Category Archives: Pneumatology

What is Man, O LORD? On a Spirit Grounded Humanity

Posted on by

What is man, O LORD?

Since man has Him, the Spirit is certainly in man—in his soul and through his soul in his body too. It is the nearest, most intimate and most indispensable factor for an understanding of his being and existence. But while He is in man, He is not identical with him. We have seen already that this would imply a transformation of man into God, which is excluded by the fact that Spirit is a conception of activity. The Spirit is not transformed into the soul of man, although He first and supremely creates the soul of man and make is His own dwelling. Nor does he become corporeal, although as the Spirit of the soul He immediately becomes the Spirit of the body and man is ordained to be not only spiritual soul and besouled body, but also spiritual body. He does not merely become the human subject. The human subject is man as soul, and it is this which is created and maintained by the Spirit. Bur for this very reason the Spirit lives His own superior and alien life over against the soul and the human subject. He is not bound to the life of the human subject. He cannot, therefore, be reached by its death. When the subject dies, He returns to God who gave Him. In distinction from the human subject, He is immortal. Whether or not death is the last word concerning man depends upon whether He is given again and that “may” is renewed.[1]

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. –I Thessalonians 5:23

But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. 10 And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. –Romans 8:9-11

Barth is primarily engaging with the so-called trichotomous versus the dichotomous view when it comes to a human faculty psychology as found in I Thessalonians 5:23. In the prior context (in the CD) he has argued against the trichotomous position in favor of the dichotomous locus, in regard to human being being soul and body versus body, soul, and spirit. He argues, as the passage above illustrates and develops, that the Holy Spirit, particularly as He is referred to in the Pauline corpus, is the animating, the activating, the dynamic and grounding aspect of what it in fact means to be genuinely human as that is guaranteed in and from the plenitude of God’s triune life, mediated to humanity through the humanity of Jesus Christ, and given lively valence in and through the dynamism of the Holy Spirit. I agree with Barth here.

While a person still has life on this earth they are constantly being activated by the Holy Spirit. That is to say, even if a person is in the pagan status, the Holy Spirit, nevertheless is engaging them, wooing them with the breath of Christ, in regard to sin, righteousness, and the coming judgment. We have not been left as orphans. And even though we indwell these fallen bodies of death, by God’s grace, through the grace of God’s humanity, we remain related to Him in and through the hovering and activating work of the person of the Holy Spirit. But if, as Paul teaches, a person does not have the Holy Spirit, that is in a saving realization, in union with Jesus Christ’s humanity, then that person, ultimately will fall into dissolution and reap the wind and whirlwind of their self-possessed non-being; this is known as hell.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §46 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 157.

The Dysteological Spirit as Parody of the Holy Spirit

Posted on by

Telford Work in his chapter on mapping a modern view of the Holy Spirit offers a really nice index of how that gets expressed under the pressures of secularism. Let me share how he sketches that; this is under a section he calls a Dysteological Pneumatology (think something like a Dystopian doctrine of the Spirit).

For Nietzsche these spirits are individual wills vying for power. For Freud they are the dark psychological forces that drives single minds and whole civilizations. Among humanity’s countless groups and subgroups they are the countless human structures that Paul calls stoicheia or “elements” of the world (Gal. 4:3) and that Walter Wink associates with the New Testament’s powers and principalities. For neo-Darwinians, who posit a never-ending biological flux in a world of change and adaptation, they can be the ephemeral species themselves, their ecosystems, the whole evolving biosphere, genes, or individual specimens.

The world’s spirits are thus embedded in an eternal struggle with one another and with the world that creates and destroys them. The cosmology of dysteological modernity is pluralist, pagan, and ultimately nihilist. Ambition, shame, and envy rule the lives of individuals, families, empires, oppressed peoples, cultures, gangs, parties, and businesses—not because of original sin, because that has been dismissed out of hand, but because it is simply how things are. The power of this vision is as immense as its varieties are innumerable. Only a few prominent ones need mentioning: Social Darwinism makes “survival of the fittest” into a social ethic, to the point of imposing empire upon and even sterilizing the weak. National Socialism elevates the honor of a Volk (a people or race) above all human decency. Corporatism forges alliances between ruling parties and business, labor, and advocacy groups. Environmentalism weighs the conviction that ecological destruction ill serves humanity against its suspicion that the reality problem is humanity itself. Prejudice marginalizes whole groups in order to privilege others; meritocracy tries to defuse it by setting achievers against one another in a competition for access to power; affirmative action and then multiculturalism have turned the tables on the old winners in the name of justice.[1]

The secular has been so tightly woven into the fabric of global society that it can be difficult to disentangle this thread from that, and recognize just how diffuse these fallen Nietzschean and Hegelian spirits are throughout the sectors of the world; even our churches. But these are the spirits, who started out as the Holy Spirit (that is by way of the notion that the devil seeks to emulate in his perverse way), who we are contending with each and everyday in our society at large. Whether the spirit is diluted into the waters of the seemingly mundane of day-to-day life, or more extravagantly, into the shakers and movers of geopolitical maneuvering, they have a certain dark and even demonic yield that stands behind them. The demonic, or even more pointedly, the satanic nature of it all can be observed in its parody. That’s how the satan works; he is not an original thinker, so he attempts to take the Holy, parody it into more palatable visions—palatable to his already secular empire—and sell it to his squads of people in either romantic historical dress, or in just straight up brute materialist in your face reality.

What should stand out though, as we engage with Work’s work, is that the seedlings behind the secular are not areligious, atheological, or aChristian. They are highly religious, highly theological, even highly Christian by way of original orientation. And so, it ought to betake the Christians, of all people, to have the capacity and vivacity, to spot these false spirits, parading as the Holy Spirit, and exorcise them for what they are; indeed, the spirit[s] of antiChrist.

[1] Telford Work, “Pneumatology,” in Kelly M. Kapic and Bruce L. McCormack, eds., Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2012), 236–37.

On Barth’s “Lack” of an Experiential Theology: A Brief Impression on Zahl’s Reading

Posted on by

I am just starting to read Simeon Zahl‘s book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience. I think overall it is going to be an excellent read. But he is, right off the bat, critical of both Martin Luther and Karl Barth, respectively, when it comes, to what he claims to be their theological penchant to squash a place for human experience in the performance of theological activity. The following is what I just punched out quickly (on my phone) as a first impression on my Facebook timeline. I’m sure there will be more to come, but I wanted to share my initial impressions here and now.

When Barth’s critics attempt to “defeat” him by periodizing him (reducing his theological efforts and their implications to their own space and time in German/Swiss environs and in early to the mid 20th century), they engage in a reductionistic fallacy (if not an inverted golden age fallacy [i.e., genetic fallacy]). It isn’t that the conditions of his theological environment didn’t have basic impact on Barth’s theologizing; but it is a question of whether or not the fundamental questions he was engaging at the time have parallel proponents even now in the 21st century. His anti-natural theology approach wasn’t merely his response to Nazism (even though it was one of the targets of his aim), it primarily was rooted in age old theoanthroplogical issues; particularly as those pertain to a doctrine of sin, and the attendant impact that has on humanity’s capaciousness vis a vis a theological ontology and epistemology. It’s not that human experience has no role in Barth’s theologizing vis a vis the performance of theology, per se. But it is that, for Barth, the conditions for human experience in theology have no ground outwith God’s human experience for us, as that is first established in His firstborn of creation, in the Christ (cf Col 1:15ff). It is plausible to conclude that Barth might flatten everything down by a ‘Christological objectivism’ and or ‘Christomonism,’ as is often the critique levied at Barth. But when Barth is understood from within the broader thematics of his total CD, I would suggest that he offers the only real ground for affectivity and experientiality to obtain within His Church. That is because for Barth’s theology, without the resurrection of the Godman, Jesus Christ, the conditions for *anything* to obtain (like at all) are non-starting. I can agree that there is a lacuna in Barth’s theology in regard to a developed pneumatology (same goes for TF Torrance). But that shouldn’t lead someone to the conclusion that the resources for such development are inherently squashed simply because Barth et al. didn’t fully develop that in toto. Just because Barth has a particular reception history, this does not necessarily entail that he has been received properly (per the “received” and perceived implications of his theology).

How Does the Christian ‘Get’ the Holy Spirit; Or How Does the Holy Spirit ‘Get’ the Christian: The Locus: Christ’s Vicarious Humanity

Posted on by

Have you ever wondered how you might construe a Christ concentrated understanding of how the Christian receives the Holy Spirit; how the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ serves as the basis through whom Christians come to participate in the lively reality of the Holy Spirit? Often we abstract the Spirit’s work from the Son’s (and the Father’s) as if the Spirit is the divine agent who imbibes or woos faith into the forthcoming believer, and by this creative act of Divine plenitude the would be believer comes to the confession of faith in Christ. Indeed, the Spirit has his own unique and active work in regard to the salvific reality, but as Thomas Torrance points out it would be wrong to think this work abstract from the person and work of the Son in Jesus Christ, or indeed, abstract from the Triune life itself. But in a very specific way here we see Torrance’s bringing together of the Spirit and the Son as the place wherein salvation first inheres, in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; and as an echo of that reality, we as images of this image (Jesus Christ cf. Col. 1.15), as we are brought into union with the vicarious humanity of Christ, indeed by the Holy Spirit, come to participate in the humanity, Christ’s humanity for us, wherein the Holy Spirit is fully operative as the One who leads and casts out, as the One who directs our steps in the way they should go; to the right hand of the Father. Torrance writes:

Our receiving of the Spirit is objectively grounded in and derives from Christ who as the incarnate Son was anointed by the Spirit in his humanity and endowed with the Spirit without measure, not for his own sake (for he was eternally one in being with the Spirit in God) but for our sakes, and who then mediates the Spirit to us through himself. As one of us and one with us he sanctified himself in the Spirit that we might be sanctified in him and thus be sanctified in the truth. Our receiving of the Spirit, therefore, is not independent of or different from the vicarious receiving of the Spirit by Christ himself but is a sharing in it. Since he received the Spirit in the humanity he took from us, we on our part receive the Spirit through union with him and through him with the Father. This was the point Athanasius had in mind when he wrote: ‘Our being in the Father is not ours, but is the Spirit’s who is in us and dwells in us . . . It is the Spirit who is in God, and not we viewed in ourselves.’[1]

For one thing, just from an identity point of view for the Christian, this should let us know that our salvation is not our salvation, but instead is a reality extra nos (outside of us); a reality that we have no control over, but who is in control of us as we submit to his reality for us in Christ by the Spirit of Christ who is the Holy Spirit of the Triune life. This should let us know that we do not find what we need, as the ‘world’ and liberal theologies call us to, by recessing deeper and deeper into ourselves. The fact that our very ‘being’ is grounded somewhere alien to ourselves, and in Christ’s being as we are brought into union with his humanity by the creative and recreative work of the Holy Spirit in his humanity and now our humanity in union with his, ought to alert us to the reality that there was and is nothing good that dwells here (that is in our ‘old person’).

I can’t help but think of the reality of the cross in this context; in order for us to come to this Dogmatic point of reasoning requires something greater than an abstract or discursive moment in our intellectual lives. What is required for these categories to work is both the Incarnation&Atonement; more pointedly, what is required is a putting to death of our ‘old man’ and resurrecting of the ‘new man’ in Jesus Christ. This is where the ‘being’ of humanity brought to breath by the Holy Spirit comes to reality; as THE man, the mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ, is breathed into life by the Holy Spirit in concert with the Father and in the strength of his own life Divine, and in this reality we can come to speak in the terms that Torrance and Athanasius do.

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark Publishing, 2016), 148.

Avoiding the Sin of Acedia: Living the Christian Life in Step with the Spirit of Christ

Posted on by

We come into the Christian life, whenever we do, and start the walk. At first, at least in evangelical circles, we identify new converts, often times with such phrases as “they are on fire,” so on and so forth. But after time passes, trials and tribulations face us, and we
gain experience[s] in the church we might become jaded, or at the very least start to experience a sense of dullness towards all things spiritual. We begin to domesticate and normalize our faith to the point that we conflate our experiences with the object (and subject) of our faith, Jesus Christ. Once we take this step—usually subconsciously—a vacuum is created. This is where things become tenuous, and spiritually dangerous. We will attempt to fill this vacuum with all sorts of new experiences, experiences that are more akin to ‘sowing to the flesh’ rather than ‘to the Spirit.’ We start to engage in daily practices that ‘grieve’ and ‘quench’ the Holy Spirit in our lives, and this all out of the seeming mundanity of our spiritual lives; out of the idea that we have arrived as Christians, had all or most of the experiences one can have, and now are seeking fulfillment in life by other means. I remember, as someone who grew up in the church, having a conversation with friends (who had similar backgrounds) when we were just recently out of high school, we thought we were all ‘veterans’ of the faith; that we’d already seen it all. It wasn’t long after this that I started to slide in my walk with Christ, and what I have been describing thus far began to overtake me; leading to actions that did not magnify Christ, but instead magnified me.

In the ancient monastic church the ‘sin’ I’m referring to was called acedia. Cornelius van der Kooi offers a wonderful description of this as he is discussing participation in the Spirit of Christ in his development of a Spirit Christology; he writes:

. . .  We do not have the unique relationship with God that Christ enjoyed. We are God’s adopted children. Yet this status in itself is a great mystery: it is the triune God who dwells in us, who has poured out his Spirit in his church! At the same time, this indwelling is not a matter of peace but involves warfare. We are often stubborn and do not readily incline to the Spirit and his work. In fact, the Holy Spirit may be grieved and even snuffed out. The house may feel or even be empty. Before we know it, we may be overcome by what in the monastic tradition is called the demon of acedia. It is the feeling of emptiness, boredom, and discontentment, bordering on melancholy. It refers to those times when we live in our own little world, are asleep, are unguarded, and try to put our restlessness to death with nervous distractions. Here no therapy can help us but only healing. God’s Spirit must come in order to fill us and make us complete. Outside of that movement, we are lost.[1]

This sort of creep can even happen to us as we are seemingly and actively walking with Jesus; even in seasons when we think we are genuinely in step with the Spirit. It might not be as overt as the discussion I had with my friends years ago, it might be more subtle; we might be reading the Bible daily, reading theology texts, be involved in church ministries and activities, and yet acedia could still begin to grab a hold of our hearts and put us into a place of spiritual deadness; a spot where we are going through the motions. My sense is that acedia is alive and well in the Christian church, and is one that we need to recognize and repent of.

What this sin points up to me is that within the Christian life there is a vigilance that is required. It is reliance upon the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, that will provide the kind of vigilance we need to avoid this particular ‘demon.’ It is so subtle and ‘creepy’ that we might not know it is even happening to us until we have engaged in some sort of egregious sin that then makes our whole lifestyle all too apparent. This is why reliance upon the Holy Spirit in Christ is so important for the Christian life. He will ‘put us to death over and over again, that the life of Christ might also be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies’ (II Cor. 4.10). I would suggest that this is what is required if we are to avoid acedia; we must, as the Apostle said of himself, ‘have the sentence of death written upon us that we won’t trust in ourselves, but in the One who is able to raise the dead’ (II Cor. 1.7-9). We can pray for this type of lifestyle, and God will and has provided that for us in Christ. But this type of lifestyle—the one that avoids acedia—is not comfortable. In fact this type of non-acedia lifestyle can cause great anguish, dark nights of the soul, bouts of depression and anxiety, physical tumults, and a host of other means through which the Holy Spirit in God’s providence in Christ, will produce his death in our lives that his life will also be present for the world to see, and for us to experience. If you dare, ask the Lord to arrest any sort of acedia in your life and see what he won’t do. His grace is sufficient (I say with fear and trembling).

 

[1] Cornelius van der Kooi, This Incredibly Benevolent Force: The Holy Spirit in Reformed Theology and Spirituality (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018), 104-05.

The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance: The Holy Spirit ‘Accommodates’ the Ineffable God through the Son, Jesus Christ

Posted on by

The Holy Spirit is often overshadowed by discussions surrounding Jesus, and even the Father, but in a way this is by design and the “order” of God’s life internal to himself. There are many important aspects of the Holy Spirit’s work though that we shouldn’t overlook, particularly with reference to, of course, thought about the Holy Trinity and the interior life of God. Thomas F. Torrance has these insightful things to note; as usual Torrance focuses in on the role that the reality of the homoousion brings to bear on a doctrine of the Holy Spirit:

It is by reference to this epistemological centre in the incarnate Son or Word mad flesh – that is, to the homoousion of the Son and the hypostatic union of divine Nature and human nature in him – that we also clarify our knowledge of the Spirit. He is not knowable in his own distinctive Person or hypostasis in the same way, for he is not embodied, like the incarnate Son, in the concrete modalities and structured objectivities of our world of space-time, or, like him, therefore, brought within the range of our human knowing at our lowly creaturely level. The Holy Spirit is God of God but not man of man, so that our knowledge of the Holy Spirit rests directly on the ultimate objectivity of God as God, unmediated by the secondary objectivities of space and time, and it rests only indirectly on those objectivities through relation to the Son with whom he is of one being as he is with the Father. Through all of God’s self-revelation to us in the incarnate Son, the Holy Spirit is the creative Agent in mediating knowledge of God to us in himself and the creative Agent in our reception and understanding of that revelation, although he is not himself the Word (λόγος) of that revelation or the Form (εἶδος) which that revelation assumes in Jesus Christ as it comes from the Father and is appropriated by us. But because it is in the Spirit as the immediate presence and power of God’s revelation to us that we know God in this way, the Father through the Son and the Son from the Father,  we know the Spirit in himself as Lord God no less than the Father and the Son, who therefore with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified. It is through holding constantly in our though the inseparable unity between the economic activity of God in the Spirit and the economic activity of God in the Son that we may be prevented from reading back into God himself the material or creaturely images (e.g. latent in human father-son relations) that rise out of the reciprocity he has established with us through the incarnation of his Son in space and time as one with us and one of us. Through the oneness of the Son and the Spirit the imaging of God in Jesus the incarnate Son or the Word made flesh is signitive, not mimetic. Thus the creaturely images naturally latent in the forms of thought and speech employed by divine revelation to us are made to refer transparently or in a diaphanous way to God without being projected into his divine Nature.[1]

It takes at least a minute or two to try and comprehend what Torrance is getting at; particularly in the last few clauses of the paragraph. Essentially, I think Torrance is underscoring how there remains a type of ‘gulf’—a Creator/creature distinction—between us and the ineffable God. Such that the work of the Holy Spirit is, in part, to provide the accommodating context between God who is ultimate, and those of us who are not. His work is to create the union between God and humanity where this can happen in hypostatic union—so His overshadowing of Mary’s womb. It is this dynamic, back-and-forth in dialectic, wherein us humans, as we participate in and from the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, are able to actually make our way through the diaphanous humanity of Christ—like the torn veil of his broken and now resurrected body for us—into the very recess of God’s eternal, Holy, and Triune life. But it is, as Torrance develops, the work of the Holy Spirit to constantly mediate us into the mediating humanity of Christ; a humanity that finds its breath life in the antecedent and eternal life of the Divine Logos, the eternal ingenerate Son, Jesus Christ. It is as if the Holy Spirit, in a way, is the like the cleft of the rock that Moses was hidden in as he encountered the back side of God’s intensely burning shekinah presence; it’s just now that because of the Holy Spirit we are now ‘hidden’ (Col. 3) in the vicarious humanity of Christ, the eikon of God (Col 1.15) wherein an elevation has happened (Eph. 1.18-23). Through the mediatorial humanity of Christ, by the Spirit, we are able to look into the eyes of Godself by gazing into the face of Christ (II Cor. 4.5-6); we are now robed in his humanity, by the Spirit, which allows us to literally and ontologically sit at the right hand of the Holy Father, in the Son, and to participate and partake in the divine nature itself, by the grace of the Spirit, carrying out our priestly roles as coheirs with Christ, and sons and daughters of the King.

These are things and realities, in many ways, that we can only marvel in outright worship at. Realities that we can taste and see are good by participating in them; we can only talk about them to just an extent. But then again, that’s the point of all this; the Holy Spirit in and through the vicarious humanity of Christ, is in the constant mode of accommodating these deep and ineffable realities about God’s life into our lives in and through the creaturely modalities and creational structures we find ourselves currently enrobed by. The evangel is that because of who God is, Triune Love and Grace, he has bent down to us, and continuously does so by the work and person of the Holy Spirit, in and through the Sabbath rest of the Holy Son; our brother and Savior, Jesus Christ. amen.

 

 

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 101.

‘From’ Christ, not ‘For’ Christ: “Why don’t you have a category for obedience?”

Posted on by

I have lots of people email (instead of comment) me about my various posts here at the blog. Recently I received an email from someone who wondered why I didn’t have a category (in my categories for the blog) designated as “obedience”? I haven’t emailed this person back yet, but I thought before I did that I would respond to this rather interesting observation here at the blog first (it seems fitting for me to do so).

adam-eve-garden-of-eden-1To start with, I do have a category entitled “ethics,” which deals with issues and instances of concrete instantiations of Christian obedience (or disobedience); and then I do deal with Christian obedience in many posts, but they aren’t under a specific category of “obedience,” but instead those can be found under the category of “salvation” (and then a lengthy process of weeding through this posts will ultimately yield results that show I have dealt with questions that are oriented around Christian obedience). But I would like to answer this question with more particularity, and clarity on why my blog does not emphasize this category (as important as it is!). My blog does not emphasize this category (in the way my interlocutor is wondering, I presume) because the way I think of our relation to God in Christ, has Christ in the way; and I mean in the way of you and me (logically, theo-logically). Historically, and classically, Evangelicals (given their hybrided dependence upon Reformed/Covenant theology) have emphasized relation with God through a mode of emphasizing law-keeping conditioned by forensic categories of thought (just read an Evangelical systematic theology if you don’t believe me). And insofar that I have eschewed this classical mode, I have abandoned emphasizing law-keeping (code for ‘obedience’, usually) as the emphasis by which I understood relationship with God, and how I conceive of Christian holiness (or obedience as its subsequent expression). To provide an example of where the Evangelical heritage comes from, theologically, in this regard; let me quote Kim Riddlebarger (a contemporary advocate of Covenant Theology, and member of the White Horse Inn radio broadcast, along with Michael Horton), as he sketches the original and lasting relationship and way that he (and the classically Reformed) think of how God and man (God/world) relate to each other through the Covenant of Works (or Creation):

[A]s redemptive history unfolded, the first Adam—the biological and federal representative of all humanity—failed to do as God commanded under the terms of the covenant of works. The Lord God said to Adam, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). This covenant of works or, as some Reformed writers speak of it, the “covenant of creation” lies at the heart of redemptive history. Under its terms God demanded perfect obedience of Adam, who would either obey the terms of the covenant and receive God’s blessing—eternal life in a glorified Eden—or fail to keep the covenant and bring its sanctions down upon himself and all humanity. Adam’s willful act of rebellion did, in fact, bring the curse of death on the entire human race. This covenant of works is never subsequently abrogated in the Scriptures, a point empirically verified when ever death strikes. This covenant also undergirds the biblical teaching that for any of Adam’s fall children to be saved, someone must fulfill all the terms of the covenant without a single infraction in thought, word, or deed (Matt. 5:48; 1 Peter 1:16). [Kim Riddlebarger, A Case for Amillennialism: Understanding The End Times, 47.]

Much could be said in critique of this conception of things (and I have already said much, just check my category “critiquing classical Calvinism”), but in order to not get side-tracked from the point of this post, let me stay particular to my intention. In predictable form (since Covenant theology has Creation preceding Covenant), Riddlebarger allows Creation to condition Covenant instead of seeing Covenant (God’s life of gracious love) conditioning Creation (one serious fall out of this theological ordering is that Jesus becomes conditioned by creation instead of conditioning creation himself as homoousion—I digress!). In other words, when Reformed thinkers like Riddlebarger, and his whole tradition, start theologizing and biblical exegeting they start where Riddlerbarger starts, with Law (or the Covenant of Works/Creation). And yet, as Ray Anderson has highlighted (along with others), what should be understood (first), is that God spoke and created (which is an act of grace as corollary with His overflowing life of Triune love). So what grounds any relation with God, first, is not Law-keeping, but the fact that God spoke (which is grace)! This might seem to be a subtle shift, but it is profound!

Following this shift of emphasis, what becomes primary is not my personal obedience (and Law-keeping), but God’s in Christ for us. As Thomas Torrance has written (as I just quoted this in a post below this one),

[…] Under the gracious impingement of Christ through the Spirit there is a glad spontaneity about the New Testament believer. He is not really concerned to ask questions about ethical practice. He acts before questions can be asked. He is caught up in the overwhelming love of Christ, and is concerned only about doing His will. There is no anxious concern about the past. It is Christ that died! There is no anxious striving toward an ideal. It is Christ that rose again! In Him all the Christian’s hopes are centred. His life is hid with Christ in God. In Him a new order of things has come into being, by which the old is set aside. Everything therefore is seen in Christ, in the light of the end, toward which the whole creation groaneth and travaileth waiting for redemption. The great act of salvation has already taken place in Christ, and has become an eternal indicative. [see full text here].

This does not mean that personal obedience is not important, but it frames it in a way that allows me to keep my eye on Christ instead of first looking at myself (and then reflexively looking at Christ: i.e. reflexive faith], as if I, myself, can somehow be abstracted out of the only true humanity which is Christ’s. So I “seek first His kingdom and righteousness, then all these other things will be added unto me” (and I only seek first, because He first loved (and sought) first that I might love Him, through Him by the Spirit). My relationship with God is not dependent upon my obedience, but Christ’s obedience for me (us); and so this ought to go along ways in illustrating why I don’t have a separate category (apart from Christology) for obedience in my sidebar. Thomas Torrance in his (posthumously published) book Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ really captures the import of this shift and way of framing things from God’s gracious Self directed life for us in contrast to the Legalistic emphasis that the classical Covenant of Works flows from:

(iii) The holiness of the church is its participation through the Spirit in Christ’s holiness

 This holiness is actualised in the church through the communion of the Holy Spirit. He only is the Spirit of holiness, he only the Spirit of truth; and therefore it is only through his presence and power in the church that it partakes of the holiness of Jesus Christ. Since the holiness of the church is its participation through the Spirit in Christ’s act of self-consecration for the church, then that is the only holiness, the only hallowing of the church there is. That is the holiness which was actualised in the church when it was baptised with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the union of the church with Christ was fulfilled from the side of the church as well as from the side of Christ.

The church is not holy because its members are holy or live virtuous lives, but because through his presence in the Holy Spirit Christ continues to hallow himself in the midst of the church, hallowing the church as his body and the body as his church. Thus the true holiness of the members is not different from this but a participation in it, a participation in the holiness of Christ the head of the church and in the holiness of the church as the body hallowed by Christ. Participation in this holiness however involves for the members of the church a life of holiness, just as it involves a life in Christ, of faith relying upon his faithfulness, of love that lives from the overflow his love, of truth that comes from the leading of the Spirit. Because the church is the body of Christ in which he dwells, the temple of the Holy Spirit in which God is present, its members live the very life of Christ through the Holy Spirit, partaking of and living out the holy life of God. Therefore personal holiness, and all the qualities of the divine life and love found in their lives, are the fruits of the Holy Spirit. [Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement, edited by Robert Walker, 386-87.]

There is a lot to comment on here as well, but I must limit myself. I will just say that it is this reversal of things (i.e. placing the Covenant of Grace [God’s life Pre-destined]) from Law to Grace that explains why I don’t have a category explicitly labeled “obedience”. It isn’t because I don’t think Christian obedience is important, it is because I think the gr0und of this emphasis is roundly rooted in Jesus Christ for us (and thus I have a category for Christology instead). It isn’t that I don’t think personal obedience or holiness are important, I do! Instead, it is because I am persuaded that focusing on Christ and God’s Triune life of gracious love, and participating in that from the Spirit’s unioning activity will produce obedience and the life of Christ through the members of our bodies as they are constantly given over to the death of Christ that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our body. We obey, only because Jesus obeyed for us first. We don’t obey to ensure that we are one of the elect that God purchased from the mass of “perdituous” humanity; we obey because God loved us first that we might love Him back through the mediating and priestly Spirit anointed humanity of Jesus Christ. It is only through this framing of things that I feel I can live out this exhortation from St. Paul:

 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. ~Galatians 5:1

Without the freedom of God for us in Christ I live under a burdenouss yoke that really ends up being hell; which, I am pretty sure this is what Jesus came to save us from (ourselves), and for Himself (and His shared life in the Monarchia or God-head). So obey, but only from Christ by the Spirit, not for Christ so you can find God’s approval.

The Holy Spirit and T. F. Torrance

Posted on by

The Holy Spirit is such a minimized character within the triadic unfolding of God, partly because this is His mission—to bear witness and magnify Jesus—and partly because if He has received any attention, often times it is in an abused way (i.e. pentecostalism). The Holy Spirit, historically, has been thought of as the linch-pen who subjectifies, for us, the objective work of Christ. He is the One who, eternally functions as the communal personage that completes the interpenetrating (i.e. perichoretic) stasis of Father and Son. He subjectively brings us into this communion, by uniting us with Christ through His humanity, and into His divinity. This is why Paul can say:

. . . But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. ~ I Corinthians 6:17

So much beyond the minimalist and abusive notions that accompany thinking about the Holy Spirit today, there is a richness about Him, that can only be fully appreciated within the context of Jesus’ incarnation, which He bears witness to, and the subsequent fullness of Joy He brings us into as our union with Christ becomes the occasion for knowing the Father. Once again Torrance has this insightful plus for our consideration:

Like Christ the Holy Spirit is one in being and of the same being as the Father, but unlike Christ the Holy Spirit is not one in being and of the same being as we are, for he incarnated the Son but does not incarnate himself, he utters the Word but does not utter himself. He directs us through himself to the one Word and Face of God in Jesus Christ in accordance with whom all our knowledge of God is formed in our minds, knowledge of the Spirit as well as of the Father and of the Son. This is the diaphanous self-effacing nature of the Holy Spirit who hides himself, as it were, behind the Father in the Son and behind the Son in the Father, but also the enlightening transparence of the Spirit who by throwing his eternal Light upon the Father through the Son and upon the Son in the Father, brings the radiance of God’s Glory to bear upon us. We do not know the Holy Spirit directly in his own personal Reality or Glory. We know him only in his unique spiritual mode of activity and transparent presence in virtue of which God’s self-revelation shines through to us in Christ, and we are made through the Spirit to see the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. While the Holy Spirit thereby guards the transcendence of God who infinitely exceeds what finite minds can grasp, nevertheless through his personal presence to us he brings the ineffable Being and Reality of God out of his unapproachable Light to bear upon us, and brings us out of our distance and darkness to have communion with himself and through himself with the Father and the Son. Because through him the Word of God continues to sound forth and is heard and believed, because in his light we see light and by his creative operation we come to know the unknowable and eternal God, we know the Holy Spirit, although personally distinct from the Father and the Son, to be no less Lord God than the Father and the Son, both as he is toward us and as he is antecedently in the undivided oneness of God’s eternal being. (Thomas F. Torrance, “The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons,” 66-7)