The Progressive Mystery: Tracing the Elusive Spirit in Scripture and Tradition

By Myk Habets

A careful exploration of how the identity and mission of the Holy Spirit have been progressively revealed throughout Holy Scripture and then interpreted by the Church. The Progressive Mystery describes how the Spirit has been revealed, understood, and interpreted throughout the sweep of Holy Scripture and the ways in which the orthodox understanding of the mission of the Holy Spirit has developed. An ideal entrée into the study of pneumatology, it introduces readers to the complex history of the theology of the Holy Spirit. Ideal for students, it takes its place among other introductions to pneumatology, as a readable and reliable guide to an elusive topic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Release date: May 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683592792

Myk Habets

Myk Habets (PhD, University of Otago, New Zealand) is head of theology and senior lecturer of theology at Laidlaw College, New Zealand. He is the author of Theology in Transposition: A Constructive Appraisal of T. F. Torrance and Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance.

Book preview

The Progressive Mystery

Tracing the Elusive Spirit in Scripture & Tradition

Myk Habets

The Progressive Mystery: Tracing the Elusive Spirit in Scripture and Tradition

Copyright © 2019 Myk Habets

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

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The Progressive Mystery was originally published by Archer Press (Auckland, NZ) in 2018 (original ISBN 9780473414245).

Print ISBN 9781683592785

Digital ISBN 9781683592792

Cover design by Windsor Creative (copyright ©) not to be reproduced without prior written permission of Lexham Press.

To Tim Meadowcroft on the ocassion of his returement.

List of Abbreviations

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

1.Introduction

Part 1: An Old Testament Pneumatology: Tracing the Elusive Spirit

2.The Semantic Range of Ruach

3.The Spirit in Creation

4.The Spirit and the Community

5.The Spirit, Christ, and Consummation

6.The Spirit as Person

7.Intertestamental Progression—From Ruach to Pneuma

Part 2. A New Testament Pneumatology: Confessing the Holy Spirit

8.The Holy Spirit in the New Testament

9.Spirit in Matthew-Mark

10.Spirit in Luke-Acts

11.Spirit in Johannine Literature

12.Spirit in Pauline Literature

13.Spirit in Hebrews and Petrine Epistles

14.Conclusion: Confessing the Holy Spirit

Part 3. The Spirit and the Early Church: Towards Orthodoxy

15.Three Foundational Fathers

16.The Homoousion Framework

17.Heresy Threatening the Foundation

18.Completing the Homoousion Framework

19.Building Upon the Foundation

Part 4. The Spirit and the Contemporary Church: A Third Article Theology

20.Reformed Theology

21.Roman Catholicism: The Ecclesiological Spirit

22.The Renewal Mosaic: Pneumatological Power?

23.Evangelicalism & the Future of Spirit Talk

24.Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Scripture Index

Acknowledgments

I began to write this book well before it was ever published. At the time, I was moving from what I would now call a warm fundamentalism into an open Evangelicalism; a move that was both personally enriching and intellectually stimulating. I continue to be enriched and stimulated by the triune God of Grace, by Holy Scripture, and by my participation in the Evangelical church; local and global. As part of my own faith development I was prompted (I now know) by the Holy Spirit to know more about who God is and how he works in the world. My Christian worldview was, at the time (and still is, no doubt), too small and needed to be enlarged and inflamed with a fresh vision of who God is in his triune splendour. A significant part of that journey was acquainting myself with the identity and mission of the Holy Spirit. This volume is only a part of that journey which I share with you now.

Many people are to be thanked: my family, especially Odele who supports and challenges me in so many ways, my friends, my church, and my workplace. My early theology tutors deserve special mention, espeically Tim Meadowcroft, a teacher, colleague, and friend. Each one of you has contributed to my own faith development, and for that I thank you. Special thanks go to our family home group (we really need a name!); a place of belonging and friendship. Sharing faith and life together as families has been a blessing.

To those who worked on the production of this book, I thank you, espeically Sarah Snell, and Windsor Creative.

Finally, my thanks and worship go to the Spiritus vivificans, the Holy God who unites us to Christ and with Christ presents us to the Father.

Myk Habets

Doctor Serviens Ecclesiae

Chapter 1

Introduction

It is a well-known and often stated maxim in Christian theology that the identity and mission of the Holy Spirit is consistent throughout the canon of Scripture, and yet at the same time, it is known that the Holy Spirit is revealed progressively throughout that witness. This is not to imply that there is not development within the canon on this theme or that what we now know of the Spirit is all there is to know. Both assumptions are wrong. Rather, the continuity and development of the identity and mission of the Spirit must be closely examined and understood if Christians today are to have any understanding of, and any intimate relationship with, the Holy Spirit of God.

As we near the end of the current renaissance of the Trinity, as it has often been called, a late twentieth, early twenty-first century phenomenon, we are now entering a time where the fruit of that renaissance—good and bad—is being felt across the other theological loci. Pneumatology is not immune to this development. In fact, in light of the focus on the Spirit in contemporary theology it may not be an exaggeration to say that in the early twenty-first century we are facing a renaissance of pneumatology. This is certainly the assessment of at least one significant survey of the Spirit, that of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen.¹

Many treatments of the Holy Spirit focus on specific themes, or experiences, of the Spirit, and are helpful. However, by not dealing in-depth with the biblical material, pneumatology often suffers caricature and misapplication. In this work, I have sought to linger over the biblical text long enough to see the progressively unfolding revelation of the identity and mission of the Holy Spirit. As such, a biblical theology in Parts 1 and 2 will occupy our attention. Here I take particular notice of the semantic range of the terms ruach and pneuma before looking at the locus of activity of the Spirit in both Old and New Testaments.

Having taught pneumatology for many years, I often encounter the idea that the Spirit is not really present in the Old Testament and as such we need to wait for the New Testament before we can know anything of who the Spirit is and what he does. This is a grave mistake and we are impoverished by it. The Spirit saturates (anoints) the Old Testament. The ruach YHWH is variously presented in the Old Testament as a personification of God’s power exercised in judgment or blessing, it empowers leaders, gives life to creation, is a creative force, is the medium of divine revelation and wisdom, and mediates God’s presence with his people and all creation. The Spirit’s work is pervasive.² But who is this Spirit? What is it? Sin and faithlessness grieve the Spirit, sometimes causing the Spirit to withdraw his presence from people. Can this really be a personification? An impersonal force? Not likely. The mission of the Spirit is revealed in the Old Testament in ways which prepare God’s people for a fuller revelation of his identity in the New Testament; but already in the Old Testament the Spirit is a person, fully at work, and fully God.

To concisely order the vast amount of material on the Spirit in the Old Testament, I have chosen to present the work around the ideas of creation, community, and consummation. These three areas are ones in which the Spirit is intensively active and revealing. These three areas are also picked up on and developed in the New Testament. An understanding of the Spirit’s work at creation prefigures the spiritual new creation Jesus offers; and knowing the ways in which God’s Spirit breathes life into creation, and with the Son, brings all things to fulfillment, is a dimension of depth required to understand the New Testament.

Seeing the ways in which the Spirit forms, leads, and indwells the community of Israel; its leaders, artisans, and others, forms the platform for understanding the ways in which the Spirit continues to call people out and form them into the Body of Christ, the Church. What it means to be full of the Spirit is initiated here, in God’s dealings with his first peoples, the Hebrews.

Hearing the growing number of prophecies and anticipations of what lies ahead for the people of God prepares the way for the Messiah, and with him the fullness of the Spirit poured out on all flesh. As the Spirit was active at creation he is active throughout world history, including its consummation. Indwelling these texts from the Old Testament alerts us to what is going on in the New when John the Baptist announces the fact that the Coming One has arrived, or when Paul confesses Jesus as Lord, or when John of Patmos sees the Lamb on the throne of God and waters of living water streaming from the throne for the healing of the nations. In short, the Old Testament revelation of the identity and mission of the Spirit prepares us for the continued ways in which God reveals himself as the triune Lord of glory in the New Testament. To miss this is to miss the main thing.

In Part 2 the New Testament portrayal of the Holy Spirit is presented by looking at the different books in clusters: Matthew and Mark, Luke and Acts, John and the Johannine Epistles, the Pauline corpus, Hebrews, and Petrine Epistles. Each book has a distinctive contribution to make to our understanding and experience of the Holy Spirit, and yet each book contributes seamlessly to a united whole, a coherent picture, a canon of faith.

What is especially important to notice in the New Testament are the ways the Spirit is united to the work of the Son in an act of mutual mediation. With many other scholars, I tend to think of the Son’s mission as subsequent to that of the Spirit’s, in that the Messiah appears in the Gospels in the midst of the Spirit’s work in the world. Indeed, it is the Spirit who prepares the way for the Son; he prepares a womb, a tomb, and an upper room.³ What began in the Old Testament is here in the New fulfilled as we read of the Spirit of life, the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Power, the Spirit of Prophecy, and the Spirit of Christ.

In the Synoptic Gospels, we witness a Spirit Christology at work, as the Spirit is associated with the person and work of Christ, in anointed Jesus and equipping him for ministry, indwelling and filling him, being the power of his miracles, and the unction behind his words of life. Jesus is so associated with the Spirit that he is known as the Messiah—the Spirit anointed One who would pour out the Spirit on all flesh, just as Joel had prophesied. In John, we have a complementary vision but this time a Logos Christology, one in which the Spirit is the other Paraclete, the one sent by Jesus to continue his work in the church and the world.

Luke-Acts gives us a window into the world of the earliest Christians and they ways in which God’s presence was experienced by them in Word and Spirit. The Spirit here continues to be poured out on the people enabling them to prophesy and understand, to work and serve, and to witness to the work of the triune God of grace and glory. And many were added to their number. And what has begun in the Gospels is continued in the Epistles, as Paul and Peter and the other canonical writers further explicate the life of faith lived in devotion to Christ, before the Father, and in the power of the Spirit. Finally, John presents us with a vision of the future, of the consummation of time and history as we know, where Jesus is Lord and the Spirit fills the renewed creation without measure.

In Parts 3 and 4 our attention turns from the canon to the ways in which the faithful have sought to make sense of what God has revealed and then apply it to faith and practice. It is beyond the limits of a concise introduction to offer a comprehensive survey of Church history, and so in Part 3 I have limited the focus to the establishment of pro-Nicene orthodoxy as it relates to the Holy Spirit. Likening these developments to the construction of a house, first the foundations are set for the homoousion, or the teaching that the Father, Son, and Spirit are of one substance and so are one God, equally divine and worthy to be worshipped. Three Fathers are central here; Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen. A brief survey of these three foundational fathers shows the considerable differences between early Christian thinkers, and yet at the same time, the emerging consensus on who the Spirit is in relation to the Father and the Son. These foundations were then built upon by Athanasius as he sought to establish the orthodoxy of the homoousion from Scripture and subsequent theology. It becomes quickly evident that these general theological convictions were the necessary development of biblical portrayals of the Spirit. Here the economic and ontological aspects of God’s being were clearly represented and coordinated.

No teaching of the church has ever gone unchallenged, and the identity and mission of the Holy Spirit has been no different. Heresy threatened to weaken the foundations of the church’s pneumatology and we briefly explore the most important of these. A tactic of the pro-Nicene theologians of the time was to associate opponent’s views with a known heresy; in this way, the charge of ‘Arianism’ took on polemical force. What Arius and his follows argues is canvassed here before we turn to the completion of the house of pneumatological orthodoxy with Nicaea in 325 and then Constantinople in 381. In this story, the three Cappadocians loom large as they each contributed to an orthodox Christology and then pneumatology. Before concluding this section, we mention the profound influence of Augustine on the establishment of pro-Nicene theology and the ways in which he built upon the foundation set by the other fathers.

Part 4 explores a number of influential movements and thinkers that have contributed to contemporary pneumatology. The inclusion of topics here is idiosyncratic, given the range of material one could choose from.⁴ I have decided to look at those aspects of the tradition that have most impacted the Evangelical church today and so there is a focus upon Reformed thinkers in the first part and then Pentecostal and charismatic thinkers in the second. From Reformed theology, we inherit a robust and welcome theology of Word and Spirit, one in which the two hands of God, as Irenaeus would have it, work together.⁵ From Renewal sources, we are reminded that we not only know the Spirit, but we experience him and his fullness too. Along the way, views of several significant thinkers are presented in order to signal the ways in which the church is where it is today.

What is the future of Spirit-talk? While none of us has the definitive answer, I suggest in the conclusion that a Third Article Theology is a timely and faithful next stage for pneumatological discourse. As the church reflects upon and seeks to be obedient to the Holy Spirit, we recognise that God is at work amongst his people, drawing them into his future and his purposes. May this survey be simply another faithful servant to achieve such ends.

Part 1

An Old Testament Pneumatology: Tracing the Elusive Spirit of God

Long before the Spirit was a theme of doctrine,

He was a fact in the experience of the community.

EDUART SCHWEIZER

We would do well to return to our biblical roots on this matter,

if the church is going to count for anything at all in the new millennium

that lies just around the corner.

GORDON FEE

Not by might, nor by power,

but by my Spirit says the Lord of hosts.

EZEKIEL

Chapter 2:

The Semantic Range of Ruach

This is an Old Testament theology of the Spirit of God—ruach in Hebrew.¹ Unlike the approach often taken, we must resist the temptation to read back into the Old Testament our New Testament paradigm at this stage of biblical theology; that does and must come later.² First we must learn to see what the biblical record progressively reveals to us about the Holy Spirit. It is our aim to trace the understanding of the Spirit of God through the pages of the Old Testament taking particular notice of the developing idea of the ruach of God and how the people came to experience and understand that experience of God’s presence and activity.³ We shall then be in a position to survey and then comment on the New Testament’s veritable saturation of Spirit talk and their understanding of the pneuma of God.⁴

The Spirit in the Old Testament forms no easy pattern of interpretation; he is spoken of very differently in Judges than, for example, in the Psalms.⁵ In the Old Testament he is less central than in the New and in the Old Testament the term Holy Spirit appears infrequently (Ps. 51:11; Isa. 63:10–11).⁶ Nevertheless the Old Testament is the place to start our investigation as it offers us an indispensable insight into the world of ideas, world-view, and expectations which lie behind the New Testament itself. Here are the Scriptures which formed the belief and understanding of Jesus and his followers, and which in turn were interpreted afresh in light of Jesus’ own life, death, and resurrection.⁷

At the outset, I must explain my position on the usage of personal pronouns for the ruach, the Spirit of God. Throughout this section on Old Testament theology I shall use a variety of personal pronouns for the Spirit of God, ranging from he to it. The reason for so doing is due to the difficulty in many instances of deciding which personal pronoun would best be used. Ruach in Hebrew is feminine, pneuma in Greek is neuter, spiritus in Latin is masculine! While the New Testament certainly leaves no room for doubting the personal nature of the Holy Spirit as the third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Old Testament often uses metaphors and symbols for the work of the Spirit of God, and so an impersonal designator is often more appropriate to use. I trust this convention causes no offence to the reader but instead highlights the manifest witness to the person and work of the Spirit of God within the pages of sacred Scripture.⁸

The procedure of this chapter will be to explore the semantic range of the term ruach within the Hebrew canon and then move on to a brief survey of the particular activity of the Spirit of God.⁹ We will occupy ourselves with the questions—what does the Old Testament mean by ‘Spirit’? What is the relationship between ‘S/spirit’ and God? What is ‘the Spirit of God’? We can best answer these questions by examining the use of the word ruach. We will not mention every instance or deal with every nuance of the word and its development, but we will attempt to trace its broad use and progressive development through the Old Testament account. Due to the survey nature of this work specific texts could not be dealt with directly in any detail and so throughout the chapter various works are cited that will allow the reader to directly consult in depth treatments of a given text.¹⁰

In his pneumatology Clark Pinnock asks, How do we grasp the breath of God? How do we speak of the power that gives understanding or convey in words the uncreated energies of God? How do we define Spirit?¹¹ In short—we don’t. Instead we turn to the pages of Scripture and attempt to piece together the self-revelation of God himself—Father, Son, and Spirit. Wilf Hildebrandt opened his important work on the Spirit of God with the following words that deserve repeating:

It is almost as difficult to trace the source of the winds that sweep across the universe as it is to pinpoint the origins of spirit notions in the ancient Near East. Nearly as complex is the tracing of the background to Israel’s pneumatology as presented in the OT.¹²

The main word for S/spirit in the Old Testament is the term ruach ).¹³ This term occurs approximately three hundred and eighty-nine times in the Hebrew Old Testament. Of these references around one hundred directly concern our study of the Spirit of God active in the world of the created order including humankind.¹⁴ Other uses of the term (semantic range) include wind, breath, transitoriness, volition, disposition, temper, and spirit.¹⁵ By far the majority of references to ruach have an anthropological meaning that may point to the emotions and dispositions of humankind. This is why an analysis of the specific context is all important in deciding what is meant by ruach in any given passage.¹⁶

The most basic meaning of ruach is blowing,¹⁷ air in motion,¹⁸ or wind.¹⁹ Perhaps the best definition has been offered by Albertz and Westermann as both wind and breath, but neither is understood as essence; rather it is the power encountered in the breath and the wind, whose whence and whither remains mysterious.²⁰ This definition is broad enough to capture the term’s semantic range and expresses at least in part what is invisible or unseen and so elusive to describe. The invisible essence of ruach is known primarily by its effect on the visible world, by which we can then attempt to perceive its essence. Thus, ruach is a term representing something unseen in order that the visible effect of this invisible force might be adequately apprehended.

The idea behind ruach is the extraordinary fact that something as intangible as air should move; at the same time, it is not so much the movement per se which excites attention, but rather the