The Spirit

'Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.'

The idea of the Spirit seems to provoke very different reactions from Christians and this has been the case throughout the centuries. One only needs to look back as far as figures such as St Francis of Assisi and his followers or Martin Luther and his friar opponents to see how those who regarded themselves as fired by the spirit could very easily either end up being painted as saint or heretic: the former inspired by the Spirit of God and the latter by the Spirit of the Devil.

Yet despite disagreement about who had the spirit, there was a general agreement amongst Christians that it was indeed important to have it, at least until developments of scholastic thought that led to Reformation and the Enlightenment. Until the High Middle Ages, and the introduction of Aristotelian metaphysics, the Spirit served a very simple function: it was imputed into the heart of the believer through the word and sacraments of the church. It cleansed, hallowed and healed each believer; they carried him around in their heart and allowed them in St Paul’s words to cry ‘Abba, Father.’

In this model from the first millennium of the church the Spirit dwelt in the believer’s heart and freed his will from its bondage to original sin. Here the Spirit was found as a Spirit of freedom: not a freedom to do whatever we want and desire, but a freedom to be the people that God chooses us to be. In this view the sacraments of the church made sense as those things that heal the sinner from his sickness and change him from glory to glory.

This changed with the discovery of Aristotle. Aristotle’s view that ‘like can only know like’ changed the way in which theology was done. This is a very questionable thought to apply to theology anyway: Christianity has at its heart the idea that God the Son became man and by touching the dirty, unclean and wretched he transformed them to wholeness and health of body and soul, which clearly contradicts the ideas of Aristotle, which would imply that God would have to become something less than God and contaminate himself were he to become incarnate.

Nonetheless, despite this contradiction, from Thomas Aquinas on there is more of a tendency to stress that the Holy Spirit sanctifies good habits rather than individuals, so that the Holy Spirit could be free from the contamination that a sinful soul might leak into him. This made the relationship between humanity and the Spirit more to do with the economy of salvation than with a relationship with God. With the rise of Occamism and the gradual falling away of belief in the real existence of universal groups of things, such as habits, the Holy Spirit became evermore to resemble a system in the economic chain. In the theology of Gabriel Biel, a professor at Paris in the 1490s the work of sanctification by the spirit was reduced to turning the leaden token of human good works into the gold that was payable to God: a far cry from the spirit who dwells in our hearts to make us cry Abba, Father.

The Reformation reversed some of this process, but failed to reject the central philosophical developments that had led to this change, in fact in many ways they re-enforced the Aristotelian assumptions that had changed philosophy. For Luther there could be no possibility that the Holy Spirit actually dwelt in the human soul and moved it, for him there had to be a clear divide so that humans were absolutely sinful and absolutely righteous all at once. The Holy Spirit could not move the will of man in relationship toward the divine for this would make God’s purpose mixed up with those of humanity. Thus the Spirit became an imputed thing, something that covered the human being, not something that dwelt in humanity.

Yet at another level the Reformation was successful in reviving an image of the Holy Spirit as relational and not simply to do with the economy of salvation. To Luther, and to Calvin and Bucer, the Spirit was that which consoled the conscience. Even if the Spirit thus became divorced from human action, it became a vital part of human reflection, what we might call spirituality. His consolation gave Christians strength and conviction, a lively faith. The sacraments once again became vital in that they like the preaching of God’s word were things that could quicken the conscience to repentance and true faith, so that alongside an outward act true faith could be imparted.

This achievement was possibly the greatest of all that the Reformers did: economics was replaced with relationship. This achievement was, however, the most vulnerable, and this was demonstrated in their life times by the various radical reformers. If the Spirit was about consolation and this could be found in a number of sources, many of which were simply about private thoughts, then a road was opened to the spirit being pared away from the life of the church, its sacraments, and even scripture which had been so precious to them all. The Spirit could very easily become the spirit of self reliance of Defoe’s Crusoe stuck in the lonely island of his mind.

This was indeed where history took us. Enlightenment thinking tended to radicalise the position of the Reformers. With the new emphasis laid on the philosophy of the immanent ideals formed by the human mind rather than the externals of life, it should be unsurprising that much of the magisterial reformers’ views on lively faith being imputed to the human and imparted to his conscience through word and sacrament gradually diminished in favour of a purely experiential approach. If what could be known is what could be internally verified by the mind then the experience of faith in the conscience, regardless of outward act.

With the various academic attempts to breakdown and reformulate the doctrines of the church, the Trinity often all but disappeared along with an emphasis on incarnation and atonement, and thus the Holy Spirit similarly suffered. In many modern accounts of theology the spirit can seem merely a force of the monad creator God which allows us to know that he cares about us. The Spirit could in this context, one in which there is no real doctrine of sin or justification, could easily be ignored in favour of more pressing concerns such as morality and rights.

Recently there has been an upsurge of interest in the Spirit. Various types of charismatic forms have sprung up attempting to reclaim something of our doctrinal past. Some groups speak of experiences of the spirit in lively worship, for others it is found quietly contemplating with candles or music. Both have some point. However, we should be aware that if our doctrine of the spirit is based purely upon our own experience then it is unlikely to prove enduring. What if we do not feel the Spirit at times? How is this experience of the Spirit to be tested? How do we know that this is indeed the Sprit of Christ and not some fond invention of our own hearts? How do we norm these experiences in the life of the church and in scripture?

In our post-modern context, one in which we can clearly see that the human mind is not as transcendent as our forebears thought it was, how can we as church engage with the Spirit? What should Christians do with Pentecost now?

Possibly it is time to re-root ourselves in the dogmatic tradition of the church and give to the Holy Spirit his proper role. St Paul tells us that it is the Spirit that drives out fear and allows us to cry ‘Abba Father.’ We need to think less of a spirit who is merely about our own private thoughts as a pleasant sensation, and rather more of him who effects our salvation in Christ.

Christians need to grasp that the Holy Spirit, the comforter, is the Spirit that is sent by Christ upon his church and to each one within that church. This should make us aware of two things.

Firstly, the spirit cannot be severed from Christ. If Christ sends his spirit on the church it is because the church is his body. The work of the spirit therefore cannot be divided off from Christ’s work; it is to make effective the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom; the gospel that was manifest in the person of Christ.

The spirit is that which mediates Christ’s presence to us so that we can hear and appropriate the preached word of scripture, and is that which mediates Christ to us in Baptism and the Eucharist. The Spirit is more than just a fuzzy feeling; he gives himself to us with concrete and trustworthy signs, so that we may see the presence of Christ amongst us and thus live a life of holiness.

Secondly, because it is the Spirit of God, the Spirit that was manifest at Christ’s baptism, it is the same spirit that is imparted into the body of Christ and to each believer. The disciples had the spirit given to them as a corporate body and individually, and it is wrong to privilege one of these facets above the other: Christ must present himself to each believer, as each believer attempts to present Christ to the world. Thus the work of the spirit cannot be a just private thought for it is something that illumines the whole body of the church.

We should pray for the Spirit to come amongst us as God’s church, to hallow us in Christ, so that through our Spirit of adoption we may have the will, the freedom and the confidence to be God’s children.