Conversion and the Holy Spirit
nine
CONVERSION
John Stott
Mission is the loving service that God sends his people into the world to render. It includes both evangelism and social action, for each is in itself an authentic expression of love, and neither needs the other to justify it. Yet because of the appalling lostness of humanity there is an insistent urgency about our evangelistic task. The nature of evangelism is a faithful proclamation of the good news. Dialogue is its necessary preliminary inasmuch as listening must precede proclaiming, and the salvation that is its goal is personal freedom through Christ, though with unavoidable social implications in anticipation of the eschatological “freedom of glory” when God makes all things new. Our fifth word is conversion. It denotes the response that the good news demands and without which salvation cannot be received.
The Contemporary Distaste for “Conversion”
Yet conversion is another unpopular word today. One reason for this unpopularity is the impression of arrogant imperialism that some evangelists have sometimes given. If ever our evangelism descends to the level of “empire building,” “scalp hunting” or boasting about numbers, then of course we bring the word conversion into disrepute.
To such perverted forms of evangelism, however, it would be better to apply the term proselytism, for evangelism and proselytism are emphatically not identical activities. True, it is difficult to find a satisfactory definition of each, so that Bishop Lesslie Newbigin has written, “One is inclined to conclude that the only workable distinction is that evangelism is what we do and proselytism is what others do.”
A helpful distinction has been made by the WCC, when they speak of proselytism as follows:
Proselytism . . . is the corruption of witness. Witness is corrupted when cajolery, bribery, undue pressure or intimidation is used—subtly or openly—to bring about seeming conversion; when we put the success of our church before the honour of Christ; . . . when personal or corporate self-seeking replaces love for every individual soul for whom we are concerned. Such corruption of the Christian witness indicates lack of confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit, lack of respect for the nature of man and lack of recognition of the true character of the Gospel.
The Lausanne Covenant includes a rather similar statement. It confesses that we are guilty of “worldliness” whenever, “desirous to ensure a response to the gospel, we have compromised our message, manipulated our hearers through pressure techniques and become unduly preoccupied with statistics or even dishonest in our use of them.”
Over against the use of coercion and the unseemly spirit of triumphalism one can welcome J. C. Hoekendijk’s insistence on the opposite qualities: “To evangelise is to sow and wait in respectful humility and in expectant hope: in humility because the seed we sow has to die, in hope because we expect that God will quicken this seed and give it its proper body.”
If such misguided forms of evangelism cause a revulsion against conversion, another reason is the popularity of religious relativism and universalism. For relativism declares that no religion has finality, while universalism declares that no human being is lost. According to some forms of universalist theology, universal salvation has already been accomplished by Jesus Christ. The whole human race has already been reconciled to God by Christ. If that were true, then the only function left to evangelism would be to acquaint the ignorant of this good news, and conversion would cease to indicate a change of any kind except in a person’s awareness of their true status and identity.
Scripture does not support this view, however. It is true that God is described as having done something objective and decisive through the cross. Thus, “God . . . through Christ reconciled us to himself” and “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). But this does not mean that all human beings have actually been reconciled to God. For now he commits to us the ministry and the message of reconciliation. And this ministry and message are not to inform people that they are already reconciled, but rather to beg people on behalf of Christ: “Be reconciled to God.” What validity would such an appeal have if those who hear it are already reconciled to God but simply do not know it? We must never expound God’s reconciling work in and through Christ in such a way that it eliminates the contemporary need for people to be reconciled to God. As James Denney expressed it, “It is in virtue of something already consummated on His cross that Christ is able to make the appeal to us which He does, and to win the response in which we receive the reconciliation.”
So if we are to be truly biblical in our understanding, we must hold together two truths, first that God was “in Christ” reconciling the world to himself, and secondly that we ourselves must be “in Christ” if we are to receive the reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18-21; compare 2 Corinthians 5:17; Romans 5:11).
Further, it is our solemn duty to affirm that those to whom we announce the gospel and address our appeal are “perishing.” We proclaim to them the good news of Jesus not because they are saved already but in order that they may be saved from perishing. Our responsibility is to “preach peace” in the sense of promising peace with God through Jesus Christ to those who repent and believe. To preach peace in the sense of announcing smooth words to those still in rebellion against God, of saying “peace, peace when there is no peace”—this is the word of a false prophet, not of a true evangelist of Jesus Christ. The gospel brings warning as well as promise, of the retention of sins as well as the remission of sins (John 20:23). “Beware, therefore,” warned the apostle Paul, “lest there come upon you what is said in the prophets: ‘Behold, you scoffers, and wonder, and perish’” (Acts 13:40-41). Perish is a terrible word. So is hell. We should, I think, preserve a certain reverent and humble agnosticism about the precise nature of hell, as about the precise nature of heaven. Both are beyond our understanding. But we must be absolutely clear and definite about the awful, eternal reality of hell. It is not dogmatism that is inappropriate in speaking about the fact of hell; it is glibness and frivolity. How can we think about hell without tears?
Conversion and Regeneration
If, then, a response to the gospel is necessary, this response is called conversion. What does it mean? In the New Testament the verb epistrephō is usually in the middle or passive voice, and for this reason is six times translated to “be converted” (for example, Acts 3:19 AV). But at the same time it has an active sense and means to “turn.” When used in ordinary, secular contexts its first meaning is to “turn around,” as for example when Jesus turned around in the crowd to see who had touched him (Mark 5:30). Its other meaning is to “return,” as when an unwanted greeting returns to its giver (Matthew 10:13), or the demon determines to return to the house he has vacated (Matthew 12:44), although the more usual verb for returning is hypostrephō, as when the Bethlehem shepherds returned to their sheep and the holy family to Nazareth (Luke 2:20, 39).
When the same verb is used theologically, it is evident that it has not changed its basic meaning. It still signifies to turn from one direction to another, or to return from one place to another. Thus, Christians can be described as having “turned to God from idols” (1 Thessalonians 1:9; compare Acts 14:15) and also, after “straying like sheep,” as having “now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls” (1 Peter 2:25). Since the turn from idols and sin is usually called “repentance,” and the turn to God and Christ “faith,” we reach the interesting biblical equation that “repentance + faith = conversion.”
What, next, is the relation between conversion and regeneration or the new birth? Certainly each belongs to the other as obverse and reverse of the same coin. We can assert without any fear of contradiction that all the converted are regenerate and all the regenerate are converted. It is impossible to envisage or experience either without the other. Nevertheless, they must be distinguished from each other theologically. Three differences may be mentioned.
First, regeneration is God’s act, whereas conversion is a human act. Regeneration is a new birth, a birth “from above” (anōthen), a birth “of the Spirit.” It is the peculiar work of the Holy Spirit who himself infuses life into the dead. Conversion, on the other hand, is what we do when we repent and believe. True, both repentance and faith are God’s gifts, and we could neither repent nor believe without his grace (for example, Acts 11:18; 18:27). Nevertheless, what God’s grace does is so to set us free from darkness and bondage as to enable us to do the repenting and the believing. I doubt if we need lose sleep over the question of which comes first. Scripture seems to accord the priority now to the one, now to the other. The really important truth is that they are inseparable.
Second, regeneration is unconscious, whereas conversion is normally conscious. The latter is not always so as a remembered conscious act, for many people brought up in a Christian home have loved God and believed in Jesus from their earliest years and cannot recall a period in which they did not believe or a moment when they first did. To such people we must say that convertedness as a condition of life is much more important than conversion as a remembered experience. For adults, however, the turn from idols to the living God, and from sin to Christ, is a conscious act of penitence and faith. But regeneration is unconscious. Its results may well be consciously enjoyed, in terms of assurance, release, communion with God, love, joy and peace. Yet the actual passage from death to life is not a felt experience. Indeed, this is what our Lord seems to have meant when he said to Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The new birth itself is a mysterious work. Its consequences, however, are plain. An analogy with physical birth may be helpful. We were not conscious of the process of being born; our self-consciousness has developed subsequently. However, the fact that we are self-consciously alive is itself proof that we were, at some point in the past, actually born! Similarly the reason we may know we are born again is not because we were consciously aware at the time of what was happening, but because we know that our present spiritual life, perceived in our Christian self-consciousness, or rather God-consciousness, must have originated in a spiritual birth.
The third difference between regeneration and conversion is that the former is an instantaneous and complete work of God, whereas the turn of repentance and faith that we call “conversion” is more a process than an event. There can be no doubt of the suddenness of the new birth. The very imagery of birth makes this clear. For though months of gestation precede it and years of growth follow it, birth itself is a crisis event. We are either born or unborn, just as we are either alive or dead. Further, birth is a complete experience. Once born we can never be more born than at the first moment of emergence from the womb. So with the new birth. Regeneration is not a matter of degrees, as if one person could be more regenerate than another. We may indeed be more or less holy, more or less obedient, more or less like Christ and our Heavenly Father—both in comparison with others and in our own changing journey of discipleship. But we cannot be more or less regenerate, any more than we can be more, or less, born.
There is an evident gradualness about many conversions, however. People begin to become troubled in their conscience and to see the need for repentance. The Holy Spirit begins to open their eyes and they begin to see in Jesus Christ the Savior they need. They may then enter a period of struggle, half resisting, half yielding. They may become like Agrippa “almost persuaded,” or like the epileptic boy’s father simultaneously believing and unbelieving. Even Saul of Tarsus, who is supposed to have been history’s most conspicuous example of sudden conversion, was really nothing of the kind. We are not to imagine that he had his first contact with Jesus Christ on the Damascus road, for he had apparently been “kicking against the goads” of Jesus for some time.
No doubt in the experience of many people there is a point at which the turn called conversion becomes complete, and dawning faith becomes saving faith. Moreover, sometimes people are conscious of this moment. Yet the Holy Spirit is a gentle Spirit; he often takes time to turn people around from self-absorption to Christ. And even then, after we may justly be described as “converted Christians,” his work is far from done. For although regeneration cannot grow, the repentance and faith that make up conversion may grow, and indeed must. We need a deeper penitence and a stronger faith. Conversion is only a beginning. Before us lies a lifetime of growth into maturity in Christ, of transformation into the image of Christ.
After this attempt to define conversion, both in itself and in its relation to regeneration, we must now explore certain implications of this radical change.
Conversion and Repentance
First, let us consider conversion and the lordship of Christ. We saw in the chapter on evangelism that repentance and faith are the twin demands of the gospel, and we have already noted in this chapter that the two together constitute conversion. It is the element of repentance that is regrettably absent from much modern evangelistic preaching, although it was prominent in the message of our Lord (for example, Mark 1:15; Luke 13:3, 5) and of his apostles (for example, Acts 2:38; 3:19; 17:30).
What is needed in preaching repentance today is both integrity and realism. In all our evangelism there must be integrity. Our anxiety to win converts sometimes induces us to mute the call to repentance. But deliberately to conceal this aspect of our message is as dishonest as it is shortsighted. Jesus himself never glossed over the cost of discipleship, but rather summoned would-be disciples to “sit down first and count the cost,” for he was requiring them if they were to follow him to deny themselves, take up their cross and die. Any kind of slick “decisionism” that sacrifices honesty on the altar of statistics is bound to cause other casualties as well, the victims of our own folly. We are under obligation to teach that a new life in Christ will inevitably bring in its wake new attitudes, new ambitions and new standards. For in Christian conversion not only do old things pass away but in their place new things come (2 Corinthians 5:17).
In addition to integrity, our preaching of repentance and of Christ’s lordship requires realism. It is not enough to call people to repentance in vague terms, as if conversion could take place in a kind of mystical vacuum out of which all real life has been sucked. When John the Baptist preached his baptism of repentance, he insisted that people responding must “bear fruits that befit repentance.” Neither did he leave it there. He went on to specific issues. The affluent must share their surplus wealth with the deprived. Tax collectors must replace extortion by honesty. And soldiers must never use their power to rob people, but rather be content with their wages (Luke 3:8, 10-14). Jesus evidently did the same, for Zacchaeus was quite clear that for him discipleship would involve refunding his illicit gains. Then he went on to give half his capital to the poor, presumably because most of the folk he had robbed he would never be able to trace. We too need to spell out in realistic and concrete terms the contemporary implications of repentance, conversion and the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Conversion and Church
The second implication of conversion is church membership. Some influential voices have been raised, however, to the effect that converts should not necessarily be required to join the church. Indian Christian theologian Dr. M. M. Thomas, for example, argued for what he called “a Christ-centred secular fellowship outside the church” and—in the context of India—“a Christ-centred fellowship of faith and ethics in the Hindu religious community.” He elaborated his position by adding that “conversion to Christ” should not necessarily imply “conversion to the Christian community.” Instead converts should seek to build up “a Christ-centred fellowship of faith within the society, culture and religion in which they live, transforming their structures and values from within.” In his view this might even include a rejection of baptism as having become “a sign not primarily of incorporation into Christ but of proselytism into a socio-political-religious community.” A convert from Hinduism should not be obliged to separate himself “from the Hindu community in the social, legal and religious sense.”
Revolutionary as Dr. Thomas’s proposals sound, I think we need to respond to them sympathetically. The background to his argument is the disastrous development in India and elsewhere of what is usually called “communalism.” It is the rise of a Christian community that, instead of being scattered throughout the non-Christian community as salt and light, becomes isolated from it as a distinct cultural entity on its own. I shall have more to say about this cultural question later.
A second reason why one can understand Dr. Thomas’s position concerns the state of the church that converts are expected to join. There is so much about churches, not only in India but everywhere, that is unattractive. There is disunity, lack of integrity, power seeking, even corruption and immorality. We may become very disillusioned with the church and wonder why we would want to bring anyone from “outside” into it. Yet surely, in the light of this, our Christian duty is to seek the renewal of the church, not to avoid or abandon it. For it still remains God’s church, unless of course it has totally apostatized from the revealed truth of God. Even the Corinthian church with its bitter factions, tolerated immorality, disorders of public worship and doctrinal uncertainties was nevertheless addressed by Paul as “the church of God which is at Corinth” (1 Corinthians 1:2).
From this contemporary debate we need to turn back to the Bible and to its consistent witness that through the historical process God has been and still is calling out a people for himself, a people who are to be distinct from the world in their convictions and standards, while remaining immersed in it. According to the letter to the Ephesians this redeemed community is central both to the gospel and to history. Further, from the day of Pentecost on, when God’s people became the Spirit-filled body of Christ, the apostles expected converts to join it. Peter’s summons to the people that very day was not only to repent and believe—as if their conversion could remain an individualistic transaction—but also to be baptized and thus to “save themselves” from that “crooked generation” and be “added” to the new community of the Spirit (Acts 2:40-47). Some kind of transfer from one community to another (I shall later qualify what is meant by transfer) was thus envisaged from the beginning. Baptism, in the New Testament, clearly incorporated converts into the worshiping, teaching, serving community of the church.
Indeed, although a certain “human community” doubtless exists outside Christ, and millions of people are searching for it today in the West’s depersonalized technocracy, yet we must maintain that “Christian fellowship” is something different in kind. It has a supernatural origin and quality, for it involves fellowship with God as well as with his people. A Christian congregation that calls people to conversion and so to church membership must exhibit visibly “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”
Conversion and Society
Third, we must examine the relation between conversion and social responsibility. Personal conversion leads to social action—or should. That is because a convert to Jesus Christ lives in the world as well as in the church, and has responsibilities to the world as well as to the church. I think it is the tendency of churches to “ecclesiasticize” their members that has made so many modern Christians understandably wary of conversion and church membership. Conversion must not take the convert out of the world but rather send him or her back into it, the same person in the same world, and yet a new person with new convictions and new standards. If Jesus’ first command was “come!” his second was “go!”—that is, we are to go back into the world out of which we have come, and go back as Christ’s ambassadors.
Paradoxically, conversion combines a turning away from the world (in the sense of its sin and rebellion against God) with a turning toward the world, in the light of our biblical hope and awareness of God’s ultimate redemptive purpose for the world.
With his customary simplicity Archbishop Michael Ramsey summed up the alternatives in one of his addresses to those about to be ordained to the pastoral ministry. He said,
I suggest that there are three broadly contrasted procedures. It is possible to preach the gospel of conversion without any sight of its social context. It is possible to preach a social gospel which omits the reality of conversion to Christ. Be it your wisdom to preach the gospel of conversion, making it clear that it is the whole man with all his relationships who is converted to Jesus as the Lord of all he is and does.
Commitment to Christ involves commitment to the world into which and for which he came.
In October 1973 during the course of a mission in the University of Dar es Salaam, I was given the privilege of a brief audience of President Julius Nyerere. We talked about the degree of Christians’ involvement in Tanzania’s national development. President Nyerere then said with great emphasis, “I myself am involved. Every Christian should be involved. I sometimes ask people who call themselves ‘committed Christians’ what they are committed to. Christ was committed to people. We should be also.”
Conversion and Culture
Fourth, I come to the question of conversion and human culture. We have already touched on it when discussing church membership. Let me now introduce the subject in this way. Some people think and talk about conversion as if it involved no great upheaval, and little if any change in the convert’s lifestyle. Others seem to expect such a complete change as virtually to fumigate the convert from all the supposed contamination of his or her former culture. But conversion is not the automatic renunciation of all our inherited culture. True, conversion involves repentance, and repentance is renunciation. Yet this does not require the convert to step right out of their former culture into a Christian subculture that is totally distinctive. Sometimes we seem to expect them to withdraw from the real world altogether!
In both West and East it is vital for us to learn to distinguish between Scripture and culture, and between those things in culture that are inherently evil and must therefore be renounced for Christ’s sake and those things that are good or indifferent and may therefore be retained, even transformed and enriched. In the West, conversion may sometimes seem like a step into an out-of-date past.
Our congregations demand from every new member not only a conversion but also a change in culture. He has to abandon some of his contemporary behaviour and to accept the older patterns prevalent among the majority of the congregation. The new Christian has to learn the old hymns and to appreciate them. He has to learn the language of the pulpit. He has to share in some conservative political opinions. He has to dress a bit oldfashioned. . . . In brief, he has to step back two generations and undergo what one may call a painful cultural circumcision.
In the Majority World too, and wherever a non-Christian religion dominates a country’s culture, Christians need great wisdom to discern between what may be retained and what must be renounced. In many cases new converts adopt too negative an attitude to their former culture. This may have several serious consequences. Christians who break loose entirely from the society in which they were nurtured may find themselves rootless and insecure, and may even—with conventional restraints removed—lapse into moral license. They may even develop a Christian “communalism” that gives them a new security in which to live but cuts them off from their former friends and relatives. Also they may arouse opposition. When Christians are seen as undermining the fabric of traditional society, they are regarded as dangerous fanatics and provoke fierce, irrational hostility.
There have been examples of this from the earliest days of the church, as when the Jews accused Stephen of teaching “that this Jesus of Nazareth will . . . change the customs which Moses delivered to us” and when some merchants of Philippi accused Paul and Silas of “disturbing our city” because “they advocate customs which it is not lawful for us Romans to accept or practice” (Acts 6:14; 16:20-21). In both cases, although one context was Jewish and the other Roman, the issue concerned “customs,” either the abandonment of old customs or the introduction of new ones. Culture consists of customs, and people feel threatened when their customs are disturbed. Of course, in one sense Jesus Christ is always a disturber of the peace, because he challenges all inherited custom, convention and tradition, and insists that the whole of life must come under his scrutiny and judgment. Yet it is not a necessary part of our Christian allegiance to be iconoclasts, and to destroy the culture of the past for no better reason than that it is old or that it was part of our preconversion life. Culture is ambivalent because human beings themselves are ambivalent. As the Lausanne Covenant expressed it, “Because man is God’s creature, some of his culture is rich in beauty and goodness. Because he has fallen, all of it is tainted with sin and some of it is demonic.” So “culture must always be tested and judged by Scripture,” and we need discernment to evaluate it.
Writing against a Muslim background, Bishop Kenneth Cragg sums up well the relation between conversion and culture:
Baptism, bringing persons within the church, means their incorporation by faith into the supranational fellowship of Christ. It does not, properly understood, deculturalise the new believer; it enchurches him. That “enchurchment,” as its impact widens, bears creatively upon all areas of its context. The new Christian becomes responsible to Christ for his old setting and to his old setting in the new truth. But he is not thereby “going foreign.” All that is not incompatible with Christ goes with him into baptism. Conversion is not “migration”; it is the personal discovery of the meaning of the universal Christ within the old framework of race, language and tradition.
Conversion and the Holy Spirit
The fifth and last aspect of conversion to be developed is its relation to the work of the Holy Spirit. This is the note on which I believe it is right to conclude, for much of what I have written thus far may have seemed too human-centered and human-confident. Mission, I have urged, is what we are sent into the world to do. In evangelism we do the proclaiming and in dialogue we do the listening. Salvation is what we long that our friends will receive. And conversion describes (even in the New Testament) what we do, both when we ourselves turn to Christ and when we turn others to Christ. Thus people are said in the Acts to “turn to the Lord” (for example, Acts 9:35; 11:21), and Jesus himself spoke of our need to “turn” and humble ourselves like children if we are ever to enter God’s kingdom (Matthew 18:3-4). Also John the Baptist was to “turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God” (Luke 1:16), while the apostle Paul was to “turn” many Gentiles “from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:17-18; compare Acts 26:20 and James 5:19-20). But all this language of human activity is seriously misleading if it is taken to mean that in the end mission is a human work and conversion a human achievement.
This is precisely the impression that we often give, however. In this pragmatic age the church easily slips into the outlook of the world and supposes that the key to evangelistic success is business efficiency. So we publish our manuals of instruction on do-it-yourself evangelism and perfect our ecclesiastical methodologies. Mind you, I happen myself to believe in efficiency, and have never found any reason why Christians should be conspicuous for their inefficiency! At the same time, we must never degrade evangelism into being merely or even mainly a technique to be learned or a formula to be recited. Some people seem to look forward with relish to the time when the evangelistic work of the church will be computerized, the whole job will be done by machines instead of people, and the evangelization of the world will be the ultimate triumph of human technology!
In contrast to the proud, self-confident mood of the modern age, the apostles’ humble reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit stands out in bold relief. They believed (and we should believe with them) that people are dead in trespasses and sins, blind to spiritual truth, and slaves of sin and Satan. In consequence, they cannot “turn” themselves or save themselves. Neither can any of us “turn” other people or save them. Only the Holy Spirit can open their eyes, enlighten their darkness, liberate them from bondage, turn them to God and bring them out of death into life. Certainly repentance and faith are plainly declared in the New Testament to be a human duty (Acts 2:38; 16:31; 17:30), but, as we have seen, they are also the gift of God (for example, Acts 11:18; Ephesians 2:8; Philippians 1:29). And however perplexing this antinomy may be, it is necessary in our human-centered world to assert it, so that we may humble ourselves before God.
We are all familiar with the development of modern psychological techniques—in advertising (overt and subliminal), in government propaganda, in the deliberate inducement of mass hysteria and in that most wicked assault on the human personality called “brainwashing.” But we Christians must make it clear beyond all doubt that evangelism is an entirely different kind of activity. We must refuse to try to bludgeon people into the kingdom of God. The very attempt is an insult to the dignity of human beings and a sinful usurpation of the prerogatives of the Holy Spirit. It is also unproductive. For one inevitable result of evangelism by unlawful means (what Paul called “disgraceful, underhanded ways,” 2 Corinthians 4:2) is the leakage from the church of those whose conversion has thus been “engineered.”
Some words of caution now need to be added, lest we draw unwarranted deductions from the necessity of the Holy Spirit’s work in evangelism. Let me mention briefly four conclusions that trust in the Holy Spirit cannot justify.
First, trust in the Holy Spirit is no excuse for shoddy preparation. “There is no need for me to prepare before preaching,” somebody argues; “I shall rely on the Holy Spirit to give me the words. Jesus himself promised that it would be given us in that hour what we are to say.” Such talk sounds plausible, until we remember that misquotation of Scripture is the devil’s game. Jesus was referring to the hour of persecution, not of proclamation, and to the prisoner’s dock in a law court, not the pulpit in a church. Trust in the Holy Spirit is not intended to save us the bother of preparation. The Holy Spirit can indeed give us utterance if we are suddenly called on to speak and there has been no opportunity to prepare. But he can also clarify and direct our thinking in our study. Indeed, experience suggests that he does a better job there than in the pulpit.
Second, trust in the Holy Spirit cannot justify a general anti-intellectualism. The “lofty words and wisdom” that Paul renounced were not doctrinal preaching or the use of his mind, but the popular wisdom of the world and the fancy rhetoric of the Greeks. In contrast to the former he determined to be loyal to the foolish message of the cross, and in contrast to the latter he would rely in his human weakness on the “demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4). But Paul was no anti-intellectual. His sermons were full of doctrinal substance and reasoning. He and his fellow apostles were not just heralds announcing good news; they were advocates arguing a case. As Wolfhart Pannenberg has written,
An otherwise unconvincing message cannot attain the power to convince simply by appealing to the Holy Spirit. . . . The convincingness of the Christian message can stem only from its contents. Where this is not the case, the appeal to the Holy Spirit is no help at all to the preacher. . . . Argumentation and the operation of the Holy Spirit are not in competition with each other. In trusting in the Spirit Paul in no way spared himself thinking or arguing.
Third, trust in the Holy Spirit cannot be used to justify irrelevance. Some say rather piously that the Holy Spirit is himself the complete and satisfactory solution to the problem of communication, and indeed that when he is present and active, then communication ceases to be a problem. What on earth does such a statement mean? Do we now have liberty to be as obscure, confused and irrelevant as we like, and the Holy Spirit will make all things plain? To use the Holy Spirit to rationalize our laziness is nearer blasphemy than piety. Of course without the Holy Spirit all our explanations are futile. But this is not to say that with the Holy Spirit they are also futile. For the Holy Spirit chooses to work through them. Trust in the Holy Spirit must not be used as a device to save us the labor of biblical and contemporary studies.
Fourth, trust in the Holy Spirit does not justify the suppression of our personality. Some seem to imagine that if the Holy Spirit is to be in full control, they must entirely eliminate themselves. But what doctrine of the Spirit is this? Our understanding of biblical inspiration should have protected us from this mistake. For in the process we call “inspiration,” the Spirit did not suppress the personality of the human authors, but first fashioned and then fully used it. Although modern Christian communicators cannot lay claim to a comparable inspiration, they may be sure that the same Spirit has no wish to obliterate their personality either.
What is forbidden us is all rhetorical affection; all deliberate contriving of effect; all artificiality, hypocrisy and playacting; all standing in front of the mirror in order to self-consciously plan our gestures and grimaces; and all self-advertisement and self-reliance. More positively we are to be ourselves, to be natural, to develop and exercise the gifts that God has given us, and at the same time to rest our confidence not in ourselves but in the Holy Spirit who deigns to work through us.
All down its history, the Christian church seems to have oscillated from one extreme to the other. At times it is so worldly that it goes to the extreme of self-confidence, as if evangelism were merely a question of business efficiency and human technique. At other times it becomes so otherworldly that it goes to the opposite extreme of self-depreciation, as if evangelism were entirely the work of the Holy Spirit and we had nothing whatever to contribute. But a truly biblical understanding of the purpose of the Spirit to work through some human beings to lead others to conversion would deliver us from both these extremes of self-reliance and self-despair, of pride and laziness.
What Scripture lays on us instead is the need for a proper combination of humility and humanity—the humility to let God be God, acknowledging that he alone can give sight to the blind and life to the dead, and the humanity to be ourselves as God has made us, not suppressing our personal individuality, but exercising our God-given gifts and offering ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness in his hand. I wonder if anything is more needed for the Christian mission in the modern age than this healthy fusion of humility and humanity in our reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit.