8. Conversion: Getting In (Part 2)— The Spirit at the Entry Point
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Conversion: Getting In (Part 2)—
The Spirit at the Entry Point
“Getting in,” which begins with the hearing of the gospel, is appropriated by faith and includes an experience of “receiving” the Holy Spirit.
“How do you feel?” Trevor was asked, following his response to hearing the gospel and having asked Christ to come into his life. “Wonderful,” he responded, “I feel like a new person.” “That’s great,” came the reply. But also with the reply came the first cautionary words he would learn as a new believer in Christ. “But don’t trust your feelings; your salvation is not based on how you feel but on the truth of what Christ has done for you. You will have to learn to trust his word, because the feelings may not always be there.”
This is a common conversation for us, and full of truth and wisdom. What is hard to imagine is Paul ever having such a conversation with his new converts. In Galatians 3:1–5, when he encourages them to stay with “faith in Christ” and not get entangled with “works of law,” he first appeals not to the truth of the gospel but to their experience of the Spirit by which they started on the path of Christian discipleship. This is not an appeal to feelings but to something common to them all—the experienced reality of their conversion to Christ through the coming of the Spirit.
Although Paul would not have used such language, Christian conversion, for Paul, has both an objective and a subjective dimension to it. On the one hand, Christ’s death and resurrection have secured eternal salvation for those who believe. This objective, historical reality is conveyed with various figures of speech, each of which emphasizes a significant aspect of the believer’s new relationship with God (redemption, reconciliation, washing, propitiation, justification, adoption, birth). At the entry point of conversion, this objective historical reality becomes an objective personal reality for the believer as well, in terms of her or his position in God through Christ. As Charles Wesley sang (marvelously):
Arise, my soul arise,
Shake off thy guilty fears;
The bleeding sacrifice
In my behalf appears;
Before the throne my Surety stands,
My name is written on His hands.
But for Paul the beginning point of conversion also involves a clearly subjective, personally experienced dimension that results in some radical changes in the believer; and the Spirit is the absolutely indispensable element for this dimension. As H. B. Swete put it, “Without the mission of the Spirit the mission of the Son would have been fruitless; without the mission of the Son the Spirit could not have been sent.” That Paul held the Spirit to play such a key role in the subjective side of conversion can be shown in several ways, beginning with our trust in Christ.
The Spirit and Faith
The relationship of the Spirit to faith in Paul’s letters is not an easy one to sort out. On the one hand, in Galatians 3:2–5 Paul states firmly that the gift of the Spirit comes through “faith in Christ Jesus.” According to any systematic presentation, this suggests that faith itself precedes the reception of the Spirit. On the other hand, in 1 Corinthians 12:8 and 13:2 faith is considered one of the evidences of the Spirit at work. If these passages can be dismissed as referring (correctly so) to that unusual gift of faith that accompanies the miraculous, the same can scarcely be said of the faith that is the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). Here faith refers to “saving faith” in its continuing expression of “faithfulness.” So also in 2 Corinthians 4:13, Paul refers to “having the same Spirit who effects faith as the psalmist had,” who leads us “to believe.”
This prompts me to suggest that faith itself, as a work of the Spirit, leads us to receive and experience the Spirit who also comes through that same faith. Although it does not fit our logical schemes well, the Spirit is thus both the cause and the effect of faith. This same close relationship of the Spirit to faith is also presupposed in Galatians 5:5, where Paul urges that we, in contrast to them (the Jewish Christian agitators), “by the Spirit, on the basis of faith, await the final righteousness for which we hope.” The object of faith, as always, is Christ; the Spirit is the means whereby such faith is sustained.
What all of this means, then, drawing on our conclusion from chapter 7, is that for Paul both the understanding of the gospel and the event of preaching, including the hearing that leads to faith, are the work of the Spirit. In this sense one may legitimately argue that faith itself is also a prior work of the Spirit in the life of the one who becomes a believer, since “we have the same Spirit who inspires faith” so that “we believe” (2 Cor. 4:13). It is equally clear from the evidence that “faith” is not all there is to it.
The Crucial Role of the Spirit in Conversion
That something “happens” to the one who puts his or her trust in Christ is not simply the presupposition of revivalist preaching. It is the clear understanding of Paul, who wrote all of his letters before there was a second generation, those who grew up as the children of believing parents. The first generation, those to whom his letters were addressed, were for the most part converts to Christ from paganism. His own encounter with Christ, even though it meant fulfillment of his hopes rather than conversion from another religion, had a clearly experiential quality to it. Such an experiential dimension of entry into Christian life was therefore both his presupposition and what happened to others when he preached.
The Spirit at the Beginning Point
“Did you receive the Spirit by Torah observance, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now trying to come to completion through the flesh?” This is the question with which Paul confronts the Galatians (3:2–3), to bring them up short in their readiness to be persuaded by Jewish Christian agitators to be circumcised. Notice he does not put it our way, “Were you saved, or justified, and so on?” His question works precisely because of the experiential nature of their having received the Spirit, as the present-tense question in verse 5 makes certain: “He who supplies you with the Spirit and performs miracles among you, is this by faith or by doing the law?” For Paul the Spirit is the crucial element to all of Christian life; therefore his argument stands or falls on their recalling their own experience of conversion at the beginning in terms of the Spirit.
The Spirit plays the same vital role in several other passages where Paul describes his readers’ turning to Christ in terms of what has happened to the believer (1 Cor. 12:13; Eph. 1:13–14; Titus 3:5–7). So also with all sorts of texts where, quite in passing, he reminds them of their beginnings in Christ. For example, God gave them his Spirit (Rom. 5:5), anointed them with the Spirit (2 Cor. 1:21), poured out his Spirit generously on them (Titus 3:6), and sealed them with the Spirit (Eph. 1:13; 4:30). Believers have received the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:12; 2 Cor. 11:4), been saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit (2 Thess. 2:13; Rom. 15:16), been circumcised in their hearts by the Spirit (Rom. 2:29), and been joined to Christ so as to become one S/spirit with him (1 Cor. 6:17). As well as “by the name of Christ,” believers have been “washed, sanctified, and justified” by “the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). In the analogy of Ishmael and Isaac in Galatians 4:29, the former is “born of the flesh,” while the latter (= the Galatian believers) was born of the Spirit.
Titus 3:4–7 is significant in yet another way, since Paul here describes conversion in language that sounds much like a creed. What is remarkable is the significant role the Spirit plays in this formulation. Here the Spirit is mentioned even before the work of Christ, since the emphasis is on what has happened to the believer: God has saved them through the washing and renewing work of the Spirit, whom God lavishly poured out on them through Christ the Savior.
For Paul, therefore, whatever else happens at Christian conversion, it is the experience of the Spirit that is crucial; and therefore it is the Spirit alone who identifies God’s people in the present eschatological age.
The Spirit as the Identity Marker of the Converted
In the same manner, Paul three times distinguishes believers from nonbelievers in terms of the former having the Spirit, while the latter do not (1 Cor. 2:6–16; 12:3; Rom. 8:9). Most significant of these is 1 Corinthians 2:6–16, where he sets out the basic contrasts between the “natural person” and the “Spiritual person.” The natural person is one who does not have the Spirit and is therefore incapable of understanding what God has done through the cross; whereas the opposite is true of the believer. Likewise no one can make the basic Christian confession of Jesus as Lord, except by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3). Finally, he says it plainly, “If anyone does not have the Spirit, that person does not belong to Christ at all” (Rom. 8:9).
In a former time Paul had divided the world between “us” and “them” in terms of Jews and gentiles. The new division is between those who belong to Christ and those who do not; and what characterizes the former is that they have the Spirit, while the others do not. Whatever else, the newly formed people of God are Spirit people. They have come to life by the life-giving Spirit (Gal. 5:25; 2 Cor. 3:3, 6); they walk by the Spirit, and they are led by the Spirit. For Paul, therefore, to “get saved” means first of all to “receive the Spirit.”
The Spirit and Paul’s Images for Salvation
How Paul perceives this converting work of the Spirit is best seen by looking at the various images he uses to describe salvation. The more common images are seldom used in conjunction with the Spirit. Justification is connected with the Spirit only in 1 Corinthians 6:11; redemption, propitiation, and reconciliation are not at all. The reason for this is close at hand: these images emphasize the objective aspect of salvation, dealing with the believer’s position or relation to God, and therefore are used exclusively to refer to Christ’s saving work in our behalf, in which we put our trust. But when Paul uses metaphors that emphasize the believer’s experience of salvation, the Spirit is then frequently mentioned.
Adoption
We have noted above in chapter 6 that the use of this imagery is key to Paul’s understanding of the church as God’s family (Gal. 4:5–6). Here we note that verses 5 and 6 together give solid evidence of the distinctions made about the objective and subjective dimensions of conversion. In verse 5 Paul refers to Christ the Son’s act of redemption on the cross as securing our “adoption as ‘sons’”; in verse 6 he individualizes this work in terms of the Spirit’s crying “Abba,” the special language of the Son, from within the heart of the believer.
The difficulties with this text come with the way verse 6 begins. In making his new point (after vv. 4–5), Paul starts the sentence by saying that because they are “sons,” God has sent the Spirit of his Son into their hearts. That sounds as if the one thing (objective sonship) preceded the other (the gift of the Spirit). This apparent awkwardness is the result of our reading the text as though Paul were offering a chronology of individual salvation. Verse 5, however, does not refer to the individual believer’s salvation history at all. Rather, Paul here presents the work of Christ as an objective, once-and-for-all historical reality, by which Christ procured “adoption” for all who would ever trust him. The experience of the individual believer is historically later than, and based upon, this prior work of Christ. Thus the cause-and-effect relationship is that between “sonship” provided for us by Christ’s death on the cross and “sonship” as made real by the Spirit in the life of the believer. That Paul has little concern for the “ordering” of things can be seen from 3:2–5 (noted above), where the Spirit alone is the key to their conversion. The same is true of the parallel in Romans 8:15–17, where the Spirit, not Christ, is mentioned as responsible for adoption. Paul’s intent in both texts is simply to remind believers that their receiving of the Spirit is what makes them children, as is proved by the cry “Abba.”
We should not pass too quickly over the significance of this cry. Abba was the language of infancy, and along with Imma (“Mother”), the first word an Aramaic-speaking child would learn. But it was also the endearing term that children of all ages continued to use, expressing both intimacy and special relatedness. What may begin as baby talk is not thereby to be outgrown; on the contrary, it is to be grown into. That we are the beloved children of the eternal God is knowledge “shed abroad in our hearts by the Spirit” (Rom. 5:5) and by that same Spirit is manifest in our lifelong cry to God as our heavenly Abba. Crying “Abba” to God through the Spirit of God’s Son means that our relationship of utter dependence on God, lost in the fall, has been restored by the Son; we can depend on him for everything. The experience of the Spirit leads the believer not only to a position of justification before God; it also should lead to an ongoing awareness of the privileges of childhood—personal relationship and companionship with God himself. Being “in the presence of God” through Christ and by the Spirit (2 Cor. 2:17; Eph. 2:18) was for Paul a cause not for fear but for confidence.
These three images need to be examined together, partly because in some cases they occur in the same texts and partly because some issues raised by them belong in discussion together.
1. The image of “washing” as a work of the Spirit first occurs in 1 Corinthians 6:11. Many see here a reference to baptism, especially because it is followed by the phrase “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,” which is considered a baptismal formula. But this interpretation runs aground both on Paul’s usage elsewhere and on the structure of the sentence, where both prepositions modify all three verbs. That is, “in the name of our Lord Jesus” and “by the Spirit of our God” together modify the three verbs “washed, sanctified, justified.” Although this expression may indirectly allude to baptism, in context the emphasis falls on the image of “washing away of sin,” especially those sins just mentioned in verses 9–10. Our point is that the Spirit is specifically singled out as the means of such cleansing.
This image occurs again, along with the images of “rebirth” and “renewal,” in Titus 3:5. As the central feature of salvation Paul says (literally), “God saved us . . . through washing of rebirth and renewal of the Holy Spirit.” Although there are some inherent difficulties with this phrase, the evidence points most strongly to an interpretation that sees this not as referring to two experiences (the washing of rebirth and the renewal of the Spirit = baptism and confirmation, or conversion and Spirit baptism) but to one (a washing that involves rebirth and renewal, all of which are put into effect by the Spirit).
But opinion is also divided among those who take this position. Does “washing” refer to water baptism or more simply to the “washing away of sin,” and what relationship does the Spirit have to this washing? Again, we need not doubt that it probably alludes to baptism; but that Paul uses a figure of speech and not the word “baptism” implies that his own emphasis is on the figure, not on the event of baptism. The final phrase, “of the Spirit,” is the key to the whole. Salvation is not received through baptism—that is foreign to Paul—but through the work of the Spirit, which in this case is represented as a “new birth” (cf. John 3:3) or a “renewal” in the new believer’s life.
2. The two expressions “new birth” and “renewal” are as close as we get to the concept of “regeneration” by the Spirit in Paul’s writings. But if this concept is infrequent, the idea behind it is not foreign to Paul. We begin the Christian walk, having been given life by the Spirit (see below). Such new life is likewise pictured as a renewal (cf. Rom. 12:2; Col. 3:10).
Absolutely basic to Paul’s understanding of becoming a believer in Christ, therefore, is not simply that we are given a new objective standing with God—redeemed, forgiven, cleansed, “justified”—but that we are also “washed . . . by the Spirit,” which includes rebirth and renewal. By the Spirit God cleanses people from past sins; by the Spirit God also transforms them into his people, “reborn” and “renewed” to reflect God’s likeness in their lives.
Paul understands a radical change to have taken place at the beginning point of conversion; it means a complete reorientation of our entire lives. This reorientation is directly tied to the work of the Spirit. Theologically we may refer to this as a rebirth, even though this image is not central in Paul’s view of things. For him, because his primary focus is always on the work of Christ, what happens to the believer is “death” and “resurrection” (2 Cor. 5:14; Gal. 5:24; Rom. 6:1–6; Col. 2:20–3:4). And this is where conversion as the experience of the “life-giving Spirit” comes in.
3. Whatever else may be said about God in the Old Testament, the main reality about him, which is revealed even in his name, is that Yahweh is the living and life-giving God. That God lives and gives life to all that lives is foundational to biblical faith. What is crucial to Paul’s understanding of Christian conversion is that the Spirit whom believers receive is none other than the “Spirit of life” (Rom. 8:2, 6), who “gives life” to those who turn to Christ (2 Cor. 3:6). For Paul the old (flesh, sin, Torah observance) has been crucified (Gal. 5:24); we have been raised with Christ to live in “the newness of the Spirit” (Rom. 7:6). “If anyone is in Christ, a new creation,” he exclaims (2 Cor. 5:17); “the old (life ‘according to the flesh’) is gone; the new (life ‘according to the Spirit’) has come.”
This is why from Paul’s perspective Christian conversion also includes walking in “newness of life.” Thus, following his statement that the flesh was crucified with Christ, he implores that “if we live (following our crucifixion with Christ) by the Spirit, then let us also behave in keeping with the self-same Spirit” (Gal. 5:25). For Paul there is no such thing as a believer who is not thereby brought to life—life now and forever—by the coming of the life-giving Spirit. Such life manifests itself in the radically new life of God given by the Spirit.
Paul’s understanding of Christian conversion as essentially the work of the Spirit, therefore, has no place in it for the whitewashed sinner, the person who is still sinful but justified before God anyway. The only coming to Christ known to Paul is one in which the life of the believer has been invaded by the life-giving Spirit, who both applies the redemptive work of the cross and also transforms us from within, by the “renewing of the mind” (Rom. 12:2). All of Paul’s metaphors of “before” and “after” speak in the same way of the radical transformation of life that the Spirit brings (death/life; old anthrōpos [person]/new person; darkness/light; etc.), which is brought into focus by the next image as well.
Sanctification
Paul’s primary use of the term “sanctification” is also as a figure of speech for conversion, not a reference to a work of grace following conversion. This can be seen most clearly in 2 Thessalonians 2:13, where Paul refers to the Thessalonians’ experience of salvation as being brought about “by sanctification of the Spirit and belief in the truth.”
The image is drawn from Jewish religious practices, where the sacred rites and utensils have become so by their having been sanctified unto God, that is, set apart solely for God’s holy purposes. This same use of the image, referring now especially to gentile conversions under Paul’s ministry, occurs in Romans 15:16. The Jewish Christians in Rome may not call “common or unclean” (because of failure to be circumcised) those whom God has sanctified by the Spirit. The gentiles’ reception of the Spirit was God’s ultimate act of creating for himself a sanctified offering composed of both gentile and Jew.
On the other hand, the use of the same imagery to refer to the Corinthians’ conversion (1 Cor. 6:11) is intended to emphasize that conversion includes the sanctifying work of the Spirit which prohibits the kind of behavior in which they formerly engaged. “Such were some of you,” he asserts, “but you have been . . . sanctified . . . by the Spirit of our God.”
Adding to these the images of “anointing,” “seal,” “down payment,” and “firstfruits” (see chap. 5 above), one can draw firm conclusions:
1. The wide variety of images and figures of speech in itself indicates that no single one will do. The work of Christ, applied by the Spirit in Christian conversion, simply has too many facets to be captured by a single image. In almost every case the choice of images is related to the perspective on the human condition that is addressed in the context. Thus, propitiation responds to our being under God’s wrath; redemption to our being enslaved to sin; justification to our guilt before God’s law; reconciliation to our being God’s enemies; sanctification to our being unholy; washing to our being unclean; and so on.
2. The images tend to be used in keeping with the emphasis of the moment, thus the point in context is what is at issue, not the precise timing or relationships in conversion.
3. There is no such thing as Christian conversion that does not have the coming of the Spirit into the believer’s life as the critical ingredient. However variously expressed, the presence of the Spirit is the one constant.
But all has not been said. Does the evidence of this chapter mean that those who, when coming to faith in Christ, did not have an experiential realization of the Spirit’s presence therefore fall short of biblical faith? Not for a minute. All of us who trust Christ have received the Spirit, even if the coming of the gift was more quiescent. The point of this chapter for today’s believer is that the Spirit, and the Spirit alone, not only gets us on our way in Christ but also is what Christian life is finally all about.
That the coming of the Spirit in the Pauline churches was a more experiential reality than is true for many of us probably has a lot to do with their expectations. For some of us it may also be related to being second-generation Christians. As has often been said, “God has no grandchildren.” So when do we experience the Spirit? Such an experiential way of entry is still common in many parts of the world. What we may say with confidence is that even though we may not have begun that way, we may still enter into a much more experienced life in the Spirit than is perhaps now the case. In this regard the Spirit has not changed.
More also needs to be said about the Spirit’s role in salvation in Christ, because Paul would not understand conversion that did not include growing up into Christ. For him the Spirit was the essential ingredient to the whole of life in Christ. So, what does the converted person look like? What does it mean to become a Spirit person—one who not only begins with the Spirit but walks in the Spirit? That is the subject of the next two chapters.
Reflection Questions