"THE HOLY SPIRIT"
THE activity of God by His Spirit is a wonderful
theme. It embraces His creative work in the beginning. His sustaining power
ever since, and above all His activity for the redemption of His saints,
from ancient times to the present day. It is a work which affects our lives,
as followers of Christ in these latter days, and so must be of intense
interest to us. By its very nature, however, the Holy Spirit is bound to
be difficult to write about. Clearly anyone undertaking the task must discipline
his thought and expression so that they agree with me only clear revelation
we have on the subject, the Word of God itself. By that standard alone
must this 75 page booklet by Brother Edgar Wille be judged.
Refreshing Reminders
The author has many refreshing things to say. He
warns us against the dangers of reading the Bible in a "sterile" way, of
looking at God's revelation in Christ as if it were purely of historical
interest, of regarding the risen Lord in heaven as if he were an "absentee
landlord", of relying upon our own works for our justification, of failing
to take seriously the promise that Jesus would dwell with those who abide
in him and to grasp what God is prepared to do for us by His Spirit. All
these points are good and sound; it is unfortunate, however, that the author
frequently makes them with an exaggeration which throws his treatment of
this exalted theme out of true Biblical balance.
He calls his booklet "An Exploratory Survey of Scripture
Teaching"; it is rather a piece of special pleading for & particular
way of understanding the activity of the Holy Spirit in the saints.
The Significance of Pentecost
He begins with Pentecost (Acts 2), and indeed his
interpretation of the events of that day in Jerusalem when the assembled
disciples received the gift of the Holy Spirit and went forth to preach
to the multitudes, dominates the whole of his exposition. "Jesus had in
effect said (to the disciples) '...Don't begin your witness until I come
unto you in a new form and endow you with an inner witness'... Their mission
could not begin... until they had a new experience and a unique participation
in Christ". "Jesus was in their midst, giving them an experience of him
and an inner conviction of his presence." The "experience" also affected
the multitude; "You have felt (Jesus) in your midst", Peter is represented
as saying in effect (p. 6). "Not only was he in their midst, but also in
their hearts convicting them of sin". As soon as Peter had finished speaking,
"this inner conviction wrought, by the Holy Spirit caused them to be 'cut
to the heart',". "Conversion is a revelation of Christ which he gives,
us as he gave the early church on the day of Pentecost" (p; 7). "The significance
of Pentecost -... the gift of ability to witness and the inner witness
which convicted multitudes of sin... this dynamic power from the Lord Jesus"
(p. 32). So was ushered in "the age of the Spirit".
But a careful reading of Acts leads to a different
understanding. . The disciples had been promised "power from on high",
which came accompanied by cloven tongues of fire, and the power to witness
in other languages than their own. The assembled multitude were "pricked
in their heart", (their mind, conscience) by Peter's revelation that Jesus
of Nazareth had really been their Messiah, that God had demonstrated it
by raising him from the dead, and yet they were the ones who had actually
crucified him (twice asserted, 2:23, 36). It was this dreadful realisation
that they had actually put to, death their own Messiah which affected their
hearts. It is only, after this that Peter, upon their earnest cry,
"What shall we do?", tells them to repent and be baptized for the remission
of their sins, and then God would grant them the gift of the Holy
Spirit. The witness for them and in them would come afterwards-it was not
the
cause of their repentance.
The Baptism of Jesus
The same misrepresentation of the Spirit's activity
appears in the author's account of the baptism of Jesus. "Something new
and different happened when the Holy Spirit, took up residence in him by
Jordan's waters" (p: 15). "The baptism of the Spirit was the breaking in
of the Spirit upon the Son... Christ is now 'another man', able to go forward
"and grapple with the tempter's power" (p. 16). "In his baptism of the
Holy Spirit lay the power to realise his divine Sonship, to lay his spell
on those who should come to him" (p. 17). But Jesus was by this time 30
years old. What had he been doing in, say, the previous ten years? Must
he not already have "realised" his "divine Sonship"? Surely, for he bad
already grown sufficiently in grace and divine wisdom deliberately to undertake
his great ministry knowing what the end of it would mean for him; he was
already the kind of "man" God needed. In what significant sense then could
he at his baptism have "become another man"? The author's interpretation
is a misrepresentation of the record of the Gospels, where the "descent
of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus in dove form at his baptism was a witness,
first to himself and then through John the Baptist to the multitude (John
1: 32-34), that he was "my beloved: Son, in whom I am well pleased"; and
it was a grant to him of special equipment for his work.
Interpretation
The writer of these lines has spent many hours carefully
studying this booklet, and feels as a result that to follow in this review
the author through his frequently repetitious comments on the documents
of the New Testament would be a long and frankly trying task, because so
many of them are interpretations based upon his view of the manifestation
of the Spirit of Christ at Pentecost. The author sees, for example, the
indwelling Christ active everywhere in the events described in the Acts
of the Apostles. As a careful reading of Acts shows, however, the activity
of the Holy Spirit appears in direct interventions (Paul on the way to
Damascus, Cornelius, etc.), by explicit messages through visions or in
some unexplained way, and in the Apostles' "It seemed good to the Holy
Spirit and to us"; Christ is indeed directing the progress of the Gospel,
but the thought of his indwelling in the believers hardly appears in the
book at all. It is the same with the author's treatment of the book of
Revelation. His long treatment of the Epistles reveals many Scriptural
expressions pressed into the service of his theme in a manner which their
context and plain sense do not justify. It is better to turn to consider
some of the more general implications of his thesis.
Pentecost for every Believer?
In Acts Pentecost was a corporate experience in which
the power of the Spirit came upon the assembled apostles for the foundation
of the church, and not upon them as individuals. The author, however, applies
the term Pentecost to the experience of all believers in a way which the
Scriptures do not; "Every believer has his Pentecost and only through it
can he enter fully into the full persuasion and inner experience of the
Lord's death and resurrection" (p. 35). Hence his great emphasis is upon
"experience": "Christianity is an experience, not a philosophy or a theology.."
(p. 7) "The Spirit of truth, the Comforter, would draw from the things
of Christ and make them known in the inner experience of believers" (p.
22). He quotes an unnamed writer who, reviewing passages where the saints
are said to suffer, die, be raised and quickened in Christ, adds; "These
passages.. show that the relationship described is one of mystical fellowship
in Christ" (p. 29). (This quotation with approval of the vague, unscriptural
expression "mystical fellowship" is, to say the least, unwise). "No mere
intellectual pursuit could bring (a Christian) to recognise Jesus as Lord;
it is a divine act that creates the realization in the mind and heart of
man and brings about the consequent commitment. The written Word (etc...)
are media through which the Spirit works, but the Spirit is the creator
of the conviction." (p. 41).
There is the risk of misunderstanding the author
here in the way things are said, yet it should be pointed out that the
Scriptural emphasis places the believer's "experience" in a different order.
Christianity is indeed more than "a theology"; but properly theology is
the study of God, and the believer needs to learn of Him through His word,
to appreciate divine righteousness and human sin, to grasp the hope of
the Gospel of grace, and to humble his heart in repentance, "To this man
will I look, even to him that is poor (humble), and of a contrite spirit
(repentant), and that trembleth at my word" is surely just as true of New
Testament times as it was of Israel. With such a man God can cooperate
by His Spirit, can indeed come and "dwell with him". Then the believer's
"experience" can be rich indeed; but it does not precede the understanding,
it follows it, and it is its "fruit".
Experience
So the author's emphasis upon "experience" leads
him to lay insufficient stress upon the believer's need to understand God's
revelation and its teaching. The believers "share the fellowship of the
Father and the Son" (p. 31). True; but upon what basis? That expressed
by Jesus in John 17 runs like this: "They have kept thy wordÖ the words
which thou gavest me I have given unto them... Sanctify them in thy truth;
thy word is truth ... I made known unto them thy name", with all that implies
in understanding of the character of God and His redemption in Jesus. It
is against such a background that we must understand "... they may be one...
thou in me ... I in thee... they may be one in us". It is an identity of
name and word and truth, the work of the Spirit, but not of a "mystical
indwelling" of Christ,
The Words of the Spirit
The author's view of the understanding of those who
do not agree with his thesis is often expressed in crude terms. "Christ
is not only in a written record" (p. 24); believing the Gospel is not "mere
objective, intellectual reasoning" and believers are not "slaves blindly
obeying" some form of "legalism" (p. 27). "More than black words on white
paper are needed" (p. 28), The conversion of the Thessalonians involved
"something more than the appeal of mere words to the intellect" (p. 60),
and our view of the activity of the Holy Spirit in New Testament times
must not be that it produced "complete wonder working... men and women
reduced to mere automatons" (p. 31). Such descriptions are almost a caricature
of the understanding of the Truth found in the majority of our community,
and they certainly do not form the only alternative to the author's thesis.
It is true that we come to know God and His Son firstly through words printed
in a book-but what words! They are the words of the Spirit and as such
they have "dynamic power" (to use Brother John Carter's phrase) sufficient
to enable the believer to draw near to God. When the mind is prepared by
intimate contact with the "sacred Scriptures, inspired of God, profitable
for... instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete"
(2 Tim. 3: 16-17, RV), then God will surely add, according to His promise
what blessing is needed and appropriate, and He will do it by His Spirit.
"This receiving of the new life of the Spirit", writes
the author, "was not possible till after Jesus was glorified" (p. 21),
Only when Jesus was risen and ascended "could he fully perform the work
of re-creating men and women" (p. 19). This is "the divine initiative in
the recreation of men and women" presented in the New Testament as "the
truth, and reality, in contrast with the racial, legal and material shadows
which had preceded it" (p. 20) He quotes, evidently with approval, an unnamed
writer: "The Spirit was in John the Baptist as it was in the ancient psalmists
and prophets, and not as it afterwards dwelt in the apostles ... not as
it now dwells in all believers" (p. 14), These expressions imply that the
spiritual life of the faithful under the old covenant was seriously inferior
to that of the believers today, for it was not possible for them to be
"re-created" with "the new life of the Spirit" before Christ had risen
from the dead; and they much reduce the power of prayers like David's "Create
in me a clean heart, O God."
The Spirit of the Old Testament
But what are we to make of statements like these:
"The old covenant did not provide for forgiveness of sins, only cleansing
from ceremonial defilements . . . the new one would provide for forgiveness
of sins and would restore them to fellowship with God" (p. 50). "The inner
work of the new covenant is superior to the merely outward ministry of
Law, with its absence of real forgiveness" (p. 70). It is difficult to
believe that the author intends us to take these statements literally,
for to do so would mean that when David repented of his sin, "I acknowledged
my sin unto thee... and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin" (Psa. 32:5),
he was mistaken, and that when he prayed, "Cleanse me from my sin ... Restore
unto me the joy of thy salvation" (Psa. 51:2, 12), he was not being restored
to fellowship with God at all. The fact, however, that the author can use
such expressions suggests a confusion of thought between the forgiveness
of the individual and the ultimate atonement for sin in Christ, and indicates
a serious failure to appreciate the Spirit of the Old Testament and the
continuity of spiritual experience from the faithful before Christ to the
believers in him after his resurrection.
The author is right to be critical of that attitude
which relies upon "works" for salvation, and equally right to insist upon
the reality of the mercy and forgiveness of God in Christ. But the strength
of his condemnation leads him into unbalanced expressions. The Epistles
are "continually saying that I must surrender my own efforts to be righteous,
stop trying and start trusting". Our sad story of failure springs from
an inability to believe fully in the indwelling Spirit and consequent failure,
to let the Spirit take over the running of our lives" (p. 50). "All a man
has to do is to believe, have faith, trust that he has been included in
Christ, then his sins are forgiven-he is justified by faith" (p. 53). "Our
bodies are to be yielded to Christ, so that he may work his righteous will
through them. He uses us as his instruments ... Our behaviour is not our
own, but another is using us... The very use of 'yield' in Romans 6 suggests
that we are mastered by a power greater than ourselves, far greater than
our own resolution could be" (p. 54). "We get... gospel blessings, not
by doing something, but by believing" (p. 59).
Grace--and Action
That these expressions are really half-truths is
revealed by a careful reading of the New Testament Epistles. The Apostles
vigorously teach that our salvation is not by our works, and that our forgiveness
is through God's grace and not our merit, yet they are constantly exhorting
the faithful to action. Those who inherit eternal life, says Paul,
do it "by patient continuance in well-doing" (Rom. 2:7). To the Galatians:
"If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit" (note
the onus placed upon us by that "let us", and the practical nature of "walk",
the regular Scriptural expression for conduct, manner of life). To the
Colossians: "Mortify therefore your members..." (3:12). To the Thessalonians:
"Abstain from every form of evil" (1, 5: 22); and of course his, "work
out your own salvation..." (Phil. 2:12). The author's preference for Phillips'
translation of this last quotation, "Work Out the salvation that God has
given you", where for once he abandons the NEB, indicates the difficulty
he finds in giving Paul's "Work out your own salvation" any real weight.
And his preference for "experience" rather than "action" emerges in his
choice of the NEB version of Paul's "As ye received Christ Jesus the Lord,
so walk in him", which reads,"... live your lives in union with
him". In the counsel of the Apostles there is a marvellous balance between
faith, spiritual understanding and love on the one hand, and the need to
direct our lives into right ways and to avoid evil practices on the other.
It is a balance which the author's booklet fails to express.
In his concluding chapter the author writes; "This
book ... has aimed simply to stir believers to a greater awareness of the
work in their lives, both as individuals and as a community, of the living
God and the risen Jesus, which work is said consistently in the New Testament
to be accomplished by the Holy Spirit". With this aim all sincere believers
will have great sympathy. It is a matter of regret that the author's exposition
appears to place the emphasis on a power that "does something to you",
rather than on a power which works in proportion to our "intelligent and
affectionate response" (Dr. Thomas) to what God has revealed to us and
done for us. That same power, incidentally, can cleanse and destroy, according,
to a man's relationship with God...
In his last chapter the author provides us with a
practical piece of advice: "Instead of introducing prospective enquiries
(he means in a search for certainty, etc.) we should concentrate on our
part of the partnership, working out our own salvation in fear and trembling"
(p. 73). Amen to that. We may safely trust God and the Lord Jesus to carry
out what they have promised, though we may not feel we understand just
how they will do it. If the Apostle says that we can be "strengthened with
power through (God's) Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in
our hearts by faith" (Eph. 3: 16), then we ought wholeheartedly to believe
him and rejoice in the privilege*. Let us then address ourselves to what
we can do; work out our own salvation in reverent submission to
the will of God as He has revealed it to us in His Word, confident that
He will work in us what His infinite goodness wills to accomplish.
FRED PEARCE
The Christadelphian - 1976 pages 13 - 15
* See The Spirit A general Exposition (p. C:189-191) for a more accurate exposition of this passage.