Spirit and Life: The Practice of Living by the Spirit

By Roland J Lowther

The Apostle Paul challenged Christians to live by the Holy Spirit. But how
is such a Spirit-orientated life to be envisaged? How might it be defined?
In answering these questions, this remarkable book investigates Paul's
concept of living by the Spirit. The radical conclusion of the book is that the
Spirit-influenced Christian; engaged in a Spirit-endowed Church; aware of
a Spirit-ordered world; under the authoritative guidance of a Spirit-inspired
Word, lives a Spirit-coordinated life to the glory of God. A must read for
those who wish to walk in God's ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authentic Publishers
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781842278772

Roland J Lowther

Roland J. Lowther is the pastor of Eternity Presbyterian Church, Queensland, Australia. He holds a PhD from the University of Queensland on the subject, 'Living by the Spirit'.

Book preview

Endnotes

Introduction

A New Possibility

The possible is often shrouded by the impossible. By the year 1813 the newly established colony of New South Wales was struggling to sustain its growing agricultural economy. The burgeoning needs of the expanding settlement, exacerbated by an unpredictable climate, had forced a crisis. Australia certainly had no shortage of land, but expansion away from the coastal strip was considered virtually impossible due to the ‘impenetrable’ terrain to the west; a ‘fact’ made clear by the failure of all previous expeditions. However, some believed in the possibility of overcoming the impossible. Buoyed by a new sense of purpose and the hope of success, an expedition embarked on 11 May under the leadership of three ambitious explorers: Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson. Despite a gruelling 50-mile trek across the rugged escarpments, the expedition broke through just twenty-one days later.

Why had they succeeded where all before had failed? Perhaps their willingness to view the problem through ‘fresh’ eyes, and their courage to adopt a new method of exploration were significant factors. Whatever the reason, the circumstances of these early pioneers provide a fitting metaphor for the moral plight of many contemporary Christians; believers who have come to believe that living a life free from the power of sin is practically impossible. Hindered by the ‘impenetrable’ barriers of human incredulity and/or guilt-driven self-exertion, their religious lives are characterized by a vacillation between moralistic striving and guilt-ridden capitulation. Yet, not unlike our three courageous explorers, the Apostle Paul’s mature reflections on the Christian life reveal a more optimistic appraisal of a way through life’s moral labyrinth. For Paul, the ‘new way’ of the Spirit gives supreme confidence to believe in a life free from the debilitating grip of sin; a life beyond a moral struggle under religious law – a life of new possibility.

For the authentic Christian, the perennial concerns of the ­moral-self and its engagement in everyday life remains a constant challenge. In facing this challenge, the believer is invariably confronted with the question: ‘How it is possible to overcome the selfish human desires that thwart even the best moral intentions?’ For some an answer is impossible; for others the solution lies in a system of religious discipline: studying the Bible, keeping God’s laws, praying regularly, diligently attending church, and so on. While these practices are admirable, relying on them to ‘mortify the flesh’ seldom yields substantive victory over the relentless power of sin and its resultant guilt. Consequently, many well-meaning believers resign themselves to a life of repeated moral failure, only embracing a hope of emancipation from sin’s power in the ‘next’ life. In contrast, the Apostle Paul confidently offers a solution, which he is convinced is more than adequate for addressing the problem: Living by the Spirit! (Gal. 5:16). However, the relative simplicity of Paul’s solution causes many contemporary Christians to either dismiss it entirely, or subjugate it beneath the ­duty-driven elements of their ‘religious system’. But, if we are willing to accept that God has revealed his wisdom in the New Testament writings for our guidance and edification, then surely it behoves us to pay closer attention to what Paul actually meant by living by the Spirit?

Protestant theology has struggled to meaningfully connect the Holy Spirit to the ongoing moral life. In many instances, the Spirit is located within the category of sanctification (interpreted as maturity);¹ while within the category of ethics (moral practice), law-oriented imperatives seem to subsume the Spirit’s role.² The function of the Spirit then, regarding Christian living, is asymmetrically bifurcated between sanctification and ethics. Within this tradition, attempts to understand the Spirit’s role in moral life, if not manifesting the one extreme of legalism or the other of licentiousness, have tended to promote a holiness-oriented ethic of ‘Spirit-enabled’ obedience to God’s moral law – in various manifestations. In practice, the most common form among conservative Protestants ‘simplistically’ promotes Holy Scripture as a moral guide, while tacitly acknowledging the Spirit’s prompting in the process of interpretation and application. Of course, the Spirit does play a role in a Christian’s engagement with the text of Holy Scripture, but can authentic practical Christian living be derived from Spirit-endowed, textual interpretation alone? Can we really say that the Holy Scripture demands ‘exclusive rights’ to the Holy Spirit? Thus, can living by the Spirit be reduced to the individual Christian applying biblical laws or biblical truths to the contingencies of daily life?

Although the Apostle Paul upheld the divine authority of Scripture and saw a role for the law within it, his view of the Christian life and its practical and ethical outworking involved a more real, practical and comprehensive dependency on the Holy Spirit. For Paul, the Christian life was dominated by the Spirit’s influence, over and against what he considered the defunct ‘system’ of Mosaic Law: ‘But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit’ (Rom. 7:6). Although many Christians have typically understood Paul as implying that this ‘new’ way was a new ‘spiritual’ way of interpreting and obeying the law (a literal application of Ezek. 36:27), is this really Paul’s way of viewing it? I believe that Paul had something different in mind; something more comprehensively liberating – a new way of making sense of the Spirit in the Christian life that transcends the old way of the letter and not simply augments it, perhaps as Karl Barth envisaged: ‘Were this to mean that we were to serve God in some new, more refined, more detailed oldness of the letter, we should be confronted merely by a new piety. We now have to show that newness of the spirit denotes the possibility which has its beginning in God, beyond the frontier of the old and every new possibility of religion.’³

For any religious tradition to move beyond the frontier of its existing doctrinal regime and embrace a new understanding, a significant ‘crisis’ must provide the impetus for change. This book represents the theoretical culmination of such a crisis. Influenced by traditional Reformed theology, I sought to apply the ethical principles of that tradition to my own life, and the lives of those in the church that I led. Yet, as I did so, I became increasingly aware of the practical inadequacies of the law-oriented model I had considered the ethical norm. I discovered that a religious life based on a system of law-­oriented morality, or even the less rigid practice of ‘literally’ following the commands of Scripture generally, while helpful in informing my conscience, proved to be less than adequate in effectively addressing the ‘real’ moral contingencies of everyday life. Knowing that I was a sinner who needed to overcome the sin that persistently shadowed me was never disputed, but knowing how to gain victory over it seemed to be an elusive mystery. Just like the beleaguered man of Romans 7:24, I faced the continual frustration of knowing the good that ought to be done, but the frustration of lacking the power to actually do it. Despondent, I privately lamented, ‘Is this life of moral frustration simply to be embraced as the normal Christian experience; something I must resign myself to?’ To further increase the burden, this deficiency was not simply confined to my own personal experience, but I could see it reflected in the personal struggles of many well-meaning fellow Christians, too.

I eventually came to see that this ‘way of living’ did not correspond at all with the life of ‘freedom’ Paul promoted in his letters. Furthermore, with the crisis coming to a head, a serious reconsideration of the Christian life began. I was genuinely seeking to understand how a Christian might address the ongoing influence of sin’s power in a more adequate way. Periodically, I had reflected on the notion of obedience and its place in the Christian life, wondering what a truly obedient life before God might entail. Not content to merely wonder, I set about conducting a simple practical experiment based on just one question: ‘What would happen if I diligently practised obedience to God – in every area of my life?’ This was not an action based on rigid legalism or strident obedience predicated on law-keeping, but was motivated by a genuine openness to simply follow my Christian conscience in every conceivable practical context. As the experiment unfolded, mysteriously, I found myself increasingly attuned to an awareness of my own moral deficiency before God, which surprisingly resulted in a greater relational closeness to God and simultaneously corresponded with a joyful willingness to obey God’s will. Could this have been what Paul meant by living by the Spirit?

Then one evening as I was preparing a sermon for the following Sunday from the text of Ephesians 4, a deep sense of conviction regarding my own moral deficiency before a holy God overwhelmed me. It was a level of self-awareness I had previously not known. As the sermon preparation continued, strangely the Scripture became so clear, deep and rich in meaning that it seemed as if God himself was speaking to me. The word of God appeared to be far more than words about God on a page, but a living and dynamic revelation that spoke with penetrating clarity about my plight under law, and God’s powerful solution. In drawing near to God in obedience, he had drawn near to me in the Spirit, and was showing me a dimension of truth comprehension that I had previously not known. This was not merely the consequence of a rational engagement with a profound idea from the text; without doubt it was a supernatural work of God – the work of the Holy Spirit. The crisis had finally come to a head. From this watershed moment, the quest to discover the ­Apostle Paul’s doctrine of Spirit-related Christian living began in earnest. It became increasingly clear to me that the key to the Christian life must lie with a fuller comprehension of the Spirit. This conviction soon crystallized into a concrete endeavour, formed around one basic question: In light of the Apostle Paul’s teaching, what might a theologically reasoned view of living by the Spirit actually look like and how might it be defined in a way that could be readily translated to earnest Christians?

Before we go any further, it would be wise to define what I mean by the term living by the Spirit. This phrase is the Apostle Paul’s way of conveying the notion of a Christian life comprehensively governed by the Holy Spirit’s influence. It connotes a ‘walk of life’ or ‘lifestyle’ that is controlled by or under the influence of the Holy Spirit. It is often set in contrast with the more rigid system of law, and as such is inherently ethical or moral in its fundamental make-up. Translating what that might ‘actually’ mean for modern Christians is the sole intention of this book; not only understand it but develop a cogent ‘teachable’ theological model that could provide a foundation for Christian practice. Not only so, but by virtue of the very practical nature of the Holy Spirit’s engagement with concrete life, there is a requirement to employ a method of investigation that enables the theological endeavour to extend beyond the realm of pure theoretical reflection. In such a venture, any attempt to define the Spirit’s practical and moral work without integrating a practical element into the process will indubitably restrict the enquirer’s capacity to apprehend the rich nature of the Spirit’s dynamic involvement in the affairs of ‘ordinary’ life.

Recent studies in the field of pneumatology (the theological study of the Spirit), and its engagement with the Christian life, have addressed Pauline ethics by appealing to a theoretical engagement between their own model of interpretation and Paul’s texts.⁴ These studies are valuable and necessary to the overall theoretical endeavour, but this book takes an entirely different approach. It seeks to integrate theory and practice to the point of developing an empirically verifiable understanding of living by the Spirit. A practice–theory–practice method is employed to provide the structure for developing this model. Framed within the parent discipline of practical theology, the process also transverses multiple sub-disciplines. Descriptive theology, historical theology, systematic theology and strategic-practical theology are pressed into service, as well as the use of other disciplines such as exegesis, history, philosophy and psychological analysis. Therefore, in taking an approach that encompasses both theory and practice, the goal is simple: to develop, test and analyse a working model of Paul’s concept of living by the Spirit that could be described, understood and practised!

With respect to the study of Holy Spirit in the domain of practical life, up until recently there has been a relative lack of material within Protestantism generally, and Reformed theology particularly. Although there are some notable exceptions that have ‘leaned’ in a practical direction (Calvin, Owen and Edwards), the development of this field has remained relatively subdued. Not only in this and related Protestant traditions has the Spirit’s practical value been tightly wedded to the text of the Scriptures, but also in some instances the emphasis on the ethical priority of the law has limited the adoption of a comprehensive appreciation of the Spirit within the realm of the practical Christian life. Further to this, a negative reaction (sometimes quite militant) to the Pentecostal and charismatic movements during the twentieth century has also done very little to assist progress. In fact, rather than enhancing the practical engagement of the Spirit among conservative Christians, such reactions have actually incited a hardening of the pneumatological arteries among many Protestants. Predictably, this often translates into a strong reaffirmation of the word of Scripture as the ‘only’ authority on matters of ethics and life, with the Spirit being ‘domesticated’ as a hermeneutical servant of the literal text.

This being the case, reclaiming a more comprehensive understanding first involves reconsidering the specific nature of the letter / Spirit⁵ relationship. Protestant theology (principally the Reformed version) has tended to conflate the letter / Spirit antithesis, which has the propensity to manifest an ethical model that promulgates the Spirit as an adjunct to the law, where the Spirit exists to give a deeper understanding of the law and then empower its obedience. However, this study will contend that this is not the Apostle Paul’s intention at all. For Paul the ‘letter’ more accurately refers to the historically situated, old ethical regime of law and the ‘Spirit’ represents the new modality of ethical life within the new domain of grace. Thus, when Paul sets forth his theological argument in Romans 6 – 8, he has in mind a Christian morality that is broadly non-nomistic and squarely grounded in the concept of ‘union with Christ’, through the Spirit. The death and resurrection of Christ and the spiritual connection of the Christian to these Christ events empower the believer to embrace the Christian’s relation to the moral imperative in a distinctly non-nomistic way. As Christ died, so the Christian’s old self, and by extension his or her relationship to the law, died with him or her. Because Christ was raised, the Christian is raised to a new reality, where the indwelling Christ (present as the Spirit) comprehensively animates ethical conduct.

Living by the Spirit is conceptualized in this work as a theological system. As such it seeks to develop the ideas into an ordered theological system that aids the reader more adequately to understand and practise not only the concepts organically set forth in Holy Scripture, but also how wider fields of human truth apprehension correlate with it. When considered from a contemporary perspective, Paul’s own notion of living by the Spirit is not laid out in a logically structured or rationally definable manner; and given that Paul didn’t live in a culture or tradition like ours, this is entirely to be expected. To the modern interpreter, it appears that Paul presents his ‘new way’ of moral living in such a vague manner that gives the modern reader the impression that his first-century readers and listeners just intuitively understood what he is talking about, and the modern reader is left clueless. Despite this perception, I believe that an attempt to understand it should not be simply abandoned, treating it as a ‘mystery’ of the ancient church. Attempting to formulate a ‘broad’ model of living by the Spirit, that both honours the intention of the New Testament writings and the needs of the modern Christians, framed within a cogent theological framework, is a truly worthwhile endeavour.

This ‘system’ asserts that the Holy Spirit is the primary source of truth. Yet, this source does not engage the Christian interpreter in ‘pure’ abstraction, but works through various media. The media I have identified are: the material world, the church, the Christian person (as a reasoning and experiencing being) and the Christian Scriptures. However, at the risk of developing a hermeneutics with four equal and competing sources of authority, and for reasons that will become evident, the book’s argument retains and supports Holy Scripture as the primary regulatory authority. While it is helpful to formulate categories that aid in understanding Spirit and by extension moral living, the Christian life is not simply lived out in the realm of logical categories. Understanding is a dynamic process, and is arrived at through a dynamic integration of these aforementioned media. In much the same way as a biologist might identify various systems within a life form, which seamlessly work to animate that form of life, so too the Holy Spirit works through the various media to animate and empower the moral and ethical life. This might be usefully described as: the Spirit-influenced Christian; involved in a ­Spirit-endowed church; aware of a Spirit-ordered world; under the guidance of a Spirit-inspired word; living out a Spirit-coordinated life – living by the Spirit.

This theology is an applied theology. Theological reflection has, traditionally, been oriented in a uni-directional manner, moving from theory towards practice in the ‘hope’ that the system or theory might be taken up by practitioners and applied. While in many cases the theories presented within such systems prove to be practically untenable, the distinctive feature of this investigation is its ability to provide the capacity to test the veracity of the theological formulation within the very concrete situation out of which the original crisis arose. All of this leads to one ultimate purpose: to encourage Christians to enter their own personal quest of discovery into God’s Spirit and to recognize the value of it in living a God-honouring life. It is my intention to challenge them to embrace an appreciation of the practical Christian life beyond the frontier of seemingly impenetrable law-based religion and truly appreciate the understanding that the Apostle Paul saw as the only valid alternative – living by the Spirit. For this author, it has been a long journey of discovery; for readers who have laboured under the weight of a law-oriented Christian life, a rule-based morality, or a moral system that draws on a ‘rigid’ reliance on rational interpretation, coming to terms with the Holy Spirit in the Christian life is a truly liberating phenomenon.

1

The Spirit beyond the Horizon of Theory

As late as the mid-eighteenth century, European cosmographers continued to speculate on the existence of a great southern landmass (Terra Australis). In fact, it was considered that the laws of physics demanded its existence to counterbalance the continental landmasses of the north.¹ However, validating the actual existence of this great mystical continent required more than continuing academic speculation; it required authentic empirical verification. Various voyages of discovery embarked in the latter part of the eighteenth century in an attempt to prove that which was previously assumed. Although prior claims were not exonerated in their entirety, these expeditions did meet with partial success. The discovery of Australia and New Zealand, while not constituting the great continent they were expecting, nevertheless provided validation for these ambitious endeavours.

Similarly, a genuine appreciation of the Holy Spirit can never remain a purely speculative endeavour. The Christian cannot come to an authentic understanding of it by remote analysis. At some point, practical engagement is necessary to gain a fully orbed understanding of how the Spirit actually works. George Smeaton argues, ‘The distinctive feature of Christianity, as it addresses itself to man’s experience, is the work of the Spirit, which not only elevates it far above all philosophical speculation, but also above every other form of religion.’² For Smeaton, the Spirit’s active presence makes Christianity not only a transcendent discipline, but a discipline that reaches deeper into the tangible dimensions of human life. Although purely theoretical treatments of theology have value in explicating technical aspects of the Christian faith, the distinctive nature of the Christian engagement with the Spirit requires more. Ultimately, the student of pneumatology cannot avoid coming to terms with the Spirit within the domain of real life, and as a