CHAPTER 11
THE SPIRIT OF GLORY
When Jesus says in the farewell discourse that the Spirit “shall glorify me” (John 16:14 KJV), he is saying more than we might assume at first glance. It is more than spotlighting and bringing honor to Christ. The Holy Spirit glorified Christ himself, in his person, decisively and publicly, by raising him from the dead. The Spirit who had been responsible for uniting the eternal Son to our humanity now raised him from death and clothed him in immortal glory as the first specimen of the new creation. The Spirit ensured that the incarnate Son who abased himself for us would recover the glory that he had with the Father before all ages (John 17:22–24).
And yet, it is more than a return to the eternal glory that he shared by virtue of his deity. His humanity is not akin to a spacesuit that he dons for his mission, only to leave it behind as he returns to his eternal status. The whole point of the incarnation was to assume our humanity so that he could fulfill the human vocation representatively for us, bear our judgment, and be raised and glorified as the beginning of the new creation. This time, when he enters the Father’s glory in the power of the Spirit, he does so as the incarnate Word. We have seen how the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead and thus vindicated him publicly as the firstfruits of the new creation. Thus the glory that he possesses now is even greater than it was from all ages; it is not only the glory appropriate to God but the glorification of his humanity. Interestingly, Jesus is the only human being who could truly say that he had sanctified himself (John 17:19), winning the prize of glory. But he prays that the Father will make his disciples share in his glory (17:17). The Father answers this prayer by sending the Spirit, first as an indwelling deposit guaranteeing final salvation, and, second, as the surveyor and perfector who will clothe us all in glorious splendor, far beyond the beauty of our first parents at creation.
THE DOCTRINE OF GLORIFICATION
Reaching back all the way to the eternal covenant between the persons of the Godhead for the salvation of the elect, the Spirit’s saving agency reaches forward to glorification (Rom 8:11). On that day, our complete conformity to the image of Christ—with radiant bodies dressed in beauty and grace—will not only be God’s vindication of us but the consummated vindication of himself and his purposes in history. This status of the image not even Adam and Eve knew before the fall since it was the goal of their vocation. Peter even calls this participation in the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4) since we share in the glorifying energies that conform us finally, completely, and forever to God’s moral nature.
With Christ as mediator in creation, all human beings share his communicable attributes analogically (as his image). And yet, we have marred this image. The Spirit is restoring this image through a union with the Son that is far more wonderful than the natural one in creation. At Christ’s return the Spirit will raise us from the dead into immortal glory, announcing publicly to the cosmic and earthly powers that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. In our glorification, we will be “deified”—that is, as Francis Turretin puts it, “as much like God as a creature can ever be.”1
It may surprise some readers that this theme of deification (or glorification) was also an important theme in the writings of the Reformers. Zwingli dedicated an article to it in his Defense of the Reformed Faith, concluding, “That a person is drawn to God by God’s Spirit and deified, becomes quite clear from scripture.”2 Luther also taught that the goal of our salvation is to be “completely deified,” and he saw this truth as the effect of rather than alternative to forensic imputation.3 Calvin asked, “What is the goal of our adoption which we attain through him, if it is not, as Peter declares, finally to be partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4)?”4 Immortality is not the soul’s native origin, he adds, but the prize that Christ has won for us.5 Creation in God’s image is “participation in God,” but justification and re-creation in Christ by grace is “a joy beyond words.”6 Nevertheless, “we are one with the Son of God; not because he conveys his substance to us, but because, by the power of his Spirit, he imparts to us his life and all the blessings which he has received from the Father.”7 He says that the “fanatics” imagine that at death “we shall at length revert to our original [state],” erroneously conceived as absorption into deity.8 Besides some Anabaptist leaders, he undoubtedly had in mind Andreas Osiander, the erstwhile colleague of Luther whose views alienated him from Lutheran circles. Even after his deep criticisms of Osiander’s more Origenist view of union, Calvin nevertheless maintained that deification is that “than which nothing can be conceived better.”9 Propitiation and victory underscore the danger that Christ’s death has overcome for us. Yet to be delivered from sin’s curse and therefore from the kingdom of Satan is not yet to be united to God. The atonement needs the ascension and Pentecost.
If we tend to bring the Holy Spirit in too late to the story in the history of redemption (Pentecost) and the application of redemption (sanctification), our eyes tend to become blurry when it comes to the future glory that awaits us in the Spirit. I suggest that where glorification has been marginalized in more recent Reformed soteriological discussions, it has been due in part to a lack of due appreciation for (a) the saving significance of the ascension as the glorification of Christ’s humanity as our representative, (b) the Spirit’s agency in completing the work of salvation, and (c) the eschatological aspect, out of an understandable concern to highlight the “once and for all” character of justification.
THE GROANING SPIRIT
Something needs to be said about the Spirit’s “groaning,” particularly as this longing for the consummation is essential to our lives in the Spirit here and now. “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom 8:22 ESV). The point is emphasized in the Greek: The whole creation “groans together” (systenazei) and “travails together” (synōdinei). The Spirit who “cherished the confused mass,” to repeat Calvin’s phrase, can hardly give up on creation even after humanity has dedicated its resources to destroying it. I take this to be a sort of personification of human prayer. Creation is praying for the end of its bondage to the curse imposed upon it because of human rebellion. The Greek verbs translated here as “groans together” and “travails together” underscore the collective burden of creation under the weight of the curse. But only four verses later we read, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (v. 26). The Holy Spirit is not yet in a triumphalistic mood. There is too much bondage, too much rebellion and quenching and resistance to his reign for that. Yet our prayers join in the “groanings” of the Spirit along with all of creation in anticipation of the world’s release from bondage, bathed in the glory of God.
What does all of this have to do with glorification? Everything. The future hope of glorification—of the revelation of the children of God (v. 19)—is the hope that keeps creation and the elect moving together in step with the Spirit. Even as I write this, I am unsure exactly what this means. But the Holy Spirit does. This frees me to pray for it, assuming that creation is “praying” with me, for only with the revelation of the children of God is its fate settled forever. The whole creation groans, and I groan, but more than all of this “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (v. 26).
The other important reference to groaning occurs in 2 Corinthians 4. John Levison writes:
Paul is not rendering a definitive doctrine of resurrection bodies. He is instead ruminating upon the vision of Ezekiel within his own context: believers who now groan in the context of present suffering (2 Cor 4:16–18) can confidently anticipate a time when Ezekiel’s vision will become a reality, when new sinews, flesh, and skin will come upon dead, naked bones. Of this believers can be certain because God ‘has given the spirit,’ as in Ezekiel 36–37, as a pledge.10
It all points to life, but “lavish life.” “This vision is about life beyond measure, beyond hope, beyond suffering, beyond the shadow of death.”11
Also in 1 Thessalonians 4:3–8, “Paul has picked up three facets of Ezekiel’s vision—the spirit given into Israel, holiness, and knowledge of God—and adapted them to the situation of the Thessalonians.”12 Having “received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit” (1 Thess 1:6 NRSV), they “turned to God from idols” (v. 9 NRSV) and should therefore repent of sexual immorality.13 The reference is not just past conversion and future resurrection, but the present and ongoing gift of filling: the Father “gives his Holy Spirit to you” (v. 8).14 “Being filled with the spirit, therefore, from Paul’s perspective, is not a spiritual transformation that takes place on a sphere other than the human and earthly. . . . Filling with the spirit, on the contrary, renders the spirits of this world obsolete (Gal 4:3), restructures human relationships (Gal 4:4–7; Rom 8:12–17; and Philemon), and causes the hegemony of fear to disintegrate (Rom 8:15).”15
Whatever all of this inward groaning entails, it is surely nothing less than a passion sparked by the foretaste of a world that is new in a qualitatively different sense than any era that has preceded it. As the harbinger of the age to come and the consummator of the Trinity’s works, the Spirit binds us to the hope of a completely renewed world. “But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him’ ” (1 Cor 2:9 ESV). Are we ready for this? Of course not. But the indwelling Holy Spirit prepares us for it. And there is no prayerful “groaning” that does not lead toward it.
1. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. J. T. Dennison Jr., trans. G. M. Giger (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1997), 3:209.
2. Huldrych Zwingli Writings, Vol. One: The Defense of the Reformed Faith, trans. E. J. Furcha, Pittsburgh Theological Monographs (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1984), 57.
3. Martin Luther, from a 1529 sermon quoted in Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, trans. Walter A. Hansen, vol. 1 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1962), 175–76. See Kurt E. Marquart, “Luther and Theosis,” CTQ 64.3 (2000): 182–205.
4. As cited in Joseph Tylenda, “The Controversy of Christ the Mediator: Calvin’s Second Reply to Stancaro,” CTJ 8 (1973): 148.
5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Lewis Ford Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 2.1.1.
6. Ibid., 2.2.1.
7. John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospelof John, trans. William Pringle, Calvin’s Commentaries 18 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, n.d.; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 184 (on John 17:21; emphasis original).
8. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Second Epistle of Peter, trans. John Owen, Calvin’s Commentaries 22 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, n.d.; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 371 (on 2 Pet 1:4); cf. Institutes, 1.15.5.
9. Calvin, Second Epistle of Peter, 370 (on 2 Pet 1:4).
10. John Levison, Filled with the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 262.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 265.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 266.
15. Ibid.