5. The Beginning of the End— The Spirit as Evidence of the “Presence of the Future”
5
The Beginning of the End—
The Spirit as Evidence of the “Presence of the Future”
The visitation of God through the Spirit establishes believers as a thoroughly eschatological people, who live the life of the future in the present as they await the consummation.
At a recent coffee hour with students in the Regent College atrium, one student asked, “If you were to return to the pastoral ministry, what would you do [meaning, How would you go about it? What would you emphasize?]?” My answer was immediate: “No matter how long it might take, I would set about with a single passion to help a local body of believers recapture the New Testament church’s understanding of itself as an eschatological community.” I then set about to explain why, and to explain what that might look like in the present day.
I have no illusions that it would be easy, I further explained. The one feature that distances the New Testament church from us—probably more than any other feature—is the thoroughgoing eschatological perspective from which believers viewed everything that God had wrought through Christ and the Spirit.
Eschatology has to do with the time of the End, and this refers first of all to Jewish expectations that God through his Messiah would bring a dramatic end to the “present age.” This in turn would be followed by the “coming age,” signaled by the resurrection of the dead and the gift of the promised Holy Spirit. These expectations may be diagrammed as in figure 1.
A unique twist to this end-time expectation conditioned the earliest Christians’ existence in every way, and the outpoured Spirit was essential to this new understanding. The first Christians believed that the fulfillment of God’s Old Testament covenant promises had begun with the work of Christ and their experience of the promised Spirit. In their view they were already living in the beginning of the end times. Their new perspective, which conditioned everything about them, may be sketched as in figure 2.
The first clue to this outlook came from Jesus’s own proclamation of the kingdom—as a present reality in his ministry, although still a future event. But it was the resurrection of Christ and the gift of the promised Spirit that completely altered the primitive church’s perspective, both about Jesus and about the people of God. In place of the totally future, still-to-come end-time expectation of their Jewish roots, with its hope of a coming Messiah accompanied by the resurrection of the dead, the early believers recognized that the future had already been set in motion. The resurrection of Christ marked the beginning of the End, the turning of the ages.
However, the End had only begun; they still awaited the final event, the (now second) coming of their Messiah Jesus, at which time they too would experience the resurrection/transformation of the body. They lived “between the times”; already the future had begun, not yet had it been completely fulfilled. This already/not yet perspective, in which they believed themselves already to be living in the time of the End, even though it was yet to be consummated, is the eschatological framework that determines everything about them—how they lived, how they thought, and how they understood their own place in the present world, which was now understood to be on its way out.
Paul’s End-Time Perspective
This new perspective about the end times absolutely determines Paul’s theological outlook—how he thinks and talks about Christ, salvation, the church, ethics, the present, the future, everything. This is reflected both in his explicit language and in a whole variety of presuppositional ways. “We are those,” he reminds the Corinthians, “upon whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor. 10:11). On another occasion, he tells them Christ’s death and resurrection have already passed sentence on the present age (2 Cor. 5:14–15), which is thus “passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31). With the coming of Christ the new order has begun; all things have become new (2 Cor. 5:17). It is no longer an option to view things from the perspective of the “flesh,” that is, from the “old order” point of view. The death and resurrection of Christ and the gift of the Spirit mean both death to the old and a radical, newly constituted life in the present.
For Paul, therefore, salvation in Christ is a fundamentally eschatological reality, meaning first of all that God’s final salvation of his people has already been accomplished by Christ. In a sort of divine time warp, the future condemnation that we all richly deserve has been transferred from the future into the past, having been borne by Christ (Rom. 8:1–3). Thus we “have been saved” (Eph. 2:8). Since our final salvation has not yet been fully realized, he can likewise speak of salvation as something presently in process (“we are being saved,” 1 Cor. 1:18) and as yet to be completed (“we shall be saved,” Rom. 5:9). “Redemption” is both “already” (Eph. 1:7) and “not yet” (Eph. 4:30), as is our “adoption” (Rom. 8:15 and 23) and “justification” (= the gift of righteousness; Rom. 5:1 and Gal. 5:5).
This essential framework likewise causes Paul to see the church as an end-time community, whose members live in the present as those stamped with eternity. We live as strangers on earth; our true citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20). Ethical life, therefore, does not consist of rules to live by. Rather, empowered by the Spirit, we now live the life of the future in the present age, the life that characterizes God himself. This is why, for example, Paul appeals to end-time realities as the reason believers may not resolve present grievances before pagan courts (1 Cor. 6:1–4). Their heavenly citizenship trivializes such grievances—and puts believers in the awkward position of asking for a ruling by the very people that they themselves will eventually judge. Believers have tasted of the life to come; and the full and final realization of the future is so certain that God’s new people become heavenly radicals as they live in the “already” but “not yet” of the present age.
Since this eschatological perspective so thoroughly conditions Paul’s outlook on everything, our first task is to look at the crucial role the Spirit plays in “salvation in Christ.” We will then point out how this understanding of the Spirit affects the central passion of Paul’s life, the inclusion of the gentiles in the end-time people of God.
The Spirit as the Evidence and Guarantee of the Future
Paul derived his already/not yet eschatological perspective from two experiences at the beginning of his life in Christ: his encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus road (“I have seen the Lord,” he tells the Corinthians), and the subsequent gift of the Spirit. In Paul’s pre-Christian understanding, the resurrection of the dead and the gift of the Spirit were the two primary events that marked the end of the ages. Both of these have now been set in motion.
First, from his Jewish roots Paul understood the resurrection of the dead to be the final event on God’s earthly calendar, the unmistakable evidence for the full arrival of the End. For Paul the resurrection has already taken place when Christ was raised from the dead, thus initiating the final doom of death and thereby guaranteeing our resurrection. Christ’s resurrection makes ours both inevitable and necessary—inevitable, because his is the firstfruits that sets the whole process in motion; necessary, because death is God’s enemy as well as ours, and our resurrection spells the end to the final enemy of the living God, who gives life to all who live (1 Cor. 15:20–28). Believers therefore live between the times with regard to the two resurrections. We have already been “raised with Christ,” which guarantees our future bodily resurrection (Rom. 6:4–5; 8:10–11).
Second, the gift of the Spirit is the crowning evidence that God’s end-time promises are being fulfilled. For Paul, neither his own experience of the Spirit nor his perception of that experience makes sense apart from the perspective of the fulfilled promise and salvation as already but not yet. From his Jewish heritage he well understood that the Spirit was part of the promise for the future. As noted in chapter 2 above, Jeremiah and Ezekiel gave an eschatological cast to the promises of the new covenant. This perspective became thoroughgoing in later Jewish expectations on the basis of Joel 2:28–30, that “afterward I will pour out my Spirit on all people.”
This is why the Spirit is crucial to Paul’s understanding of Christian existence. The gift of the outpoured Spirit meant that the messianic age had already arrived. The Spirit is thus the central element in this altered perspective, the key to which is Paul’s firm conviction that the Spirit was both the certain evidence that the future had dawned and the absolute guarantee of its final consummation.
The Spirit as Down Payment, Firstfruits, and Seal
This twofold role of the Spirit (as both evidence and guarantee of the future) emerges in a variety of ways throughout Paul’s letters, but nowhere does it emerge more prominently than in three metaphors for the Spirit that are unique to him: down payment, firstfruits, and seal. All three images are apt; each may emphasize the Spirit either as the present evidence of future realities or as the assurance of the final glory, or both simultaneously.
1. The metaphor of “down payment,” which occurs three times (2 Cor. 1:21–22; 5:5; Eph. 1:14), appears exclusively in Paul in the New Testament; and he uses it exclusively to refer to the Spirit. The word shows up often in Greek commercial papyri as a technical term for the first installment (hence “down payment”) of a total amount due. As such, it both establishes the contractual obligation and guarantees its fulfillment. For Paul it thus serves in all three instances to emphasize both the already and the not yet of our present existence.
This is especially clear in Ephesians 1:14, where Paul calls the “promised” Holy Spirit the “down payment on our inheritance.” One can scarcely miss the “already/not yet” presuppositions of this language. On the one hand, the “Holy Spirit of the promise” and “our inheritance” come directly out of the future expectations of Paul’s Jewish heritage: the Spirit whom we have received is the fulfillment of the promise. On the other hand, this “fulfilled promise” is likewise the guarantee of our future inheritance. The Spirit, therefore, serves as God’s down payment in our present lives, the certain evidence that the future has come into the present, and the sure guarantee that the future will be realized in full measure.
2. The metaphor of “firstfruits,” used of the Spirit in Romans 8:23, demonstrates equally well the Spirit’s role in Paul’s changed eschatological perspective. This metaphor, used previously of Christ’s resurrection as the guarantee of ours (1 Cor. 15:20, 23), reflects in a special way the tension of present existence as already/not yet and the guarantee of our certain future.
The larger context of Romans 8:14–30 is especially noteworthy. With the Spirit playing the leading role, Paul in verses 15–17 has struck the dual themes of our present position as children (who, with Christ, are thus joint heirs of the Father’s glory) and of our present existence as one of weakness and suffering as we await that glory. These are the two themes taken up in verses 18–27. By the Spirit we have already received our adoption as God’s children, but what is already is also not yet. Therefore, by the same Spirit who functions for us as firstfruits, we await our final adoption, in the form of the redemption of our bodies. The first sheaf of grain is God’s pledge to us of the final harvest. Thus, in one of Paul’s clearest passages outlining his basic eschatological framework, the Spirit plays the key role in our present existence, as both evidence and guarantee that the future is now and yet to be.
3. The third metaphor, “seal,” also occurs three times with direct reference to the Spirit (2 Cor. 1:21–22; Eph. 1:13; 4:30). In literal usage a seal referred to a stamped impression in wax or clay, signaling ownership and authenticity and carrying with it the protection of the owner. In Paul, as Ephesians 1:13 and 4:30 make certain, the seal is a metaphor for the Spirit, by whom God has marked believers and claimed them as his own.
In contrast to “down payment,” there is nothing essentially eschatological in this image; nonetheless, Paul’s metaphor plainly carries such overtones, emphasizing either the present or the future. In 2 Corinthians 1:21–22, the gift of the eschatological Spirit in the lives of the Corinthians serves as the seal that both marks them off as God’s possession and authenticates Paul’s apostleship among them. Likewise, in Ephesians 1:13, by sealing them with the Holy Spirit, God stamped the gentile recipients of that letter as his own possession. At the same time, the guarantee of the future in the metaphor is expressly stated in Ephesians 4:30 (“with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption”).
These metaphors serve as starting points for us to penetrate Paul’s understanding. The Spirit is the evidence that the eschatological promises of Paul’s Jewish heritage have been fulfilled. At the same time, the Spirit as God’s empowering presence enables the people of God not simply to endure the present as they await the final consummation but to do so with verve (with “spirit,” if you will). And that is because the future is as sure as the presence of the Spirit is an experienced reality; hence the significance of the dynamic and experiential nature of the Spirit’s coming into the life of the believer and the church.
The Spirit and Resurrection
The most prominent feature of what is “not yet” in Pauline eschatology is the bodily resurrection of believers. Here again is a place in Paul’s understanding where the Spirit plays a decisive role. But that role is not, as is sometimes asserted, that of agency; rather, the indwelling Spirit serves as the divine pledge of our future bodily resurrection. That is, the Spirit does not bring about our resurrection but guarantees it. Moreover, since the final resurrection takes place in the sphere characterized above all by the Spirit’s presence, Paul sees the closest kind of connection between the Spirit and the nature of the resurrection body. A few words about each of these matters are warranted.
First, resurrection, both Christ’s and ours, is invariably expressed in terms of God’s activity, attributed at times to God’s power. The clearest expression of the Spirit’s role in this reality is Romans 8:11. Here Paul does not say, as some have read it, “If the Spirit who raised Christ dwells in you.” Rather he says, “If the Spirit of him [God] who raised Christ dwells in you.” Paul’s point is that if the Spirit dwells in us, that is, the Spirit of the very God who raised Christ, then that says something significant about our own future—that the presence in our lives of the Spirit of the God who raised Christ guarantees the “future life” of our mortal bodies as well, destined for death though they still be (v. 10).
To this clause Paul adds a prepositional phrase, which ends up in the textual history of Romans in two different forms. One, taken up by the NIV and others, reads, “through the Spirit who dwells in you.” Although this reading speaks clearly of agency, it is patently secondary. Both the manuscript evidence and the primary rule of textual criticism (namely, the reading that best explains how the other came about in the original) support the text that reads, “because of the Spirit who dwells in you.”
Paul’s point is simply that we can be certain that our bodies, though destined for death, will be given life, precisely because of the Spirit who indwells us. Thus, in this passage, as in all others that speak to the question, the Spirit guarantees our future, including our bodily resurrection.
That is also the clear sense of the metaphor “down payment” in 2 Corinthians 5:5 and the metaphor “firstfruits” in Romans 8:23. In each case the metaphors signal the Spirit’s presence in our lives as the sure guarantee that we shall realize our final “adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” Thus, even though one could hardly object to the Spirit’s agency with regard to this final realization of the future, Paul’s point is a consistently different one, namely, that the Spirit is both the evidence and the guarantee of the future, including the final expression of the future.
That leads, second, to a word about the nature of our redeemed bodies, since in 1 Corinthians 15:44–48 Paul insists on calling them “spiritual bodies.” This expression does not refer to their substance, as though Paul intended to compare them with our present bodies composed of material substance. Rather, he is contrasting our present existence with our heavenly one; the future body is supernaturally fitted for the final life of the Spirit, totally unhindered by any of its present weaknesses.
Left to his own, and apart from the language dictated by his opponents in Corinth, Paul later speaks of the two modes of our bodily existence as “the body of our [present] humiliation” that God will transform into the likeness of “the body of Christ’s [present] glory” (Phil. 3:21). The “body of glory” is his “Spiritual body,” the body supernaturally transformed for existence in the final realm of the Spirit. Thus, the “redemption of the body” has to do with the present body’s becoming a “Spiritual body,” in that it will be totally transformed, fully adapted, for the life that is to be, of which the Spirit’s presence now is the guarantee.
We note finally in this regard that Paul’s worldview is not tinged by Greek body/spirit dualism. The Greeks considered the body a second-rate shell for the spirit, despised and subdued in the present and finally sloughed off as believers attain true spirituality. This was apparently the Corinthians’ position, and Paul attacks it twice in his letters to them.
For them the Spirit meant present ecstasy, life above and beyond mere bodily weaknesses, and thus evidence of being released finally from bodily existence altogether. For Paul the Spirit meant empowering for life in the midst of present bodily weaknesses—in a body obviously in the process of decay. Thus in 2 Corinthians 5:5 he reaffirms his position from 1 Corinthians 15:35–58 that the presence of the Spirit means that these “decaying bodies” have also been stamped with eternity; they are destined for resurrection and hence transformation into the likeness of Christ’s now glorified body. God, Paul argues, “has fashioned us for this.” The Spirit, whom the Corinthians have come to understand in a triumphalistic way (that is, as carrying them somehow above the trials and troubles of earthly life), is rather the guarantee, the down payment from God, that these bodies are also destined for a “Spiritual” (= glorified) future.
The point of this passage, I should add, needs to be heard again and again over against every encroachment of Hellenistic dualism that would negate the body in favor of the soul. God made us whole people; and in Christ he has redeemed us wholly. In the Christian view there is no dichotomy between body and spirit that either indulges the body because it is irrelevant or punishes it to purify the spirit.
This pagan view of physical existence insinuates itself into Christian theology in a number of subtle ways, including the penchant on the part of some to “save souls” while caring little for people’s material needs. Not the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body is the Christian creed, based on New Testament revelation. That creed does not lead to crass materialism; rather, it affirms a holistic view of redemption, which is predicated in part on the doctrine of creation—both the physical and spiritual orders are good because God created them—and in part on the doctrine of redemption, including the consummation. The whole fallen order, including the body, has been redeemed in Christ and awaits its final redemption. The clear evidence that the body is included in final redemption is the presence of the Spirit, which does not move us toward a false, Hellenistic spirituality but toward the biblical view noted here.
The Spirit and the Mission to the Gentiles
Partly in preparation for the next chapter, we need finally to note the role of the Spirit in the heart of Paul’s own calling and mission—the promised inclusion of the gentiles in the end-time people of God. This was the singular passion of his life; and their inclusion together with Jews as one people of God on the basis of the work of Christ and the gift of the Spirit, and therefore apart from Jewish Torah observance, is what drives the argument of both Galatians and Romans and is the presupposition of the argument of Ephesians. This comes out most clearly in Romans, whose principal concern comes to its climax in 15:5–13, at the conclusion of the theological argument of the letter. It is as Jews and gentiles together “with one mouth . . . glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” that the eschatological promises of God regarding the inclusion of the gentiles, expressed in the final series of Old Testament texts in verses 9–12, find their fulfillment. The role of the Spirit in this fulfillment is a staple in the argument of Romans. It is expressly stated elsewhere in two key passages.
The most significant passage in this regard is Galatians 3:14, since the promise of the Spirit is equated with the blessing of Abraham, even though the Old Testament passage does not mention the Spirit. Since the “blessing of Abraham” came in the form of a “promise,” this word is the one Paul uses, throughout the argument of Galatians 3, to refer to the blessing of the Abrahamic covenant. In a statement crucial to this argument, Paul says the fulfillment of this promised blessing for the gentiles is in their having experienced the Spirit as a living and dynamic reality. The blessing of Abraham, therefore, is not simply “justification by faith.” Rather, it refers to the life of the future now available to Jew and gentile alike, achieved through the death of Christ but applied through the dynamic ministry of the Spirit—and all of this by faith.
Likewise in Ephesians 1:13–14, addressing his gentile readers directly, Paul assures them that they, too, have been sealed by God as his possession, by giving them “the Holy Spirit of the promise” (= the Holy Spirit promised to Israel). By that same token God also guaranteed the final inheritance for Jew and gentile alike, since the Spirit is God’s down payment of our (Jew and gentile together) inheritance. Thus, with a subtle shift of pronouns Paul moves from “our” (= Jews) having obtained the inheritance, to “your” (= gentiles) having been sealed by the “promised Holy Spirit,” to the Spirit as God’s down payment on “our” (= Jew and gentile together) final inheritance.
This is eschatological language. The Spirit as the fulfilled promise confirms that God’s future salvation has now come. Jew and gentile together have obtained the inheritance, which they also patiently await. “A person is not a Jew ‘outwardly,’” Paul says in another place (Rom. 2:29), nor is true circumcision (that which identifies God’s people) a matter of cutting off the foreskin but is rather “by the Spirit, not by the letter.” This, too, for Paul has to do with eschatological fulfillment, this time of Deuteronomy 30:1–6, with its promise of a renewed people whose hearts God has circumcised.
So also with the language of hope. In Ephesians 4:1–3, Paul’s concern is that his readers “maintain the unity [of Jew and gentile as one people of God] effected by the Spirit.” The one body, he adds in verse 4, formed by the one Spirit, also lives in one hope of their calling, precisely because through the Spirit gentiles have become fellow heirs with Jews of the final inheritance (1:13–14). And in Romans 15:13, having noted that Christ is the fulfillment of Isaiah 11:10—he is the one in whom the gentiles now hope—Paul concludes by praying that his predominantly gentile readers will “abound in [this] hope by the power of the Spirit.” Thus the Spirit for Paul is the key to the present fulfillment of the eschatological inclusion of the gentiles in the people of God.
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In light of all this evidence, including that already given in chapter 2, it is fair to conclude that the Spirit is the key to the future orientation of Paul and the early church. By the Spirit’s presence believers have tasted of the life to come and are now oriented toward its consummation. “We are saved in hope,” Paul tells the Romans (8:24); by the power of the Spirit we “abound in hope” (Rom. 15:13). And for the early Christians “hope” was a content word; that is, it did not mean mere wishfulness but absolute certainty.
Despite what is often implied to the contrary, however, Paul’s primary emphasis is not on this certain and eagerly awaited future that the Spirit guarantees. It is rather on the Spirit as the demonstration that the future has already been set in motion. This is especially true at the very heart of matters for him, that through Christ and the Spirit, God is already calling out a people for his name, who will live the life of the future in their present existence together as they await the consummation.
Reflection Questions