CHAPTER 12
THE SPIRIT AND THE BRIDE
The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. . . . He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
REVELATION 22:17, 20 ESV
Where the Church is, there is also the Spirit of God and where the Spirit of God is, there are also the Church and all grace.
IRENAEUS1
To believe in the Holy Ghost, and the holy catholic church, you know how near they stand together in the Creed. His invisible coming at Pentecost was the visible consecration and dedication of that great temple, the mystical body of Christ, to be reared under the gospel.
THOMAS GOODWIN2
There seems little doubt that we have seen greater interest in “Third Article” theology in recent decades.3 But the question is whether the focus is the Spirit who “spoke by the prophets” to reveal Christ and who creates “one holy, catholic and apostolic church,” leading the ground campaign for “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins” until “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.” How can not only weak but even sinful ministers be considered “servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor 4:1 ESV), much less God’s coworker (1 Cor 3:9), “ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us” (2 Cor 5:20 ESV)? How can ordinary water or bread and wine in the context of a covenant ceremony count as God’s own pledge of salvation? And how can the Spirit’s invisible operations be identified with such visible rituals? Yet the same assumptions that provoke these protests could (and often do) question the identification of God’s speech with human utterances in Scripture and preaching, as well as the incarnation itself.
THE SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH
Many evangelicals (myself among them) were reared with the epithet “churchianity,” directed scornfully at anything that to us smacked of formalism and ritualism. Often, being born again by the Spirit was set explicitly over against belonging to the church. Meanwhile, some churches (those charged with “churchianity”) seemed to accept the divorce, though favoring the church over the Spirit. These are exaggerations, of course. Nevertheless, it would be a distortion, I think, to recover a proper appreciation for the Holy Spirit that failed to entail a robust ecclesiology.4 The opposition between the Spirit and the church has a long pedigree in more radical and mystical movements of church history. What seems striking in our day is the extent to which this radical impulse has become mainstream. Before engaging this approach, let us examine the opposite tendency to domesticate the Spirit by assimilating him to the church.
Assimilating the Spirit to the Church: Totus Christus Variations
Conflation of Christ with the Spirit (and both with the church) reaches an extreme in the conviction of Russian Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov that the church is the incarnation of the Spirit.5 John Milbank offers his own endorsement of Bulgakov’s eccentric thesis.6 Indeed, a future orthodoxy will have “to speak in a sense of a triple incarnation of the entire Trinity.”7 Beyond lacking any scriptural warrant, this thesis confuses the distinct properties of the persons. The Spirit works within nature; he even united the Son to our humanity in the incarnation, as we have seen. But the Spirit is never the subject of incarnation. Even to speak metaphorically of the Spirit’s “incarnation” is a category mistake and eliminates the incommunicable properties that are essential to the distinction of persons.
However, the assimilation of the Spirit to the church is part of a longer history of assimilating Christ to his church. Although the incarnation of the Spirit as the church is a highly eccentric thesis, it has been common in church history to identify the Spirit as the soul of the church.8 Congar writes that the church is Christ’s “human and collective visibility: the Christ, it has been said, needs the Church as a pneuma needs a sōma.”9 Like Origen, de Lubac replaces the covenantal relationship of Head and body with a Platonist anthropology. Notice what is lost: first and foremost, Jesus. His visibility—his humanity—is transferred from himself to the church. However, the Spirit is also lost by being assimilated to the church as its soul. Of course, it is only an analogy, but it is an analogy for an inadequate concept. Jesus becomes the church (and vice versa), with the Spirit as his/its soul. Further along the line (especially with Aquinas), it is not entirely clear whether this soul of the church is created grace or uncreated (the Spirit).10
One important development in this trajectory was Augustine’s totus Christus concept. Union with Christ is simultaneously union with his body. So intimate is the bond that we are justified in saying that Christ as head and the church as his body form “the whole Christ” (totus Christus).11 Augustine repeats the formula in On the Epistle of John 1.2, and in a sermon he adds that although Christ would be complete without us, he has not chosen to be complete without his body (Sermons 341.1.1); Augustine also drew the idea from Matthew 25:31–46 and Acts 9:4.12 In both passages Jesus identifies his people with himself: extending charity to fellow believers being persecuted is extending it to him, and confronting Saul with the question, “Why are you persecuting me?” Controversy provoked some of these statements, as Augustine considered the Donatist schismatics to be tearing Christ’s body apart. The bishop of Hippo asks whether this heresy calls into question the very incarnation itself that Christ has come in the flesh.13 As John Burnaby noted, students of the Eastern fathers will not find this concept alien.14
In subsequent centuries, though, this biblical—especially Pauline—teaching took on larger proportions. Through the influence of Christian Neoplatonism, mediated especially by Pseudo-Dionysius, the church was conceived as a ladder or pyramid with myriad levels of being descending from the One (i.e., God) to Mary and the saints and then all the way down to laypeople and even those barely in communion with the church. In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII issued a bull, Unam Sanctam, which claimed sovereignty over this pyramid in its terrestrial administration, both spiritual and temporal. As the body is subordinate to the soul, the state was said to be subordinate to the church with the pope as its head, and submission in all things to the Vicar of Christ was considered essential to salvation.
Furthermore, in the high scholastic theology of the West the efficacy of the sacraments was lodged increasingly not in the Spirit but in the priest who was granted in ordination the infusion of a new character that enabled him to transform the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood.15 With the natural body of Jesus despatialized in Thomas Aquinas’s formulation, the miracle of transubstantiation “placed Christ fully in the church’s possession,” notes Douglas Farrow. “Indeed, it meant that the church now controlled the parousia. At the ringing of a bell the Christus absens became the Christus praesens. . . . Seated comfortably with the Christ-child on its lap, the church soon became his regent rather than his servant. In short, its Marian ego, already out of control at the beginning of the eucharistic debates, afterwards knew no bounds.”16
The dogma of transubstantiation shapes Roman Catholic ecclesiology even as it reveals deeper theological and metaphysical assumptions. The bodily absence of Christ since his ascension is not a problem that highlights the need of the Spirit because Jesus has in a functional sense returned in and as the church. Although he rules invisibly through his omnipresent divinity, his earthly, visible form is his body, the church. This version of the totus Christus supplies the grandest vision of the church but at the highest cost: it substitutes the church for both the humanity of its Lord as well as the Spirit, whom the Lord gives to unite us to that glorified humanity. It leads inevitably to a domestication of the Spirit (as well as of Christ)—reduced to the immanence of ecclesial being and action. This is far from an exclusively Roman Catholic temptation, but it is important to reflect briefly on at least some of the factors that contributed to the marginalization of the Spirit in favor of the church.
Is there, then, any necessity of invoking the Spirit? This concern has been raised frequently by Orthodox theologians, who point out that while the epiclesis (prayer for the Spirit) is essential to the consecration, it fell into disuse in Western liturgies.17 Further marginalizing the Spirit, by the time of Aquinas the sacraments were to be understood as infusing created grace into the soul just as medicine cures the body. Just as what began as a thoroughly scriptural argument for the unity of Christ with his church increasingly elided any distinction between Head and members, the Spirit as well as the kingdom of God also became assimilated to the church. The Council of Trent reinforced the idea of the church as a legal institution with power over all souls and bodies.18
Johann Adam Möhler led the way in the late nineteenth-century “Reform Catholicism” ecclesiology to turn the post-Tridentine concept of the church as essentially a legal institution with plenary power toward a more organic idea. Yet Möhler’s approach was, if anything, an even greater intensification of the notion that the church is Christ’s continuing incarnation. “The Church is ordinated towards the invisible, spiritual and eternal. . . . But the Church is not only invisible. Because she is the Kingdom of God, she is not a haphazard collection of individuals, but an ordered system of regularly subordinated parts.” Through this hierarchy, “the divine is objectivised, is incarnated in the community, and precisely and only in so far as it is a community. . . . So the Church possesses the Spirit of Christ, not as a many of single individuals, nor as a sum of spiritual personalities, but as the compact unity of the faithful, as a community that transcends the individual personalities . . . the many as one.” Christ’s mission is “to reunite to God mankind as a unity, as a whole, and not this or that individual man.”19
Not only unity—common fellowship in Christ, but unicity—numerical oneness in a hierarchy with a papal head—is Adam’s understanding of the church.20
In a somewhat chilling illustration of his time and place, Adam passionately asserts, “One God, one faith, one love, one single man: that is the stirring thought which inspires the Church’s pageantry and gives it artistic form.”21 Echoing Hegel, he declares, “For only in the whole can the divine realise itself, only in the totality of men and not in the individual.”22 As a consequence, “The structural organs of the Body of Christ, as that is realised in space and time, are pope and bishops.”23 For all of these reasons, says Adam, “The Catholic Church as the Body of Christ, as the realisation in the world of the Kingdom of God, is the Church of Humanity.”24
The domestication of the Spirit or Christ to the church is also a temptation in Protestant circles. Endorsing modalism, Friedrich Schleiermacher further conflated the Spirit with the community of Jesus.25 The maximal “God-consciousness” that Jesus acquired is available to us by participation in the community that he founded.26 Invoking the analogy of a “national spirit,” Schleiermacher identifies the Holy Spirit not as a distinct person of the Trinity but as the “common spirit” of the church.27 It is good that Jesus departed because the church replaces his actual personal existence, extending his life—his special relation to the divine whole of reality—in and as his community.28 Instead of being a person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit becomes the personality of the community. I have engaged at length with the now familiar ways in which evangelicals also talk about the church as Christ’s ongoing incarnation.29 But if Jesus, the Spirit, and the church are simply merged in our thinking, there can be no real unity between them. It is that paradoxical union of different persons that Jesus highlighted in his farewell discourse, as we have seen.
More recently, Anglo-Catholic theologian Graham Ward goes so far as to suggest that the “displacement” of Jesus-in-the-flesh is not a loss but a transubstantiation of his personal existence in and as the church. Despite his disclaimer that his “interpretation of the ascension is not in accord with Origen’s ‘ascension of the mind rather than of the body,’ ”30 Ward’s arguments do little to allay the contrary judgment. According to this rather extreme version of the notion of Christ’s ubiquity transferred to the church, “We have no access to the body of the gendered Jew. . . . It is pointless because the Church is now the body of Christ, so to understand the body of Jesus we can only examine what the Church is and what it has to say concerning the nature of that body as scripture attests it.”31 “As Gregory of Nyssa points out, in his thirteenth sermon on Song of Songs,” Ward quotes, “ ‘he who sees the Church looks directly at Christ.’ ”32
Similarly, Robert Jenson argues that the apostle Paul considers a person’s body as simply the person in his or her availability to others. “In Paul’s ontology, such personal availability may or may not be constituted as the biological entity moderns first think of as ‘a body.’ ”33 After offering some intriguing insights into the Corinthians’ failure to discern Christ’s body in the congregation and in the Eucharistic bread,34 Jenson takes the further step of suggesting that Christ himself finds his personal body in the church and Eucharist. “The church with her sacraments is truly Christ’s availability to us just because Christ takes her as his availability to himself. Where does the risen Christ turn to find himself? To the sacramental gathering of believers. To the question ‘Who am I?’ he answers, ‘I am this community’s head. I am the subject whose objectivity is this community. . . . And again: ‘I am the subject whose objectivity for this community is the bread and cup around which she gathers.’ ”35 The last two examples represent totus Christus with a vengeance.36 Rather than turn to the Spirit’s work of uniting the members to the glorified Head, such proposals lead inevitably to the evaporation of Jesus and his replacement by the church.
Once more the importance of recognizing the intersection of the ascension and Pentecost becomes self-evident. Lacking pneumatological mediation, proposals such as these spiritualize Jesus, transforming the human person into a cosmic ecclesial personality. Douglas Farrow reminds us again that if we explain away his real departure in the flesh, all particularity of Jesus is lost. The question, “Where is Jesus?” is not speculative. It determines the larger question, “Who is Jesus?” If the answer to the first question is “Everywhere,” then the answer to the second must be, “Everything.” Claiming to be Irenaean, incarnational, and antignostic, such an approach becomes much nearer to Gnosticism. “Its chief characteristics are to be found in its universalism, its synergism, and its panentheism, all of which justifies us in labeling it as Origenist rather than Irenaean.”37
There have been critics of extreme approaches to the totus Christus. Walter Cardinal Kasper laments, “In modern theology one often gets the impression that pneumatology has become a function of ecclesiology; the Spirit has become the guarantor of the Church as an institution and pneumatology has become the ideological superstructure on top of ecclesiology.”38 Heribert Mühlen (1927–2006) judged that the notion of the church as Christ’s continuing incarnation was a culprit in the weak pneumatology underlying Catholic ecclesiologies. While differing in some respects, Yves Congar was sympathetic to Mühlen’s critique, which he summarized as follows:
The Church has to be seen not as what [Johann Adam] Möhler called a “continued incarnation,” a formula that was later accepted by the Roman School, but rather as the presence and activity in the “Church” of the same personal Spirit that [sic] anointed Jesus as the Messiah. The most suitable formula for a dogmatic definition of the mystery of the Church, then, would be “only one Person, that of the Holy Spirit, in several persons, namely Christ and us, his believers.”39
For Mühlen, the church is not a continuing incarnation but the continuing act of the Father’s bestowal of the Spirit. This shift from a one-sidedly christological ecclesiology to a more robust pneumatology carries significant ramifications. This may be seen in the way that Aiden Nichols appeals to Mühlen’s thesis regarding the totus Christus:
The unity of this persona will not of course be the hypostatic unity whereby the Word and the humanity the Word assumed in Mary’s womb are one Person. . . . Rather, the unity of the una quaedam persona comes about through the mediation of the Holy Spirit, who is himself one and the same in Christ and ourselves.40
Separating the Spirit from the Church
It was largely in reaction against an immanentism and the domestication of transcendence that Karl Barth perceived in both Roman Catholic and liberal Protestant teaching that he contrasted more sharply than even Zwingli the visible and invisible church as well as the reality (i.e., act of revelation) and the sign (Scripture, preaching). “To speak of a continuation or extension of the incarnation in the Church is not only out of place but even blasphemous,” he boldly and properly insists.41 However, distinctions often become dichotomies between God and humanity, the divine Word and human words, baptism with the Spirit and baptism with water. It is difficult to resist the impression that these dichotomies belong to the map of eternity and time, respectively. Once more we see the correlation between the means of grace and the church that the Spirit constitutes through them. Barth complained, “The Reformed Church and Reformed theology (even in Zurich) could not continue to hold” to Zwingli’s teaching and took a “backward step” toward Calvin’s “sacramentalism.”42
In order to uphold God’s sovereign freedom, Barth insisted that creaturely agency can only testify to grace, not convey it. “The work of the Church is the work of men. It can never be God’s work.”43 Zwingli held that the Spirit does not need “a channel or vehicle.”44 Similarly for Barth, Christ is to be sharply distinguished from the church. “He is He, and His work is His work, standing over against all Christian action, including the Christian faith and Christian baptism.”45 Consequently, the church loses in Barth’s conception its tie to history and visibility except as another worldly institution in which sometimes a miracle of revelation occurs in it despite itself.46 Barth’s actualist ontology underwrites this emphasis: “The Church is when it takes place.”47 It is remarkable that this fundamental diastasis between everything divine and everything human, which marked his Römerbrief, remained so constant even to these late writings. In that early work Barth went so far as to contrast the visible and invisible church in terms of the “Church of Esau” and the “Church of Jacob.”48 So where the conflation of Christology and ecclesiology in some modern theologies virtually eliminate the difference between divine and ecclesial agency, Barth virtually eliminates affinity.
An altogether different rationale for the opposition of the Spirit to the church has gained prominence in recent decades. Whereas for Barth the opposition is between Christ and the institutional church, this newer trajectory is dominated by a pneumatological emphasis. Traditional ecclesiologies are Christocentric, with the dominant image of the church as Christ’s body. Concomitant with this focus is an emphasis on the particularity of revelation and redemption, associated with the maxim that there is no salvation outside of the church (extra ecclesiam nulla salus), endorsed by Lutheran and Reformed as well as Roman Catholic and Orthodox confessions.49 Critics of this approach suggest that a more Spirit-centered account enables us to construct more open, universalistic, and pluralist theologies.50 Attempting initially a christological foundation for a more inclusive theology of religions, Clark Pinnock said that he had to find a more pneumatological basis.51 G. F. W. Hegel became an important resource for Pinnock’s reflections at this point.52 There is a directness and immediacy of the Spirit to human beings “as spirit,” he argues, that transcends the particularities of Jesus and the church.53
Indeed, the features that the Protestant Reformers identified with “enthusiasm” are now increasingly taken for granted by many theologians across the various traditions. The Spirit is identified with that which is invisible, individual, inward, voluntaristic, immediate, and spontaneous, which gives rise to a universalistic and pluralistic collection of individual wills. This is contrasted with the visible, ecclesial, external, verbal, mediated, and official form and ministry of the church with its unity of faith and practice. This trend is very much in keeping with the secular spirit of the age, which captures such contrasts under the now familiar rubric, “spiritual but not religious.”
According to Karl Rahner, “God . . . has already communicated himself in his Holy Spirit always and everywhere and to every person as the innermost center of his existence.”54 But is this another way of domesticating the Spirit? Whether by confusing him with the inner spirit of the self or the inner spirit of the church, we turn the Spirit into something that we control or that is simply ourselves. The Spirit’s voice turns out to be merely talking to ourselves. In doing so, we not only sacrifice the particularity of the Trinitarian confession but surrender the very possibility of our being judged and therefore rescued by God.
For many Christians today, even those in more liturgical traditions, the notion that the Spirit is at work visibly wherever the Word is faithfully preached and the sacraments are administered according to Christ’s institution is no longer intuitive. For many, it seems, the only way of redeeming the term church is to identify it exclusively with the invisible church, that is, the spiritual fellowship of all God’s elect in all times and places rather than the visible and concrete institution that in its various manifestations is somehow thought to be endowed with real authority from Christ and genuine power from the Spirit. The Spirit is associated with mission, often in some tension (if not outright contrast) with the church’s ministry of preaching, sacrament, and discipline.
But this is a glaring misapprehension of the economic operations of the Trinity in general and the incarnation in particular. The Father sent the Son, and the Spirit clothed the Son in our nature; the Father and the Son sent the Spirit into our hearts, regenerating and uniting us to Christ the living vine. The Spirit’s work is consistently associated with that which is public and tangible in history, as we have seen. Furthermore, the Spirit equips the church to be an official and creaturely embassy of Christ’s reign and sends us out on his mission to bring the liberating word of the King to the ends of the earth. The sending of the church therefore belongs to the same economy as the Father’s sending of the Son as well as the sending of the Spirit by the Father and the Son. Consequently, to divide Spirit-filled mission from the institutional church is to misunderstand at a fundamental level who the Spirit is, how he works ordinarily, and what we are called to do and be in the world today.55 I fear that we are creeping toward a Gnosticism that views the visible church as the prison house of the invisible church.
Pointing out the similarities between Barth and Hans Küng, Avery Cardinal Dulles counters that the empirical church is not simply the work of humans, distinct from the kingdom as the work of God. “At the outset it seems worthwhile to note that the term ekklesia as used in the New Testament is an eschatological term. It means an assembly or convocation and more specifically the convocation of the saints that will be realized to the full at the eschaton.”56 Dulles properly notes that, far from passing away as Barth holds, the church “will then truly come into its own. . . . The eschatological meals that Jesus celebrates with his disciples are a foretaste of the final messianic supper in the Kingdom of heaven. . . . Nothing suggests that the community of the disciples will be dissolved in heaven, when the twelve sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”57 The New Testament everywhere anticipates the consummation of the church’s existence, not its dissolution.58 The distinction between ecclesia militans and triumphans is still important.59 Dulles is closer on these points at least to the traditional Protestant (at least Reformed) understanding of the church as more than a secular institution that happens to coincide at flashpoint moments with the work of God. If the consummated reality is the abolition of the church, then how can its current existence be anything other than an empty sign?
Lesslie Newbigin is correct when he asserts that Barth’s interpretation goes beyond the Reformers (even Luther) when he sets the event of proclamation against the history of a covenant community. “The eschatological has completely pushed out the historical.”60 While it is true that Word and sacrament create and sustain the church, Newbigin rightly insists that “they do not create the Church de novo, or ex nihilo”; “every setting forth of the word and sacraments of the Gospel is an event in the life of an actually existing Christian church.”61 The semi-realized eschatological event occurs each Lord’s Day within the context of a covenant community extended through all times and places. A covenant community takes time; it cannot be merely an event, much less a crater that is left behind by revelation. Both a people and a place, an event and an institution, the visible communion today is connected historically to the apostles by the external marks of Word, sacrament, and discipline. And yet it must be added that the only reason why any particular setting forth of the Word and sacraments can be a continuation in history of God’s covenant and kingdom is due to the Spirit’s free operation that no church can take for granted.
Less extreme than Barth’s account is John Webster’s statement of the relation. He is eager to affirm that “the Father wills that ex nihilo there should come into being a creaturely counterpart to the fellowship of love which is the inner life of the Holy Trinity.”62 Matthew Levering notes:
Webster fears, however, that ‘a potent doctrine of the church’s relation to God as both participatory and mediatorial’ will obscure ‘God’s utter difference from creatures even in his acts towards and in them’ (ibid., 163). The solution for Webster is to locate the church concretely under the cross and to emphasize the work of the Holy Spirit as pure grace, rather than as ‘some kind of coordination of divine and creaturely elements’ (ibid., 181).63
While the opposition is not quite as sharp as it is in Barth, Webster places the church’s activity on the testifying side of the register. The church witnesses to God’s grace in Christ, Webster argues, but plays no role in the “actualization of or sharing in the divine presence and action.”64 But Levering rightly replies: “The eschatological people upon whom the exalted Christ pours out his Spirit do more than testify in repentance and praise to the promise and command of the gospel.”65 If the church does not replace Christ, it also cannot be separated from him. To reduce the nature of the church to the agency of its members is to separate the church from both its exalted Head and its indwelling Spirit. Ephraim Radner goes further in arguing that the visible church is so compromised that it lacks the Spirit’s presence.66 Yet this is tantamount to saying that Christ has failed to keep his promise.
In short, many Protestant ecclesiological assumptions today are closer to the radical than to the magisterial Reformation in spirit and substance. If Rome forgets the distance between Christ and the church that the Spirit must mediate, radical Protestants seek to overcome this distance by an unmediated encounter within the individual. This individualism is reflected in an independent and egalitarian ecclesiological impulse. In Roman Catholic ecclesiology, the tendency is to confuse things that ought to be distinguished: Christ and the visible church, and therefore regeneration and water baptism, the transformation of consecrated bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, and so forth. In fact, in the Eucharist the creaturely sign itself is annihilated, replaced by the reality. The actions of the church simply are the actions of Christ. The Anabaptists exhibit the opposite tendency—to separate things that ought to be united.
The Spirit in the Church
Responding to these opposite tendencies, it may be good to begin by observing that of all the genitive designations for the Spirit in Scripture, one does not find “Spirit of the church” among them. The third person of the Godhead is called the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Even when he is given as the indwelling deposit and renewing agent, the Lord and giver of life is never the possession either of pious believers or of the holy church. Nevertheless, I have argued that he has bound himself freely to the people, places, and things that have been designated in his Word. But sanctification is different from transubstantiation. To be holy, sacred, and indwelled by the Spirit is not to be something other than a creature, but to be a creature claimed by God’s gracious choice. The creature must remain a creature ontologically; to mediate the reality, the sign cannot become the reality—in order to be set apart for participation in God.
As Lesslie Newbigin observed, the theory of the church “as ‘the extension of the Incarnation’ springs from a confusion of sarx with sōma.”67 “Christ’s risen body”—that is, his ecclesial distinguished from his natural body—“is not fleshly but spiritual,” Newbigin observes. “He did not come to incorporate us in His body according to the flesh but according to the Spirit”—hence, his promise that when he ascends he will send the Spirit.68 Nor is the Spirit, much less his created gifts, the soul of the church, I would add. How does such a conception avoid the conclusion that the church is after all simply talking to itself, saving itself, and relating to itself? The relation in this conception is not between persons but between faculties in one person.
Congar’s maxim—that Christ “needs the Church as a pneuma needs a sōma”69—discloses the metaphysical background of the Roman Catholic conception. Rather than the dynamic eschatological distinction that we find in the New Testament between the flesh (the power of this age) and the Spirit (bringing the powers of the age to come), we have a static ontological one. Insofar as he exists at all for us now, Jesus is a soul needing physical embodiment as the church. Further, the analogy renders not even the Holy Spirit but Christ as the pneuma of the church. Consequently, Jesus loses his humanity—the very humanity that we need to be glorified at the right hand of the Father as our forerunner, and the Holy Spirit is left without any obviously constitutive role.
This is why the eclipse of the epiclesis in the Latin Eucharistic liturgy is so profoundly lamented in Orthodoxy. It deepens the suspicion that the ladder of grace has been so filled in by ecclesiastical mediators that the Spirit’s operation is unnecessary. This was a serious mistake, which Reformed theology acknowledged not only theologically but liturgically by reintroducing it into its Eucharistic service. As Walter Cardinal Kasper explains, the recovery of the epiclesis in Roman Catholic practice became part of the liturgical reforms after Vatican II. “Anyone remotely familiar with the Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist, going back to Calvin,” he says, “will know about the ecumenical significance of this teaching.”70 A faithful ecclesiology will not domesticate the Spirit to the church but will recognize the positive difference between Jesus, the Spirit, and the church that makes salvation and genuine union possible.
Far from dispensing with totus Christus, I believe that the proper response to these distortions is to recover Augustine’s idea. He spoke of the intimate connection being so close that Christ and his church may be spoken of as una quaedam persona—“as it were, one person.”71 But the “as it were” in Augustine’s version of totus Christus (as in the “one flesh” of Paul’s marital analogy) becomes “quite literally” in Ratzinger’s concept of a “fusion of existences.”72
Augustine’s notion of totus Christus is simply another way of expressing the doctrine of union with Christ, and in De Trinitate the Spirit is seen as essential in bringing about this union. This is precisely how Calvin interprets these passages, echoing Augustine’s exegesis nearly verbatim:
This is the highest honor of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete! Hence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, when the apostle discusses largely the metaphor of a human body, he includes under the single name of Christ the whole Church.73
Reformed theology has always been happy to appeal to the Augustinian motif, which is clear enough in John and Paul. Yet this totus Christus is conceived in terms of its eschatological rather than metaphysical foundations. Of course, there are metaphysical and ontological repercussions: while remaining creatures, those who are caught up by the Spirit into the eschatological life of Christ the firstfruits are transformed in soul and finally, at the last, in body. However, in the New Testament, as in Augustine as well as Luther and Calvin, the relation of Christ and his church is that of husband and wife: “one flesh” in union, not a “fusion of existences”; of Head and members, vine and branches, firstfruits and harvest, not as pneuma and sōma. There remains an eschatological tension between the “already” and the “not yet” that affects Christ as well as us.74 As Herman Bavinck nicely summarizes:
As the church does not exist apart from Christ, so Christ does not exist without the church. He is ‘the head over all things’ (Eph. 1:22; Col. 1:18), and the church is the body formed from him and from him receives its growth (Eph. 4:16; Col. 2:19), thus growing to maturity ‘to the measure of the full stature of Christ’ (Eph. 4:13). . . . Together with him it can be called the one Christ (1 Cor. 12:12). It is to perfect the church that he is exalted to the Father’s right hand. . . . Just as surely as the re-creation took place objectively in Christ, so surely it must also be carried out subjectively by the Holy Spirit in the church. The church is an organism, not an aggregate; the whole, in its case, precedes the parts.75
It is the purpose of the Spirit not to alleviate our cry for our Lord’s bodily return even as if he were Christ’s replacement, much less by talk of the church (or one of its pastors) as vicar. On the contrary, the Spirit’s indwelling presence provokes that longing for the bodily appearance of the very one to whom he has united us through faith. The proper invocation of the Spirit will always keep us in that tension between the “already” and the “not yet,” enabling the church to remember the Christ who died and rose again for us, who intercedes now for us, and who will come again to make us share perfectly in his glory. In spite of his ascension, Christ is intimately and inseparably united to his ecclesial body. However, it is not by eccentric moves in the field of Christology that this can be affirmed but by embracing a robust pneumatology.
Because of the Spirit’s labors, the invisible church is made visible, though as yet the imperfect bride rather than the glorious spouse. Because of the Spirit the church is not merely a historical institution, the continuation of the effects (Wirküngsgeschichte) through a long tradition, nor merely an eschatological event that occurs in the eucharistic assembly, nor merely a future reality that has no bearing on the present reality of the visible body of Christ, but all three at the same time, in a semi-realized kingdom.
KINGDOM OF THE SPIRIT VERSUS CHURCH
As the modernist Catholic theologian Alfred Loisy complained, “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church.”76 Judging by a considerable body of literature, there are “church people” and “kingdom people,” the Spirit being identified especially with the latter. However, there is a wide spectrum ranging from conservative to liberal. At least in more evangelical circles, the kingdom emphasis gained traction through Dutch neo-Calvinism, inspired by the vision of Abraham Kuyper for transforming all spheres of life under Christ’s lordship.77 While most representatives have followed Kuyper in affirming both kingdom and church, the former is frequently treated as more encompassing and inspiring.
Scot McKnight has expressed the point that much of contemporary theology has moved in the direction of marginalizing the church in favor of the kingdom.78 In some ways, this phenomenon parallels the false choice explored in the previous chapter. From this perspective, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and churches of the Reformation alike are characterized as inwardly focused on ecclesiastical machinery, more in line with the apostles (especially Paul), while kingdom-oriented Christians are more interested in Jesus and the kingdom living that he lays out in the Sermon on the Mount.
The kingdom had been assimilated in liberal theologies to the ethical idea of a gradual progress of humanity toward justice, peace, and righteousness. Conceiving Jesus as a prophet rather than the divine Savior and substitute for sinners, Walter Rauschenbusch followed a more Ritschlian line. “Jesus always spoke of the Kingdom of God,” he wrote. “Only two of his reported sayings contain the word ‘Church,’ and both passages are of questionable authenticity. It is safe to say that he never thought of founding the kind of institution which afterward claimed to be acting for him.”79 With the subordination of the kingdom to the church, Rauschenbusch argued, came the eclipse of ethics by an ingrown focus on doctrine, worship, preaching, and sacraments; hence, the corruptions of the medieval church and the failure of Protestantism also to reform the structures of society.80 The death of Jesus is subordinated in Rauschenbusch’s thinking to his life of experiential solidarity with suffering humanity. “If [Jesus] had lived for thirty years longer, he would have formed a great society of those who shared his conception and religious realization of God, and this would have been that nucleus of a new humanity which would change the relation of God to humanity.”81 “We can either be saved by non-ethical sacramental methods,” he wrote, “or by absorbing the moral character of Jesus into our own character. Let every man judge which is the salvation he wants.”82
Especially in mainline theology today the Spirit is identified with the kingdom as something different from the visible church. As noted above, this was true of the early Anabaptists and has been true more generally of radical Protestantism in various forms. However, in the modern versions at least, the kingdom tends to be understood as a triumphing force in the world. At least in the most recent versions, history, nature, and the body are celebrated. Indeed, everything is “sacramental.” It is the particularity of the incarnation, this church, and these sacraments that cause offense.
In some versions (especially Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack), the kingdom just is the world. It remains a question whether it is nevertheless “gnostic” in the triumphalistic sense represented by the likes of radical Anabaptist Thomas Müntzer. The new “saints” are persuaded that their higher gnosis transcends all scriptures, churches, and traditions and that through proper moral education and social engineering the lead of matter may be transformed into the gold of Absolute Spirit.
Shocking the liberal establishment as well as the orthodox, Albert Schweitzer famously (or infamously) argued in 1906 that this completely misunderstood Jesus’s own understanding of his mission. Jesus was convinced that he was ushering in the messianic kingdom, but his death brought this ideal to an end, and if he was to have any lingering effect his followers realized that the kingdom would have to be transformed into a purely spiritual entity—the church.83 There is little to say after Schweitzer if one follows in his line. The kingdom Jesus envisioned does not exist, and the church that he did not envision is in fact the only entity remotely extending his memory.
But Schweitzer’s “consistent eschatology” proved to be a speed bump. For the most part, liberal Protestants (and many Catholics) returned to the more Kantian-Ritschlian triumphalism. The earlier impulse of radical Protestantism is evident in the work of Harvey Cox, Jürgen Moltmann, and various theologies of liberation. In spite of the emphasis on the free Spirit who descends where he will, even in Pentecostal and charismatic circles the tendency to treat the Spirit as a possession of the individual believer or a particular movement of revival is evident.
A chapter in Pentecostal theologian Frank Macchia’s Baptized in the Spirit is titled “Christ the King and the Spirit the Kingdom.”84 First of all, there is the depersonalizing tendency: the Spirit not as the one who brings the kingdom to completion but simply as the kingdom. Would it not strike us as odd to hear the Father or the Son spoken of as “the kingdom”? Second, rendering the Spirit identical to the kingdom makes him just as indistinguishable from the field of his agency as it does to say that the church is the Spirit’s incarnation. One serious cost of such immanentizing of the Spirit is that a church, kingdom, individual, world, or movement that simply is the Spirit cannot be brought into being, sustained, and led into the consummation by the Spirit. It cannot be judged or saved; it cannot hear a word that is external to itself
Yet the opposition of kingdom and church is not limited to radical Protestantism. After the Second Vatican Council, mainstream Roman Catholic theologians have argued in a vein similar to Fr. Richard P. McBrien. In Do We Need the Church?, Fr. McBrien wrote, “The church is no longer to be conceived as the center of God’s plan of salvation. Not all men are called to membership in the Church, nor is such membership a sign of present salvation or a guarantee of future salvation. Salvation comes through participation in the Kingdom of God rather than through affiliation with the Christian Church.” 85 He added, “All men are called to the kingdom, because all men are called to live the gospel. But the living of the gospel is not necessarily allied to membership in the visible, structured Christian community.”86 Thomas Sheehan’s The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity is yet another example of the opposition between the kingdom and the church in Roman Catholic circles today.87 As Levering points out, even Gerald O’Collins suggests that the church serves the kingdom.88 According to Levering, “This disjunctive language, which presents the church as a servant of the kingdom and thus as something that will not be needed when the kingdom fully arrives, construes the church in a merely juridical fashion.”89 Since God offers grace to everyone, revelation must be universal. “O’Collins rejects any distinction between ‘super-nature’ and ‘nature,’ ” notes Levering “—in this case between a supernatural revelation granted by God and a merely natural knowledge of God resulting from a human search.”90
There can be little doubt that the interest in a more pluralistic and universalistic theology is driven to a large extent by the pressures that the church faces in a secular culture that is increasingly hostile to any religious claims that divide ostensibly greater and higher loyalties. Levering refers to the example of Diana Eck, who eschews the image of “the body of Christ” as hierarchical in favor of “household.” “The underlying foundation of the world household will finally have to be pluralism,” she claims.91 Further, “this kingdom of divine blessing is much wider than the church. It is the Kingdom of God, not the Christian Church.”92 Levering properly judges,
Eck’s vision of a world-unity based on the recognition of our common humanity neglects the human need for forgiveness, for mercy, which requires the historical action of the living God to overcome our brokenness and the harm that we have done to others. We need the God of mercy, in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, to heal our alienated condition and establish for us a relationship of love and justice by a transformative gift of love.93
Further, for Eck death is the end; thus, our only hope lies in this life.94 Everything sacred, including the Spirit and the kingdom, has been reduced to the immanent frame—in other words, has been secularized.
It is therefore ironic to see some significant post-Conciliar ecclesiologies downplaying the soteriological significance of the church, while churches of the Reformation that continue to hold to their confessions insist upon the point. For Luther and Calvin, as for Cyprian, Augustine, and all of the church fathers, the church is the mother of the faithful and “beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for.”95
THE CHURCH AS THE KINGDOM IN THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Rev 22:17 ESV). Together, the Spirit and the church are inviting the world to the wedding feast of the Lamb. And the church is not merely the messenger but the beloved who is the bride of that feast. The church is therefore not only the agent of the kingdom but the goal of the kingdom itself. It is that part of the world that Christ calls his own body. The kingdom call, “Come!” is inseparable from both the ministry and participation in the visible church.
The same arguments against setting the Spirit and the creaturely means of grace in antithesis go a long way toward deconstructing this false choice as well. If the Spirit worked only immediately in the hearts of individuals, the church would be dissolved at the outset into nothing more than an affinity group with shared private experiences. Yet if the Spirit works through creaturely means that are inherently social, the church is indeed a kingdom of priests (Rev 5:10), one body with many members (1 Cor 12:12–14), branches connected to each other because they share in the same vine (John 15:1–4). They are one in Christ because the Spirit has united them to Christ together through the Word and the sacraments. Because the Spirit indwells each believer personally, the unity of the church cannot be conceived as a “fusion of existences,” as in prominent construals of Roman Catholic teaching encountered above. Rather, each member is chosen in Christ, redeemed, justified, regenerated, and eventually glorified. Yet because each member is in Christ, the Head of the body, the Spirit indwells the whole church even as he indwelled the typological temple in Jerusalem.
Similarly, if the kingdom were merely a community of Spirit-filled agents bringing liberation within the kingdoms of this age, it would no longer be the gift of the triune God but rather another socio-political movement in the history of this fading age. What makes the communio sanctorum more than just another special interest group, ideological camp, or political-action committee? Surely it exhibits common characteristics of human society and organization. Nevertheless, the church is the human creature that the triune God has brought into being and united to the deified humanity of God the Son. It is descending from heaven as a bride prepared for her husband, not rising from its own foundations with its own inherent possibilities like other organizations and associations. The church is adopted by God the Father with the Son as its Head and the Spirit as its regenerating and energizing Lord. For this reason alone it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.
At the same time, if the church were to be defined apart from (much less over against) the kingdom, it would lose its missional identity, becoming a self-enclosed and self-serving institution alongside other clubs and voluntary organizations. In either case, the church is seen less in eschatological terms as the creation of the Spirit, the bride descending from heaven for her bridegroom, than as a human society that is evolving through the energies of sinners with similar outlooks, moral visions, and rites.
Repeatedly, Jesus and the apostles describe the kingdom as a gift that we are receiving. The world will persecute the church, Jesus tells his disciples. Nevertheless, “Fear not, little flock, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32 ESV, emphasis added). “I will build my church,” Jesus promised, “and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Matt 16:15–18 NRSV, emphasis added). All other empires that we build in history can and will pass away, but “we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Heb 12:28). Christ himself is the gift, along with his Spirit, and because the church-kingdom is brought into being, sustained, and grows to the ends of the earth through the preaching of the gospel and baptism and Eucharist, it is a thoroughly divine work of grace through creaturely means of grace. There is a place for our agency: for actively following Christ’s example of humility and generous love as well as righteousness. However, there is something far richer, far deeper than our “willing and running.” It is the Holy Spirit who moves us beyond the imitation of Christ into union with Christ. The church does not repeat or extend Christ’s incarnation or his redeeming and reconciling work. Rather, it is called in all of its difference from Christ to be the creaturely and sinful entity that it is: witnessing to Christ.
What is the kingdom, as Jesus taught it? And is this kingdom substantially different from what the apostles describe as the church? Jesus describes the kingdom as a great feast where “many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 8:11). “The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad” (Matt 13:47 ESV). The kingdom is “the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 24:47; Acts 2:38; 13:38; 22:16; 26:18) and the authority to forgive sins in the King’s name was central to the apostolic identity (Matt 16:19; 18:18). The close connection between the Spirit and forgiveness of sins is evident in what Jesus decrees when he breathes on his disciples in preparation for their kingdom work: “Receive the Holy Spirit,” adding immediately, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven” (John 20:22–23). The kingdom adorns outcasts in the wedding garment (Matt 22:1–14). It is the regime in which the same Spirit who was upon Jesus without measure indwells his people as “living stones” being built into a holy sanctuary (1 Pet 2:5). In the church, the pilgrims gathered from east and west are baptized with the Spirit—John the Baptist’s chief indicator of the kingdom’s arrival. They gather regularly to share in a meal that is a foretaste of the wedding banquet in the kingdom, submitting to the discipline and doctrine of the apostles and the prayers (Acts 2:42). The charter of the kingdom, known as the Great Commission, sends the apostles out to proclaim the gospel, to baptize, and to teach in his name (Matt 28:19; cf. Mark 16:15–16). Indeed, our Lord asks Peter to feed and tend his sheep (John 21:15–17), and the chief purpose in sending the Spirit according to Jesus was that his disciples would be made his gospel witnesses to the ends of the earth until he returns (Acts 1:8).
Are these not precisely the emphases of the apostles, including (even especially) Paul? What, according to the Gospels, is the chief purpose of the Spirit’s mission, equipping believers for the kingdom’s advance? They will be made witnesses throughout the world, proclaiming “repentance and forgiveness of sins” (Luke 24:45–49). Is this not the message of Paul?
Furthermore, far from opposing a charismatic community led by the Spirit on a kingdom mission to an institutional church weighed down by doctrines, scripture, offices, and rituals, the Gospels record the drama that is then unpacked in the apostolic letters. Far from a freelance source of spontaneous revelation, the Spirit binds his ministry to Christ’s mission, as we have seen from the farewell discourse. It is the Spirit who inspires the apostolic canon that is to be foundational for all times and places, and who calls and equips officers and the whole body for mutual love and mission. And when Jesus promises to build his church (Matt 16:18), he knows that it will be by his Word and Spirit that this is accomplished.
When one compares the identification of the kingdom in the Gospels with the description of the church in the Epistles, any cleavage vanishes between a charismatic and dynamic kingdom of the saints and the church as an institution across all times and places. Consistent with his farewell discourse, Jesus’s answer to the disciples’ last question, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) is to wait for the Spirit’s outpouring at Pentecost. This is the conquest, the fulfillment of the event Jesus promised in answer to their question about the kingdom’s restoration.
Throughout the Gospels Jesus is redefining the qahal (assembly) of Israel and redrawing its boundaries around himself, as does the apostle Paul (e.g., Eph 2:11–22). Jesus will gather “other sheep” into the fold of the true Israel and will be one Shepherd over one flock (John 10 as the fulfillment of Ezekiel 34). For the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, the kingdom is no longer a geopolitical nation but a worldwide family of Abraham that flourishes and conquers through the Word and Spirit. Is this not the basic structure of Paul’s message as he traces the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant now that the old covenant has been rendered obsolete with Christ’s advent? And is not his understanding of the cosmic battle—“we do not wrestle against flesh and blood” or with the weapons of this world (Eph 6:12 ESV; cf. 2 Cor 10:4), but instead are armed only with the gospel and the Spirit (e.g., Eph 6:10–18)—precisely that of Jesus’s sermon?
Is Paul’s exhortation here so different from the report of the astonished seventy-two in Luke 10? “The seventy-two returned with joy and said, ‘Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.’ He replied, ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven’ ” (vv. 17–20).
In both instances Christ’s followers are beneficiaries of his conquest of the evil powers, but the principal matter for rejoicing is that they are enrolled among the elect. The church will tread upon snakes (the demonic hosts), triumphing over them by “the word of their testimony” concerning Jesus (Rev 12:11).
The nation-state is dismantled in order to expand the borders of the kingdom to the ends of the earth. Yahweh will at last be acknowledged as Israel’s only King. The Father’s benediction rests on its heirs not as the reward for their faithfulness in the land but at the outset, as a gift to the spiritually destitute (Matt 5:1–12). As a “city set on a hill,” the church is to be characterized in its sacrificial fellowship by a higher ethic in terms of anger, lust, divorce and lawsuits than society at large (vv. 14–37 ESV).
Possessing the security of a heavenly homeland and every good gift in Christ, they endure persecution, and instead of driving out the nation they pray for their oppressors and respond with foolish generosity (vv. 38–48). Shockingly, Jesus issues the imperative, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt 22:21). Yet in the church, the leaders are not to jockey for power like the gentile rulers but are to imitate the King who “came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28).
Are not all of these imperatives carried over by the apostles, as they enjoin obedience even to the wicked rulers as God’s servants (Rom 13:1–7; 1 Pet 2:13–17)? They are to exhibit patient and nonviolent reaction to persecutors, mutual submission in love, and the settling of differences even over temporal affairs by the church.
Jesus breathes on the disciples, and they receive the Holy Spirit. He gives the apostles the keys of the kingdom, which are nothing other than the marks of the church: by preaching the gospel, baptizing, and teaching them to obey his commands they will open and shut the kingdom’s gates (Matt 16:17–19; 18:18–20; John 20:22–23). In view of these episodes in the Gospels, what is the apostle Paul’s message and ministry other than the triumph of Jesus over Satan, death, hell, and the curse of the law? It is the worldwide family of Abraham that reaches even the courts of Rome itself, the nations streaming to Zion in willing submission to Israel’s King.
Therefore, far from setting the church and the kingdom in oppositional terms or even from making the church little more than a base for advancing the kingdom, the New Testament treats the church as the kingdom in this present age. As Scot McKnight argues, “The kingdom is a people governed by a king” and this describes the church. “Jesus connects the present church (a people) to the future kingdom (a people). He connects what Peter does now in the church to what God will do then in the kingdom . . . church and kingdom are indissolubly connected. . . . The church, then, is what is present and peopled in the realization of the kingdom now.”96
An understandable objection to identifying church and kingdom is the assumption that it restricts the kingdom (and the Spirit’s saving operations) to the official ministry of the assembled church. Are we really to believe that the kingdom of God means nothing more than the gathering of professing Christians for worship on Sunday? Yet this objection rests on a misunderstanding. Even if the kingdom is visible today in the world in and as the church, the term may be understood in two ways. The church is first and foremost the people, the professing believers with their children. This congregation is gathered officially by its covenant Lord to receive his good gifts, including his instruction but especially his promise and its visible seals in the sacraments; to pledge their loyalty and recount with thanksgiving his mighty acts; to confess their sins and their common faith; to receive his absolution and to seek his protection; and to embrace each other in the fellowship of a family. Thus bathed and fed, the church is then scattered into the world as witnesses to Christ and as salt and light, loving and serving their neighbors through their callings. This too is the work of the church, but it is the work of the church as scattered into the world as God’s secret agents who are pilgrims seeking a better homeland.
Christology and ecclesiology remain distinct because Christ forever remains the head rather than the body. The head is glorified, thus securing the final glorification of the saints, but the body is not yet glorified. And yet Christ and his church-kingdom are not separated because the Holy Spirit unites the members to the head.
CONCLUSION: THE SPIRIT CREATES AN EXTROVERTED CHURCH
Despite its failures to exhibit what the triune God has “worded” it to be, it is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” in Christ and will be revealed as such by the Spirit on the last day. In that light, we press on in the Spirit to “bring forth” the fruit of the Spirit and to share the gifts of the Spirit that build up the body in maturity and outreach. Rather than driving us deeper into ourselves, away from other people and external authorities, the Spirit drives us outside of ourselves by a public word and ministry that makes us extroverted—looking up to Christ in faith, looking forward in hope, and looking out to our neighbors in love. In a fallen age bent on divorces and domination, the Spirit is creating a global community that, for all of its failures, is a sign of the coming peace, unity, and joy of the family of God.
As if flying with string in his beak, the Holy Spirit is binding together things that otherwise fall apart. He is making saving connections. First, he binds eternity to time by uniting Christ to our humanity and its history of death and then raising Jesus beyond death as the eschatological last Adam. Second, by uniting us to Christ he binds us to the Father as well as to the members of Christ’s body and knits believers from all races and languages together more and more in fellowship. At the same time, he binds local churches together in wider assemblies of council and fellowship. Third, he binds the “already” of Christ’s saving history to the “not yet” of the age to come. He is the arrabōn, the deposit, given by the Father and the Son as the pledge on our final redemption. There are so many threads that he has brought together to bring unity and order out of division and chaos!
Astonishing in its beauty as well as its biblical rigor, Augustine’s mature reflections in his great treatise, The Trinity, begin with an affirmation of the goodness of creation. This good world has been depraved—that is, corrupted—by human rebellion. Augustine represents this as a falling away from unity into division, but the echoes of Plato and Plotinus become increasingly faint as he interprets this fall in biblical and Trinitarian terms. In pride and acquisitiveness, Adam and Eve together with all of their progeny have become restless. Together we have failed to adhere to the Father in the Word by the Spirit and instead have separated ourselves into warring individuals. In redemption the Spirit binds us again to Christ, not only as the Word in creation “in whom all things hold together” (Col 1:17), but as the Head of his body in whom every member is held together (Eph 4:16). No longer scattered into isolated selves by sin, would-be autonomous rulers of our own empire, we are gathered by the Spirit into Christ as a church by grace.97
In much of what is called spirituality in the secularized West, the goal is to withdraw from others, from the physical world, to “get in touch with ourselves,” and ostensibly to discover the inmost divinity of our own souls. It is just the opposite direction that we find in the biblical drama. As Augustine observed, the essence of sin is being “curved in on ourselves.” We may use religion and spirituality to deepen this turn toward a self-enclosed existence. It is seen in the Stoic ideal of the sage whose inner calm and independence create a buffer against the outer disturbances, disappointments, and even pain that others may cause.
Nothing could be further from the spirituality of the psalmist, whose very dependence on God provokes him not only to yield thanksgiving and praise but lament and sometimes even confusion and frustration with God and his purposes. Called out of ourselves, we are made vulnerable, accountable, and placed in a position of deciding whether we will entrust ourselves to God and the fellowship of other sinners. Hippolytus directed in the early third century, “Festinet autem et ad ecclesiam ubi floret spiritus—‘Let us hasten to the assembly, where the Spirit produces fruit’ (Apos. Trad. 31 and 35).”98 We really only become more conscious of ourselves and our identity by being drawn out of our curved-in existence in communion with God and other people. Even the persons of the Trinity are self-conscious precisely in their relatedness to each other: the first person knows himself as the Father because he has an eternally-begotten Son, who knows himself as the Son in and through his Father in the love of the Spirit, who knows himself as that bond of love precisely in and through the other persons.
Taking its cues from the incarnation, Christian spirituality binds us to others: first to the triune God through faith and then simultaneously to our neighbors through love. Even when we break away from our daily routines to be alone with the Lord, it is to be called outside of ourselves once again, to receive a fresh taste of that intimacy we have with the triune God and the adopted family to which he has joined us. We gather weekly not as Christ’s soul but as his body, enfleshed for each other. We come not as individuals to engage together in private devotions but to be driven outside of ourselves through the proclaimed Word. The bath and the communal meal are not private encounters with our inner spirit but with the Son who, by his Holy Spirit, unites us to himself and to each other.
In losing ourselves in Christ, we not only gain Christ—who brings us to the Father by his Spirit—but we get our neighbors and even ourselves back in the bargain. In quiet listening to the voice of another, we are not silenced but actually receive back our own properly human voice of gratitude. Because of the ascension, the church on earth is militant—that is, in the midst of the supernatural conquest of the world through Christ’s Word and Spirit. Yet it is not triumphant and must wait for the bodily return of its head in the future for the renewal of all things. At present, the church is the bride, not yet the spouse, and as it grows it longs for the bridegroom’s arrival to escort his betrothed to the wedding feast.
The church is not merely a means of mission; it is the mission. All of God’s purposes turn on his election of a bride for his Son. It is not merely a launching pad or a catalyst for something else. It is not only an instrument of some greater cause or entity. The church has been on God’s heart from all eternity, so much so that the Son assumed the role of mediator and purchased the church with his own blood (Acts 20:28). The Spirit is uniting us together into Christ as our head not merely through invisible means into an invisible church but through visible means as a visible communion in history. The church is the eschatological gathering of the remnant from Israel and the nations. Even in heaven, far from passing away the church is finally in consummated reality what God has declared it to be:
And they sang a new song, saying,
“Worthy are you to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation,
and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,
and they shall reign on the earth. (Rev 5:9–10 ESV)
The Pentecost sermon still resounds: “The promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Acts 2:39 ESV). And as John relates, “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Rev 22:17 ESV).
1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.6.1.
2. Thomas Goodwin, The Works of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, vol. 6 of The Works of Thomas Goodwin, 12 vols. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 9.
3. The Creed is typically divided into three sections, according to each person of the Trinity. Hence, “Third Article” refers to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
4. After Vatican II, as well as the influence of Pope Benedict, the charismatic emphasis on the “community of the Spirit” has played a large role alongside others in Roman Catholic ecclesiologies, just as younger Pentecostal theologians such as Amos Yong display considerable interest in the doctrine of the church and even sympathy for Roman Catholic ecclesiologies in particular (though skipping over the Reformation traditions). Furthermore, formal consultations between mainline bodies at the world level have produced some of the most impressive, integrated, and biblically grounded engagements on this topic. One notable example is Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry 1982–1990: Report on the Process and Responses, Faith and Order Paper No. 149 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1990).
5. Sergei Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). In fact, Bulgakov identifies his view as “pious pantheism”—or, more precisely, he adds “panentheism.” Yet it is difficult to discern the difference when he writes that “the Spirit is the world itself in all its being—on the pathways from chaos to cosmos” (199–200).
6. John Milbank, “Alternative Protestantism,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant, and Participation, ed. James K. A. Smith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 38–39.
7. Ibid., 39. His conclusion is drawn by further speculation on Augustine’s psychological analogy and the Spirit’s hypostatization of Love-Gift.
8. Yves Congar mentions some of the sources, from the patristic era forward, in I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith, Milestones in Catholic Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 2:18.
9. Yves Congar, Divided Christendom: A Catholic Study of the Problem of Reunion (London: G. Bles, 1939), 70–71.
10. George Sabra, Thomas Aquinas’ Vision of the Church (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1987), 101.
11. Saint Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald, trans. Edmund Hill, Works of Saint Augustine III.12 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2009), 21.8.
12. See Tarsicius J. van Bavel, “The ‘Christus Totus’ Idea: A Forgotten Aspect of Augustine’s Spirituality,” in Studies in Patristic Christology, ed. Thomas Finan and Vincent Twomey (Portland, OR: Four Courts, 1988), 84–94.
13. van Bavel, “The ‘Christus Totus’ Idea,” 84–88.
14. John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study in the Religion of St. Augustine, The Hulsean Lectures, 1938 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1960), 102: Augustine’s reflections along these lines draw directly on “the realism which Greek theology applied to the doctrine of Christ’s mystical body.”
15. Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, ed. Peter Hünermann, 43rd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2012), 959–60, 964.
16. Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 157.
17. On the importance of the epiclesis, see John D. Zizioulas and Luke Ben Tallon, The Eucharistic Communion and the World (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2011), xi–xii, 8–11, 21–28, 130. Cf. Simon Chan, “The Future of the Liturgy: A Pentecostal Contribution,” in The Great Tradition–A Great Labor: Studies in Ancient-Future Faith, ed. Philip Harrold and D. H. Williams (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 65; Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 3:267–72.
18. Robert Bellarmine, De controversies, tom. 2, liber 3; De ecclesia militante, cap. 2.
19. Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism, trans. Justin McCann (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 31–32 (emphasis added).
20. Ibid., 38.
21. Ibid., 41. Like many Catholic and Protestant theologians of his generation, Adam at first welcomed Hitler’s ascendancy. According to Krieg’s introduction to The Spirit of Catholicism, after declaring for Hitler, six months later Adam criticized the regime (xii).
22. Adam, Spirit of Catholicism, 53.
23. Ibid., 97.
24. Ibid., 159–65.
25. Immanuel Kant asserted that the doctrine of the Trinity makes no difference to practical morality (“The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, trans. by Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 264. So Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. and ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (London: T&T Clark, 1928), 738, 741.
26. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 121.
27. Ibid., §121.2.
28. Ibid., §124.
29. See for example Michael S. Horton, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 5–6.
30. Graham Ward, Cities of God, Routledge Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 2001), 112.
31. Ibid., 112–13 (emphasis added).
32. Ibid., 116.
33. Robert W. Jenson, The Triune God, vol. 1 of Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 205.
34. Robert W. Jenson, The Works of God, vol. 2 of Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 211–13.
35. Jenson, The Works of God, 214 (emphasis added).
36. See the superb critique by Ian McFarland, “The Body of Christ: Rethinking a Classic Ecclesial Model,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7.3 (2005): 225–45.
37. Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), 220–21.
38. Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (London: SCM, 1984), 139.
39. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:22–23.
40. Aidan Nichols, Figuring Out the Church: Her Marks, and Her Masters (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2013), 29.
41. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957–1975), IV/3.2, 729 (hereafter CD).
42. Barth, CD IV/4, 130.
43. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns from the sixth edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 353.
44. Ulrich Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1981), 204–5, 214–15, 239.
45. Barth, CD IV/4, 88 (emphasis added).
46. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 343.
47. Barth, CD IV/1, 652.
48. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 341–43, 353, 366.
49. The maxim is interpreted differently in contemporary Roman Catholic (not to mention mainline Protestant) teaching than it has been historically by all three traditions. Vatican II makes use of the concept of implicit faith to affirm the salvation of those “who through no fault of their own” are estranged from the Roman Catholic Church, including atheists. Interestingly, the Westminster Confession (1646) added the word “ordinarily” to recognize that there may be some who are known only to God and for some reason are not joined publicly to the church.
50. Myriad sources could be referenced from mainline Protestants. Examples from Pentecostal theologians include Amos Yong, Beyond the Impasse: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Religions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003); Samuel Solivan (“Interreligious Dialogue: An Hispanic American Pentecostal Perspective,” in Grounds for Understanding: Ecumenical Responses to Religious Pluralism, ed. S. Mark Heim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 37–45. Generously interpreting other traditions, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s Pneumatology: The Holy Spirit in Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006) also advances the author’s own sympathy for pneumatologically oriented inclusivism, which is more explicitly stated in “Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Religions: A Pentecostal-Charismatic Theological Inquiry,” International Review of Mission 91.361 (2002).
51. Clark H. Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 49, 186–87. He focuses on this question in chapter 6.
52. See Clark H. Pinnock, Tracking the Maze: Finding Our Way through Modern Theology from an Evangelical Perspective (Dallas: ICI University Press, 1996), 103.
53. Pinnock, Flame of Love, 73.
54. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 2004), 139.
55. See Reinhard Hütter, “The Church,” in Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church, ed. James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 38–39. As a condensed version of his Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Eerdmans, 1999), this essay is a lucid and profound argument for this point.
56. Avery Cardinal Dulles, Models of the Church, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 97–98.
57. Ibid., 98.
58. Ibid., 98–99.
59. Ibid., 99.
60. Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (London: SCM, 1953), 50.
61. Ibid., 50–51.
62. 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), 364, from “On Evangelical Ecclesiology” in Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 153.
63. Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 364n8.
64. John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 55.
65. Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 365.
66. Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012).
67. Newbigin, Household of God, 80.
68. Ibid.
69. Yves Congar, Divided Christendom: A Catholic Study of the Problem of Reunion (London: G. Bles, 1939), 70–71.
70. Walter Cardinal Kasper, “The Renewal of Pneumatology in Contemporary Catholic Life and Theology: Towards a Rapprochement between East and West,” in The Holy Spirit, the Church and Christian Unity: Proceedings of the Consultation at the Monastery of Bose, Italy (14–20 Oct. 2002), ed. D. Donelley, A. Denaux, and J. Famerée, BETL (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), 9–34.
71. Augustine, Ennaration on Psalm 30 2.4, quoted by Nichols, Figuring Out the Church, 29.
72. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996), 37.
73. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 218, commenting on Ephesians 1:23. See also Calvin’s commentaries, especially on John 15 and 17, although the concept is as pervasive throughout his writings and sermons as it was in Augustine.
74. It is significant that, according to the apostle Paul, the revelation of the church in these last days is part of Christ’s boast in his triumph over the powers and principalities. Through the proclamation of “the unsearchable riches of Christ,” he says, “the mystery hidden for ages” is revealed, “so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:8–10 ESV).
75. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:474, 524 (emphasis added).
76. Alfred F. Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, Classics of Biblical Criticism (self-published in French in 1903; Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 152.
77. Serving as a manifesto of sorts, Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1943) was delivered as the Stone Lectures at Princeton University in 1898. For the historical roots, see James Bratt, Dutch Calvinism in Modern America (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1984), and for a respected defense see Albert Wolters, Creation Regained (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985). The movement attracted considerable interest in the United States since the 1980s among more conservative circles (especially through the work of Francis Schaeffer and Charles Colson) as well as more progressive thinkers such as Richard Mouw, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Alvin Plantinga.
78. Scot McKnight, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2014).
79. Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 132.
80. Ibid., 133–34.
81. Ibid., 266.
82. Ibid., 273.
83. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 478. More recently, Dale C. Allison Jr. has reprised Schweitzer’s thesis in Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010): “Like the historical Zoroaster, the historical Jesus foretold a resurrection of the dead, a universal divine judgment, and a new, idyllic world with evil undone, all coming soon,” though it failed to materialize (157).
84. Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 89. Despite the title (“Christ as the King and the Spirit as the Kingdom”), Macchia’s effort to integrate the motifs of Spirit baptism and the kingdom in this chapter I find intriguing.
85. Richard P. McBrien, Do We Need the Church? (London: Collins, 1969), 228.
86. Ibid., 161.
87. Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (Random House, 1986).
88. Gerald O’Collins, The Second Vatican Council and Other Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 195.
89. Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 14.
90. Ibid., 15, referring to O’Collins, Second Vatican Council, xi.
91. Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 228, quoted by Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 303.
92. Eck, Encountering God, 230, quoted by Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 303.
93. Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 303.
94. Ibid.
95. Calvin, Institutes, 3.1.4.; cf. the Westminster Confession of Faith 25.2.
96. Scot McKnight, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2014), 87.
97. This is the running argument throughout the treatise, marvelously summarized by Luigi Giuli, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
98. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 1:68.