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The most important thing about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is recognizing its pattern.

So, let's think of preparing a recipe. You know what you want to make, say, chicken with creamy spinach. Some people don't, but I always follow a recipe. I assemble the ingredients, in this case chicken, garlic, baby spinach, wine, Djon mustard, heavy cream. Where necessary, I cut and prepare the ingredients ahead of time, following mise in place. Then the cooking and the tasty result. I have, if you will, created (in a derivative way) chicken with creamy spinach.

We see the same thing in Genesis at the creation. God the Father has decided the dish. The ingredients are God the Son. And the cooking--the bringing the ingredients to the desired result--is God the Spirit.

The Spirit is the energetic mover that uses the Son to bring the Father's desire to its realization.

That is the pattern of the Holy Spirit, his dynamic motif. His work always conforms to this shape. And anything that says it is him but that does not conform to this pattern is not him at all.

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Above, I talked about the fundamental pattern of the Holy Spirit: that he perfects or completes or brings into being the will of the Father enacted by means of the Son. I want to develop this insight. In this email, I want to make one point of clarification:

Good, orthodox trinitarian theology does not separate the persons.

Let's hear from a foundational theologian on this point.

Gregory of Nyssa is an important theologian of the ancient church. He lived from 335-395 AD. And he wrote a letter about the Trinity that has been read ever since. The letter is called "On not three gods." Let's read what he says about not separating the persons.

"In the case of the Divine nature we do not similarly learn that the Father does anything by Himself in which the Son does not work conjointly, or again that the Son has any special operation apart from the Holy Spirit; but every operation which extends from God to the Creation, and is named according to our variable conceptions of it, has its origin from the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit. . . . the operation is not divided with regard to the number of those who fulfil it, because the action of each concerning anything is not separate and peculiar, but whatever comes to pass, in reference either to the acts of His providence for us, or to the government and constitution of the universe, comes to pass by the action of the Three, yet what does come to pass is not three things."

Gregory says that we cannot pull the act of one person of the Trinity, such as the Holy Spirit, apart from the rest. They always work together. Opera trinitaris ad extra indivisa sunt; all acts or operations of the trinity are indivisible.

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We talked about food earlier. Let's think about a picnic basket. L and I still own a picnic basket. Kara was seven when we last used it. The idea, of course, is that you pack a meal into the basket. Then, when you get to some green destination, an entire spread of food and drink comes out of it. The feast spreads out much larger than the basket. The basket held the meal in miniature. And if you'd looked inside, you'd known what was coming. That is why I'm beginning with the Trinity. When we ask about the Holy Spirit, we must begin with the triune God.

In this email, I want to say that God is love. Not that he acts lovingly--of course he does--but that God IS love.

When I wrote in parts one and two, I wrote about the pattern the persons assume when they act and how they all act together. I talked about the Trinity at work (ad extra). I want to look quickly at the Godhead as it is in itself (ad intra).

Theology describes the forever life of the triune persons as an unbreakable, ever-flowing, giving and receiving, absolute reciprocating, captivating, totally transparent, intimate, and interpersonal fellowship or community (koinonia) of love (agape). The persons interpenetrate each other without losing their own distinctiveness, called, in Greek, perichoresis, in Latin, circumincession. The word is derived from the preposition peri, meaning around, and chorea which refers to a dance, such as a round dance with its music. That is why some call the divine life the perichoretic dance. It is my favorite bit of theology.

So, God IS love. And this love is the reason why, as I wrote last, one never acts without the others. The persons are always in unity. But, as I said, in their actions, they assume an identifiable pattern: the Father the creator, the Son, redeemer, the Spirit glorifier.

The Godhead of itself is ineffable. We know only what we've been told, and that is not much. How three can be one and one three is a great mystery. In our day, unlike in the past, it is not so hard. We have quantum physics as well as the nature of light to thank for allowing us to see that truth can be paradoxically complicated.

Now, then, we will discuss the Holy Spirit as he works with the Godhead in the world.

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Yes, I said that we'd move on to talking about the work of God in creation (called the sending or the mission or, in Latin, the missio Dei). But I can't help myself. There is a little more I must say about the Trinity, including the matter of origin.

We can tell the persons of the Trinity apart by how they act (the pattern), of course. They have different ways of operating in the world. But what about in the inner life of the Godhead?

The persons are distinguished in the triune life by their origin. The Father is unbegotten. The Son is begotten from the Father. And the Spirit proceeds (or is aspirated -- traditions use one or the other term) from the Father.[1] Now, this begotten or proceeding is not in time. We are just making a logical differentiation, not a temporal one. There was never a time when the Son or the Spirit were not. The Godhead is from eternity and to eternity, without beginning or end. And the Godhead, rather than being a simple, undifferentiated monad, is absolutely personal and relational.

Thus, theology has always seen in the relationship of the three persons the very definition of love and the very source of ever-flowing life. They each gaze upon each other as a beloved like themselves. And they make the other: the Father cannot be the Father save the Son, and the Son cannot be the Son without the Father. Similarly, the Spirit cannot be the Gift of the each to the other save there is reciprocity.

As St. Augustine (354-430 AD) said, "Now when I, who am asking about this, love anything, there are three things present: I myself, what I love, and love itself. For I cannot love love unless I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. So there are three things: the lover, the loved and the love." Augustine and many theologians in the West surmised that so great is the love between the Father and the Son that it becomes a third Person all of itself.

Another theologian in the twelfth century in Paris, France, named Richard of St. Victor, had another way of thinking about the love between the triune persons. He wrote:

"That love must be mutual is required by the fact that supreme happiness cannot exist without the mutuality of love... the nature of true charity reveals that three persons, not two, are necessary. For charity to be excellent, as well as perfect, it must desire that the love it experiences be a love shared with another. Thus charity is not only mutual love between two; it is fully shared love among three."

And, quoting Richard a little more:

"When one person gives love to another and he alone loves only the other, there certainly is love (dilectio) but it is not a shared love (condilectio). When two love each other mutually and give to each other the affection of supreme longing; when the affection of the first goes out to the second and the affection of the second goes out to the first and tends as it were in diverse ways-- in this case there certainly is love (dilectio) on both sides, but it is not shared love (condilectio). Shared love (condilectio) is properly said to exist when a third person is loved by two persons harmoniously and in community, and the affection of the two persons is fused into one affection by the flame of love for a third. From these things it is evident that shared love (condilectio) would have no place in Divinity itself if a third person were lacking to the other two persons."

From the beginning, Christians have been gazing at this ever-flowing dynamic relationship of absolute love and thinking about ways we could understand what is going on. Either way, it is vital when we talk about a doctrine of God to understand the kind of God we are talking about. And I hope you find this as interesting as I do.

A century or so after Richard of St. Victor, in Italy, St. Catherine of Siena prayed: "O eternal Trinity! O Godhead! That Godhead, your divine nature, gave the price of your son's blood its value. You, eternal Trinity, are a deep sea: the more I enter you, the more I discover, and the more I discover, the more I seek you."

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Creation. I have been so nervous about writing this one. How to keep from jumping into a theology of creation and, instead, to keep to our thread: the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I am going to try. There is a lot here.

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Not from necessity, but from love's overflow the world was created. "By wisdom the Lord laid the earth's foundations" (Prov 3.19 NRSV) The Greeks, after Pythagoras, saw a wise order embedded in the universe. They called this order the logos. John's Gospel picks this up and begins, "The logos became flesh and tabernacled among us." The dark water-chaos of Genesis is made logos-orderly by the activity (in Greek, the dunamis) of the Spirit.

The Spirit always works to the pattern of the Son. The Spirit is never the point. The exaltation of the Son is the will of the Father, who has put everything under his Son's feet. (The Scriptures about the exaltation of the Son are innumerable. The New Testament often quotes, for example, Psalm 2.6: "I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.") And the Son, obedient to the will of the Father, glorifies him. In creation, the mutual adoration of the persons is pressed into the wet clay of mud and history.

Couple of things.

1. Matter is good; bodies are good; time is good, as in fit for the divine purpose.
2. The Spirit works not just upon but with things. Aristotle would say that God uses not just primary but secondary actions in accomplishing his will.
3. The kind of work: a place is made for a thing: the expanse for the sun and moon, the sky for the birds, etc. The creative work is orderly. Please remember that this is not a scientific text. It is a theological one. Though, per #1, normal means of making things (geology, natural selection) don't discount the Spirit's guidance.
4. Human beings are made as a community. The Godhead does not work in solitaries but in communities. Recall that the first pair are a married pair (Adam's covenant oath "bone of my bone"), and the command to human beings is to make larger and richer communities and to garden the world--bringing order to chaos and reflecting what the Spirit did bringing order from watery chaos. Human beings are made male + female = the imago Dei, the image of God. Like priests, they should reflect to all creation the character of their maker.
5. God enters history and the world of things and knowledge. God chooses to reveal himself. No one else can make him or can use some reason or mathematics or philosophy to reason him out. The revealer is the Spirit. The revealed is the Son.
6. The Bible says there were heavenly hosts rejoicing in and perhaps helping with creation (cf. Job 38:4-7). God's overflowing love means he likes communities. Think of Job's heavenly court. It shouldn't surprise us to discover communities other than our own. Christianity says there is plenty of life out there. Christians are supernaturalists, quite literally, there is more out there than matter. Lest you wonder if that has any bearing on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, it will.
7. The triune persons move through creation toward rest, which is theological shorthand for the experience of the divine life (Heb. 4). This rest is promised to all creation, not just to human beings (Rom. 8:22).
8. Colossians 1:15-20 shouldn't be missed. In the Son, all things hold together. And recall that the persons work as one for they are one.
9. When we think of creation and the Spirit, we should read Psalm 104. And we should understand that this, combined with God's mandate to human beings and Colossians 1, form the basis of a Christian doctrine of creation care.

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That last bit on creation was not small. So, I thought I'd do a few follow-up paragraphs that each focus on one element.

The Ghent Altarpiece is a large complex of many connected paintings that make up, well, an altarpiece. It is located in St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. Fully opened, it measures eleven feet wide and fifteen feet high. It depicts all sorts of peoples and animals and instruments--all creation--gathered around a central figure: the living lamb who was slain. The Father and the Spirit are also present, but they are part of the circle around the lamb. The point is obvious: it is all about Jesus.

So, as we think about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, we must keep this in mind. The Holy Spirit affects the will of the Father to give to the Son "a name which is above every name." The way this happens develops as the story of God's people in history develops. In Exodus, he is hardening the heart of Pharaoh. In Judges, he is strengthening the arm of Samson. He is anointing David in 1 Samuel. And in Luke's gospel, he is resurrecting the dead Jesus. "The wind blows where it wills," Jesus said of the Spirit. But his will is not capricious. The Trinity wills together. And that will is the unquestioned peaceful rule of the God-man, Jesus, over creation.

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"The Spirit of the Lord renews the face of the earth. Come, let us adore him!" (a call to worship, Book of Common Prayer)

"[All creatures] look to you
to give them their food in due season;
when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
and you renew the face of the ground." (Ps 104.27-30 NRSV)

Here is the second of my mini-explorations underneath the category of creation, which occurs in the process of our exploration of the person and work of the Holy Spirit. And this one could fill a hundred books. So, let me sum it up: God is separate from the world; God respects the things he makes.

The Spirit, with the Son, both shapes and holds the cosmos together. Speaking of the work of the Son, Paul in Colossians writes: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

The Spirit is the energy of this creation and this holding together, though always working to the blueprint of wisdom, the logos, and toward the supremacy of the Son.

So, the living world is living because its source is life itself. BUT the world is not God. We do not and should not worship creation or any creature. Pantheists say the cosmos == godself. But this is not so. "You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below." (Ex. 20.4a NRSV)

God is different from the creation. And, the things he makes, he respects. He governs the world through various laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He says that matter is good--at least good enough for his purpose in creating it. And now I want to jump into science and such. The method science, called methodological naturalism, doesn't have to bracket God, but, instead, presupposes his governance, called his general providence. As I read somewhere: "God’s general providence results in a creation that is extraordinarily consistent (i.e., God is not capricious) and this enables science to work." This is an important clarification because a purely philosophical naturalism has no way of explaining why the material world is subject to discovery. As Einstein said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." This door I'm drawing here is an important one for those who are afraid that following Jesus means lobotomizing their minds. Not so. And it is important for those who are troubled with how evil rages in this world God made. But we do not have time to go into any of that. I simply point it out.

So, more directly to our aim: why is God's relationship with matter important for understanding the work of the Holy Spirit? Simply put, the Spirit works not only like some kind of magic, such as in the healing of a blind man or in the raising of the dead. But, perhaps most often, the Spirit works through the ordinary stuff of men and things.

So often in the Bible, people are drawn to fireworks when what they should be after is in the ordinary. Naaman's reluctance to baptize himself in the Jordan River. Jesus's irritation with the crowds who crave the miracles but ignore his teachings and, ultimately, himself. People say that the world we are in is a disenchanted world, but that is only because they misunderstand what enchantment is. They tell fairy stories and think the absence of fairies proves something. All they did was expose the silly nature of idolatry and miss the real nature of God's authority and responsibility as creator of this vast-beyond-vast cosmos he has made.

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In one of the letters that Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, the letter we call 1 Corinthians, Paul talks about knowledge. Corinth was a rich city. Everyone was sophisticated and educated. The schools were full of young men studying how to speak well and with authority in their future careers in government or law. But Paul had none of that polish. Instead, he talked about the cross. "I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God (τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ θεοῦ) to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1 Cor. 2.1-2 NRSV). Wisdom comes from the crucified Jesus and not philosophical or rhetorical sophistication. And he goes on to say:

"[God has revealed his wisdom (σοφίας)] to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God" (v 10-11).

The Spirit reveals Jesus to us. Here is the now-familiar pattern: the Spirit points to Jesus as the Father wills. The Spirit does this revealing in three ways.

First, the Spirit affects the creation of reasonable human beings in a reasonable world out of the love of a reasonable God.[2]

Second, the Spirit reveals God. We could and would not know him but for his loving desire to be in dialogue and community with us. The Spirit makes this happen. He inspires chosen individuals (prophets and apostles) to use their reason to speak and write his words to his people--scripture. "No prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." (2 Peter 1.21a)

Third, he illuminates sin-darkened humans to recognize the truth with their hearts and to understand it with their minds. Through the scriptural preaching of God's people, human beings all over the world, sophisticated and smooth-talking people, see wisdom where it really is revealed: in the crucified Jesus.

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Let's look sideways. Following along in the footsteps of pneumatology, we are almost at the Jordan on a very special day. But, let's pause a moment and look quickly at a neighboring line of thought. Let's look at theological anthropology, or the way the Bible thinks about human beings. And especially what the Spirit does to human beings in the OT.

I'm going to give you a couple of scriptures here, but let me just lead with the punchline. Human beings were created to image God. Unpacked a bit, this means human beings are meant to be priests. If we think about how ancient people defined priests, they would say that priests represent the character and will of a deity to the world. Priests rule, in a way, because they make judgments based on the wisdom and will of the god. Priests build and serve in a temple where a deity meets and rules his people. And priests represent the needs and desires of the outside world to the deity. Obviously, human beings fell from their priestly calling. But the Spirit who made order from chaos begins to restore human beings to their high calling.

In Exodus 31, Bezalel is given the Spirit so that Bezelel can build and adorn the tabernacle.

In many cases, judges and then kings received the Spirit so they could properly judge the people. Deuteronomy 17 makes the kingship in Israel a priestly office. The king served under and as an extension of God's word.

Actual priests (Levites) performed an office to which they were divinely separated (sanctified) and anointed.

And, finally, prophets received the Spirit so that they could speak to the people.

Put these together and we see that the Spirit's work bends toward restoring human beings (and it is always "them," the individual is not in view) to their created office.

"You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may proclaim the virtues of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2.9 NET).

"Then he said to me, 'These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple . . . '" (Rev. 7.14b-15a NRSV).

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We have finally arrived at the coming and work of Jesus himself. Looking out from the high point of things, the coming and work of Jesus is the visible part of the missio Dei--the Trinity's action to redeem the cosmos. The Philippian hymn takes it from this point of view:

"[Jesus], though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross."

Or John 5: 19, 22, 23b:

"Jesus said to them, 'Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. . . . Anyone who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.'"

This is how a theologian might talk about Jesus's work looking from above, so to speak. But Mark's Gospel has a different approach. It begins on the ground from below. In the first fifteen verses of chapter 1, Mark tells us exactly who Jesus is and what he is up to. He is the coming one (Deut 18:15; Daniel 7:13) who is greater than the final prophet, John. His coming begins the last days. He is coming in the power of the Spirit to announce his kingship, to overthrow all hostile powers, spiritual and earthly, and to forgive the sins of the faithful and give them the Holy Spirit.

In the center of Mark's outline is the baptism of Jesus. There are a lot of references to creation. The persons of the Trinity are all there: God is declaring. Jesus is obeying. The Spirit is anointing him to do what he is there to do.

So, here is our principle. As we ask, What does this tell us about the person and work of the Holy Spirit? So, we answer: the giving of the Spirit in Jesus's baptism tells us the Spirit's missio work is to do the will of the Father through the instrument of the Son for the glory of God. No less. No more.

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Our goal in this series is to follow the threads of a Biblical theology of the Holy Spirit. Last time, we arrived at the person and ministry of Jesus. As you can guess, Jesus being the very center of the entire Bible, there is a lot more to be said about him and his ministry than about the work of the Spirit, and I was quite nervous about being sucked into Christology. Therefore, I tried to keep my comments trimmed to only what was absolutely necessary. I focused on only one text: Mark's introduction to Jesus and his ministry in chapter one of his Gospel. And of that, I focused on his Baptism because the Trinity is so visible there--and so the Spirit is--and Jesus is anointed so obviously there with the Spirit for his work. I mentioned that there is a lot of creation language. The subtext in mentioning that is that what God did -- creation -- he is doing again: so the actors in one event act their roles again in the next. The ending of all of that was a principle: that "the giving of the Spirit in Jesus's baptism tells us the Spirit's missio work is to do the will of the Father through the instrument of the Son for the glory of God. No less. No more."

This bit adds a little about Jesus. Jesus is God incarnate. He is the divine Son made real man from a real woman in a real place at a real time: Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary and adopted son of Joseph, who was probably born around 3 BC in Bethlehem, a town we can still visit today. So, in his first advent, his life, death in Jerusalem, resurrection, and ascension from the Mount of Olives, in all the things he knew and all the miracles he did--was that just the Son manifesting his godself as the second person of the Trinity or was it the Holy Spirit?

We have spoken about how you cannot legitimately pull the Trinity apart. They are tightly intertwined and unified in everything that they do. Nevertheless, theology, following scripture, does see one or another figure prominently in this or that activity. At Jesus's baptism (as at creation) it is the Father who pronounces, it is the Son who, like the orderly creation, comes out of watery chaos, it is the Spirit over the waters that affects the divine will. Therefore, it is not complete speculation to ask this question about the origin of Jesus's miraculous power and insight. And, actually, I say that it is very important that we do so.

Recall that at the beginning of the last email, I posted a bit of the Christ hymn of Philippians 2. The Son emptied himself of his divine splendor and became a real human being. His glory is in his obedience. In his love, he identifies with his people "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." Indeed, he becomes the new human being, the new Adam. Speaking of the saving work of Jesus, an early theologian said, "That which is not assumed [by Jesus] is not atoned for." So, he took all of what we are and gives us all of what is his. This is the gospel: that in him our sins are killed and with him we, his people, have joy together and life eternal. (One might say the church is invited by grace--not by nature--into the triune fellowship.)

Because this is the gospel, I am inclined to agree with theologians who say that Jesus, in his humility, depended upon the Spirit and communed with the Father as a human being. He did not use his power (Jn 10:18), but walked in obedience, following the Spirit. After his baptism in Mark's Gospel, Jesus is compelled by the Spirit to do what Adam failed to do, confront Satan in the wilderness (not in his own power but in his obedient dependence upon the word of God) and call people back into fellowship with God and with one another: "The Kingdom of God has come near! Come, follow me!" We--the church--walk in the footsteps he made. And, therefore, we should expect the Spirit to be with us as it was with him. It may be more, for Jesus said, "you will do greater works than these," but it will certainly not be less.

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69. On Sunday

O God our King, by the resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ on the first day of the week, you conquered sin, put death to flight, and gave us the hope of everlasting life: Redeem all our days by this victory; forgive our sins, banish our fears, make us bold to praise you and to do your will; and steel us to wait for the consummation of your kingdom on the last great Day; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Continuing our review of pneumatology, we had arrived at the work of Jesus. I wrote, "The giving of the Spirit in Jesus's baptism tells us the Spirit's missio work is to do the will of the Father through the instrument of the Son for the glory of God. No less. No more." And I also said that the danger we face here is to drown in the orchestral swell of the work of Jesus and miss our humble and careful trace after the Holy Spirit. Yet, we should say at least what that work is, and prayer 69 "On Sunday" from the Book of Common Prayer is a beautiful confession of part of that--keeping in mind that it is the whole church that is praying and we individuals pray it as we are in that company.

I say part of that, because it remembers the existential situation of salvation, but ignores the sociological or political nature of it. For that, we go to that Old Testament teaching of God gathering his people back from all the nations so that he can be forever good to them. Here is Jeremiah 32:37-41:

"I am going to gather them from all the lands to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation; I will bring them back to this place, and I will settle them in safety. They shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me for all time, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them, never to draw back from doing good to them; and I will put the fear of me in their hearts, so that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing good to them, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul."

Isaiah -- Isaiah and Jeremiah are active under the shadow and reality of the destruction and exile of the northern and southern kingdoms, Israel and Judah -- devotes chapter 35 and many other places to this return from exile:

"the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."

Jesus's victory makes this possible--to share by grace the community of his very self with his beloved people, his bride. The valley of the shadow of death is done. Now there is the city of God.

"Look on Zion, the city of our appointed festivals!
Your eyes will see Jerusalem,
a quiet habitation, an immovable tent (Isa. 33.20)."

"And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes." (Rev. 21.2-3 NRSV)

With Jesus's enthronment upon his ascension, the way is open to anyone who will RSVP his divine invitation. And, as the Son was willingly sent and the Spirit with him, so the church will be sent to inform the Powers that they can no longer hold his people captive--they rule no more--and to publish the divine welcome. And they will do this as the new humanity. The image of God is restored in them. They are restored to their intended priesthood. And they are empowered by the same Spirit to announce his reign and welcome.

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”
And let everyone who hears say, “Come.”
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. (Rev. 22.17 NRSV)

Now we know the purpose of the work of the Son. And now we are ready to talk about the Spirit's work in and through the church--us.

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Last time, we talked about the resurrection of Jesus and a bit about the ascension. As we turn to consider Pentecost, I want to say just a little more about the latter.

After being with his people for forty days after his resurrection, Jesus ascends into glory. The clouds mentioned in Acts are a theological not an aesthetic detail. They refer to Daniel 7:13ff. Jesus is the Son of Man coming in the clouds. He receives dominion from the Father. He is enthroned at the Father's right hand.

I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed.

Daniel is picking up some of that covenant with David language. Jesus told his people to wait for the Spirit to come at Pentecost, a harvest festival. The Spirit comes on his people because Jesus has begun to reign. As Hebrews 10:12-13 says:

But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, “he sat down at the right hand of God,” and since then has been waiting “until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet.”

Previously, we noted how the Spirit is always working through the Son to accomplish the will of the Father. But now, by grace, the Spirit is going to work through the church, this kingdom of priests that Jesus has redeemed, his body, the elect, the co-heirs. Through them by grace the Spirit is going to accomplish the will of the Father, which, in this case, is to extend and complete the reign of Jesus, the Son of David, the Son of God as it says in Psalm 2 and many other places. Don't mistake the shock: the church is acting--not according to being but according to gracious inclusion--as a fourth member of the Trinity. It has been welcomed into the perichoretic dance in a way that truly boggles the mind.

The announcement that Jesus is king (and no one else) is going to require a clear commission, an equipping for that mission, and an expectation of deadly conflict both spiritual and material. I have brought up Jesus's baptism in Mark. We see those same things there which we will see in Pentecost: Jesus is clearly commissioned by the Father's public voice from heaven and John's witness. Jesus is equipped by his education in the Tanakh (the Old Testament) and the giving of the Spirit. And the Spirit thrusts Jesus immediately into the wilderness where he, in obedience and suffering, begins his cosmic conflict with Satan. Pentecost is going to replicate Jesus's pattern in the lives of his people. (I can't help but interject here that Jesus's life replicated the history of Israel. The Bible is cool like that.) Next time we finally get into the church and, therefore, us.

Now, let me say a quick word about a long-standing division in the church called the Great Schism. Back in 1054 CE, differences came to a head that were long-brewing between the Latin-speaking West and the Greek-speaking East. As is typical with human beings, there were a lot of reasons for this split. But the biggest symbolic reason was the Latin insistence that the Roman Pope was supreme. The Easterners disagreed. But the Latins were undeterred, and in their "supremecy," they insisted that a clause be inserted into the Nicene Creed (shorthand for the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed adopted by the whole church in 325 AD). This clause is called the filioque /fill-ee-OH-quay/ because those are the words that were added: "and the son." The amended text says that the Spirit proceeds "from the father and the son." I realize that this seems quite trivial, but it wasn't. The Latin church was being innovative with the most ancient of creeds without even running it by the East. The Western church had the pope after all, and the Eastern church said, yeah, there's the real problem.

Anyway, people throughout the church have been burdened about it ever since. Jesus prayed to the father that his church would be one, and untold numbers have prayed ever since for healing. The twentieth century saw a theological warming occur, and, just a few years ago, a new statement came out published by the Anglican Oriental-Orthodox International Commission (AOOIC). The statement said--and I don't have it with me so I'm just paraphrasing--that the original wording of the creed should stand as a statement of the origin of the Spirit. The Spirit proceeds from the Father alone; we discussed this some months ago. Nevertheless, following language in the Book of Acts and other places in the New Testament, when it comes to the mission of the Spirit in the church, it is fine to say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. So, then, if you open up a Book of Common Prayer or just pull it up on the internet and say the Nicene Creed and say that line "He proceeds from the Father and the Son," you are talking about the Spirit's missio work right now, not his existence in the triune life. His everlasting origin is the Father alone, but he is sent missionally by the Father and the Son.

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Dr. Gordon Huegenberger, my Old Testament professor back in the day, used to say about the structure of Genesis that every time the reader expects God's judgment, mercy is displayed, some new beginning, a promise, hope.

The disciples asked Jesus on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem, "Are you going to restore the Kingdom now?" In other words, is this the last day? Is this the day of judgment? As the prophet Joel said:

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near—
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness! (Joel 2.1-2a NRSV)

They expected that once the Messiah was enthroned, he would do justice on the earth.

The Lord utters his voice
at the head of his army;
how vast is his host!
Numberless are those who obey his command.
Truly the day of the Lord is great;
terrible indeed—who can endure it? (v.11)

And the falling of the Spirit upon the assembled on the day of Pentecost was no less than one of those moments in which the reader expects God's judgment. The reader is not wrong (see Luke 12.49-53), but with judgment also comes mercy. God comes in wind and fire upon Israel people, like at Sinai. The prophetic word of the Messiah's rule is announced to Jews from all over the world attending the feast in Jerusalem. And Peter quotes from Joel: the day of the Lord--the last day has arrived. Judgment has come upon the world." But, there is also mercy: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls." Mercy. Promise. Hope. "The promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him" (Acts 2.38-39 NRSV).

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[1] Here, following the 2018 ecumenical statement on the filoque published by the Anglican Oriental-Orthodox International Commission (AOOIC), The Procession and Work of the Holy Spirit, I consider the filioque a historical assertion, agree that the Spirit aspirates eternally from the Father alone, and is only poured out through the Son in the pursuit of the redemption of God's world and people following Jesus's assumption on Pentecost. In this, I haven't deviated from the points made in Why I Like the Filioque, but I have qualified them. The title of that post was meant to be cheeky in a kind of friendly way. The truth is, my trinitarianism, like the AOOIC, follow the Orthodox.

[2] Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture in 2006 in which he made a point worth footnoting. “The fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.” So that “not to act 'with logos' is contrary to God’s nature." For Christians, reasonable action is godly action. Christian theology does not threaten the dialogue necessary to a free society of mutual respect and responsible political action. Instead, such dialogue is part-and-parcel of its deepest theological confession.