The Lord Is the Spirit. John A. Studebaker
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Introduction
How much do we hear about the Holy Spirit and His authority? If I were to hazard an opinion I would say that no aspect of the Christian faith has been so totally neglected and perhaps misunderstood. . . . Here, I truly believe, we are dealing with the main source of weakness in modern Evangelicalism.1
The very idea of “the authority of the Holy Spirit” probably sounds new to many Christians. Some may be skeptical that this relatively unknown concept could be our “main source of weakness.” Others may wonder why such a crucial topic has been so neglected.
Many Christians feel that a general disrespect for authority marked the twentieth century, and that this disrespect is now blooming into a full crisis in our century. Hall points out that today’s postmodern culture tends to ignore the existential element of authority, particularly regarding one’s standing before God.2 In addition, our culture no longer regards any one version of “truth” as having priority over another. As a result, the Church seems to have become just one more voice among many.
Several contemporary theologians have responded to this crisis of authority by re-asserting the doctrine of Christian pneumatology (“the doctrine of the Holy Spirit”). Postmodern theologians claim that traditional models of pneumatology were constructed on “modernist” approaches to systematic theology and, in doing so, placed undue reliance on metaphysics or on the “authority” of theological methodology itself. Such models, they hold, are now inadequate for providing a new sense of authority. “The house of [theological] authority has collapsed,” proclaims Ed Farley, because it was “propped up with mythical, historical and doctrinal rationalization” that can no longer stand on their own.3 Postmodern theologians claim that, while the God of modernism was abstract and transcendent, in the Holy Spirit we rediscover God’s concreteness and immanence, as well as God’s power to liberate people from bondage. Michael Welker, for example, holds that,
authoritarian theologies of one-upmanship have sought to grasp and expound God and God’s revelation in numerous abstract formulas: God comes “from above,” God always “precedes,” God is the “all-determining” reality. The theology of the Holy Spirit will challenge us to replace these formulas or render them superfluous.4
Another postmodern theologian, Peter Hodgson, presents an even more radical assessment of the Western marginalization of the Holy Spirit.
In Western theology and philosophy the very concept of “spirit” has for the most part been fraught with difficulties, conveying something vapid and dualistic, implying a separation of and a hierarchy between the mental and the physical, the soul and the body, the human and the natural, the male and the female, the holy and the profane. The hierarchy reflects a suspicion and fear of the suppressed poles: nature, the body, the feminine.5
Such theologians usually want to promote a re-emphasis of the Spirit with respect to several doctrines of systematic theology, particularly the Trinity and ecclesiology. Such a re-emphasis sounds very appealing to the Church today, as witnessed by the many churches that are promoting an experience of the Spirit as well as the many evangelical theologians who are sympathetic with postmodern cries of marginalization and are writing on pneumatology as well. In that more theologians are taking up biblical pneumatology as a way of revitalizing the Church, the postmodern project is to be commended.
Many of these contemporary theologians, however, seem to have granted the Spirit an “authority” unchecked by biblical boundaries. Some have divorced the Spirit’s authority from the authority of Christ or the authority of Scripture. Others have adopted “panentheistic”6 portrayals of “Spirit” that often reduce the Holy Spirit’s status as divine Person to that of a divine “force,” “world spirit,” or “function” within communities. Welker, for example, borrows from the field of magnetism in referring to the Holy Spirit as a “force field” in the world.7 Hodgson refers to “Spirit” as a “primal energy” that “takes on the shape of many created spirits, not just of living persons but of ancestors and animals as well as plants, trees, rivers.”8
Evangelicals hold that Scripture lays out specific identifying characteristics regarding the Spirit’s nature and work. Since the Spirit is clearly referred to in Scripture as “God” (i.e., Acts 5:3–5), he must possess “divine authority” in some sense. Indeed a “divine authority” proper to the Spirit seems to have explicit backing in Scripture (i.e., John 3:3–8; 14–16; 1 Cor 2:10–14; 2 Pet 1:20–21). “Authority” is certainly implied when the Spirit is referred to as “Lord” in Scripture (i.e., 2 Cor 3:17–18) and in the Nicene Creed. Because of this abundant evidence, evangelicals proclaim that theologians are not to define the Spirit, nor his “authority,” in any way they desire.
At the same time, evangelicals must also admit that a general confusion reigns today regarding the precise nature of “the authority of the Holy Spirit.” It seems there are several nagging yet critical theological questions that have never been adequately answered, such as: (1) What is the biblical data regarding the Spirit’s authority? (2) How is the Spirit’s authority related to the authority of Jesus Christ and to the authority of Scripture? (3) How might a biblical understanding of the Spirit’s authority expose and correct deficiencies in postmodern pneumatology?
Such a study also intersects the sort of practical issues and questions local churches continually wrestle with—questions regarding hermeneutics (i.e., how do we interpret Scripture “through” the Spirit?), church government (i.e., how does the Spirit structure and guide a church?), and Christian spirituality (i.e., what does it mean to “respond” to the Spirit?)
Lloyd-Jones asserts that the Spirit’s authority is indeed practical in nature. After investigating the authority of Christ and the authority of Scripture, he exhorts:
I would remind you first of all that, from a practical standpoint, this third division of our study is the most important of all . . . Only when the authority of the Holy Spirit comes to bear upon us do these things [i.e., the authority of Christ and the authority of the Scriptures] become real and living and powerful to us. More than that, all that we believe about the Scriptures and about the Lord Himself can only be applied in our ministry and so become relevant to the world and its situation, as we are under the authority and power of the Spirit.9
A theological understanding of the Holy Spirit’s authority must therefore be reconstructed for today’s Church as it wrestles with postmodern and contemporary theology on both a theoretical and a practical level. This reconstruction certainly does not require a reversion to modern “authoritarianism,” but a fresh, biblical examination and articulation of the authoritative character and work of God the Holy Spirit in the Church today. With the doctrine of the Holy Spirit receiving such attention today, is it not time in the historical development of Church doctrine to develop biblical and yet practical clarity regarding “the authority of the Holy Spirit?”
Purpose