The Holy Spirit (eBook)

An Introduction

Fred Sanders (Autor)

Oren R. Martin, Graham A. Cole (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
192 Seiten
Crossway (Verlag)
978-1-4335-6146-7 (ISBN)

Infos

A Compelling Introduction to the Work and Person of the Holy Spirit The third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is equal to the Father and the Son, yet he is often overlooked and misunderstood. In this helpful introduction, theologian Fred Sanders clears the confusion by highlighting the Holy Spirit's place in the Trinity. He focuses on the Spirit's relation to the Father and the Son, and then on his work in the lives of believers. Written for pastors, students, and laypeople, this addition to the Short Studies in Systematic Theology series underscores the essential role the Holy Spirit plays in salvation history.

Fred Sanders (PhD, Graduate Theological Union) is professor of theology at the Torrey Honors College at Biola University. Sanders is the author of The Deep Things of God and blogs at fredfredfred.com.

Textauszug

1

Meeting the Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit is always already. When you become aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit, you become aware that he was present before you became aware. More than that, the spiritual awareness into which you wake up is itself, you come to learn, wrought by the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit always goes before you and prepares you to meet him when you arrive where he is. He is, to use a theological term, the prevenient person in our experience of the Trinity—he goes before. We are always playing catch-up. This is the kind of theological truth that takes time to receive. So let us begin (though the Spirit has already begun!) with a brief meditation on the Holy Spirit’s prevenience by way of reflecting on our experience of breath.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

You are borrowing the materials of your own life from the environment in which you exist. The ambient air that rushes into your lungs through your nose and mouth is absolutely necessary to sustain you. A human is a breathing thing. In fact, a complete account of who and what you are would have to acknowledge the air in your environment as a necessary part of what it takes for you to keep being you. It’s even tempting to think of the whole system of air around you as part of you. Certainly the air inside your lungs, and the oxygen in your blood, seems to be part of you; there’s always some air in you, even though it’s constantly being exchanged for new air. From another point of view, though, the airy environment surrounding you is not so much a part of you as you are part of it. Systemically speaking, you are part of a larger complex that includes not only you and all that air, but also whatever else it takes to make that air useful for sustaining you (its mixture of elements, its density and temperature, the amount of pressure it is under, and so on). That’s creaturely life. All living creatures are embedded in networks of interdependences rather than existing as sovereign, separate, sealed-off, individual entities. Breathing is “a drawing in of the air; and we are so constructed that something foreign to the constitution of the body is inhaled and exhaled.”1 We all borrow our life from our environments.

God’s Breath and Ours

There are two theological applications we can draw from this brief meditation on air, and both have to do with the Holy Spirit and his prevenience. First, it’s easy and even natural for us to think of the analogy between our dependence on air and our dependence on God. Both are invisible, both surround us, and both sustain our life. The analogy is limited by the fact that air is just as much a creature as we are, of course.2 But that’s how analogies work; our dependence on the created element of air is not the same thing as, but is in certain specific ways something like, our dependence on the Creator. In both God and the air “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), but in obviously different ways. When you opened this book about the Holy Spirit and read this chapter inviting you to breathe in and breathe out, you probably immediately sensed the power of the obvious metaphor. Breathing in and out is like prayer, or like practicing the presence of God the Holy Spirit. Again, the Holy Spirit is not air; he surrounds us not atmospherically but in a way that is holy and spiritual. He is always already surrounding us. The Spirit’s presence to all creatures—invisible, immediate, intimate—is a vital topic. The Holy Spirit’s presence to followers of Jesus is even more personal and profound. The Holy Spirit is (like) the air we breathe.

But the second application of our meditation on air is, I think, less obvious. It may require you to turn your thought patterns inside out for a moment, but it is worth doing. Here it is: though all living creatures exist in some sustaining environment, God does not. God is certainly living but is certainly no creature. Gregory of Nyssa puts it this way:

We must not imagine that, in the way of our own breath, something alien and extraneous to God flows into him and becomes the divine Spirit in him. . . . For we should degrade the majesty of God’s power were we to conceive of his Spirit in the same way as ours. On the contrary, we think of it as a power really existing by itself and in its own special subsistence. It is not able to be separated from God in whom it exists, or from God’s Word which it accompanies.3

The God in whom we live and move and have our being does not live and move and have his being in anything or anyone but himself. There are two ways to say this one thing. Negatively, you could deny that God has any environment around him. Positively, and more substantially, you could assert that God is his own environment. Just as God speaks his holy word, he breathes his holy breath. But unlike human breath, divine breath does not come into God from a surrounding environment and then return to it. God’s breath is God. God’s Spirit is God. God’s environment and conditions of existence are all simply God. Edward Polhill (1622–1694) made the point this way:

God all-sufficient must needs be his own happiness; he hath his being from himself, and his happiness is no other than his being radiant with all excellencies, and by intellectual and amatorious reflexions, turning back into the fruition of itself. . . . He needed not the pleasure of a world, who hath an eternal Son in his bosom to joy in, nor the breath of angels or men who hath an eternal Spirit of his own.4

God has no need of the breath of creatures because he has his own breath within the dynamics of the eternal divine life. Not only that, but God has no need of a region in which to be God or a medium through which to be God. God is omnisufficient, absolutely enough in every way. So this second application of our meditation on air is a contrast; God isn’t like creatures. Our breath marks us as necessarily surrounded by something besides ourselves, but God’s breath is God. In thinking about the Holy Spirit, we are trying to conceive of the divine life as a life that is always already fully resourced—oxygenated, as it were—from its own inherent resources.

These two applications of our meditation on air point in two different directions. The first application is about our relationship to God (we need God like air); the second is about God’s own inner life (God needs no air). “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” God says (Isa. 55:8). Likewise, the breath of God is not as the breath of creatures. Creaturely breath marks the point at which creatures draw on resources outside themselves to sustain them. Divine breath marks the opposite: God having life in himself, of himself, from himself, as himself. It’s hard to imagine, really, because if we start from our own experience of breath and try to apply it to God, we can only get so far. If I try to picture myself having no need of the air in my environment, I might picture myself in scuba gear or a space suit. Obviously, such technological equipment only proves the point that I need air so badly that in an inhospitable and airless setting, I will avail myself of a wearable, artificial micro-environment to meet my needs. But God has no needs.

We have come to a sort of impasse. In us, breath is the sign of our neediness, but in God it is the sign of his needing nothing. Since breath means practically opposite things in the cases of ourselves and God, we might decide that it is unwise or unhelpful to use the same word in both cases. But God is the one who picked out this word as somehow appropriate; God told us in Scripture that he has breath (Gen. 2:7; Pss. 33:6; 104:29).5 In making this comparison, God summons us to lift our thoughts up higher, starting from what we know in our own experience as breathing creatures and ascending mentally to thoughts worthy of God. Once we recognize these ways in which God’s breath is greater than and different from ours, we also recognize that our mental journey upward was only possible because God created all things with this kind of revelation in mind. God doesn’t tell us he breathes just because we happen to be creatures who breathe. No; when he made creatures who breathe, he was making images of his own infinite life, and that life is life in the Spirit. Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) taught that when we hear God speak of human breath and divine Spirit,

we have to do here not with a mere human figure used by God in Scripture to indicate relationships within His being. The reverse is true. Breath as a sign of life in living beings is an image in what is created of the particular way in which the Holy Spirit, who is the supervisor of life, receives His personal existence from the Father and Son.6

What Vos is getting at is that the living God is the one who truly has breath. His uncreated breath is the archetype, while our creaturely breath is the created, limited, imperfect image of that great original. So even though God is the one who has told us, in Scripture, that he is a living God who breathes spiritually, he did not tell us this so that we would assume he is needy like us. On the contrary, God tells us about his Spirit to help us conceive of his awesome otherness and perfection. God is his own breath and environment and life.

So the analogy, with its points of similarity and difference, is...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.9.2023
• Reihe/Serie: Short Studies in Systematic Theology
• Mitarbeit: Herausgeber (Serie): Oren R. Martin, Graham A. Cole
• Verlagsort: Wheaton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Schlagworte: accessible • Arminian • Bible study • Biblical • Calvinist • Christ • Christian Books • Church Fathers • Doctrine • Faith • God • Gospel • hermeneutics • Prayer • Reformed • short studies • Systematic Theology • Theologian • Trinity • Understanding
• ISBN-10: 1-4335-6146-8 / 1433561468
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4335-6146-7 / 9781433561467