Schooled by the Spirit: How Christians Learn to Think Christianly #5

In the first post of this series, we saw that the epistemic role of the Spirit is at the heart of Christian ethical behavior. But that assertion does not explain how the Spirit forms Christians ethically. In the previous post, we explored the New Testament foundations of our trinitarian doctrine. In this final post, we'll reflect on the theological implications of our claims about how the Spirit forms us.

The Holy Spirit and the Church

As we have seen, the apostles understood that the Church is called to a truly spirit-filled existence, an aesthetics and ascetics that denotes God's triune love so that all the world might be drawn into that love. Our worship and our ethics are inseparable, for our Eucharistic living is about existing "dispossessively and not powerfully", an existence that imitates Christ's "dispossession, impoverishment, and powerlessness" on the Cross. Easter spirituality is the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of dispossession that enables disciples to possess God’s "Word as their ultimate destiny" so that humankind is reconciled and reunited with the Creator and creation. (Carter, J. Kameron. “Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity: A Theological Engagement With Douglass's 1845 Narrative.” Modern Theology 21:1, (2005):55-60.)

This gift is the gift of identity, for friendship with God is our beginning and end, our ultimate reality (Gen 2:4ff). The Spirit makes possible the friendship with God that generates and constitutes human identity (as Augustine reminds us, human flourishing is the means, and not the end, of our friendship with God). As “children of wrath,” we are estranged from this identity by sin (“we were dead through our trespasses” (Ephesians 2:5)).  To draw fallen humanity into our destiny of friendship with God, the Spirit is the agent of baptismal regeneration, the creative gift of new birth in Christ that is distinct from and precedes ethical transformation (“be transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Romans 12:2)). 

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The Spirit thereby makes it possible for disciples to receive identity as members of the family of Abraham through Christ (Galatians 2:15-21; 3:16-30) and learn to understand how their neighbor might “sacramentally and iconically might bear the presence of God” (Colossians 1:25 - 2:3)(Carter).  Because of this pneumatic existence that constitutes and sustains our common life,  we (the Church) are theologically those people who are at the same time recipients of the gift of identity in Christ and enfleshed witnesses to the Giver.  Through the agency of the Spirit, we are the people who receive the gift of identity and denote the Giver of that identity so that others might receive it.

This understanding of the Spirit as the Person through whom we receive identity in Christ suggests that it is inadequate to think of the Spirit merely in terms of a mediatorial role. That is, it is inadequate to reduce the Spirit to an adjective that describes and thereby designates or justifies a human who reveals truth through prophetic speech (“he was ‘in the Spirit’ when he rose to speak against abortion....”).   So, too, is it inadequate to reduce the Spirit to the role of an abstract Reason who reveals to humankind the structures of the universe. For the Spirit’s role is not merely communicative in the narrow sense of an illuminative bridge between God and humankind, but rather is constitutive of Christian life.  

We speak of receiving the Spirit in baptism and we invoke the Spirit in prayer and sacrament (epiklesis) because we believe that the Spirit does much more than inform human life; (Marshall makes clear this important distinction between mere mediation and instructing the Church in proper beliefs: “Since the Spirit creates and rules the total situation in which the relevant utterances are made, the meaning of those utterances depends primarily on the action of the Spirit himself, and only secondarily on that of the free human agents who make them.  As the immediate agent of the unitary action of the Trinity in the world, the Spirit is the total cause of all that is not God.”  Marshall, p. 203.)) we claim that the Spirit transforms our common life so that it becomes itself a sacrament that denotes the inner life of God and draws others into it (Williams, Rowan. pp. 115-6.)  The habits of our common life are therefore an essential part of the Spirit’s epistemic role: the practices of the Church are the crucial means by which the Spirit reveals to the world the truth it does not know.

The Spirit is thus active within history, transforming humankind, divinizing creation by bringing us into the encounter with divine grace - as we behold communities whose practices signify the presence of the Spirit -  such that we experience grace as command, living so that our lives correspond to grace. 

To connect Spirit, the practices of the Church, and the divinization of creation is to claim that the Spirit is actively bringing about an exchange of properties between God and humankind (communicatio idiomatum) - chiefly the gift of charity that make the resurrection community possible;  it is to emphasize the eschatological character of the Spirit.  Through the sacramental habits of the Church, we invite the world to behold the Spirit as an irruption of the eternal into ordinary time such that the distinction between ordinary time and eternity is erased, at least for a moment; and, through that encounter, to fall in love with God and thereby receive the gifts of faith in and hope that this distinction will be erased forever at the fulfillment of time (Romans 10:4).