Theology for the Masses

It is difficult for Western Christians to conceive the Spirit as person and not merely a force or energy. Persons generally at least have names, gender, and emotion, after all. On a one level, the Spirit seems to have none of these. The problem is exacerbated when we read Augustine and he speaks of the Spirit as the “bond of love between the Father and the Son.” It is not so much that Augustine is wrong here, but by describing the Spirit this manner robs the Spirit of personhood in favor of function. Influential as Augustine is in Western Christianity, this depersonalization has ravaged our pneumatology.

Though there are many things that make up personhood. In the next few posts I wish to engage the name, the gender, and the emotions of the Spirit. The goal is to begin building a more complete and functional understanding of the Spirits nature as a person.

To an ancient Jew a person’s name provided information concerning the person’s character. To know someone’s name, was to know who they are and what they’re about. It was more than just information used to catalogue someone in their mind as differentiated from another person. A person’s name was identical to the person.

The difficulty with understanding the Spirit as a person is that Spirit isn’t exactly a name. The Father’s name is Yahweh, the Son’s name is Jesus, but the Spirit seems to lack a name. And without this identifier we are stuck with thinking of the Spirit, not as a person, but an impersonal force. This misconception simply won’t do. In order to move past it, we need to understand that the Spirit does, indeed, have a name: Ruach.

Like its Greek counterpart, Pneuma, Ruach has a plethora of meanings ranging from a light breeze to breath, or even a fierce wind. We must understand from the outset that ancient Jews did not draw a sharp distinction between Spirit and wind; indeed, we need to appreciate the fact that “wherever we read ‘wind’ in the Scripture, people of biblical times also understood ‘spirit,’ and wherever we read ‘spirit,’ they also understood ‘wind.’”[1] The symbol and the signifier are interconnected.

So, if the importance knowing the Spirit’s name lies in understanding the core of the Spirit as a person, then what does the name Ruach (wind or breath) tell us about the Spirit?

First, Ruach informs us that, like a natural wind, the Spirit cannot be tamed. The Spirit is free from the box of any particular cultural construal. The Spirit transcends and supersedes all our finite conceptions. To yoke the Spirit would be like taming the wind: if the wind were tamed it would no longer be wind, it would be dead and lifeless air. To bottle up the Spirit for one’s political or social agenda is impossible. In our attempts to do so, we inevitably demonstrate that it is not the Spirit we have caged with our ideological agendas, but an idol forged in our image. We cannot tame Ruach.

Second, Ruach, like breath, communicates life. The Spirit gives the breath of life not only to human beings but to the entire cosmos. This breath demonstrates that the Spirit’s concern extends beyond our human interests to the whole of creation. Indeed, just as the Spirit breathed life into the first creatures in Genesis, so too the Spirit longs to breathe new life into a redeemed world, not just redeemed human beings.

Furthermore, the Spirit breathes life into the church. The church does not survive on her own efforts or energies. For all our scheming, planning, and strategizing, this is not how the church perseveres in life. Our identity is not wrapped up in programs or number of baptisms; our identity is rooted in the life giving breath of the Spirit. Neither the church nor the individual Christian life is sustainable through suffocating programs and agendas which inhibit our breathing the fresh air of God’s Spirit.

Third, the name Ruach, like breath, communicates intimacy. “Breath is that which is most ‘inward’ and intimate, most vital and personal to a human being.”[2] It is through the Spirit that the church has intimate fellowship with the Father (Eph. 2:18-22). “We know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” (I John 4:13) Just as the Spirit was Jesus’ “inseparable companion,”[3] so too the Spirit is warmly present. When we are lonely or infirm, the Spirit is there when no one else it. The Spirit groans on our behalf, knowing that our sufferings are but a momentary affliction that the Triune God longs to redeem.

Finally, when we add the word Holy before Spirit, we recognize the non-triviality with which we approach Ruach. Ruach is not like you and I. Holiness does not merely describe the moral quality of Ruach, it describes Ruach’s very being. Holiness is an essential ontological attribute to the Spirit. Being in the presence of Ruach is to be in the presence of the holy. This does more than just make the hair on the back of our neck stand up. The holy is frightening and terrible. To be in the presence of a person who knows us so intimately (all our secrets, all our failures, all our high-handed sins), a person who could, like a fierce wind, cast us away, a person who cannot be bridled by our agendas; to be in this person’s presence is fearful. Indeed, the presence of the Holy Spirit is “disturbing, upsetting, and awe-ful.”[4] I do believe that love is God’s central attribute. But that love is Holy Love.

A name is a symbol that creates worlds. By recognizing the Spirit’s name, we are invited into a world of gentles breezes and fierce storms. While only goodness can be found in this name, there remains nothing safe about the Holy Spirit. Transcendent but immanent, tangible yet holy, the tension is purposeful in the symbolic world created and sustained by the name Ruach.