The transparent Spirit

A belated Pentecost thought, courtesy of T.F. Torrance - quotes are all from "Theology in Reconstruction", 253-258.

The office of the Holy Spirit in the Church is not to call attention to himself apart from Christ but to focus all attention on Christ, to glorify him, to bear witness to his deity, to testify to his mind and will, and in him and through him to lead us to the Father.  He is God the Spirit by whom we know God, for he is God the Spirit by whom God bears witness to himself.  Transparence and self-effacement thus belongs to the very nature and office of the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, who is known only as the Father is known through the Son and the Son is known in the Father, and who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified as himself very God.

It is worth tugging at some of the threads in this quote to make sure we've understood them.  Note that the Spirit is worshipped and glorified because he is himself God, true and full God; but he is not worshipped in the attention that we pay to him, but the attention that we pay by him to the Son, to Jesus Christ as he leads us to the Father.  The Spirit is known, and known as God; but he is not known in himself, but only as he himself makes known the Father and the Son.  Torrance summarises this by referring to the Spirit's transparence.  He doesn't mean to imply by this any sort of insubstantiality, as if the Spirit could be 'seen through' because of his weightlessness and lack of solidity.  We are dealing with the almighty, personal God when we are dealing with the Holy Spirit.  The point is simply that the divine office of the Spirit as he is revealed to us in the Gospel is to make Christ known, and through and in him the Father.  His almighty power is shown, not in itself, but in showing us the almighty power of the Father and the Son.

What really strikes me about the way that Torrance utilises this concept is that he sees the transparence of the Spirit as in some sense a transferrable quality.  In thinking and speaking of God, we utilise human forms and concepts, which in themselves "are quite opaque as far as their reference to God himself is concerned."  We simply don't have the ability to stretch our language up to God.  "This is where the transparency of the Spirit comes in, for to be genuine our witness must be shot through and through with the uncreated light of God's self-revelation."  We need the Spirit to make our words transparent to God's reality, to make them bearers of God's own light - something we can't do by ourselves.

Torrance extends this description of the transparency of the Spirit to Scripture - the perspicuity of the Scriptures means the fact that the Spirit causes the biblical witness to be transparent to divine reality - and baptism - in which we are meant to look "through the rite to Christ and his Gospel... Without Sacramental transparence Baptism becomes blind and meaningless."

We need - desperately need - the work of the Holy Spirit to make anything that we do with reference to God genuinely valuable and meaningful.

We recall too that this transparence comes from the Holy Spirit, from his own self-effacing nature and office in hiding himself, as it were, behind the Face of the Father in the Son and behind the Heart of the Son in the Father, yet revealing the one Triune God by letting his eternal light shine through himself to us.

Celebrating hungrily

The celebration of Pentecost is a bit different from all the other gospel feasts that make up the church year. Like all those feasts - Christmas, Easter, Ascension - Pentecost looks back to something that happened, a foundational event in the ministry of Christ for his church. In this case, we recall the way in which the ascended Lord Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on his followers in Jerusalem, thus constituting them his new earthly body, his witnesses. We remember, and we celebrate with gratitude because without that event the good news of Jesus would never have reached us, the community of the church would never have come to be.

But the difference lies in this: Pentecost is celebrated with an edge of hunger and desire to it. That first giving of the Spirit is an unrepeatable, unique event, in one sense, but in another sense as we read the narrative and remember the event we are caused to long that it might happen again. Of course it can never happen again for the first time, in the foundational way in which it happened there and then; but because the outpouring of the Spirit is an ongoing ministry of Christ, there is a definite sense in which it could happen today, here and now. In some way it definitely is happening - otherwise the church would long since have died out of the world - but don't we want to see it happen in power, as it did? Wouldn't we love to see the Spirit at work bringing thousands at once to new life through the gospel? Don't we want the dramatic transformation which came over the Lord's fearful disciples? 

So we celebrate the then-and-there with a distinct eye on the here-and-now, and pray: come, Creator Spirit.

The Lord's Prayer, on the Day of Pentecost

Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed be your name in my own heart,
and in the hearts of all your people,
by the presence of your own Holy Spirit.

Your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven;
with the same prompt obedience and holy joy as angels and archangels before your throne,
may I and all your creatures do your will.

Give us today our daily bread,
and by your Spirit sustain us in our life;
for when you withdraw your Spirit we perish,
and when you send your Spirit the earth is renewed.

Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,
and cleanse our consciences from all sense of guilt
as your Comforting Spirit ministers to us
the forgiveness secured by the cross and resurrection of Christ our Lord.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,
sending your Spirit ahead of us to prepare our way,
and walking with us by your Spirit in every step we take.
Equip us, gracious God, by the gifting of your Spirit,
to live in holiness, by whatever path you lead us.

For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God,
now and forever.

Amen.

Praying for God

Preaching from Ephesians 3 on Sunday, I was particularly struck by the things that the apostle Paul prays for:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

He asks that God would give his Holy Spirit, so that the believers might be strengthened in their spiritual innards; he asks that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith.  He asks that they might know the love of Christ in all its unknowable immensity; he asks that they may be filled up with God in all his overflowing fullness.

Big asks!

But also asking for things which to an extent they already have.  They're Christians, which means they have the Spirit, they know Christ by faith, they have some experience of God's love, God already dwells in them and amongst them.  They have all this; but Paul prays it for them anyway.  Because God is inexhaustibly rich, because the love of Christ is a vast ocean that can never be fully charted, because the Holy Spirit is a never-ceasing fountain of grace - therefore, Paul prays for them, that they might have and enjoy what they already have and enjoy, more and more, through and through.

And notice that what he wants for them is God.  This is God's will: to give himself to his people.  The God who lacks nothing, and is rather the source of all goodness, wants to give his presence, his power, his own self, to his people.  It is only because the gift is God himself that Paul can pray knowing that there is always more for them to receive, no matter how much they have already.  God in his infinite bounty desires to spend eternity demonstrating just how bottomless is his grace.

Can you have more of God?  If not, I don't know what Paul is about here in this prayer.  Yes, there is more.  Always more.

And might we not ask for that?  For God?  Remember that the good Father always gives the Holy Spirit to his children who ask him.  Here is a thing he has promised to give in response to prayer, and moreover it is the best thing - himself! - and a thing we will never have finished praying for because there is always more.  And yet our prayer meetings, and I would guess our personal prayer times, are full of prayers for other things, uncertain goods, finite ends.

Might we not pray for God?

The Person of the Spirit

When I was a younger man, I moved in church circles where it was not uncommon to hear that the Holy Spirit really doesn't want any of our attention.  The Spirit, we were told, is a like a spotlight, shining on Jesus - that is where all our attention is meant to be.  The Spirit is self-effacing.  The Spirit wants nothing more than for us to stop thinking about the Spirit altogether and focus on the Lord Jesus.

There is some truth in these sayings, and the emphasis on Christ was helpful.  But hasn't something gone wrong?

For starters, it seems clear that these sentiments are pretty near the boundaries, if not actually outside the boundaries, of creedal orthodoxy.  "We believe in the Holy Spirit... who with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified..."  I think perhaps the argument would be that the best way we worship and glorify the Spirit is by honouring the Son to whom he bears witness; again, that can't be completely wrong.  But the Creed expects us to worship and glorify the Spirit alongside the Father and the Son.  Is that really happening when the Spirit is minimised in this way?

There is a danger that the language used of the Holy Spirit - especially that spotlight image, which you'll find in a number of books - denies either or both of the deity and the personality of the Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is God, as the Father and the Son are God; therefore, the Spirit is worthy of worship and glory.  The Holy Spirit is personal, as the Father and the Son are personal; therefore, he cannot rightly be viewed merely instrumentally, as a means to an end.  We are, as John Owen points out, to have communion with the Spirit, just as we are with the Father and the Son.

My observation is that this view of the Spirit tends to go along with a general de-emphasising of everything that is considered subjective, in favour of the objective truth.  Again, there is some good in this.  Keeping the truth as it is in Jesus central is, well, central to the Christian life.  But when we make the objective everything, when we emphasise to the neglect of everything else what God has done in Christ there and then, there is a real danger that the truth of the gospel never makes it to the here and now.  It is noteworthy that the culture of those 'Spirit as a spotlight' churches tends to be quite emotionally repressed, tends to downplay the significance of the sacraments, and tends to be pretty wordy and ideas focussed.  This seems to me to flow logically from removing the subjective from the realm of God's activity.  If we think that the Spirit, no less than the Father and the Son, is to be worshipped and glorified, won't that lead to more careful cultivation of the heart, the inward life - the realm of the Spirit's work?  Won't we think more highly of the sacraments and the experiential aspects of worship and church life if we believe that the Spirit is at work there - and that he deserves to be worshipped and glorified by our participation in that work?

I guess what I'm saying is: if we don't worship and glorify the Holy Spirit, we will probably abandon the realm of the 'subjective' to the purely human, and will therefore suspect it.  We will be suspicious of emotion, suspicious of experience, suspicious of everything which is not the objective truth.  But in the Spirit God has claimed all that, claimed it for subjection to the Lordship of Christ and activated it in his service.  So yes, emotion bound firmly to the truth; yes, the sacraments only with the Word; yes, experience interpreted by the Scriptures.  But still, in all these things, the work of the Spirit seen and honoured.

The visible church

The distinction between the visible church and the invisible church plays various different roles in different theologies and ecclesiologies.  Basically the idea is that the church as we see it in the world and in history, the empirical church, is not wholly identical with the church as it exists in the sight and plan of God, the spiritual church.  This distinction may serve to justify the relative impurity of present churches - it sometimes functions, for example, as an argument for mixed congregations in which it is known that many are not living as disciples despite their attachment to 'the church'.  It can also function as an apologetic for the ruined and divided state of the church catholic - the visible church is by schisms rent asunder, but the invisible church is nonetheless one and whole in Christ - which can unfortunately make efforts towards visible unity seem a waste of time.

At one level I think the distinction is certainly necessary.  The New Testament seems to call for it, whenever it acknowledges that there will be eschatological surprises over who ultimately is found to belong to the church.  And it seems inevitable conceptually - I am reminded of Screwtape's advice that the newly converted patient should be put off church by keeping his mind on the deeply unsatisfying reality of his neighbours assembled in church rather than on "the Church as we (demons) see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners."

But does this idea also have dangerous implications?

In The Trinitarian Faith Torrance suggests a particular genealogy for the distinction between the visible and the invisible church.  For some of the early Fathers of the church - he particularly mentions Origen and Clement of Alexandria - there was a similar distinction between the physical/sensible gospel and the spiritual/eternal gospel.  Influenced by Platonic dualism - with its rift between the visible/invisible, temporal/eternal, physical/spiritual, and its clear preference for the latter in each of these dualities - there was a tendency to see the incarnation, in all its visible/temporal/physical nature, as pointing towards a better invisible/eternal/spiritual gospel, of which it was a passing sign.  The danger here for Christology is hopefully obvious, but what if - as Torrance suggests - this is also the source of the idea of a visible and invisible church?  What would be the consequences?

Torrance suggests that this distinction "opened the door for the identification of the real Church with a spiritualised timeless and spaceless magnitude, and for the ongoing life and mission of the empirical Church to be regarded as subject to the laws that control human society in this world." (276)  In other words, the visible church - being no longer regarded as itself the Body of Christ, but only at best as a rough approximation of or signpost to his spiritual Body - is run as if it were just another human society.  The reality that the church - meaning the local congregation here and now - exists because its members have been baptised by one Spirit into the one Body of Christ, through whom they have access together to the Father: all that is lost, or is in danger of being lost.  In practice, the presence and reality of the Spirit with(in) the people of God here and now is downplayed or neglected; human efforts to maintain and organise the church are substituted for a dependence on God's Spirit.

I don't know my Patristics well enough to know if Torrance's account is correct; I find it plausible from the little that I do know.  I wonder what it would look like in our churches to resist this dualism.  A higher doctrine of the church?  Actually, I would guess, an understanding of the church that sees it not as an add-on to the gospel but as an intrinsic part of the gospel.  And then a lived reality of church which leans much more heavily on the presence and work of the Holy Spirit uniting us to Christ in the here and now.

The gentle God

One of the things about God that I wrestle with is his determination to make me into a human being, a person.  It often seems like this great project of his leads down long, winding roads which surely don't get to the point, or at least don't get there very quickly, and involve me in lots of heartache along the way.  I wish he would short-circuit the process.

Why, for example, does God not just kill off sin in us the moment we first turn to him?  Why does he not make vocation blindingly clear to us the moment we first ask?  Why does he let us, individually and collectively as families and churches, muddle through decision making processes and get it wrong more often than not, when he could just signpost the way clearly - with a voice from heaven perhaps?

I think at least part of the reason is that God will have his human creations as humans, as real relational counterparts to himself.  This does not imply, as more liberal theology has always thought, that God gives human beings radical autonomy, that they stand outside his sovereignty, that they are able to ultimately defy his will.  No, God is God.  But he is God with us in a particular way.

T.F. Torrance commented on the Patristic understanding of the Holy Spirit thus: "If it is only the almighty who can be infinitely gentle, the Holy Spirit may well be characterised as the gentleness of God the Father Almighty."  The way God governs his human creation is through the gentleness of the Holy Spirit.

When we think of the Spirit we usually reach for the dramatic things: Philip whisked away to Azotus, missionary endeavours directed by audible voices from God or prophetic words, healings, tongues of fire.  That the Spirit did and does these things is undeniable, to those who take the Scriptures seriously.  It is not for nothing that he is associated with fire.

But he is also dove.  He is also breath.  He is gentleness.

The Spirit of the Creator God is not in the business of continually over-riding the will and the thought and the judgement of the creatures he made.  He gave us those things!  And he wills that we should use them, that we should be trained in life and godliness, not just magically transformed into the final product.  He wants us to be people.

When faced with a difficult decision, I want God to take it out of my hands.  Lord, just make it clear to me.  Show me your will in a way that I can't dispute or question.  Instead he usually leaves me to pray and think and chat it through with others - and then make a call.  He wants me to be a human being.  Part of that is using my created faculties.  Part of it is also trusting him in a bigger, deeper way: not trusting him to signpost everything in my life, but trusting him to hold me whether I get it right or wrong, trusting him to gently weave even my nonsense into his greater story.  To trust, I suppose, not just the fire of the Spirit's immediate and obvious leading and equipping, but also the Spirit brooding over the waters, the gentle breath of the Spirit in the everyday and the normal.

I feel the burden of responsibility that comes with being human.  I would often prefer it if God would just over-ride my humanity.  But instead he gently takes our very human processes and practices and faculties and softly but surely brings us into his way, through our mistakes and failings as often as not.

The Spirit and the spirits

You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 12:2-3

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.  By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.

1 John 4:1-3

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit who delights to exalt Jesus.  His mission in this last age is to bear witness to Christ, to open eyes to the reality of who Jesus was and is - and in this way to bring people to faith and into unity with Christ (and to reveal the reality of sin and judgement in those who will not believe).  Always his focus is Christ Jesus.

Sometimes people ask me 'how do we balance Jesus and the Spirit?' - meaning, how do we take seriously the objective revelation of God in Christ as Scripture bears witness to him, and also take seriously the mysterious subjective revelation of God in the Spirit?  The answer is that we don't.  Taking the Holy Spirit seriously means setting our spiritual eyes, our hearts, our minds on Christ Jesus.  Any spirit which distracts from Jesus, any spirit which does not exalt him, and spirit which does not confess his incarnation - his death, resurrection, and ascension - as the central reality of human history and each individual human life: that is not the Holy Spirit, but is the spirit of antichrist.

This can be subtle.  There is teaching which makes much of Jesus, but not quite enough.  There is teaching which makes Jesus the noblest of human beings (but not God, at least not in the fullest sense) - this is implicit in a lot of liberal teaching (and there is a lot of it masquerading as evangelicalism at the moment, but that's another matter); and there is teaching that makes Jesus divine in some sense (but not a real human being) - although this side of the equation is perhaps less popular in the current cultural moment.

But the Holy Spirit says 'Jesus is Lord' (that is, the LORD), and the Holy Spirit says 'Jesus came in the flesh' (that is, in genuine humanity, in which he suffered, died, and rose).

Test the spirits, and listen to the Spirit.

Little less conversation

"For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power."

In 1 Corinthians 4, Paul sees himself as up against people who talk a good game, especially when it comes to the kingdom of God and their part in it.  The position they seem to hold would probably nowadays be called 'over-realised eschatology' - they think they have all the blessings of the kingdom now, they think that they are reigning now, and (to pick up some hints from chapter 15 of the letter) they may even think that they have been resurrected now.

Paul's response to this and similar positions held in Corinth is the theology of the cross.  God displayed his power in the weakness of Christ crucified; God displayed his wisdom in the folly of Christ crucified.  Paul has modelled his ministry on Christ - perhaps not deliberately, perhaps just inevitably as he has sought faithfully to proclaim the gospel.  He hasn't been impressive, humanly speaking.  He hasn't come with strength or with glorious rhetoric.  He preached the weak and foolish cross, in a weak and foolish way, and God worked.

But within that context, Paul asserts that the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.

If there isn't a contradiction here, it must be a funny sort of power Paul is talking about here - a cruciform power, the power of God revealed in weakness.  But still, it's power.  It is all very well for these folk in Corinth to talk about their kingly enjoyment of the kingdom of God - which they seem to see displayed in exalted and lofty ideas, a refined spirituality, a liberation from the moral strictures of human society, a deliverance from the suffering that is the common lot of humanity.  But Paul has power, a power that will puncture all this talk.  The power of the gospel of Christ crucified, presented in a cruciform way, by the apostle whose ministry is shaped by the cross.

Here's what I wrestle with.  In the church as I know it, there's a lot of talk.  But there's not a lot of power.  And the temptation is to try to substitute more talk for what's missing.  The more we feel the gap between the NT description of the Christian life and our own experience of it, the more we're tempted to talk up the Christian life.  Papering over the weakness of our experience of the Spirit with words.  But that's not the kingdom of God.

Praying this morning for genuine power, not to bypass the cross or the weakness or the suffering, but to take the cross and the weakness and the suffering and make them the place where God's power is displayed.

Give us thyself, that we may see...

Give us thyself that we may see
The Father and the Son by thee.

So John Dryden interprets part of the great 9th century hymn to the Holy Spirit, Veni Creator Spiritus - accurately capturing at least part of the concern of the original.  We seek the Spirit, so that by the Spirit we might know the Father and the Son (and, in the slightly more Trinitarian formula of the original Latin composition, might know the Spirit himself also).

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit plays a vital role in the doctrine of revelation.  Put it in the context of the whole Trinity.  The Father is the unseen, and the Son is the visible image of the invisible God.  The ancient argument for the deity of Christ revolved around this: if the Son is not God, then God is not revealed.  Nothing less than God could truly reveal God to us.  But granted the deity of the Son: how does it come about that a human being, who is not God, can have God revealed to them?  If it is true that only God can reveal God, is it not also true that only God can see God?  In other words, even granted the true revelation of God in the person of Christ, we human beings have absolutely no inherent capacity to receive this revelation.

Without God (the Spirit) working in us, we cannot see God (the Son) revealing to us the being and person of God (the Father).  And so we pray, Come, Creator Spirit!

Galatians: a hard question

Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?

Paul doesn't seem to think that this is a hard question.  He obviously expects the Galatians to be aware at once that the Spirit came upon them as they heard and believed the good news about Jesus.  It's foundational to his argument, not only that this was the case in the past, but that it continues to be the case in the present - does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith?  He clearly expects that the Galatians will be able to give a straightforward and unequivocal answer: the Spirit is communicated to us, and works powerfully amongst us, as we hear and believe the message.

What do we do when the answer to that question no longer seems obvious?

If Paul hasn't massively misjudged the Galatian Christians - if they are in fact able to provide the answers which he expects to these questions - then it becomes baffling that they would be looking to work out their day to day godliness by way of the law.  And indeed, Paul seems pretty baffled and perplexed throughout the letter.  Obviously they don't see the law keeping which they are considering adopting as contrary to faith, and don't see clearly as Paul does that working out your holiness by the route of law is incompatible with reliance on the Spirit.  But at least they know, or should know, that it is the Spirit, received as they've heard and believed the gospel, who has provided the energy of their holiness thus far.

What if we're not even sure of that?

It seems pretty clear that spiritual experience is not an optional extra in the Christian life for Paul.  If you can't testify that you received the Spirit when you believed, and that the same Spirit continues to be poured out in your church community as you gather around the gospel with faith, then of course you will start to look around for another way to power the holiness engine.  But the engine of genuine godliness only runs on the Holy Spirit.  If you pour your own efforts into that fuel tank, whether shaped by the law of Moses or any other scheme, it will break down your Christian life, as surely as filling my diesel car with unleaded will lead to going nowhere fast.  It is the Spirit or nothing.

At this point, it's easy to get caught in sort of meta-law.  I can't get holy by my own efforts, I need the Spirit - now, what technique or discipline can I follow that will ensure that I experience the Spirit's power?  How do I do it?  How do I do it?  Bang, you're keeping the law, you're holiness engine blows up.

I can only think that the answer is, at least in part, waiting.  We have a hope of righteousness - certain, because grounded in Christ, but only very uncertainly worked out in our experience.  Wait for it - that active waiting which involves prayer and faith and watching for God's work.

The Lord, the Giver of Life

A recent camping holiday provided an excellent opportunity for some reflection on some of the 'nature Psalms', and I've especially enjoyed and benefited from time in Psalm 104.  Two verses are particularly striking:

When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your Spirit, they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.

 The basic point is simple but profound: all created things are sustained by the Holy Spirit.  As I've chewed this over, I've had a few other thoughts...

1.  The Spirit's sustaining work goes beyond the provision of the necessary means for life.  That is there in the immediate context, but these verses add something else.  God doesn't just provide the necessary secondary causes of continued existence; he actually provides, by sending his Spirit, existence itself.

2.   The Spirit's sustaining work extends to both individual creatures, and the whole system of creation.  The renewal of creation is of course driven by the ordinary processes of procreation, but underlying those processes is the sending of the Spirit.  Life and the systems which sustain and renew life are equally upheld by the Breath of God.

3.  This is not pantheism or even panentheism.  Creation is not God, nor does it subsist within God - rather, the creature is distinct from God, and is distinctly maintained and sustained by him.  Note the dynamic and interactive language used - you take away, you send forth...  The Spirit is not some sort of impersonal substrate of creation, nor is he tied to creation, but he comes and goes at the will of God, sustaining the whole.

4.  God's Spirit can be, and is, withdrawn at God's will.  The ongoing existence of creation as a whole is dependent on God's faithfulness and nothing more.  The ongoing existence of any particular creature within the whole is also dependent on God, and can be withdrawn at any point in his sovereignty.  We, and all the things we see and experience, are dramatically contingent.

5.  Creation is real.  It is not a phantom, or a dream in God's mind.  It's very fragility and dependence on God's Spirit testifies to its reality as a thing which exists but which is not God.

6.  The same Holy Spirit who hovered over the waters of creation in the beginning sustains creation now.  And he is the same Spirit who comes in the waters of baptism, creating and thereafter sustaining new life in Christ.  His work in old creation and new are linked through the creation of the human nature of Christ - hovering over the waters of the womb?

The Christmas Spirit

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God."

Christmas is about the Incarnation of the Son of God, the breaking in to human history of Immanuel - God with us as one of us.  Christmas is the basis of all our knowledge of God.  I think that without it I would be an atheist, or at least agnostic.  If God had not shown himself to us, in real space and time and history, I'm not sure I would have spotted the signs of his presence throughout creation.

But Christmas is also about the Holy Spirit, and his own pre-eminent work.  Throughout Scripture, the Holy Spirit is portrayed as that person of the Godhead who is working within the creation, sustaining it and renewing it.  And here he is sanctifying one part of genuine created reality for the greatest purpose of all: the coming in of God himself, not only to be near humanity but to be a human being.  As Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit, so he will be empowered throughout his life by the Spirit, and will eventually offer himself through the same Spirit to the Father, suffering and dying, before being raised again by the power of that same Holy Spirit.

There is a sort of vague 'spirit of Christmas' which is abroad, a generic festivity and merriment.  But the true Spirit of Christmas is very specific, very personal.  He is the Spirit of Jesus, the man who is God.  And that should mean more merriment, deeper festivity, real celebration.

Me and the Holy Spirit

On Sunday I preached a very poor sermon on Acts 2:37-41.  I really shouldn't bother listening to it if I were you; you have better things to do with half an hour.  To explain why it was so poor, let me give you a bit of background info about how I write sermons.  On the whole, I don't spend a whole lot of time sitting down studying.  I read the passage towards the beginning of the week, maybe take in a couple of light commentaries, and then put it to the back of my brain to turn over and over during the week.  If something tricky comes up, I'll go find a more technical commentary; if something interesting pops into my brain I make a mental note.  Sometimes whole paragraphs of a sermon are written and committed to memory whilst I am walking up the hill to work.  On the whole, I find that I spot structures to passages, and craft structures of sermons, pretty early on in the week; the flesh to go on the bones might not come until Saturday.  Or, let's face it, Sunday.

Anyway, the structure for this passage seemed clear.  Peter mentions two conditions: repentance and baptism.  Then he mentions two blessings: forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.  In between stands the name of the Jesus Christ, through whom all these things are possible as in repentance and baptism we identify with him.  Simples.  Conditions, blessings, Jesus.

But when I came to put on the flesh, I got stuck.  I can talk about repentance, goodness knows I can talk about baptism, I can and will wax lyrical about the forgiveness of sins.  But I don't really know what to say about the gift of the Holy Spirit,  Oh, don't get me wrong: I have a fine pneumatology.  My doctrine is straight.  I could lecture on the subject of the Holy Spirit.

But from the pulpit - as God's word to his people about his Spirit - I don't know what to say.

And that one failing became a black hole which dragged the whole sermon down into it, in my mind at least.  Because it seemed to me that the central question had become 'where is the answer to this promise?  Where is the gift of the Holy Spirit?'  Shouldn't we be able to see that more - if God were here, amongst us?  Shouldn't I have something to say about this?

So this is where I got to: I am not satisfied, not satisfied at all, with my current experience of God.  I was saying to a friend on Monday that my dissatisfaction is almost at a level where I feel it might overcome my laziness and fear.  Laziness because I know that, although I cannot work my way into a deeper experience of God or strive my way into his favour, I will need to seek him with my whole heart, and that sounds like hard work.  Fear because as long as I can blame my lack of zeal, God himself is not put to the test, but if I really seek him and he is not there...

I guess I'm praying, in so far as I can be bothered and in so far as I dare, for more dissatisfaction that can be satisfied with this gift of the Holy Spirit.

And in the meantime, I will try to write a better sermon for next Sunday.

I (think I) believe in the Holy Spirit

I've been tying my reading into the calendar recently - I spent some time in Church Dogmatics IV/1 over Easter, especially looking at the section on the resurrection (which, incidentally, shows that Barth moves a long way from the existentialism of the commentary on Romans, and is not all the theologian that his opponents and many of his 'friends' consider him to be - but that is by the by); since Pentecost I have been re-reading Simon Ponsonby's book on the Holy Spirit, God Inside Out.  It is a good read, from a Biblical charismatic perspective, and I've enjoyed it as much this second time through as I did the first time.

But, if I'm honest, the closest I can come to a ringing confession of the faith of Pentecost which is expressed in Simon's book is something along the lines of 'I'm pretty sure about the Holy Spirit.  Most of the time, anyway'. Not a faith to move mountains.

Here's the thing.  When it comes to what God has done, then and there, I find my brain quite useful.  The more I look into it, the more I think it is as certain as anything in history ever can be that Jesus rose from the dead.  Okay, it takes faith to get from that to saying 'and it was for me', but still there is investigation I can do.  On top of that, I can view the problem from philosophical and theological points of view, and I can say: of course, the cross and resurrection of Jesus.  That is what we need.  It makes sense.  Even when it doesn't make sense, I can understand that the theology of the cross cuts across my understanding - crucifies it, as it were - to get me to the truth.  I get it, or it gets me, even when I don't really get it.  I have no problem, either, with saying that some things - the most important things - are taken on faith, and are not seen.  People who live under the sign of the cross must expect to live by faith and not sight; sight is for the resurrection, sight is for the time when we know as we are known.

But the thing with the Holy Spirit is that the Bible leads me to believe that I should be able to see him at work.  Ever noticed that in Acts the proof that people are converted is that they obviously receive the Spirit?  Think about Peter with Cornelius.  It is the visible reception of the Spirit that persuades him that these people have come to believe in Christ.  It would be very different in the churches I frequent.  We infer the Spirit - someone appears to believe, so they must have received the Spirit.  Peter's reasoning is the other way round - someone received the Spirit, they must believe.  Maybe this was a special case.  Maybe.

What evidence is there in conservative evangelical circles that the Spirit is at work?  Is it just that I find it hard to see it, and easy to explain it away?

How does the faith/sight dichotomy feed into this?

I'm not sure.  But in the meantime, I do believe in the Holy Spirit.  I'd just like to see him out and about more, that's all.

Thoughts approaching Pentecost

1.  The prayer for the Spirit, whether addressed directly to him ("Come, Holy Spirit") or to the Father and Son ("Send your Spirit"), is the third of three 'prayers of locomotion' which the Christian prays.  The first is "your Kingdom come"; the second is "come, Lord Jesus".  The second is a prayer for the ultimate fulfilment of the first.  God's Kingdom rule comes when God's King comes, and so ultimately we look to the coming of Christ and the end of this age for the answer to our prayers.  When we pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit, we are looking for the provisional, penultimate entry of the Kingdom into the circumstances of this age, of our daily lives and the situations we know.  Pentecost itself points beyond itself, to the time of the restoration of all things.  Bearing this in mind will help us to remember that even on the 'Spirit's day' Jesus is the final word.

2.  It may be (in a dry and dusty part of the brain) that the language of "coming" has to be understood metaphorically - after all, the Spirit is everywhere and in everything.  Even if this is so, we must acknowledge that the metaphor is absolutely appropriate.  The idea of coming establishes two poles - there, where the Spirit is and is at work, and here, where his presence and work are needed.  (The Lord's Prayer is explicit on this - "...on earth as it is in heaven").  It is the 'movement' from there to here for which we pray.

3.  We can be hopeful in praying for this movement, for at least two reasons.  Firstly, Christ has promised to send the Spirit from the Father.  Secondly, the fact that we are praying shows that even here, whilst it is definitely not there, the Spirit is still (and already) present.  We pray only at his prompting.

4.  Although the dove has understandably been adopted as the symbol of the Spirit, the more prevalent Scriptural images are fire and a mighty wind.  Perhaps the dove is better suited to the brand of mysticism we prefer, or perhaps we just like the peaceful imagery more.  Perhaps fire threatens us - does a fiery pneumatology imply a fiery ecclesia?  Or at least a community where more sin is burnt away than we are happy with?  And a rushing wind sounds perhaps a little more out of control than we would like?

5.  Speaking of mysticism, let's have none of it.  Let's remember that the Spirit is not formless, in the sense of a spiritual force that twists and bends this way and that.  As the Spirit of the Father and Son, he takes what is theirs and gives it to us.  Every time we see something desirable in Christ, every time something of the gospel rings true, every time we take a stand for God's sake against some sin - internal or external - there is the work of the Spirit.  Mysticism is the attempt to have a direct experience of God which bypasses the human and historical Christ; the Spirit of Christ is not to be thought of as in any way facilitating such a foolish enterprise.

6.  We are in need - oh, how we are in need!  We are and have nothing unless the Spirit comes to us.

Not left as orphans

Sometimes my mind wanders, and I start to wonder exactly what it must have been like on the Saturday after Jesus was crucified.  Some pretty weird stuff had accompanied his death.  I imagine many people in the vicinity of Jerusalem were a bit shaken up.  But for Jesus' disciples, there must have been devastating sadness: their Master has been taken away (as had been predicted of him, if only they could have seen it).  No wonder that when Jesus appeared on the Sunday they disbelieved for joy.  But again, this is only what he had told them.  His resurrection showed that he had gone victoriously through death and had returned to proclaim his triumph - first of all to the disciples, but through them to the whole world.

Jesus came back to us.

I also sometimes wonder what it must have been like after Jesus ascended into heaven.  I wonder whether some of the disciples weren't tempted to question whether perhaps everything would just go back to being the way it was.  Perhaps the death and resurrection of Jesus were important events, but not world changing events.  Maybe they had some sort of deep significance, but they were ultimately one off things that could not be expected to have an effect on the whole of their own lives, let alone the lives of people who were geographically and historically distant.  Then Pentecost came.  The Spirit was poured out.  The resurrection of Jesus was not a distant event; it was here, now, changing everything.  We are still essentially in that situation - in need of the Spirit to come to us, to make it all not only true but real.  And as we wait, he comes, and we rise up.

Jesus comes back to us.

And of course, the story is running on towards it conclusion.  There is a slow train coming, up and round the bend.  Even as the Holy Spirit makes Jesus present to us now, we feel all the more acutely his absence.  As we gather in his name to worship, we see more clearly all the opposing names that are still raised against him.  As we rejoice in what he has done to liberate us, we experience more deeply the grief of the ongoing slavery in the world.  As we are thankful for our salvation, we acknowledge again and again our ongoing sin.  But we know that it will come to an end.

Jesus will come back to us.