Theology for the Masses

Growing up poor, I remember times when my parents just didn’t have enough money to buy Christmas presents for us. They almost always seemed to work things out in the end, but there were times things just didn’t to come together. One advantage they had was Wal-Mart’s layaway program – come in and find what you want, pay a little for it now and come back and pay the rest later, at which time you can pick up your item.

This was an advantage for my parents, but not for us kids. One Christmas I remember my mom and step-father taking us to Wal-Mart and telling us we had $100 worth of items to put on layaway. This was right around the time the original Super Wal-Mart’s came out, so I ran around that store for probably 3 hours collecting baseball cards, sweaters (when I was a kid I wanted to be a preppy[1]) and a baseball glove. After our time was up we went and put the items on layaway, in full confidence that in a month we would be able to come back and get our presents.

Unfortunately, that never happened. The first payment was made and my mom and step dad never went back to pay the rest so that we could get our Christmas presents. They never gathered enough money to pay the full sum; I never saw my baseball cards.

The larger narrative of the Spirit of God never has this kind of unfortunate conclusion. The Spirit is the first-fruits of our final, eschatological inheritance…the down payment of our final redemption. At the cross our savior won redemption for the entire world and the giving of the Spirit testifies that that redemption, already accomplished, will finally be completed. The Spirit witnesses in the “right now” to the “what is yet to come” – and the “what is yet to come” is guaranteed.

“Down payment” is from the Gk. avrrabw.n, a word which comes from the business world. The idea is a contractual agreement between two parties that the buyer will make a single payment at one time, in promise of returning with the full sum at a later time. The fulfillment of the promise is GUARANTEED in the initial installment.[2] Thus, promised by the Father (Acts 1:4-5), the Spirit is God’s layaway plan for creation. The Spirit is His promise to entirely finish what He began so long ago. The Spirit is the evidence that we possess in the “now” what we still yet await for in the “then.” The Spirit is the church’s evidence that God will cash in on His promise.

The Spirit is the promise of the final redemption of this world. He is the “wellspring of Christian faith, forward-looking toward the final end.”[3] The Spirit is the promise of the Father, the promise that all our temptations and sufferings do not have the final say. We do not have to wallow in our own depravity, but the Spirit gives us hope to see “the possibility of being wholly set free” and urges us to break free from the fetters of our so-called “freedom.” This hope is entirely audacious. In the face of our failures, this crazy, Spirit induced hope emboldens us to see that our sin does not have the final say. We can truly believe that this sin is the last one.

In Ephesians 1:13, Paul speaks of this inheritance of redemption being sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. A seal was a stamped impression on wax or clay that signified ownership and authenticity. It carried with it the protection of its owner. The Spirit, then, is the evidence that we are authentically owned by God. He has purchased us out of the slave-market and has made us children! This seal marks us “until the day of redemption.” The Spirit is the evidence that God protects us and will finally redeem us.

What better message of hope exists? God is not like my parents. He does not lack the resources to go back and finally redeem his purchase. The promise of full and final redemption is made known in the initial installment, the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit and the Word are inseparable. They, together, are the means by which God created and sustains the world in Genesis. By His word God calls forth all of creation. By the Spirit He works chaos into cosmos. God has called the world into being with the breath of His mouth (ruach) and has made everything by his word (Ps. 33:6).

At times in the OT “spirit” and “word” are even interchangeable. Ancient Jews found it difficult to draw too sharp of a contrast between them. This is because they understood the creative and providential potential of both.

Ancient people believed they could create reality through the spoken word. The spoken word “is regarded as the medium of owners which effectively influence events.”[1]

And even today, though we hardly believe it, human words have the ability to create worlds. By gossip or negativity a world of despair may be created around a person. By love and grace a world of godliness may flourish around someone else.

If we are to have a renewed understanding of the Spirit in the church today, we need to also regain a new understanding of the power of words. With our words, we need to create a world where the Spirit and spiritual things may thrive and prosper. Clearly we do not take the freedom from God to choose to act on His own, but we can still work to create an environment that is ready when God does choose to act. This is done through a connection of Spirit and word.

Notice how so many of our spiritual charisms (gifts) essentially involve words: Tongues is itself a verbal gift, teaching and prophesy are gifts most often employed through spoken word, discernment involves distinguishing whether a spoken word came from God or not, and what would encouragement be if it did not involve a word of hope? And the list could go on.

In a world where everything has already been said, and much of our rhetoric is merely adding to the noise, we need to recover a sense of connection between the Spirit and words. If we fail to do this, “our words may well make a good deal of sense, but they will be devoid of power; it may be that they will explain something, but they will move nobody. They will be ineffectual, idle, fruitless.”[2]

We live in a world where words are considered either hurtful or meaningless. People do not trust the words of lying politicians, the words of cheating pastors, nor the words of even their own family members (“I love you.” doesn’t even mean anything anymore because it’s been so overused and commercialized!).

The church, to them, is just another political entity vying for power, a power to hurt other people. This is how the world sees the church – and we’ve given them no other model! But “if we really want the Spirit to place words on our lips, we need to live constantly in an attitude of death to our own glory, seeking only the glory of God.”[3] We need to stop our self-seeking and squelch our power-hunger. We need to humbly live in the Spirit and employ the words of humility and love.

A fresh recovery of the Spirit goes hand in hand with a recovery of our ecclesial rhetoric. From the individual struggling with gossip, to the larger community struggling with our political rhetoric, from the Pentecostal emphasizing the Spirit to the Protestants emphasizing the Word, we cannot forget that these are inseparable. The Spirit and the word, together, create and sustain worlds. As long as we ignore the value of both in the contemporary church we will continue to reap the harvest of spiritless meaninglessness.

In a previous post I argued that everything is sacred. That is, all aspects of our lives are sacred because the Spirit permeates all things. Taking a bath is sacred. Baptism is sacred. Doing the laundry is sacred. The Eucharist is sacred.

What I unwittingly communicated in that post, however, was that taking a bath and getting Baptized are sacred in the same way and to the same degree. And though Luther says that every time we wash our face we should think of our Baptism, I am convinced that this reasoning is flawed. There is something distinctively set apart about the sacraments. That is, the sacraments are holy in a different way and to a different degree than taking a shower is holy.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think I was on the right track in that post, I just think there were implications of that line of reasoning that I hadn’t explored. In this post, I want to suggest that the problem with the previous post wasn’t so much that I uplifted the bath (which was the intent), but that in doing so I unfortunately drug Baptism down to the level of a bath.

Instead of positing an “everything is equally sacred” model, I want to continue to suggest that everything is sacred, including a bath, but that all things are not sacred in the same way or to the same degree. While a bath is sacred because the Spirit is present with us during that time, there is a very real sense in which the church has always held that Baptism is a time and ritual which invokes the Spirit in a special way. The sacraments of the church invite the presence of the Spirit in a distinct way. So, yes, my bath might be sacred because the Spirit communes with me there – indeed, some of my best times of worship and fellowship with the Spirit have been while showering – but it is not sacred in the same way as Baptism.

To illustrate this I want to pull from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. Under the Old Covenant, the people of God worshipped and met with Yahweh at the Temple. The Temple and its objects were all considered “holy” or set apart from common use. But within the Temple there was a “Most Holy Place.” The existence of the Most Holy Place didn’t negate the holiness of the other spaces and objects, it merely suggested that there is a continuum of holiness. Everything in the Temple was holy, but this particular space and the objects within that space were more holy and holy in a different way.

So too it is with the Spirit’s activities in the life of the church. Mundane things such as eating and drinking can be made holy by the presence and activity of the Spirit of God. But there are some things which are Most Holy. Baptism, the Eucharist, the gathering together of the community on Sunday – these things are Most Holy. Common time, which is never common because of the Spirit, becomes increasingly holy. Common objects, such as bread and wine, become Most Holy during the Eucharist. And common water becomes Most Holy during Baptism.

Everything is still sacred. But some things are more sacred and in a different way.
And what was once routine was now the perfect joy – Switchfoot

For all our debates about the nature and genre of the Creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, I’m amazed by the lack of discussion surrounding the meaning of the Spirit’s activities in 1:2 where the text reads, “And the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep.”

We’ve been so sidetracked by other questions, often questions the text isn’t even asking, that we’ve overlooked this odd and fascinating feature of the Creation narrative – the presence and activity of God’s Spirit.

Neglecting the Spirit’s role in creation is easy for us, not only because we’re distracted by the Creationism vs. Evolution questions, but also because we’ve severely limited the Spirits role in the Christian life to conviction of sin and assurance of salvation. Or, more specifically, we’ve limited the Spirit’s role to our subjective devotional lives.

But prior to the need for conviction of sin and the need for assurance of salvation, the Spirit was involved in the work of creation. Contrary to our privatized Pneumatology, the fingerprints of the Spirit are clearly displayed in the cosmos.

But what do those finger prints look like? And why was the Spirit hovering over the deep?

By placing the Spirit within Genesis 1:2, where we have the beginning of a movement from darkness and void to order and light, the author suggests the Spirit is the agent by which creation is given form and order. The Spirit is not removed from the creation; the Spirit is intimately with the creation, guiding its development and progress along with the spoken word of God.

The Spirit’s hovering over the face of the deep is significant. For the ancient Hebrews, the sea was a force of chaos and unruliness. Often mythologized in Babylonian religions, the chaotic character of the sea is confirmed by numerous biblical accounts: Noah’s Flood and the destruction of the entire world, the crossing of the Red Sea, Jonah and the whale, Jesus and the calming of the Storm. Even more telling is in Revelation when the sea is the place from which the great Beast comes (13:1) and, ultimately, a place to be destroyed in the new creation: “and there was no longer any sea.”(21:1)

Furthermore, within our narrative, it is important to note that the deep is possibly a subtle reference to a Babylonian deity, Tehoim, “a belligerent and monstrous ocean goddess.” If so, Genesis 1:2 would have been an especially comforting verse for ancient Hebrews wrestling with the constant pressures of Babylonian culture and religion. Not only are the chaotic waters of the deep under the Spirit’s dominion, but implicitly and subversively, Babylonian religion is stripped of its power and demonstrated to be inferior to the religion of Yahweh. For in our narrative, the Spirit is holding at bay the chaotic forces of the world – Babylonian religious and cultural influence, to be more specific. The Spirit drifts over the deep and demonstrates the dominion of God over the disorder soiling the life of an exiled people attempting to be faithful to Yahweh’s covenant “in a foreign land.” (Ps. 137:1-4)

I know the objections will be that there are no forces of evil yet b/c Genesis 3 has not yet occurred. But, again, like the Creationism debates, I don’t think that’s the question the narrative asks.

Rather, it assumes some sort of rebellion has already occurred. You see, the pre-Fall narrative is replete with numerous subtle references to Babylonian deities, and even words which indicated violent subjugation (1:28). Furthermore, such an answer also accounts for the mysterious serpent in Genesis 3 – another possible allusion to a Babylonian deity, and one which would, again, make a lot of sense to an ancient Hebrew person struggling with the constant influences of Babylonian religion and culture.

Thus, what we’re learning from Genesis 1:2 is that those forces of chaos, those things in the world that are disorderly and unruly, are still held in check by the Spirit. The Spirit is already at work to bring the creation back to its original intention – the order of God.

The implication of this is, yes, that there were forces of death operative within creation prior to Genesis 3, but these forces were not yet operative within humanity or the earth in which humanity resided. But these forces of death are being checked by the Spirit. Indeed, even though the narrative makes subtle references to pagan deities, these subtle references are subtle precisely because the narrator wants the reader to see that the sea was created by God and that God is in control. The sea is not a deity, it is part of Yahweh’s creation and He is sovereign over it as the Spirit hovers over the deep and keeps it in its place (Ps. 140:9). “The author here plainly understands God’s act of creation to have involved some type of conflict with cosmic chaos, but also clearly portrays Yahweh as being more than up to the task.”

So what is the Spirit doing hovering over the face of the deep? Displaying and maintaining God’s sovereignty over creation. Demonstrating God’s intimate concern for the details of His creation. And ensuring the ancient reader that God maintains control over the chaotic influences and forces of false religion. The gigs up: the Sea is demythologized and shown to be part of creation. It is not an independent agent, and insofar as chaotic forces do control the sea, Genesis 1 will not allow us to despair, as if Yahweh has lost his sovereignty.

*I reserve the right to change my mind later about any of this.*

Is Sunday more holy than Thursday? Are the Eucharistic elements more sanctified than my Wonder bread and Welch’s grape juice? Is a church sanctuary more holy than the public park?

For modern Christians the answers are generally, Yes, each of the former is more holy or sanctified than the latter.

But I want to argue in this post that the Spirit of God is active in all things – even those mundane or common objects, times, or places. In other words, Sacred Space need not be limited to cathedrals or communion tables. Sacred Time need not be restricted to Sundays or Lent. And Sacred Objects need not be restricted to Bibles, crosses or pulpits.

Rather, encountering the Spirit of God occurs with mundane things, places, and times:

• Simple kitchen tables where we meet God each morning for our devotions
• That old, tattered watch our grandfather gave us with the Bible inscription on the back, continually challenging us to faithfulness
• Thursday night dinners with old friends who challenge you to love God more.

The sacred is found in the mundane. As one scholar put it, we can and do encounter God in “quite unreligious, commonplace experiences.”

This does not mean nothing is sacred for the Christian. Rather, it means all times, places, and objects are sacred:

• Paul tells us all days are to be lived for the Lord, not just the Sabbath.
• All meat comes from God, even if it’s sacrificed to idols.
• The temple of the Holy Spirit is not built by human hands, but is the community, ekklesia, of God.
• Whatever you do with your hands do with all your might – not with eye service and pleasers of people, but unto God!
• Whether you eat or drink (mundane tasks, are they not?), do it all to the glory of the Lord.

However highly hallowed or wholly humdrum, everything must be considered consecrated.

• And if everything is sacred then nothing is merely mundane. No person, no task, no object, no place and no time can be considered God-forsaken:
• As believers in a crucified savior, every person is considered sacred to God and therefore to us.
• As kingdom workers, even term papers and taxes become sacred.
• As resident aliens, each place we go the kingdom of God accompanies us.
• As agents of redemption, we redeem the time and demonstrate God’s sovereignty over all ages.

When Christians understand that nothing is mundane we are also able to see the all pervasive presence of the Spirit in all created things, great and small.

The Spirit’s presence in Genesis 1:2 suggests that the Spirit has always been involved with the creation. And now through Jesus’ death the Spirit reveals that all creation falls under Christ’s redemptive purposes (Col. 1).

In recognizing this we have the ability, indeed privileged, to observe the Spirit’s workings in the mundane tasks, we are able to be present – that is, not continually distracted by what/who is coming up next or later. We can focus on our task at hand precisely because we know that the Spirit is at work in this task, no matter how trivial. We work with the Spirit to call all things to the redemptive purposes of God.

Let me illustrate this: When I do the dishes for me wife, no matter how mundane that seems to me, I am enacting loving service within our home. I not only demonstrate my love for her as a husband, but I actually demonstrate the love of Christ for her. This demonstration of love is prompted by the Spirit. The Spirit compels me to creative means of loving my wife. But that creativity need not be only and always big-feats of romance (as important as that may be). Rather, my wife feels most loved when I simply clean the bathroom or take out the trash. Everything is sacred in our marriage – even pee stains around the toilet! (or, rather, the absence thereof) If I ignore the mundane, my wife will feel unloved.

So it is with the Spirit. The Spirit does not always and only need our great missionary allegiance. The Spirit wants us to be faithful in all our little tasks. Our excellence and present-ness in all things mundane turn those things, places, and people into sacraments – means by which we encounter the living God through physical realities. It is here that something “as ordinary as a sleeping child, as simple and objective as a flower, suddenly commands attention.” And it does so because the presence of the Spirit.

Everything is sacred, brothers and sisters. Everything.

Could it be that everything is sacred?

And all this time

Everything I’ve dreamed of

Has been right before my eyes.

-Andrew Osenga “Sacred”

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.

The other day I was speaking with a friend about the pessimism of our generation, how our Hermeneutic of Suspicion has so permeated every part of our lives that we are (at least I am) too skeptical even for the Holy Spirit. In an age when politicians have bombarded us with promises un-kept, when our preachers of holiness have had extra-marital lovers, and when our God seems increasingly distant, we do not feel we can trust anyone, especially the subjective “inner witness of the Spirit” which cannot be measured or counted by any kind of empirical method I know of.

Even we Postmodern’s who think truth transcends empirical verification struggle to discern the work of the Spirit precisely because we have no way of gauging it. We recognize, hopefully, that there are times when it seems the Spirit is leading us to do one thing, but then when all the chips fall we see that we regrettably misunderstood. Any college student who’s ever used the line “God is telling me to break-up with you” after previously saying “I think it is God’s will that we date” can testify to what this failure to discern looks like. But what are we supposed to do about this?

Paul tells us that if anyone has the Spirit of Christ then he belongs to Christ. But how do I know that I have the Spirit of Christ? He answers that we know this because the Spirit bears witness with our Spirit that we belong to God. But how is this witness sensed? Does this witness look the same for every person? What about when I don’t feel the witness of the Spirit or discern it in any way?

You see, I have trouble with this kind of reasoning – if feel that, in some way, Paul is leaving me to my subjective whims. One minute I may see the fingerprints of God on everything in my life, sensing the Holy Spirit in every footstep I take and every choice I make. The next minute (and this is far more prevalent), I feel abandoned, completely forsaken by any divine testimony, cold and wintry, alone. In fact, if I’m completely honest with you, often (especially recently) when I discern the work of the Spirit in my life, it seems like God is more of a Cosmic Sadist than a Lover wooing me to drink deeply of His Being.

In other words, there’s no consistency here. I have no objective means by which I can discern the witness of the Spirit from heart burn, upset stomach, indigestion, or….well, you get it. In the end, I lack the ability to empirically verify the work of the Spirit, and that’s the only way I know how to sense anything.

But even if I were able to discern the work of the Spirit through verifiable means – I surely couldn’t trust the statistics, could I? Often in our churches we have replaced genuine Holy Spirit movement with static’s about how many have attended or been baptized. Indeed, one clear sign that this isn’t a genuine witness of the Spirit’s presence is that, at least in my Southern Baptist circles, we have tended to lie about our numbers. So, empirical verification is out the window – too easily manipulated by our false-selves.

When we return to the subjective elements of this discussion, though, my skepticism goes deeper still. I wonder if maybe I don’t even want any kind of assurance or subjective witness of the Spirit. That is, when I look around at the comfortable Christianity lacing our pews, eating the greasy sermonic foods of pop-psychology and easy-believism I can’t help but wonder if inner witness and assurance make us fat. Maybe it is better that I never feel I am completely in the arms of God – for then, at least, I know I must continue to press toward the mark of attaining the resurrection of the dead. At least then I know I can’t sit comfortably in my pew assuming God is for me and not against me. Indeed, at least I cannot mistake false-assurance or false-witness for the real thing.

Interestingly, I hear people say things like, “God told me…” and I, sometimes, believe they are telling the truth. They are generally people I trust, who I know have a good relationship with God, so I have no reason to be critical of such a statement coming from them. But I wonder why there are so few times, if any at all, in my life when this has happened to me? Do I not read my Bible enough, fellowship enough, attend enough church activities, pray enough? Maybe I’m just not spiritual enough. Maybe I’m still fettered by Enlightenment rationalism and anti-experience. I just want God to tell me something – anything, that I can take and say, “Yeah, that was the witness of the Spirit, that was God telling me….” Unfortunately most of the time I feel He’s an Absentee Landlord.

I truly wish things weren’t this way. I wish I could write a much more positive and enlightening treatise on the Holy Spirit. Hopefully one day I will be able to. But for now – I can neither trust empirical evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work, nor my subjective whims which may be the by-product of having eaten at Taco Bell 2 hours ago. I think I’m just too skeptical for the Holy Spirit – and this scares me.