.”15 Other familiar contrasts appear in his Revisioning Evangelical Theology: “creed-based” versus “piety” (57), “religious ritual” versus “doing what Jesus would do” (48), with priority given to “our daily walk” over “Sunday morning worship attendance” (49), and individual and inward commitment over corporate identity (49–53). “A person does not come to church to receive salvation,” but to receive marching orders for daily life.16 He adds, “We practice baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but understand the significance of these rites in a guarded manner.” They are “perpetuated not so much for their value as conduits . . . of grace from God to the communicant as because they remind the participant and the community of the grace of God received inwardly” and are part of “an obedient response.”17
Given the history of enthusiasm, Wade Clark Roof ’s findings are hardly surprising when the American sociologist reports that “the distinction between ‘spirit’ and ‘institution’ is of major importance” to spiritual seekers today.18 “Spirit is the inner, experiential aspect of religion; institution is the outer, established form of religion.”19 He adds, “Direct experience is always more trustworthy, if for no other reason than because of its ‘inwardness’ and ‘withinness’—two qualities that have come to be much appreciated in a highly expressive, narcissistic culture.”20 This opposition, often assumed more than defended explicitly, is paradigmatic for much of contemporary spirituality across traditions. Tragically, this false choice between the Spirit’s work and external means divides the church between enthusiasm and formalism.
THE SPIRIT VS. EXTERNAL MEANS
| The Spirit | External Means |
Immediate (working apart from means) |
Mediate (working in the heart through means) |
Individual |
Corporate |
Internal, secret, subjective |
External, public, objective |
Disorderly, spontaneous/sudden |
Orderly, gradual |
“Living” (Spirit) |
“Dead” (Letter) |
Obvious/measurable results |
Promised long-term results often imperceptibly realized |
It is not difficult, working from this assumed dualism, to drift toward “enthusiasm” on one side and “formalism” on the other. Following the Tübingen school of F. C. Bauer, Adolf von Harnack was merely continuing the tradition of radical Protestantism rather than magisterial Reformers when he attributed the whole tradition of creedal Christianity to the Hellenization of the faith under the auspices of “Catholicism.”21 According to Harnack, there are signs of this in the New Testament itself, but for the most part he believed that this was a postcanonical development. Appeals to the Spirit often have fueled departures from Scripture and the ordained structures of church office, worship, discipleship, and outreach.22
However, at the same time that New Testament scholars are closing that gap between the first Christians and the formation of the canon, some evangelical and Pentecostal scholars are locating the “ossifying” tendency in the New Testament traditions themselves. For example, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen says that as early as “the last part of the Christian Bible, the Catholic Epistles,” it seems that “the charismatic, dynamic, and surprising elements of the Spirit’s ministry are either absent or marginal.”23 Instead, the emphasis begins to fall on the “inspiration of Scripture and gifting to the ministry (‘ordination’), which lean toward structures and institutionalization.”24 This is a difficult case to make, since the charismatic element and the orders and offices arise in complete unity already in the very early Pastoral Epistles and also in the book of Acts composed after the Catholic Epistles.
I think that much of the polarization on this topic today is due, ironically, to a shared assumption of this erroneous conception of how the Spirit works. If some churches marginalize the Spirit in favor of the institution and its forms, others react simply by making the opposite choice. However, there are myriad ways of domesticating the Spirit besides assimilating his sovereign work to formalism. If some render the Spirit an ecclesiastical employee, others presume to make the Spirit a mascot for a movement or a prisoner of their own private experience.
As Roman Catholic theologian Yves Congar notes, pressing a false choice between the church as institution and as a charismatic community of the Spirit has been a perennial challenge from the earliest days.25 With the creation of the Eucharist at the hands of the priest, who by virtue of the sacrament of ordination had the power to perform the miracle of transubstantiation, and the efficacy of the sacraments guaranteed (barring no obstacles being placed in its path) simply by administering the rites (ex opere operato—“by doing it, it is done”), there seemed little for the Holy Spirit to do. And, as Calvin complained, the gradual addition of sacraments in the Middle Ages compromised the significance of the two that Christ had appointed.26 Even Yves Congar points out that in the early church baptism and confirmation (sealing with the Holy Spirit) were one and the same event.27 He adds, “There can be no doubt that this sacrament is in an unstable state at present. How can the one who celebrates it claim to be able to ‘give the Holy Spirit’?”28 Furthermore, the miracle was conceived as an infusion of created grace—a spiritual substance that acted medicinally on the soul. The indwelling of the uncreated Spirit was included in this infusion, of course, but seems more like an ingredient than the efficient agent.
Yet Paul’s contrast in 2 Corinthians 3 between the “killing letter” and the “life-giving Spirit” has been a staple of radical mystical sects. Interpreted in more ontological terms as correlative to that which is associated with matter versus that which is inward and spiritual, the warfare between flesh and Spirit could only take the form of a battle with the creaturely means of grace as the imposition of an external bondage. Luther wrote in the Smalcald Articles:
This is what [Thomas] Müntzer did and what is done today by very many people who want to be judges discerning between the spirit and the letter, and who do not know what they are saying or teaching. Papism is also pure enthusiasm, since the Pope claims to ‘keep all laws in the casket of his heart’ and since everything that he decides and commands with his Church is spirit and must be regarded as just, even if it goes beyond Scripture or the spoken word and is contrary to them. . . . That is why we have the right and we are obliged to insist that God is only able to enter into a relationship with us men through the external word and the sacraments. Everything that is said of the Spirit independently of this word and the sacraments is the devil!29
In this context Calvin wrote daringly to Cardinal Sadoleto, “We are assailed by two sects: the Pope and the Anabaptists.” Conceding that the comparison sounds counterintuitive at first, the reformer explains that both appeal to ongoing special revelation based on the idea of a continuing apostolic office. In this way, both separate the Word from the Spirit and “bury the Word of God in order to make room for their falsehood.”30 The Reformers charged the radicals with “enthusiasm”—meaning, literally, “God-within-ism.” Why do you need a visible church and its external ministry when your inner self is a spark of divinity and God speaks directly to us in the depths of our hearts?
To this separation of the Word from the Spirit Calvin counters, “For the Lord has so knit together the certainty of his Word and his Spirit that our minds are duly imbued with reverence for the word when the Spirit shining upon it enables us there to behold the face of God; and, on the other hand, we embrace the Spirit with no danger of delusion when we recognize him in his image, that is, in his Word.”31 The formula that Calvin employs is “inwardly, by his Spirit; outwardly, by his Word.”32 Pentecostal theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen notes:
The stress on the relation of the Spirit to the Word (and sacraments) meant that, by and large, the Magisterial Reformers preferred to speak of the fruit of the Spirit over the charismatic gifts. It is easy to understand why: both the Anabaptists and Roman Catholics often elevated the role of healings, prophecies, visions, and other charisms above the Word and sacraments; at least that was the perception of Luther and Calvin.33
The chief motive for the Reformers’ reaction was not a proto-Enlightenment aversion to the miraculous but their conviction that any Spirit severed from his Word is other than the third person of the Trinity. They were opposed to any metaphysical dualism which undermines the logic of the incarnation if not the incarnation itself.
In 2 Corinthians 3 the apostle is contrasting covenants, not spheres. Or, to put it differently, we have Paul’s “two ages” rather than Plato’s “two worlds.” The old covenant belongs to this fading age, depending as it did on the weak arm of the flesh—human obedience to Torah. It has served its role, pointing to realities that it could nevertheless never bring into existence. Only with the arrival of the Spirit is the new creation breaking into this present age through the gospel.34 Apart from the brooding of the Spirit over the darkness and void of our soul, we are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1 KJV).
As Kuyper explains, in Scripture “flesh” refers to “the whole human nature” under sin; in fact, “flesh in this sense refers more directly to the soul than to the body.”35 After all, Satan and his demons are bodiless spirits.36
The difference between divine and human life gives Scripture its uniqueness and precludes antagonism between its letter and its spirit, such as a false exegesis of 2 Cor. 3:6 might suggest. If the Word of God were dominated by the falsehood that has crept into our hearts, and in the midst of our misery continues to place word and life in opposition as well as separation, then we would take refuge in the standpoint of our dissenting brethren, with their exaltation of the life above the Word. But we need not do so, for the opposition and separation are not in the Scripture.37
Setting the Spirit over against the Word and the sacraments is no more sensible than contrasting the carpenter with his or her hammer. The Holy Spirit “regenerates us by the Word,” as working with an instrument.38 “Therefore instead of being a dead-letter, unspiritual, mechanically opposing the spiritual life, it is the very fountain of living water, which, being opened, springs up to eternal life.”39
This defense of the Spirit’s operations through creaturely means should not lead us to a general theory of the sacramentality of creation. In an effort to affirm the goodness of creation, it is often argued that everything is a medium of God’s saving revelation. The difficulty with this view lies not in its appropriate affirmation of created matter as capable of being taken up by God as a means of grace. After all, affirming this point is a major burden of this chapter and, indeed, much of what I have said thus far. Rather, the problem lies in failing to distinguish common grace and saving grace, general and special revelation. The world displays God’s invisible attributes and his law, but only the gospel reveals his way of salvation.40 The world is not intrinsically holy and revelatory of saving grace. Rather, God freely and deliberately sets apart certain elements of his creation in the act of binding us to himself. It is his use—that is, his word and promise—that makes them holy, and the Spirit’s agency that makes them effectual.41 While creation announces God’s manifold wisdom and power, the gospel is a surprising announcement that God made after humans had rebelled against God and his natural order. This gospel must be brought by a herald. God himself must tell us where to find him: in the manger, at the cross, and at church.
On the one hand, therefore, we should avoid assimilating the Spirit to the means of grace as if they were the efficient cause of saving blessings. On the other hand, we should not separate what God has joined together. It is worth elucidating these two extreme tendencies in order to know how best to address them.
EX OPERE OPERATO: ASSIMILATING THE SPIRIT TO THE MEANS OF GRACE
The danger of an ex opere operato view of the church’s agency is by no means limited to Roman Catholic theology. In reaction against sectarian enthusiasm, churches of the Reformation have sometimes created their own formalism, as if merely by going through the motions of being baptized, attending sermons, being confirmed and made a full member, receiving the Eucharist, and so forth, one was united to Christ by true faith. The church’s confession and liturgy may be treated as guarantors of authentic ecclesial existence apart from any need to invoke the Spirit.
Further, in the historical context of rising nation states, Protestant churches were often established by the secular authority. It is difficult to imagine a greater domestication of the Spirit to the powers of this present age.
Nevertheless, there are other ways to domesticate the Spirit, even in free churches, including Pentecostal and charismatic traditions. Ironically, it has often been the case that even in the name of celebrating the Spirit’s work over against the institutional church and its ministry, such groups have simply substituted new methods as means of grace in the place of the public ministry of Word and sacrament. Particularly through the influence of Anglo-American revivalism, there has been a discernable tendency to combine the familiar “enthusiast” critique of the ordinary means of grace with a nearly ex opere operato view of alternative methods. The efforts of Charles G. Finney (1792–1875) illustrate this point.
First, he marginalized the means instituted by Christ. The Great Commission just said, “Go,” said Finney. “It did not prescribe any forms. It did not admit any. . . . And [the disciples’] object was to make known the gospel in the most effectual way . . . so as to obtain attention and secure obedience of the greatest number possible. No person can find any form of doing this laid down in the Bible.”42 This is a curious statement especially in light of the fact that the means appointed explicitly by Christ in the Great Commission are preaching, baptism, and discipline.
Second, having “liberated” the Spirit from the ordinary ministry, Finney bound the Spirit even more tightly to his own invention: the so-called “new measures.” The title of one of his most popular sermons, “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts,” summarizes his theology. A revival, healings, and other extraordinary manifestations of the Spirit can be planned, advertised, and staged. In quite explicit terms Finney placed the Spirit squarely within the control of the individual and especially the clever evangelist who could devise “methods calculated to induce the greatest number of conversions.”43 He added, “A revival is not a miracle or dependent on a miracle in any sense,” but “is simply a philosophical result of the right use of means.”44 Where the Heidelberg Catechism reminds us that “the Holy Spirit creates faith in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments,”45 Finney devised methods of his own that were, to his thinking, more effective. Of course, these new rituals wear off, and ever-new excitements are required to move people to the next level of obedience.
So, ironically, the declaration of independence from ordained means occasioned something close to an ex opere operato conception of the efficacy of new methods authorized merely by the evangelist’s creativity. A kind of deism emerged even while extolling the Spirit’s freedom from the institutional church and its official ministry. Conversion was transformed into a series of steps that ensured the new birth. One obvious innovation was the “anxious bench,” which evolved into the “altar call,” where the convicted came forward to be born again. Having fulfilled the new rite, they were assured that they were in a state of grace. Much like the Roman Catholic rite of penance, this ceremony could be repeated in the case of backsliding, or what Thomas Aquinas called “a second plank after a shipwreck.”46
In much of evangelical piety, as sociologist James D. Hunter observes, the experience of grace is reduced to formulas, steps, and procedures.47 There are myriad guides with titles such as How to Be Born Again or Four Steps to Receiving the Holy Spirit, in which little if any mention is made of baptism, preaching, the Supper, and formal church membership while the prescribed steps are offered as effectual means of salvation and growth in a cause-and-effect manner as anything in Roman Catholic practice. Furthermore, invoking business models and marketing principles, church-growth manuals frequently have exhibited a mechanical approach: by following such principles (effective for the church as for any business) success is ensured. Nature abhors a vacuum, and these enthusiastic movements demonstrate that where divinely ordained methods are marginalized, new ones take their place—often attended by a more mechanical (ex opere operato) assumption of their effects.
More recently, within neo-Pentecostal circles there has arisen a spiritual technology that does not even seem to require God’s involvement: there are spiritual laws just as there are physical ones, and if one follows the prescribed procedure God is bound to deliver the required goods. “Name it, claim it” is yet another version of ex opere operato, but with little or no connection to the promises that God has made or the means through which he has promised to deliver them. Miracles turn out to be natural effects of natural causes. Like the deist’s Architect or benign Providence, God’s role seems to reach no further than to have set up the spiritual laws of the cosmos in a certain way so that if we follow the correct principles and procedures, miracles are inevitable. Even where such extravagant versions of spiritual technology are eschewed, the question may be legitimately raised as to the Spirit’s necessary role in a religious approach that sociologist Christian Smith has described as “moralistic, therapeutic deism.”48
In all of these ways, there is a common weakness. We can assume at least in practice that if we believe, do, or experience the right things, whether ordinary or extraordinary, whether divinely ordained or not, the Spirit is under our control, like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp. The invocation of the Spirit is no longer required, since we know that the Spirit is at work wherever the right officers, ceremony, doctrines, or techniques are employed.
THE SPIRIT AND THE MEANS OF GRACE
It is not a question of the Spirit versus creaturely means, but of the Spirit’s normal operations through them—as in the Spirit’s hovering over the waters in creation to fill them with life to his association with rods and staffs, tabernacles, oil, animal sacrifices, and sacred meals. In his ministry, the sign of Jesus being the promised Servant of the LORD on whom the Spirit rests is that he preaches the gospel to the poor (Matt 11:5).
Jesus could have immediately healed the blind man in John 9, but instead he spoke his word. “Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud” and told him to wash his eyes in the pool of Siloam. The man returned with joy, able to see (vv. 6–7 ESV). God not only assumed our flesh but delighted to use earth and spit for his miraculous sign. (Did he not make us from the dirt in the first place?) The Spirit raised Jesus’s dead body to life and will do the same for all whom he has united to Christ (Rom 8:11). After the resurrection, Jesus came to his disciples and declared, “Peace be with you” and commissioned them as his apostles: “And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld’ ” (John 20:20–23 ESV).
In all of these instances the Spirit works through the audible word that Jesus speaks, the visible signs that Jesus performs, and, now, through the preaching and sacraments delivered by his ministers. Radical mystics have typically pointed to John 6 where Jesus said, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all,” but the next sentence reads: “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63 ESV).
THE SPIRIT AND THE WORD
Congar accurately summarizes that while Luther and Calvin rejected an ex opere operato conception of the sacraments, they refused to separate the Spirit from the means of grace. “Both Reformers kept to a middle road, or rather a synthesis, and each in his own way insisted on a close relationship between an external ‘instrument’ of grace . . . and the activity of the Spirit.”49 The Spirit attaches his ordinary operations to these means not because he cannot work apart from them but because we need to know where God has promised to meet us in grace rather than in judgment.
Alongside his strong emphasis on the union of Word and Spirit, Luther underscored the Spirit’s operation. “Neither you nor I could ever know anything of Christ, or believe on him, and obtain him for our Lord,” we read in his Larger Catechism, “unless it were offered to us by and granted to our hearts by the Holy Ghost through the preaching of the gospel.” He adds, “Where Christ is not preached, there is no Holy Ghost who creates, calls, and gathers the Christian church, without which no one can come to Christ the Lord.”50 Similarly, Calvin warns against setting the Spirit over against the external Word.51 Yet the effect belongs to the Spirit. This is reflected even in the Old Testament typology, he argues: “The tabernacle was sprinkled with oil, that the Israelites might learn that all the exercises of piety profited nothing without the secret operation of the Spirit.”52 The Spirit works in us inwardly, personally, individually, and secretly but through the external, public, and corporate means of grace.
This is the consistent teaching also of the ancient fathers. For example, Gregory of Nyssa observes that the water in baptism and the bread and wine in Communion, ordinary substances, are only made means of grace by the Spirit, who works where he will “by some unseen power and grace.”53 Not only were we saved by the incarnate God hanging on a wooden cross; “a bramble bush showed to Moses the manifestation of the presence of God: so the remains of Elisha raised a dead man to life; so clay gave sight to him that was blind from the womb.”54 So too in baptism “it is not the water that bestows [grace] (for in that case it were a thing more exalted than all creation), but the command of God and the visitation of the Spirit that comes sacramentally to set us free.”55
Lutheran and Reformed traditions place special emphasis on the preached Word, since “faith comes from hearing . . . the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17 ESV). Through this proclamation Christ himself is present among us by his Spirit, dispensing his gifts. The Spirit’s work is distinguished but not separated from the external means he employs. Since we cannot be saved by anything within us, introspection is insufficient. Just as we need Christ, outside of us, to redeem us, we need an external gospel addressed to us by him through a fellow sinner. The Westminster Larger Catechism explains:
The Spirit of God maketh the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word, an effectual means of enlightening, convincing, and humbling sinners, of driving them out of themselves, and drawing them unto Christ, of conforming them to his image, and subduing them to his will; of strengthening them against temptations and corruptions; of building them up in grace, and establishing their hearts in holiness and comfort through faith unto salvation.56
It is not only the message but the method that drives us out of ourselves, which of course an “inner word” cannot do. Through the very creatures that he has made, God the Spirit draws us out of our self-enclosed existence to look up in faith to God and out to our neighbor in love.
If faith comes by the preaching of the gospel, and preaching is an inherently social event, then the effect of the preached word as the primary means of grace is not individualism but real community. Faith does not arise spontaneously in one’s soul but in the covenantal gathering of fellow hearers. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains:
If there were an unmediated work of the Spirit, then the idea of the church would be individualistically dissolved from the outset. But in the word the most profound social nexus is established from the beginning. The word is social in character, not only in its origin but also in its aim. Tying the Spirit to the word means that the Spirit aims at a plurality of hearers and establishes a visible sign by which the actualization is to take place. The word, however, is qualified by being the very word of Christ; it is effectively brought to the heart of the hearers by the Spirit.57
Even baptism and the Lord’s Supper derive their efficacy from this proclaimed gospel. From beginning to end, the church always remains a “creation of the word.” Bonhoeffer observes:
To summarize, the word is the sociological principle by which the entire church is built up . . . both in numbers and in its faith. Christ is the foundation upon which, and according to which, the building of the church is raised (1 Cor. 3; Eph. 2:20). And thus it grows into a “holy temple of God” (Eph. 2:21), and “with a growth that is from God” (Col. 2:19), “until all of us come to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13), and in all this growing “into him who is the head, into Christ.” The entire building begins and ends with Christ, and its unifying center is the word.58
The preaching creates the community, while the Supper, by evoking personal acceptance through faith, makes that community in some sense visible—or better still, audible.59 “Sometimes men are called, and so regenerate, in an extraordinary manner, as was Paul,” John Owen noted. “But mostly they are so in and by the use of ordinary means, instituted, blessed, and sanctified of God to that end and purpose.60
It is certainly true that the Spirit must operate within our hearts to convince us of the truth of his Word.
The Spirit was given to the apostles to bring to mind all that Jesus had said and to reveal “things to come” (John 14:17; 16:12–13 KJV). The Spirit is not a freelance operator, generating fresh stages of revelation in these last days, but is working in the hearts of the unregenerate to bring them to faith and in the hearts of the regenerate to illuminate their understanding through the Word. “The work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration doth not consist in enthusiastical raptures, ecstasies, voices, or any thing of the like kind,” noted John Owen, “but by and according to his word, both of the law and the gospel.”61
Rome binds God to earthly means, he argues, while the Anabaptists disallow that God can freely bind himself to them.62 Scripture teaches that preaching and the sacraments are instruments, while the Spirit remains the agent.63 To convey the efficacy of the means of grace, Calvin often uses the Latin verb exhibere, which means to present, confer, or deliver. The same view is summarized later in the Westminster Standards, referring to the sacraments as “effectual means of salvation.”64 Christ, who descended to us in the incarnation, still descends to us by his Spirit through the Word, lifting us up to himself and the Father.
The Spirit and the Eucharist
Recall that Jesus’s discourse on the Spirit (John 14–16) occurred in the context of the institution of the Supper. It is not surprising that the Reformed (minus Zwingli and, to a large extent, Bullinger) turned to pneumatology in their reflections on the meaning of this sacrament. Feeding on Christ is not a mere metaphor, as Jesus makes evident in John 6:55–56, and “Christ’s body and blood” are not merely symbolic expressions. “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation [koinōnia] in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor 10:16 ESV). The sacrament is not an object lesson, a visible confirmation of an intellectual theory. The sign and seal belong to the world of politics, not religion per se. The Great King has certified to his subjects (indeed, his children) his reign over them as Savior and Lord.
According to Hebrews 6 it is a measure of God’s rich provision that even those in the church who are unregenerate, receiving the signs but not the reality, and therefore fall away (v. 9), are nevertheless beneficiaries of the Spirit’s ordinary operations in the church. Through preaching they “[taste] the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age” and through the Supper they “[taste] the heavenly gift” (vv. 4–5), even if they do not truly feed on Christ by faith.
In treating the farewell discourse directly (chapter 5), I observed that the context for the sermon was the institution of the Supper. The discourse and the sacrament both emphasize three crucial points: (1) Christ has truly departed from us in the flesh until he returns; (2) he is still present among us; (3) the Holy Spirit is the one who unites us here and now to the glorified Savior and indwells us as a pledge of final redemption. The Eucharist places us at the busy intersection between the powers of this age and the age to come, the “not yet” and the “already,” the continuing ministry of Christ in heaven and of the Spirit in leading the ground campaign.
So it is not surprising that it was in the Eucharistic debates where the Reformation revealed quite different paradigms for understanding the Spirit’s relation both to Christ and to creaturely means. At the Eucharistic altar, “all laws of nature are suspended,” wrote Pope Leo XIII, and “the whole substance of the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ,” including his physical organs.65 I have written at some length on the Word and the sacraments elsewhere.66 In the balance of this chapter, though, I want to focus on the Eucharist as a paradigm for a broader understanding of the relation of the Spirit to the means of grace, particularly by considering Calvin’s contribution.
According to Catholic theologian Brian Gaybba, “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 as God in action.”67 Of the Reformers, Kärkkäinen observes that Calvin’s theology was the most thoroughly pervaded by pneumatology.68 B. B. Warfield claimed that Calvin is “pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit.”69 J. I. Packer concurs, but only if one adds that this focus on the Spirit’s work is “read Christocentrically.”70 Nowhere is the Reformer’s pneumatological emphasis more concrete, pervasive, and persuasive than in his treatment of the Supper.
A close student of the church fathers, Calvin was influenced significantly by Augustine, along with Tertullian, but also by Irenaeus, the Cappadocians, and Chrysostom, among others.71 The second-century bishop Irenaeus had countered the gnostics by emphasizing the redemptive-historical character of revelation, with the salvation of our humanity through the incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of Christ. In this scheme, the Holy Spirit came to the fore in more distinctly personal terms over against the gnostics’ vague idea of “spiritual” reality. The third-century theologian, Origen, had interpreted the gospel within the categories of Middle Platonism-Neoplatonism. This included the metaphysical (rather than eschatological) opposition between flesh and Spirit, with the goal of escaping this world as human (especially bodily) existence.72 Although it is a generalization, these two figures—Irenaeus and Origen—represent distinct and antithetical trajectories in patristic piety. Like Luther, who claimed to have “put Origen back under the ban” in his debate with Erasmus on free will, Calvin was ill-disposed to the Origenist trajectory and drew considerably on Irenaeus.
In the sixteenth century some Anabaptist leaders returned directly to Origen’s principal ideas.73 Among the magisterial reformers, though, there was still considerable debate. Zwingli maintained a friendship with Erasmus, sharing a fondness for Platonist philosophy and, at least early on, for Origen.74 W. P. Stephens notes that the Zurich reformer’s emphasis fell on “Christ as God rather than Christ as man.”75 These differences between Luther and Zwingli became especially evident at their fateful meeting at Marburg in 1529. Agreeing on fifteen out of sixteen propositions, their breach turned on the Supper.
Zwingli heartily emphasized Christ’s bodily ascension, but like Erasmus he argued that Christ’s physical absence from us is of little consequence, since he is omnipresent in his deity.76 Zwingli wrote, “Christ is our salvation by virtue of that part of his nature by which he came down from heaven, not of that by which he was born of an immaculate virgin, though he had to suffer and die by this part.”77
It is hardly surprising that Luther heard such statements as a separation of Christ’s divine and human natures (the Nestorian heresy), threatening the reality of the incarnation. If it is true that in Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9 ESV), how can his humanity be regarded as extraneous to our salvation? For his part, Zwingli considered Luther to be a Monophysite, confusing Christ’s two natures by his argument that he can be present bodily, at every altar because his divine attributes (such as omnipresence) can be communicated to his human nature.
Other Reformed leaders such as Martin Bucer distanced themselves from Zwingli’s teaching and achieved a brief agreement with Luther at the Wittenberg Concord (1536), but it was the younger theologians—especially Peter Martyr Vermigli and John Calvin—who developed what became the settled Reformed teaching. Calvin expressed his debt to Peter Martyr Vermigli as they both, together with others, contributed to the formulation found in the Reformed confessions and catechisms.78 According to Vermigli, to suggest that a true communion with Christ’s body and blood, and therefore of the whole body with each other in their Head, is impossible apart from Christ’s bodily presence on earth is to deny the clear apostolic teaching that the Spirit has seated us with Christ in heavenly places.79
Calvin also heard Zwingli’s teaching as Nestorian. Zwingli’s view of the Supper is “wrong and pernicious,” he warned.80 Most basically, Calvin fears that Zwingli’s view strikes at the heart of our union with Christ’s saving humanity, which is so central to his own thinking.81 “It would be extreme madness to recognize no communion of believers with the flesh and blood of the Lord. . . . The flesh of Christ is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself.”82 “For in his flesh was accomplished man’s redemption,” he argues elsewhere.83 When we receive the bread and the wine, says Calvin, “let us no less surely trust that the body itself is also given to us.”84 The signs are “guarantees of a present reality: the believer’s feeding on the body and blood of Christ.”85 Otherwise, faith becomes a “mere imagining” of Christ’s presence—an ascent of mind that was characteristic of Origen and which he attributed to Zwingli.86
Lewis Sperry Chafer doubtless spoke (and speaks) for many evangelicals today when he wrote that “the Scriptures seem to support the memorial view, and rather than the elements containing or symbolizing the presence of Christ, they are instead a recognition of His absence.”87 Not even Zwingli would have gone quite as far in his expressions, but he did come close to regarding the Eucharist as the site of Christ’s absence; precisely in its celebration we look backwards and forwards, but with no present participation in his true body and blood. What we do now in the Supper is remember and anticipate, but the purpose for it now—in between Christ’s two advents—is to testify to our faith and to bind ourselves to the community of saints. This caused all but the most loyal friends of Zwingli to gasp. Against the Zwinglian comparison of the Eucharist as looking at a picture of a friend, Vermigli replied that “a friend being grasped by thinking and kept in mind does not change the thinker or nourish the mind, nor does he restore his flesh to become capable of resurrection. And what one has in a mirror is the faintest shadow, which should not be compared to that union which we have with Christ.” Christ’s presence “has the power of the Holy Spirit joined to it, coupling us most closely with him.”88 The Supper not only assures our minds, Calvin asserts, but “secures the immortality of our flesh” which is “even now quickened by his immortal flesh.”89
Apart from the ascension in the flesh, says Calvin, we are robbed of Christ’s likeness to us; we lose the significance of the Spirit’s role in uniting us to the ascended Christ, and the reality of Christ’s bodily return is called into question. Yet, ironically this questioning of Christ’s true humanity is precisely the problem that Calvin saw in the views of Rome and Luther. In an otherwise edifying Eucharistic hymn, Thomas Aquinas extols, “Sight, touch, and taste in thee are each deceived.”90 This certainly was not the case when the risen Christ presented his body to the earlier Thomas’s inspection (John 20:27–28). Of course, Aquinas did not hold that at the words of consecration Jesus does not return to every altar in exactly the same way that he will return at the end of the age. Yet after all of the qualifications, who exactly is present? And if the attributes of Christ’s deity can overwhelm his humanity, so that he can be universally present bodily, then how do we interpret a number of passages that clearly indicate Jesus’s real departure and his bodily return “in the same way” that the disciples saw him leave (Acts 1:11)? Whatever the transformation involved in his glorification, Jesus clearly teaches in the farewell discourse that he is leaving, and that they will be deprived of his physical presence on earth. But it is just at this point that he presents the Spirit as the one who will mediate his presence on earth. Jesus did not tell his disciples in the farewell discourse that he would not really be leaving, since his divinity so penetrates his humanity that he can be omnipresent bodily. Nor did he tell them that he would be returning every time the priest performed the miracle of transubstantiation. At the same time, he did not say that it did not matter that he was leaving since they will finally recognize his omnipresent divinity and be able to hold him in their memory.
Explaining away Christ’s ascension in the flesh not only calls into question his humanity that he shares with us but also the significance of the Spirit’s operations. Jesus said, “It is to your advantage that I go away . . .” (John 16:7 ESV). However, where for Zwingli this was because it revealed his omnipresent deity, Calvin emphasized Jesus’s own explanation: “For if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7 ESV). The whole thrust of this farewell discourse is his ascension and the sending of the Spirit. Calvin says, “I willingly confess that Christ is ascended that he may fill all things; but I say that he is spread abroad everywhere by his Spirit, not by the substance of his flesh.”91 Calvin complains of his critics, “For thus they leave nothing to the secret working of the Spirit, which unites Christ himself to us. To them Christ does not seem present unless he comes down to us. As though, if he should lift us to himself, we should not just as much enjoy his presence!”92 Similarly, Irenaeus said that the gnostics “do, in fact, set the Spirit aside altogether.”93
Rather than pursue dubious christological solutions, Calvin—like Irenaeus—pointed to the Holy Spirit.94 Catholic theologian Douglas Farrow suggests that Calvin, like Irenaeus, “found it necessary to reckon more bravely than the other reformers with the absence of Christ as a genuine problem for the church. It is we who require eucharistic relocation.”95 Instead of moving from Eucharist to ascension, Calvin moved in the other direction, and this led him to stress “the particularity of Jesus without sacrificing sacramental realism.” This “forced him to seek a pneumatological solution to the problem of the presence and the absence” (emphasis added).96
In contrast with the Zwinglian approach, Calvin could affirm with Paul as well as Augustine the most intimate bonds between Christ and his church. Further, to be united to Christ is to be in communion with his body. It is not the ascent of the lonely soul, Plotinus’s “flight of the alone to the Alone.”97 As the true humanizing of believers, recapitulation is also the true socializing of the anticovenantal “disengaged self.”98
Like Irenaeus, then, Calvin returns our focus to the economy of redemption: the actual history of Jesus of Nazareth from descent (incarnation and his earthly ministry of redemption), to his ascension and heavenly ministry, to the parousia at the end of the age.
To maintain a real absence is also to maintain a real continuity between the saviour and the saved. All of this demonstrates that Calvin had a better grasp on the way in which the Where? question is bound up with the Who? question. That indeed was his critical insight into the whole debate. Calvin saw that neither a Eutychian response (Jesus is omnipresent) nor a Nestorian one (absent in one nature but present in the other) will do, since either way Christ’s humanity is neutralized and his role as our mediator put in jeopardy. It is the God-man who is absent and the God-man whose presence we nevertheless require. . . . A “species of absence” and a “species of presence” thus qualify our communion with Christ, who remains in heaven until the day of judgment. It is we who require eucharistic relocation.99
It is sometimes said that the Reformed view affirms a spiritual presence of Christ in the Supper. However, this is to miss Calvin’s point and to return to the spirit-matter problem that plagued the other views. The presence of Christ cannot be divided into “spiritual” and “physical.” It is not the presence that is spiritual in Calvin’s thinking; rather, the manner in which we receive the whole Christ is by the Spirit. It is the Spirit who seats us together with Christ in heavenly places. Thus, Reformed Christians confess that the Supper not only “reminds you” but “assures you that you share in Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross and in all his gifts”100 and that what we receive by faith in the Supper is “the true body and true blood of Christ.”101
Calvin did not invent a new understanding of the Supper. Nevertheless, I share Julie Canlis’s judgment: “The radical—even watershed—role that Calvin gave to the Spirit in the Lord’s Supper cannot be overstated. As had not been done since perhaps the patristic writers, Calvin attempted to take seriously the pneumatological dimensions of presence: the Spirit is not the Pentecostal replacement for Christ but the way to him.”102 Calvin says, “In sum, God comes down to us so that then we might go up to him. That is why the sacraments are compared to the steps of a ladder.”103 Canlis observes, “The problem with medieval sacramentalism, in Calvin’s opinion, is that it reversed the direction of the ladder.”104 She adds, “If human life has been brought ‘up’ into God without change or confusion and our ‘partaking’ of his very humanity is raising us up into God’s triune koinōnia, then we see just how essential the Eucharist is as a confirmation of Calvin’s doctrine of participation.”105
What Adam lost was communion with God, from which flowed all the blessings of life, righteousness, and dignity.106 Grace is not a medicinal substance infused into the soul to elevate it toward the supernatural, as medieval theologians had argued,107 but the favor and gift of the Father, in the Son, and by the Holy Spirit. As incarnate, the Son “is near us, indeed touches us, since he is our flesh.”108 It is not just in his divinity that Christ is life-giving, Calvin says. As the eschatological firstfruits, his humanity is “pervaded with fullness of life to be transmitted to us” and this is why “it is rightly called ‘life-giving.’ ”109 And the source of that life is not the created grace infused, as Rome teaches, but the uncreated Spirit indwelling. Not everyone in the Reformed tradition has found Calvin’s case compelling, particularly regarding the energies of Christ’s glorified humanity giving life to believers, both in soul and body.110 However, to a large extent these writers misunderstand the patristic sources from which Calvin, Vermigli, and the Reformed orthodox were drawing. It is not that the virtue or power of Christ’s humanity is giving strength to our bodies in a temporal manner. Rather, the Holy Spirit is taking what belongs properly to Jesus and making it ours, endowing us—in body and soul—with eschatological life in anticipation of the resurrection. I am convinced that the more we face the reality of the ascension and our Lord’s own explanation of how the Spirit would establish our eschatological communion with him, the greater will be our appreciation for the Word and the sacraments as the means appointed for his genuine signs and wonders ministry.
The Spirit and Baptism
The sacraments are so identified with the reality that circumcision was called simply “the covenant,” just as Jesus designated the cup he raised in the upper room as “my blood of the covenant” (Matt 26:25–28). Paul called the crucifixion “the circumcision of Christ” (Col 2:11 ESV).111 It was he of whom Isaiah prophesied, “that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. . . . [H]e bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors” (Isa 53:8–12 ESV). United to Christ in his circumcision-death, the baptized too come under God’s sword of judgment. “It is a judicial death as the penalty for sin,” says Kline. “Yet to be united with Christ in his death is also to be raised with him whom death could not hold in his resurrection unto justification.”112 And as Peter affirms, baptism, foreshadowed by the salvation of Noah and his family in the flood-ordeal, “now saves” not by cleansing the body but “as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God” (1 Pet 3:21–22). “Now conscience has to do with accusing and excusing; it is forensic. Baptism, then, is concerned with man in the presence of God’s judgment throne.”113 Here, as in the exodus, we are reminded by the prophet of the eschatological nature of both the water and fire ordeals:
But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. (Isa 43:1–3 ESV)
Together with the preached Word, the baptism of the Spirit is associated in the New Testament with water baptism. The precise nature of this association is a further question, but it is important to take the texts at face value. There are a number of passages where exegetes are divided, usually along ecclesiastical lines. Some are eager to assert that these passages that refer to washing and regeneration do not refer to water baptism. Others are equally emphatic that water baptism is in view. Examples of such passages are the following:
• Titus 3:5–7 ESV: God “saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing [loutron] of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”
• Romans 6:3–4 ESV: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
• 1 Corinthians 12:13 ESV: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.”
• Colossians 2:11–12 ESV: “In [Christ] also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.”
• Galatians 3:27 ESV: “For as many of you as were baptized in Christ have put on Christ.”
• Ephesians 4:4–5 ESV: “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”
• 1 Peter 3:21–22 ESV: “Baptism, which corresponds to this [the salvation of Noah and his family from the flood through the ark], now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.”
It seems to me that the burden of proof rests on those who interpret such verses as having nothing to do with water baptism. After all, both sides generally acknowledge that water baptism is in view in Acts 2:38. Yet when the crowd responded to Peter’s Pentecost sermon, “Brothers, what shall we do?” (v. 37), Peter answered, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” It is not a particular spiritual gift that Luke intends here, but the person of the Holy Spirit himself. “So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls” (v. 41 ESV). The people received forgiveness of sins and the Spirit through faith, as this faith clung to the word of promise as certified in baptism.
When Nicodemus misunderstood Jesus’s teaching on the new birth, “Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). Jesus upbraids Nicodemus: “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” (v. 10 ESV). Indeed, Nicodemus should have known God’s promise from Ezekiel 36:25–27: “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean. . . . And I will give you a new heart. . . . And I will put my Spirit within you.” Jesus’s words to Nicodemus remind us that the water itself does not save, apart from the Spirit. Yet it would seem odd for Jesus to mention water and the Spirit if by “water” he simply meant the Spirit. Why would the one who healed the blind man with dirt and spit have any difficulty in attaching water to his promise?
Furthermore, Paul relates that Christ has “cleansed [the church] by the washing of water with the word” (katharisas tō loutrō tou hudatos en rhēmati, Eph 5:26 ESV). “One baptism” ranks alongside “one Lord, one faith” as the defining mark of the church (Eph 4:5; cf. 1 Cor 12:13). Just as there are not two baptisms with the Spirit—one for the average believer and the other for supersaints, there is no indication in the New Testament that water baptism is separated from baptism with the Spirit. The deliverance of Noah and his family through water is typological of the greater deliverance: “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet 3:20–21 ESV). This baptism always involves water and the Word, administered in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:13; Luke 3:21; John 1:31; 3:5; 4:1; Acts 8:36–37; 10:47).
On the one hand, it is undeniable that baptism is treated in the New Testament as a means of grace. That is, baptism is God’s promise-making act and gift. God “saved us,” Paul told Titus, “not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5 ESV). The “washing” here is inward to be sure, but only a gratuitous theological objection leads us to qualify these statements as having nothing to do with water baptism.
On the other hand, it is just as clear that not all who are baptized with water receive the Holy Spirit and are regenerated. In my view, the writer to the Hebrews speaks of those who were baptized (“enlightened,” an early-church term for baptism). They regularly heard the Word—to the point even of tasting its goodness and “the powers of the coming age”—and received the Supper (“tasted the heavenly gift”) and yet they “[fall] away” (6:6). One answer is to say that this warning is merely hypothetical. However, the claim here is that there are actual people who fall away. Does this mean then that they have lost their salvation? This conclusion seems excluded when the writer adds, “Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things—things that belong to salvation” (v. 9 ESV).
Who are these, then, who in some sense taste but do not drink, are baptized with water but not evidently with the Spirit, who share in the common operations of the Holy Spirit in the covenant community but are not indwelled personally by him, and taste the goodness of the Word and the powers of the age to come but are not saved? The writer tells us: they are like “land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it,” but bears only thorns and thistles and is “near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned” (vv. 7–8). They are not among those who have actually received the reality signified: “Things that belong to salvation” (Heb 6:4–9 ESV). The final section anchors our confidence in the Abrahamic covenant and the priesthood of Christ in the order of Melchizedek, in distinction from the Sinai covenant that Israel swore and the Aaronic priesthood (vv. 13–20).
Then in chapter 10, the writer warns, “Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?” (vv. 28–29 ESV). Clearly, the person in view is not an outsider but a covenant member. The writer calls upon them to remember their baptism—“after you were enlightened”—and their initial love and service to the brothers and sisters being persecuted (vv. 32–34 ESV). “Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward” (v. 35 ESV). He adds, once again to distinguish his readers from apostates, “But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls” (v. 39 ESV).
Those who are deprived of the blessings of baptism, worship, instruction in the family and the church, profession of faith, and Communion are not apostates, since they are outside the covenant from the start. But those who have received these covenantal blessings and yet turn aside are “like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal” (12:16 ESV).
In Acts 10:44–45, the Spirit is given to the gentiles: a localized Pentecost for those “far off” (cf. 2:39). Peter preached to the gentiles and “the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word” (v. 44). They had received “the gift of the Holy Spirit” and then were baptized (vv. 45–48). There are similar intervals in Acts 8 and 19 between the pouring of the Spirit, yielding faith in Christ, and water baptism. Although they are not normative, they at least distinguish between baptism (the sacrament) and the gift of the Spirit (the reality). As Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov comments, “And this occurred before and independently of baptism, so that Peter could do no more than testify: ‘Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Spirit as well as we?’ (10:47).”114 Similarly, Roman Catholic scholar Yves Congar notes in this instance that “the baptismal rite does not appear as the direct means (or rather the instrumental cause) of that gift [of the Spirit].”115 Just as one could be circumcised outwardly under the old covenant and yet uncircumcised in heart, the same is possible in the new covenant. Yet a distinction does not entail a separation.
We must therefore put together these entirely harmonious passages that treat baptism with water and baptism with the Spirit in the closest possible connection while recognizing that they are distinguished. Those who receive the reality through the promise that is signified and sealed in baptism are saved; those who do not embrace the reality are under a curse. This distinction-without-separation characterizes much of mainstream patristic teaching. For example, Basil the Great wrote:
Thus baptism signifies the putting off of the works of the flesh, as the Apostle says. . . . The Lord who gives us life also gave us the baptismal covenant, which contains an image of both life and death. The image of death is fulfilled in the water, and the Spirit gives us the pledge of life. . . . The water receives our body as a tomb, and so becomes the image of death, while the Spirit pours in life-giving power, renewing in souls which were dead in sin the life they first possessed. This is what it means to be born again of water and Spirit: the water accomplishes our death, while the Spirit raises us to life. . . . If there is any grace in the water, it does not come from the nature of the water, but from the Spirit’s presence, since baptism is not a removal of dirt from the body, but an appeal to God for a clear conscience [1 Pet 3:21]. . . . We are also able to distinguish between the grace that comes from the Spirit and mere baptism in water.116
There is simply no way to wrest baptismal regeneration ex opere operato from such passages.
Another important figure in the Christian East, Simeon the New Theologian (949–1022) wrote, “It is by the Holy Spirit that everyone experiences . . . the resurrection that takes place every day of dead souls, a spiritual regeneration and resurrection in a spiritual fashion.”117 Baptism initiates us into the mystery of salvation. However, “If one is not baptized in the Holy Spirit, one cannot become a son of God or a co-heir of Christ.”118 He adds elsewhere that one should “learn that not all those who are baptized receive Christ through baptism, but only those who are strengthened in faith” by which they apprehend the reality: Christ with his benefits. Or again: “Those who received your baptism in early infancy and who have throughout their lives lived unworthily of you will be more severely condemned than those who have not been baptized . . . since it is not only ‘by water’ that grace comes, according to your words, but rather ‘by the Spirit,’ in the invocation of the Holy Trinity.”119
Like the scribes and Pharisees, Simeon says, some prelates of his day wish “to be considered worthy to be entrusted with the task of binding and loosing” when they should hear the words of Christ. The “key of knowledge” that they had taken away was “the grace of the Holy Spirit given by faith,” which opens “the door,” which is “the Son.” The Spirit opens the door of our hearts to embrace Christ.120 Simeon did not set the Spirit over against the church and the visible means of grace, but underscored that the latter were only effectual in the power of the former.121
All of this suggests that members of the visible church in the new covenant are in exactly the same place as old covenant believers in this sense. One may be united outwardly to Christ and his visible body and yet not be a living branch of the vine. “But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring” (Rom 9:6–7 ESV). The means of grace retain their objective validity regardless of human response. The Word of God remains the Word of God, and water baptism is administered truly to the reprobate as well as the elect. However, the Spirit works when and where he will, granting faith to receive the reality presented through the sign and seal. “But if some of the [original] branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot [gentile], were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you” (Rom 11:17–18 ESV). No less than in the Old Testament, there is no salvation apart from faith. Hearing Christ preached, being baptized, and taking Communion are not substitutes for faith but are the means through which the Spirit gives us faith and confirms our faith to the end.
As the Heidelberg Catechism summarizes, “The Holy Spirit creates faith in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments.”122 God truly promises and gives Christ with all of his benefits through these means, but only those who receive the gift in faith share in the reality itself. As signs and seals of the covenant, the sacraments oblige the human partner to faith and obedience. However, baptism and the Supper are first and foremost means of grace because they are the sacraments of the covenant of grace. In instituting circumcision, Yahweh pledges, “And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generation for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your offspring after you” (Gen 17:7 ESV). Circumcision will not only symbolize this promise but will ratify each recipient of his entitlement to it: “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant” (v. 13). It was the “sign” of their justification (v. 11). The intratrinitarian covenant of redemption is realized in the covenant of grace by the union of believers to the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. Hence, we are commanded by Christ to baptize in the name of all three persons of the Trinity. “For this reason we obtain and, so to speak, clearly discern in the Father the cause [causa], in the Son the matter [materia], and in the Spirit the effect [effectio] of our purgation and our regeneration.”123
Similarly, an adult convert is justified the moment he or she trusts in Christ, but this justification is sealed or ratified by baptism. The choice, then, is not between salvation by grace through faith and salvation by sacraments; rather, the latter signify and seal the former. Precisely for that reason they must not be withheld from entitled recipients (Gen 17:14). Furthermore, just as the old covenant sacraments promised grace and threatened judgment for those who did not receive the reality signified, the New Testament provides the same dire warnings (1 Cor 10:1–22; 11:27–32; Heb 4:1–13; 6:1–12).
This line of argument suggests that baptism itself does not effect regeneration or any other grace in an automatic (ex opere operato) fashion. Rather, baptism is a visual confirmation of God’s act of communicating his covenant promise. It achieves its intended effect when and where the Spirit chooses. “The efficacy of baptism is not tied to that moment wherein it is administered,” according to the Westminster Confession, “yet, notwithstanding, by the right use of this ordinance, the grace promised is not only offered, but really exhibited and conferred, by the Holy Ghost, to such (whether of age or infants) as that grace belongeth unto, according to the counsel of God’s own will in His appointed time.”124 In fact, Reformed theology and piety emphasize the perpetual significance and efficacy of baptism for the whole life of believers.125
CONCLUSION
The point here is that we need Christ not to continue his incarnate existence on earth right now but to continue his incarnate existence in heaven—glorified as our Head, subduing enemies by his Word and Spirit, interceding for his church, and preparing a place for us in his everlasting kingdom. Christ has united himself to our flesh in the power of the Spirit; now it is we who need to be united to his glorified humanity in heavenly places.
But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim). (Rom 10:6–8 ESV)
The last thing that we should attempt is to “bring Christ down” whether by assimilating him to the church or to its ministry of Word and sacrament. Rather, he is present at the right hand of the Father and present in his Word and sacraments—as the whole Christ: yes, even bodily—precisely because it is his Holy Spirit who unites us to Christ and deepens that union.
The Spirit prepared a natural body for his Son, and because of Pentecost he is preparing Christ’s ecclesial body taken “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev 5:9). Along with the Word and baptism, the sacramental body in the Eucharist is the means by which the Spirit is uniting us to the natural body (Jesus himself in heaven) and thereby building an ecclesial body of Christ on earth.126
Assuming these categories, John Owen expresses a typically Reformed approach to the pneumatological constitution of the church as Christ’s body: “The dispensation and work of the Holy Ghost in this new creation respect, first, the Head of the church, the Lord Jesus Christ, in his human nature, as it was to be, and was, united unto the person of the Son of God. Secondly, it concerns the members of that mystical body in all that belongs unto them as such.”127 Although the Spirit formed the natural body of Jesus “by an act of infinite creating power, yet it was formed or made of the substance of the blessed Virgin.”128 Similarly, the Spirit forms a bride for the Son not from the substance of angels but from the flesh and blood of the human race. “And this belongs unto the establishment of our faith, that he who prepared, sanctified, and glorified the human nature, the natural body of Jesus Christ, the head of the church, hath undertaken to prepare, sanctify, and glorify his mystical body, or all the elect given unto him of the Father.”129 Finally, “It is the Holy Spirit who supplies the bodily absence of Christ, and by him doth he accomplish all his promises to the church. Hence, some of the ancients call him, ‘Vicarium Christi,’ the Vicar of Christ, or him who represents his person, and discharges his promised work: Operam navat Christo vicariam.”130
If we want to know where the Spirit is at work today, we should look not to the high places, the extraordinary, where so-called wonders are not signs that point beyond themselves to Christ in his saving office. Like the Son in his incarnation, the Spirit is to be found actively at work in the low places, where he descends and has promised to supply Christ with all of his benefits. The Spirit still hovers over the lifeless waters to make them teem with life. We find the Spirit only where Christ has promised to be present for us in gift-giving joy rather than in terrifying majesty. It is the Spirit who made the eternal Son “haveable” in his incarnation: the Lord of Glory wrapped in swaddling clothes. And it is the Spirit who makes him “haveable” for us now, through lowly means, although he is ascended bodily at the right hand of the Father.131
Consequently, we can know where the Spirit is at work powerfully in the world: wherever this word is proclaimed and taught faithfully in ever-expanding witness, and where people are receiving the signs and seals of this saving word in baptism and the Supper. These are the signs and wonders of new-covenant ministry through which the Spirit gives life and growth to Christ’s body.
1. I explore this at length in People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 37–98.
2. Thomas N. Finger, A Contemporary Anabaptist Theology: Biblical, Historical, Constructive (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 563.
3. See for example, Thomas Müntzer, “The Prague Protest,” in The Radical Reformation: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. and trans. Michael G. Baylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2–7; idem, “Sermon to the Princes,” Radical Reformation, 20. Cf. Thomas N. Finger, “Sources for Contemporary Spirituality: Anabaptist and Pietist Contributions,” Brethren Life and Thought 51.1–2 (2006): 37.
4. Origen, On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973). See Hans-Jurgen Goertz, The Anabaptists, trans. Trevor Johnson (London: Routledge, 1996), 49, on “spirit and letter.”
5. Müntzer, “Sermon to the Princes,” 20; see also idem, “The Prague Protest,” 9.
6. Müntzer, “Sermon to the Princes,” 20; see also idem, “The Prague Protest,” 6.
7. Müntzer, “Sermon to the Princes,” 20; idem, “The Prague Protest,” 6–7.
8. Müntzer, “Sermon to the Princes,” 20; idem, “The Prague Protest,” 9.
9. Finger, “Sources for Contemporary Spirituality,” 37.
10. Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times, trans. David Lorton, Cornell Paperbacks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 82. Cf. Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 35.
11. Ebeling, Secret History of Hermes, 82.
12. Quoted by Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 36.
13. Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri De Vries (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1900; repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 193.
14. F. C. Bauer, for example, argued that the apostle Paul used “the term, ‘spirit’ . . . to denote the Christian consciousness. This consciousness is an ‘essentially spiritual principle, which forbids him [a Christian] to regard anything merely outward sensuous, material as in any way a condition of his salvation. . . . Thus the spirit is the element in which God and man are related to each other as spirit to spirit, and where they are one with each other in the unity of the spirit’ ” (F. C. Bauer, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Work, His Epistles and His Doctrine [London: Williams and Norgate, 1875], quoted in John R. Levison, Filled with the Spirit [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009], 4). Levison adds and quotes the sentiment of Herman Gunkel: “The relationship between divine and human activity is that of mutually exclusive opposition” (5).
15. Stanley Grenz, RevisioningEvangelicalTheology:AFreshAgenda forthe21stCentury(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 56. Cf. Veli-Matti Karkkainen, Toward a Pneumatological Theology: Pentecostal and Ecumenical Perspectives on Ecclesiology, Soteriology, and Theology of Mission, ed. Amos Yong (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 9–37. In all of these cases, a “pneumatic hermeneutics” is put forward as a way of attaining rapprochement with Rome.
16. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 49.
17. Ibid., 48.
18. Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 23.
19. Ibid., 30.
20. Ibid., 67.
21. Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan, 7 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1902), 2:48–60, following a long line of “Arian” polemic; see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 194–98.
22. “What the Spirit is saying to us today” over against scriptural and creedal norms is a common refrain in mainline churches and movements. Taking as its theme, “Come Holy Spirit—Renew the Whole Creation,” the Seventh Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Canberra in 1991 seemed unclear about which “spirit” it had in mind. See Lawrence E. Adams, “The WCC at Canberra: Which Spirit?” FirstThings (June 1991), https://www.firstthings.com/article/1991/06/005-the-wcc-at-canberra-which-spirit.
23. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, “Introduction,” in Holy Spirit and Salvation: The Sources of Christian Theology, ed. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), xvi.
24. Ibid.
25. Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith, Milestones in Catholic Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 2:11–15.
26. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Lewis Ford Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 4.19.8.
27. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 3:105.
28. Ibid., 3:106–7. But then Congar also goes on to argue against infant baptism (106).
29. Martin Luther, “Smalcald Articles,” in Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (St. Louis: Concordia, 1921), 3.8.
30. John Calvin, “Reply by John Calvin to Cardinal Sadoleto’s Letter,” in Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, ed. Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet, 7 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 1:36.
31. Calvin, Institutes, 1.9.3.
32. See, for example, Institutes, 2.5.5.
33. Kärkkäinen, “Introduction,” xx.
34. Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), 300.
35. Kuyper, Holy Spirit, 254.
36. Ibid., 255.
37. Ibid., 57.
38. Ibid., 58.
39. Ibid., 59.
40. I take this to be a serviceable summary statement of Paul’s argument in Romans 1:18–3:20.
41. As Luigi Gioia observes with respect to Augustine’s teaching, “Even in the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ is not visible, which is why he was crucified—neither the Jews nor the Romans knew what they were doing.” With respect to Old Testament theophanies, he writes: “Augustine insists on the miraculous character of these events: ‘These are properly called miracles and signs’ ” (Luigi Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 108–9, reflecting on De Trinitate 3.19). Even the appearance of the dove or fire was, like these, a sign of the Spirit—not an incarnation (Gioia, Theological Epistemology, 112).
42. Quoted in Michael Pasquarello III, Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Proclamation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 24.
43. Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revival, ed. W. G. McLoughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 12–13, 17.
44. Ibid.
45. Lord’s Day 25, Question 65.
46. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (Baltimore: Christian Classics, 1981), III.84.6.
47. James D. Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 75.
48. Christian Smith, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
49. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:138.
50. As found in Article III in Luther’s Large Catechism, trans. F. Samuel Janzow (St. Louis: Concordia, 1978), 73.
51. Calvin, Institutes, 4.1.6.
52. Ibid., 2.223, on Exodus 30:23–25.
53. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Baptism of Christ (NPNF2 5:519).
54. Ibid., 5:520.
55. Ibid., 5:519.
56. The Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 155, in the Book of Confessions (Louisville: PCUSA, 1991), emphasis added.
57. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, ed. Joachim von Soosten and Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 158 (emphasis added).
58. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, 247.
59. Ibid.
60. John Owen, A Discourse concerning the Holy Spirit, in vol. 8 of The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, 16 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 213.
61. Ibid., 224–25.
62. Calvin, Institutes, 4.1.5.
63. Willem Balke, Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals, trans. William J. Heynen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 53.
64. See Westminster Confession of Faith 27; Shorter Catechism 91–93; Larger Catechism 161–64.
65. Pope Leo XIII, “Mirae Caritatis,” in The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1995), 524.
66. Michael Horton, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 35–152; The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 751–826.
67. Brian Gaybba, The Spirit of Love: Theology of the Holy Spirit (London: Goeffrey Chapman, 1987), 100, quoted by Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit: Love and Gift in the Trinity and the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 321n43. With Levering, I agree that this is an overstatement. Nevertheless, it points up the extent to which even non-Reformed readers of the Reformer recognize him as a significant figure in the history of pneumatological reflection.
68. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Pneumatology, 83n93. In The Holy Spirit and Salvation: The Sources of Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), Kärkkäinen adds, “One of the lasting theological contributions of the Geneva Reformer is his pneumatological framing of the sacraments” (176).
69. Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Calvin and Augustine (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1956), 484–87. He explains, “In the same sense in which we may say that the doctrine of sin and grace dates from Augustine, the doctrine of satisfaction from Anselm, the doctrine of justification by faith from Luther—we must say that the doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit is a gift from Calvin to the church.”
70. J. I. Packer, “Calvin the Theologian,” in John Calvin, ed. G. E. Duffield, Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology (Abingdon, Berkshire: Sutton Courtenay, 1966), 169.
71. See Irena Backus, “Calvin and the Greek Fathers” in Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Later Medieval and Reformation History, ed. Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Johannes Van Oort, “John Calvin and the Church Fathers,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Anthony N. S. Lane, John Calvin: Student and the Church Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999). Augustine ranks first, although Calvin criticized Augustine on occasion for being too Platonist. See Calvin, Comm. on John, 1:3.
72. I expand some on Origen’s role in chapter 10. For a fuller treatment, see my “Atonement and Ascension” in Locating Atonement, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 226–50.
73. Although Origen entertained the idea, some Anabaptist leaders (esp. Hans Denck, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Balthasar Hubmaier, Melchior Hoffman, and Menno Simons) argued that the Son took his flesh from heaven rather than from the Virgin Mary. Against the view, Calvin and Reformed colleagues invoked Gregory of Nazianzus’s dictum against Apollinarianism: “What he did not assume, he did not heal.” In varying degrees, some of these leaders were drawn also to Origen’s ideas of universal salvation (apokatastasis), ascetic rigor, and spiritualist understanding of the resurrection and ascension. All of them shared Origen’s dualism.
74. W. P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 9–17. Stephens relates that Zwingli’s marginal notes on Romans “points to the overwhelming, but independent, use of Origen by Zwingli, although Augustine’s teaching on grace became steadily more dominant” (ibid., 18–19).
75. Ibid., 121. Further, “the Augustinian and Neoplatonist contribution is evident in the whole of Zwingli’s theology, and especially in his understanding of the sacraments” (ibid., 254).
76. For a fair interpretation of Zwingli’s Christology, see Stephens, Theology of Huldrych Zwingli, 108–28. Unlike Luther, Zwingli enjoyed the friendship and mutual respect of Erasmus. Before joining the Reformation, Zwingli had offered private tutorials on Plato’s works. Recall Farrow’s quote from Erasmus above: “The physical presence of Christ is of no profit for salvation.” Stephens observes that “Erasmus was to be in many ways the most important influence in his development as a reformer.” Both figures used the title “philosopher and theologian” for each other (ibid., 9). “In March 1522 Zwingli was concerned to prevent a quarrel between Eramsus and Luther and saw them both as committed to the Christian cause.” Especially after their published debate over free will, Luther viewed Erasmus as an opponent of the Reformation, while Zwingli continued to see him as an ally (ibid., 11n23).
77. Ulrich Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1981), 204.
78. Calvin said that “the whole was crowned by Peter Martyr, who left nothing more to be done” (Joseph C. McLelland, The Visible Words of God: An Exposition of the Sacramental Theology of Peter Martyr Vermigli, 1500–1562 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957], 279).
79. Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Oxford Treatise and Disputation on the Eucharist, 1549, trans. and ed. Joseph C. McLelland, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 56; The Peter Martyr Library 7 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000), 14.
80. John Calvin, “Letter to Andre Zebedee, May 19, 1539” in Letters of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet, trans. Marcus Robert Gilchrist, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian, 1858), 402.
81. John Calvin, “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper,” in Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, ed. Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet, 7 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 2:170.
82. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.9.
83. John Calvin, John 1–10, trans. T. H. L. Parker, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries 4 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959–72), 167.
84. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.10.
85. B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 165.
86. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.5–6.
87. Cited in Keith Matheson, Given For You (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 262.
88. Vermigli, Oxford Treatise, 120.
89. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.32.
90. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Adoro Te Devote,” in The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 112.
91. Calvin, Institutes, 2.16.4; cf. 4.6.10.
92. Ibid., 4.17.31.
93. Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 230–31, quoting Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.17.4.
94. Calvin, Institutes 4.17.10, emphasis added.
95. Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 176–77. Unfortunately, in Ascension Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2011), written after he joined the Roman Catholic Church, Farrow attempts to make these edifying reflections fit with the dogma of transubstantiation. The resulting argument seems at least to me to be a patchwork quilt of antithetical premises.
96. Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, 177–78. Even after his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, Farrow maintains that Calvin stands out as an early modern representative of this Irenaean trajectory, against Origen and Pelagianism (Farrow, Ascension Theology, 40–41, citing Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.27 and his commentary on Hebrews).
97. Plotinus, translation in Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983; repr., 1992), 51.
98. I borrow this phrase from Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). If the consummation of our union with Christ is less than absorption into deity, as Calvin argues especially against Osiander, it is more than mere “fellowship,” as he argues against Erasmus and Zwingli. It is telling that he rejects Erasmus’s translation of koinōnia as fellowship and that the church consequently should be viewed as a mere societas rather than a communio.
99. Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, 176–77.
100. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 28, Question 75, in Psalter Hymnal, Doctrinal Standards and Liturgy (Grand Rapids: Christian Reformed Church, 1976), 36, and the Belgic Confession, Article 35 (ibid., 88).
101. Belgic Confession, Article 35 (ibid.).
102. Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 239. She helpfully summarizes on p. 113: “For Calvin, the Ascension has three main functions: first, it threw open the realm of pneumatology and, with it, the historical possibility for human participation in God; second, it represented the future of the Christian as koinōnia: to be with God, in Christ; third, it functioned as a protective measure to keep God from being manipulated or ‘pulled down’ to our sphere of idolatry and superstition.”
103. Ibid., 160, quoting Calvin from a sermon on 2 Sam 6:1–7.
104. Ibid., 159.
105. Ibid., 160.
106. Calvin, Institutes, 2.1.5–6.
107. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II.23.2; I–II.110.2.
108. Calvin, Institutes, 2.12.1.
109. Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.9.
110. This is true already with Zwingli’s successor, Heinrich Bullinger, who wrote to Calvin, “I do not see how your doctrine differs from the doctrine of the papists, who teach that the sacraments confer grace on all who take them” (cited in Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993], 3). The great Scottish theologian William Cunningham issued a particularly harsh verdict: “We have no fault to find with the substance of Calvin’s statements in regard to the sacraments in general, or with respect to baptism; but we cannot deny that he made an effort to bring out something like a real influence exerted by Christ’s human nature upon the souls of believers, in connection with the dispensation of the Lord’s Supper—an effort which, of course, was altogether unsuccessful, and resulted only in what was about as unintelligible as Luther’s consubstantiation. This is, perhaps, the greatest blot in the history of Calvin’s labours as a public instructor” (William Cunningham, Collected Works of the Reverend William Cunningham, vol. 1 [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1862], 240).
111. Meredith G. Kline reminds us that like Isaac, Jesus was circumcised as an infant, “that partial and symbolic cutting off”—the “moment, prophetically chosen, to name him ‘Jesus.’ But it was the circumcision of Christ in crucifixion that answered to the burnt-offering of Genesis 22 as a perfecting of circumcision, a ‘putting off ’ not merely of a token part but ‘of the [whole] body of the flesh’ (Col. 2:11, ARV), not simply a symbolic oath-cursing but a cutting off of ‘the body of his flesh through death’ (Col. 1:22) in accursed darkness and dereliction” (By Oath Consigned: A Reinterpretation of the Covenant Signs of Circumcision and Baptism [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968], 45).
112. Ibid., 47.
113. Ibid., 66–67 (emphasis added).
114. Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 234.
115. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:46.
116. St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, trans. David Anderson, Popular Patristics (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 58–59.
117. Quoted by Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:95, from Simeon the New Theologian’s Catechetical Discourses 6.
118. Quoted by Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:95, from Simeon the New Theologian’s Catechetical Discourses 33.
119. Quoted by Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:95–96, from Simeon the New Theologian’s Ethical Treatise 10 and Hymn 55.
120. Quoted by Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:97, from Simeon the New Theologian’s Catechetical Discourses 33.
121. Yet there was also a tendency to disparage the ordained ministry even in Simeon’s approach (Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:99). In the line of Origen, Anastasius of Sinai, and Pseudo-Dionyius, Simeon argued that one should seek the ministry of holy monks even if they are not ordained, and there were many who followed this perspective. In fact, in the Christian East believers sought out monks—“spiritual men”—rather than priests for confession and absolution until the mid-thirteenth century (ibid., 100).
122. Lord’s Day 25, Question 65 (Psalter Hymnal, 32).
123. Calvin, Institutes, 4.15.6.
124. “The Westminster Confession of Faith,” in The Trinity Hymnal (Philadelphia: Great Commission, 1990), 28.7.
125. Calvin, Institutes, 4.15.3; Belgic Confession, Article 25.
126. The so-called Corpus Triforme (“threefold Body”) is an important theologoumenon in early medieval theology. See Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds, Richard Price, and Christopher Stephens, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
127. Owen, Discourse, 159.
128. Ibid., 164.
129. Ibid., 189.
130. Ibid., 193.
131. I am borrowing Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s term “haveable,” which he used particularly in raising concern about Karl Barth’s view of revelation. Bonhoeffer expressed concern with the tendency to see God’s Word as somehow alongside, behind, or hovering above the human words of Scripture. Instead, he argued, we find both together in the Scriptures, “but in such a way that God himself says where his word is, and he does so within the human word” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, ed. Eberhard Bethge et al. [Gütersloh: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1986], 14:408, emphasis original). Otherwise, God is not “haveable” (habbar) (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, vol. 2 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Works, trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd Jr. [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996], 90). Bonhoeffer’s critique of Barth is my criticism of Zwingli’s approach—and, I believe, the implicit critique of Calvin, Vermigli, and the Reformed confessions against the pietist-evangelical heritage that shares Zwinglian assumptions.