1 The Holy Spirit: The Giver of Life
The Holy Spirit: the giver of life
The eighteenth President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant (1822– 85), was of Scottish extraction, and perhaps it was inevitable that he would eventually visit Scotland to trace his family roots. While there, he was introduced to the game of golf. A local golfer set up a ball on a tee and – after due ceremony – took a whack with his club. When the turf had settled, everyone noticed that the ball was still there. The golfer had missed it. He tried again. Once more clods of grass flew into the air. The ball remained where it was. After watching several of these inept attempts, Grant confessed himself puzzled. Golf seemed to provide lots of exercise. But what exactly was the point of that little white ball?1
As every golfer is aware, that little white ball is of central importance, although the player does have to know what to do with it! In a similar way, some Christians, particularly those within Charismatic renewal movements, have no problems understanding the significance of the Holy Spirit, while to many others the idea is a bit of a puzzle and they’re not sure quite what to make of it.
I hope this chapter will encourage a greater appreciation of the work of the Holy Spirit, the ‘Lord and giver of life’, as the creeds put it. God is able to breathe new life into our souls and the Church, rekindle our flagging faith and inflame our passion for God. But before we explore this great theme, it may be useful to remind ourselves about the sort of God that Christianity does not believe in (that we earlier touched on in The Living God): the famous ‘divine watchmaker’, popularized by the English writer William Paley in the nineteenth century.
An impoverished view of God: the divine watchmaker
William Paley (1743 –1805) was an Anglican clergyman who appreciated the power of a good sermon illustration. Like so many preachers, he borrowed ideas from other people, and it was in a 1718 book by a Dutch writer that he found what was to become his trademark analogy of God as a watchmaker. Paley declared that God was like someone who had designed and constructed a complicated piece of machinery – like a clockwork watch. (Of course, no well-dressed Victorian gentleman would be seen in public without one.)
Why did William Paley think this was such a good sermon illustration? Because the watch showed evidence of having been designed. Every aspect, from its glass face to its cogwheels, signalled that it had been constructed for a specific purpose. Wasn’t God just like a watchmaker? Looking at the complex structures of the world around us, can we not see the same evidence of design?
Now there’s a lot in Paley’s analogy. Some aspects of it are good, such as the recognition that the wonderful complexities of the natural world call out for an explanation, and that the Christian doctrine of creation provides one. But other aspects of the analogy are useless. What is remotely helpful about thinking of God as someone who makes a watch, winds it up and leaves it to tick? It’s a very inadequate and ultimately non-Christian idea because it portrays a God who is disengaged with the created world and with us: someone who makes the world, sets it going – and then walks away, leaving it to its own devices. An absentee God who cares nothing for the created order is not one a Christian would recognize. Paley’s model invites us to think of a creator God and no other kind. Now Christianity affirms that God is indeed the creator, as the creeds make perfectly clear. But there is very much more to God than this. Quite frankly, Paley’s God is very dull and uninteresting.
The doctrine of the Trinity sets before us a rich, complex and wonderful vision of God, which makes Paley’s deity seem miserably inadequate and uninteresting. For a start, the creeds insist that God actively chose to come into our world in order to redeem us. As we saw in Lord and Saviour: Jesus of Nazareth, God enters into our world and our history in the great act of salvation we call ‘incarnation’. You may remember I quoted C. S. Lewis’s rather apposite remark that God ‘descended into his own universe, and rose again, bringing human nature up with him’.2 Immediately, we realize that the God who Lewis is talking about is much more interesting than Paley’s disengaged and absentee God. As Lewis realized, God chose to enter the world, and bring about our redemption. God cares for us – and acts to show that love.
But there is more to the Trinitarian vision of God than this. It declares that God is – and always has been – present and active in the world and in human lives, in and through the Holy Spirit. It is the nature and the role of the Holy Spirit that we will be considering in this chapter.
One of the more noticeable differences between the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed is that the first simply affirms faith in the Holy Spirit, while the second offers a fuller, more substantial description of the importance of the Spirit in the Christian faith.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.3
There is a huge amount of wisdom distilled into these four lines. What does the Nicene Creed mean when it speaks of the Holy Spirit as the ‘Lord and giver of life’? Let’s begin by considering the witness to the Spirit in the Old Testament.
The Holy Spirit in the Old Testament: four leading themes
The English language uses at least three words – ‘wind’, ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’ – to translate the single Hebrew word ruach, but this important term has a depth of meaning virtually impossible to reproduce in English. It is hardly surprising then that many of our versions of the Old Testament fail to convey the richness of the original image. If we want to fully understand the range of ideas associated with the idea of God as spirit, we need to tease out some of the themes expressed through this Hebrew word.
First, the Old Testament links the Holy Spirit with life, and especially with the giving or restoration of life. In creating Adam, God breathed into him the breath of life, as a result of which he became a living being (Genesis 2.7). The basic difference between someone who is alive and someone who is dead is that the first breathes and the second doesn’t. In the old days, hospital doctors would often hold a mirror close to the mouth of someone who they believed had just died. If there was no breath condensing on the mirror, there was no life.
Life is about breathing! God is the one who breathes the breath of life into empty shells and makes them live. Just as God brought Adam to life, so God is able to bring individuals and his Church to life through his Spirit today. The famous vision of the valley of the dry bones (Ezekiel 37.1–14) also illustrates this point. The bones only come to life when breath enters into them (Ezekiel 37.9 –10). God is the one who gives life, and the one who is able to bring the dead back to life.
Dorothy L. Sayers often wrote about how she struggled with that ‘odd and difficult phrase’ that describes the Holy Spirit as the ‘Lord and giver of life’. Yet, in the end, she worked out what it was all about. Sayers was clear that a fulfilled human life was about more than mere physical existence. It was about living for a reason, with purpose and joy. That’s what she came to find in this clause of the creed. ‘The Christian affirms that the life in him proceeds from the eternal creativeness, and that therefore so far as he is moved by that creativeness, and so far only, he is truly alive.’ Christianity is about coming to life – ‘the right kind of life, the creative and godlike life’.4
The second theme associated with God as spirit is that of power, especially the power of the wind (remember, the Hebrew word ruach also has this meaning). We are all used to seeing things being moved by the invisible force of the wind, such as great sailing ships majestically crossing oceans, papers blowing across the road or trees bending in a gale. Old Testament writers saw an obvious parallel between the wind and the way in which God acted. God, like the wind, is an unseen force who acts upon the natural world and human beings.
A third approach to thinking about God as spirit (that, as we shall see, overlaps with the second) concerns the various ways in which God’s activity is experienced. Sometimes God seems like a judge, one who breaks us down in order to humble us; at other times, God appears as one who refreshes us, like water in a dry land. Israel bordered the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the great deserts on the east. When the wind blew from the east, it brought a mist of fine sand that scorched vegetation and parched the earth. The western winds, however, brought rain as they blew in from the sea, and the intensity of the desert heat was mitigated by these gentle cooling breezes.
In short, Israel’s experience of the wind was complex, and that pretty much mirrored her experience of God! At the time the prophet Isaiah was writing, Israel was held captive in Babylon. To many, it seemed as if the great Babylonian Empire was a permanent historical feature that nothing could remove. Yet the prophet proclaimed its decay and fall. God alone is permanent and all else is in a state of flux and change: ‘The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever’ (Isaiah 40.8). The rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and more recently the British Empire, must remind us of this point, so powerfully developed through the model of God as the scorching desert wind.
God is also compared by the Old Testament writers to the rain brought by the western wind (Hosea 6.3), refreshing the land. What had been dry, arid and barren ground suddenly turned green, as all sorts of plant life seemed to appear from nowhere. We can think of ourselves as travellers through a dry land who suddenly discover an oasis. In the midst of our weariness and anxiety, God refreshes us.
And finally, Old Testament writers saw the Holy Spirit as the one who inspired prophecy. This important point is echoed in the creed’s declaration that the Holy Spirit ‘spoke through the prophets’: that is, individuals who discerned God’s purpose within history, having been temporarily endowed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
All these ideas are developed further in the New Testament, as we shall now see.
The Holy Spirit in the New Testament: three leading themes
The New Testament builds on the Old Testament witness to the Holy Spirit, emphasizing that God is active both within the created order and within human existence. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are clearly understood to mark a new phase in the presence and activity of the Spirit. The Old Testament spoke of the Spirit as a powerful wind blowing over the face of the waters, a shaping energy that gave life and direction to humanity. In the New Testament, this energy is understood to be focused on the person of Jesus.
Perhaps the most dramatic description of this development is found in Peter’s famous speech, delivered on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem (Acts 2.1–29). His argument is simple: the great Old Testament prophecy of God pouring out his Spirit on all humanity is now fulfilled, on account of Jesus of Nazareth. A new day – the ‘Day of the Lord’ – has dawned.
What does this mean? To find out, let’s consider some of the roles of the Holy Spirit, as set out in the New Testament.
One of the most important of these is clearly the empowerment of believers. Just as the wind fills a boat’s sails, so the Holy Spirit gives direction and movement to the life of faith. Without the Spirit, we become spiritually becalmed. As we have just seen, this idea is present in the Old Testament, but now it becomes clear that, far from being an impersonal force, the Spirit is in fact an intensely personal manifestation of the power of God. (For such reasons, many Christians feel uneasy about referring to the Holy Spirit as ‘it’.) So in John’s Gospel we find the Holy Spirit described as the ‘comforter’ or ‘advocate’, the one who consoles us, encourages us and stands by us in moments of doubt and despair. Another facet of this task, also mentioned in John’s Gospel, is the way in which the Spirit brings to mind the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. ‘The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you’ (John 14.26).
A second role of the Holy Spirit is that of ‘illuminator’. How are we to make sense of the Bible and apply it to our lives? Many of the New Testament letters emphasize that we are not left on our own to wrestle with such questions: God somehow equips, enables or guides us throughout the journey of faith.
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.
(Ephesians 1.17–19)
Most Christians would hold that the Spirit does not provide Christians with a new revelation of God, but rather with a deeper understanding of what has already been revealed, and a sense of how this might affect the way in which we live, or help us reach a decision about what we ought to do.
A third aspect of the work of the Spirit is dwelling within believers: ‘Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?’ (1 Corinthians 3.16). The gift of the Holy Spirit is seen as a ‘pledge’ of our salvation, a ‘seal’ that confirms our relationship with God. Both of these ideas are borrowed from the commercial world of the first century, in which the New Testament letters were written.
For Paul, God has confirmed our salvation ‘by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first instalment’ (2 Corinthians 1.22). The Greek term arrabo-n, usually translated as ‘pledge’ or ‘first instalment’, refers to a deposit paid in advance to secure the purchase of an item. Legally, the item now belongs to the buyer, who is under an obligation to pay the remainder of the price at an agreed time. The granting of the Holy Spirit is seen as a portion of the full riches of God to keep us going until we enter the New Jerusalem. God’s greatest gift to us is not some commodity that bears no relation to him but, gloriously, the living presence of God in our hearts and souls.
The image of a seal refers to an imprint, often in wax, which proved the authenticity of a letter or document (such as a contract) in Roman times. The seal was a sign of trustworthiness, a reassurance that promises made would be honoured. In Chinese culture, the ‘chop’ still plays an important role. It is a personal seal, usually crafted from stone, which is dipped in red paste and stamped on documents or artwork as a mark of their authenticity. Like a signature on a cheque or other financial document, it denotes a pledge of commitment that will be fully honoured in the future.
We find this idea in John Calvin’s definition of faith, which many regard as one of the most comprehensive and helpful to have been developed by a Christian theologian. Here is what he has to say:
[Faith] is a steady and certain knowledge of the divine benevolence towards us, which is founded upon the truth of the gracious promise of God in Christ, and is both revealed to our minds and sealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.5
This richly Trinitarian understanding focuses on the ‘gracious promises’ of God, revealed and confirmed by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which the Holy Spirit plays a critical role in appropriating and applying. The Holy Spirit acts upon us, illuminating our minds and opening our hearts, so that we can receive and be transformed by the truths of faith.
One of the points that Calvin is able to make through this definition of faith is that the Christian faith is about more than simply believing that certain things are true. Christianity is not just about understanding; it is about renewal and transformation, through the power of a God whose trustworthiness is shown in and through Jesus of Nazareth. The Holy Spirit is understood as the agent of both illumination and transformation, opening us up to the truth and presence of the living God.
This theme of the Spirit as the one who enables us to trust God and grasp the promises made to us in Christ is of major importance to the devotional life of many Christians. It is, for example, an important aspect of a Christian understanding of prayer. ‘The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ (Romans 8.26). Prayer is about being in the presence of God, laying out what is on our hearts.
Having sketched some themes from the Old and New Testaments, we need to explore more thoroughly how Christians have thought about the Holy Spirit and how this helps us on our own spiritual journey. Let’s begin by thinking about the idea of the Spirit as the ‘breath of God’.
The Spirit as the breath of God
I had gone camping with some fellow students. Being poor, like most students back in the early 1970s, we had decided to cycle along the Loire valley with the minimum of expense. We happily camped in hedgerows when we couldn’t find proper campsites. One cold night, we lit a fire with our last match so we could cook our supper, and when the wood was burning, the three of us got things ready for the meal. Unfortunately, we forgot to appoint someone to look after the fire. It went out.
We stared at the dead fire, wondering what to do. All the shops were shut, so there was no chance of buying more matches. I was toying with the idea of rubbing two sticks together when one of my friends got down on his knees and began to blow softly on the embers. Ever so slowly, the embers began to glow. Then, as they got red, my friend blew harder and harder. Eventually the fire came back to life and we had a great hot supper. We probably enjoyed it all the more, knowing that we nearly didn’t have one at all!
Let’s stay with this image of breath bringing a dying fire back to life. It is widely used as an analogy for God’s renewal of our faith in times of doubt, despair or helplessness. The famous hymn of Bianco da Siena (d. 1399) expresses this idea in words that have become familiar to many:
Come down, O love divine,
seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardour glowing;
O Comforter, draw near,
within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.6
The Holy Spirit – here referred to as the ‘Comforter’ – is seen as an agent of renewal. The one who gave us life in the first place can give us new life when we are run down, exhausted and demoralized. The God who creates can also recreate.
Breath is both a sign and a source of life. When Christians talk about a ‘living God’, they are declaring that God lives and enables others to live. ‘The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life’ (Job 33.4). In The Living God, we reflected on the Christian understanding of creation: when we speak about God creating humanity, we do not think in terms of being formed as empty lifeless shells or clockwork machines. God brings us to life, not in the sense of winding up a clockwork mechanism but by enabling us to exist.
Many of us have seen artificial respiration – the process by which someone breathes on behalf of someone who can no longer do this for him or herself. This ‘mouth-to-mouth resuscitation’ involves taking a deep breath of air and blowing into another person’s lungs. The pressure of the air inflates the lungs, the oxygen in the air begins to circulate, and the patient can soon breathe without the need for further help.
But without intervention, the patient would die. He needs someone else to breathe for him until he is able to do it on his own. This familiar analogy is a good way of thinking about the Holy Spirit. God breathes into us, to make us alive and to keep us alive. It’s not something that we can always manage on our own. We need help.
Let’s tease out another theme that has been implicit in some of the ideas that we have been exploring. As we saw in The Living God, we have been created in order to relate to God. It’s an insight that is beautifully expressed in the famous prayer of Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430): ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’7 Notice that we have been created with the capacity to relate to God – it is a possibility, not something that is already part of our created nature. The God-shaped gap within us doesn’t come with God already plugged in. Or, to use the New Testament’s image, we are a temple within which the Holy Spirit may dwell. But the temple stands empty unless the Holy Spirit is present.
Perhaps the most discussed New Testament passage on this theme is the account of the night-time conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus (John 3.1–21). Nicodemus wants to know more about the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, clearly sensing that this will take him to the heart of things. In responding, Jesus declares that ‘no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above’ (John 3.3). The Greek word ano-then, here translated as ‘from above’, can also mean ‘again’. A spiritual rebirth is needed, from above rather than below, through the Spirit rather than through water.
‘No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit’ (John 3.5). We could think of the life of faith as a kind of supplementation of natural human existence, in which our lives are enriched and transformed through the presence of the Holy Spirit. Nicodemus is astonished at this suggestion. How, he asks, can he be reborn in this way? Is he meant to climb inside his mother’s womb all over again?
He has rather missed the point. Being born into the world is one thing; becoming alive spiritually is another. Coming to faith is about recognizing and embracing the ‘life of the Spirit’, in which we begin to live and think and become what God wants us to be through God’s help and presence. It’s a matter of breaking free from the world of nature and discovering the world of grace.
In his letters, Paul makes much the same point by speaking of two quite different ways of living – a physical life ‘according to the flesh’ and the life of faith ‘according to the Spirit’. Christians, Paul argues,
walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.
(Romans 8.4 –5)
It’s not an easy idea to grasp. So let’s approach it from another angle.
The renewal of the heart and mind
One evening over dinner at my Oxford college back in the 1970s, I fell into conversation with an Irish doctor who had worked in a clinic in East Africa just after the Second World War. Conditions were very basic and the medics had only a limited stock of drugs at their disposal. Perhaps as a result of coming into contact with infected patients, he developed a fever. He became confused, found it impossible to walk and couldn’t think straight. His colleagues did their best to relieve his symptoms but they couldn’t cure the fever. After an anxious few days, fortunately it passed, and in due course he was able to return to work.
The memory of his close brush with death had clearly made a deep impression on the doctor, and led him to think hard about what to do with the rest of his life. But that wasn’t the aspect of our conversation that I remember best. My new friend was musing about the impact of his infection: normally an athletic man, he found he couldn’t even get out of his bed; normally a quick-thinking person, he had become confused and unable to string thoughts together; normally a very fluent and eloquent speaker, he could now only whisper and groan. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he remarked, if there was some kind of ‘good infection’ that would make us more energetic, intelligent and articulate – that would have the opposite effect on us to the one he had picked up!
It was an interesting thought, and one that remained with me. I had just been reading C. S. Lewis’s chapter on ‘Good infection’ in Mere Christianity,8 in which he develops a distinction between physical and spiritual existence. Lewis here uses two Greek words for life: Bios, which he takes to refer to the fact that we are alive in the sense that a plant or animal is alive, and Zoe, which he understands as the purposeful, meaningful life that God intends for us.
We are not begotten by God, we are only made by Him: in our natural state we are not sons of God, only (so to speak) statues. We have not got Zoe or spiritual life: only Bios or biological life which is presently going to run down and die. Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ . . . If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as [Christ] does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has – by what I call ‘good infection’.9
Lewis’s imagery is that of us becoming ‘infected’ – but in a good way. To use his means of expressing himself, we stop being ‘statues’ and become ‘sons of God’. We cease being empty shells, created by God, and instead become what God really wants us to be – people who have been reborn, renewed and transformed by God. We cease being empty temples, constructed by God, and instead become inhabited by God who dwells within the temple of our souls. The Holy Spirit – God inhabiting us – is then able to begin the work of transformation within us, renewing our minds and hearts.
As Lewis rightly saw, we are not merely told to become more like Jesus of Nazareth, as if the Christian faith were a set of orders barked at us by some distant and uncaring general; we are enabled to become so, by a God who enriches and graces our lives, redirects our wills and inspires us to do good. ‘God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” ’ (Galatians 4.6), thus enabling us to pray and shaping us in the likeness of Jesus.
This has a major implication for Christian spirituality. The life of faith is not about a forced acquiescence to do God’s will but a renewed – and, as a result, natural – instinct to want to do what matters to God. The Holy Spirit is seen as an agent of transformation, renewing our hearts, minds and wills so that we gradually come to love what God loves. Christians see this as the fulfilment of the great Old Testament prophecy in which God establishes a new covenant with Israel. No longer will the law be something external, written on tablets of stone. ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts’ (Jeremiah 31.33).
Understanding, experience and the Holy Spirit
As I mentioned in the Preface, Christians tend to be divided in their approaches to the Holy Spirit. Some, especially those within the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements, welcome an emphasis on Christian experience – one also found in early Methodism, with its stress on a ‘living faith’ experienced by the heart and not merely understood by reason. Charles Wesley’s words from one of his best-known hymns witness to this way of perceiving the presence of the Holy Spirit:
Still the small inward voice I hear,
That whispers all my sins forgiven . . .
I feel the life His wounds impart;
I feel the Saviour in my heart.10
An emphasis on the experience of the Spirit can be argued to represent a welcome move away from very bookish or intellectual ways of thinking about the Christian faith. Why should those who cannot read, or who find abstract reasoning difficult, be disadvantaged in matters of faith? The Holy Spirit is the great leveller, making the rich experience of the living God available to all.
But not everyone feels so positively about experiential approaches to faith. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote to C. S. Lewis on 5 August 1946, making clear they made no sense to her. ‘All spiritual experience is a closed book to me; in that respect I have been tone-deaf from birth.’11 Sayers relied on reason and imagination to generate and sustain her faith, and saw no cause to appeal to the vagueness of religious experience to express or defend it. Others are wary of a ‘touchy-feely’ faith, which they consider may open them to the charge of emotionalism or subjectivism – that is, making what they feel the basis of what they believe.
Most readers will have little difficulty in sympathizing with these varying positions. They’re not mutually exclusive. In fact, many would say that they can be woven together to give a richer and deeper vision of the Christian life.
Divergence within Christianity really reflects a strength. It is a classic theme of Christian spirituality that God deals with individuals according to their varying gifts and needs, humbling the arrogant on the one hand and encouraging the down-hearted on the other. The rationality of the Christian faith appeals to those who use their reason to seek for structures and meaning within the world, while its core theme of an active and present God connects up with those who are looking for stability and empowerment.
There is only one Holy Spirit, but our experience and appreciation of that Spirit differs and reflects our individual identity. We are not forced into a template! Each of us is special, with something unique to offer God, who takes the threads of our lives and weaves them into a greater pattern.
As this chapter draws to a close, it may be helpful to present a summary of some of the leading themes of the Christian understanding of the work of the Spirit.
The work of the Holy Spirit: an overview
What does the Holy Spirit do? Many theologians have tried to provide a summary of the work of the Spirit, and a good example is found in Basil of Caesarea’s succinct statement:
Through the Holy Spirit we are restored to paradise, led back to the Kingdom of heaven, adopted as children, given confidence to call God ‘Father’ and to share in Christ’s grace, called children of light, and given a share in eternal glory.
The Christian tradition has generally understood the work of the Holy Spirit to focus on three broad areas: revelation, salvation and the Christian life. Let’s look at each of these briefly.
Revealing God to us
The Holy Spirit helps make God known to us. The second-century theologian Irenaeus of Lyons wrote of the ‘Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied, and our forebears learned of God and the righteous were led in the paths of justice’. The task of the Holy Spirit is to lead the faithful into God’s truth; without that Spirit, truth remains elusive.
This idea is developed further in the notion of the ‘inspiration of Scripture’, which affirms that the Bible has a God-given authority. This doctrine, in various forms, is the common tradition of Christianity and has its origins in the Bible itself, most notably the affirmation that ‘all Scripture is inspired by God’ (2 Timothy 3.16). Most Christian theologians affirm the activity of the Holy Spirit both in the inspiration of Scripture and in the subsequent responsibility of the Church to interpret and apply this text.
Yet it is not simply God’s revelation that is linked with the work of the Spirit; the Spirit is also widely regarded as being involved in the human response to that revelation. Most Christian theologians have regarded faith itself as the result of the work of the Holy Spirit. For example, John Calvin highlighted the pivotal role of the Spirit in revealing God’s truth and applying or ‘sealing’ this truth to humanity, to refer back to the quote on p. 10.
The appropriation of salvation
Christian theologians have noted how the Holy Spirit plays a critical role in illuminating, healing and enabling humanity to take hold of Christ, and thus benefit from his identity and his work. For example, the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) emphasized the role of the Spirit in preparing the human mind and heart for revelation and salvation:
To make this act of faith, the grace of God and the interior help of the Holy Spirit must precede and assist, moving the heart and turning it to God, opening the eyes of the mind and giving joy and ease to everyone in assenting to the truth and believing it.
The energization of the Christian life
The importance of the role of the Spirit in relation to Christian prayer, spirituality and worship has been stressed by many writers, classic and modern. The fifth-century writer Cyril of Alexandria is one of many to emphasize the role of the Spirit in bringing unity within the Church. The Spirit is also important in relation to mission, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) notes:
The Spirit prepares people, and goes out to them with his grace, in order to draw them to Christ. The Spirit manifests the risen Lord to them, recalls his word to them and opens their minds to the understanding of his Death and Resurrection.12
The Holy Spirit is thus integral to a Christian understanding of human nature and activity. We are brought to life, and empowered to act, by this Spirit. This points to the need for us to reflect further on what we understand by humanity. In the next chapter, we shall open up some of the themes of a Christian understanding of human nature and consider their implications for Christian life and thought.