Beeson podcast, Episode 327
https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2017/Gods-Empowering-Presence
Gordon Fee
February 14, 2017


Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

T. George:	Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Well, this lecture we're going to hear today goes back to the early, early years of Beeson Divinity School. Beeson Divinity School was founded in 1988. This lecture was given at Beeson in 1993, just four or five years after we began the school. It's one of our Biblical Studies Lecture series and the speaker was Dr. Gordon Fee. Gordon Fee is professor emeritus of New Testament at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a noted New Testament scholar from the Pentecostal tradition. He's published many, many books and articles and essays in the field of New Testament studies and New Testament criticism. 

	When I was writing my own commentary on the book of Galatians, a few years after his visit with us, I had sitting on my desk Gordon Fee's commentary on 1 Corinthians. It was a model for me and I recommend it to anyone, one of the great commentaries on 1 Corinthians. I have ever read. Well, his lectures here at Beeson were entitled “God's Empowering Presence: The Spirit, the Holy Spirit in Paul's Theology.” Let's go back to Beeson Divinity School in the early years of our history in 1993 and listen in to Dr. Gordon Fee speaking on God's empowering presence.

Gordon Fee:	Dean George, distinguished faculty, students and friends of Beeson Divinity School, let me begin by thanking you for the invitation to deliver these 1993 Biblical Studies Lectures. Your kind invitation gives me an opportunity to distill some of the concerns that have emerged over the past three years while working on the Spirit material in the letters of Paul. What I have to offer in these lectures is not something striking or new, rather it is an attempt to offer a perspective on what I think is a more central element in Pauline theology, especially as understanding of Christian life than is often perceived. In the interest of time therefore, let me plunge immediately into the matter at hand, the role of the Spirit in Pauline theology.

	My basic thesis in this first lecture is very simple. That the Spirit who has been generally marginalized in the academy and rather thoroughly domesticated by the church is much more crucial to Paul's theology than most of us tend to allow. Indeed, that the Spirit lies very near the center of things for Paul himself. But rather than try to demonstrate this thesis by going through the essential matters of Pauline theology and showing how crucial the Spirit is too much of that enterprise, which is what I thought I was going to do when I gave the title for this lecture, I propose instead to pursue these concerns in a slightly different way. In fact, basically by reading the final chapter in the book which in the book is entitled “Where to from Here.”

	So first, I propose to offer a brief overview of the central features of Pauline pneumatology and such. Second, to point out the frequent distance between Paul and ourselves on these matters. Third, to offer some minimal discussions about bridging that distance. What is said here, it should be noted, assumes the essential validity of the Reformation principle that the church must always and simultaneously be reformed and always being reformed, and that the essential ingredient of true reformation and renewal is for the church to become more self-consciously biblical in its life and outlook.

	First then, the Pauline perspective, a summary. The following are what I perceive to be at the heart of things regarding Paul's view of the Spirit.  Eight points. First, after 800 pages plus of careful exegesis of all the Spirit texts in Paul, and 200 pages of theological reflection on their significance, the most obvious and significant point to make is the absolutely crucial role the Spirit plays in Paul's Christian experience, and therefore in his understanding of the Gospel. In the final analysis, there is no aspect of his theology, at least what is fundamental to that theology, in which the Spirit does not play a leading role. To be sure, the Spirit is not the center for Paul, Christ is, ever and always.

	But the Spirit stands very close to the center, as the crucial ingredient of all genuinely Christian life and experience. For this reason, the Spirit arguably must play a much more vital role in our rethinking Paul's theology than tends now to be the case. I simply point out 570 marvelous pages on Paul in Herman Ridderbos’ “Outline of Paul's Theology” with less than 10 pages on the Spirit, and I asked, did he ever read Paul. 

	Second, crucial to the Spirit's central role is the thoroughly eschatological framework within which Paul both experienced and understood the Spirit. The Spirit had played a leading role in his and others' eschatological expectation, along with the resurrection of Christ, therefore, the out poured Spirit was the primary cause of Paul's radically altered eschatological perspective. On the one hand, the coming of the Spirit fulfilled the Old Testament eschatological promises, the sure evidence that the future had already been set in motion. On the other hand, since the final expression of the eschaton had not yet taken place, the Spirit also served as the sure guarantee of the final glory.

	Evidence of the future guarantee of its final consummation. Think only of the pregnant images of the Spirit as the down payment, or the first fruits, or as the divine seal upon our lives for the day of redemption. It is quite impossible to understand Paul's emphasis on the experienced life of the Spirit, apart from this thorough going eschatological perspective that dominated his thinking.

	Third, equally crucial to the Pauline perspective is the dynamically experienced nature of the coming of the Spirit in the life of the individual and in the ongoing life of the believing community. Such a view is fully pre-suppositional for Paul. It also finds frequent expression. But not as something Paul argues for but argues from, the Spirit as an experienced reality lies behind, for example, both the Corinthian abuse and the Pauline corrective of Spirit life in that community. It is basic to his reminding the Thessalonians about the reality of their conversion, 1 Thessalonians 1:46. 

	It serves as primary evidence that life in Christ is predicated on faith and apart from Torah, indeed Galatians is not about justification by faith but the sufficiency of the Spirit to do what we all could not do.  The Spirit as an experienced reality is the presupposition lying behind the apparently corrective imperatives of 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22. It serves as corroborating evidence of Paul's own apostolic ministry, 1 Corinthians 2:4-5, Romans 15:18-19. It is the predicate on which Paul can argue for the sufficiency of life in the Spirit, Galatians 5:13-6:10. And, it is essential to his reminder to Timothy to fan Spirit life in the flame for the necessary power and courage for ministry in Ephesus, 1 Timothy 1:18, 2 Timothy 1:6-7. Both Paul's explicit words and his illusions to the life of the Spirit, everywhere presuppose the Spirit as an empowering experience to reality in the life of the church and of the believer.

	Four, related to the crucial eschatological framework are several converging items which demonstrate that for Paul the experience of the eschatological Spirit meant the return of God's own personal presence to dwell in and among his people. The Spirit marks off God's people corporately and individually as God's temple. The place of God's personal dwelling on earth brought together here in terms of fulfillment are first the presence motif itself, inherit in the Old Testament tabernacle and temple. Second, the presence motif understood in the Old Testament in terms of the Spirit of the Lord, Isaiah 63, Psalm 106:33. And third, the promised New Covenant of the Spirit from Jeremiah and Ezekie, wherein the Spirit would indwell God's people and cause them to live and to follow in God's ways.

	Paul not only sees these themes as fulfilled by the gift of the Spirit but also understands the Spirit as God's own personal presence. This best accounts for Paul's general reluctance to refer to the Spirit with impersonal images. To the contrary, he regularly refers to the Spirit's activity with verbs of personal action, used elsewhere of God and Christ. The Spirit is thus the Holy Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The way God is currently present with and among his people.

	Five, in this vein, it is also important to note how absolutely fundamental to Pauline theology are his Trinitarian presuppositions. Although that is neither his language nor the language nor his major focus. What makes this pre-suppositional for Paul, without his ever discussing it as such, are the fourfold and through going realities.  First that God is one and personal; second, that the Spirit is the Spirit of God and therefore personal; third, that the Spirit and Christ are fully divine and; fourth, that the Spirit is as distinct from Christ and the Father as they are from each other. This modification of Paul's understanding of the one God lies behind much that makes his soteriology dynamic and effective.

	Six, Paul's Trinitarian understanding of God, including the role of the Spirit, is thus foundational to the heart of his theological enterprise, namely salvation in Christ. Salvation is God's thing from beginning to end. God the Father initiated it, in that it belongs to God's eternal purposes, has its origins in God, and has God as its ultimate goal, 1 Corinthians 8:6. It was set in motion by his having sent both the Son and the Spirit to accomplish it, Galatians 4:4-7. Christ the Son, effected eschatological salvation for the people of God through his death and resurrection.  This of course lies as the central feature of all Pauline theology.

	But the effectual realization and appropriation of the love of God as offered by the Son is singularly the work of the Spirit, so much is this so that when Paul reminds believers of their conversion experience, or of their present status in Christ, he almost always does so in terms of the Spirit's activity and/or presence. There is no salvation in Christ which is not fully Trinitarian in this sense and therefore there is no salvation in Christ which is not made effective in the life of the believer by the experienced coming of the Spirit, whom God poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior as Paul says in Titus 3:6.

	Seven, but despite his key role in the realization of salvation in Christ, the Spirit's major role in Paul's view of things lies with his being the absolutely essential constituent of the whole Christian life, from beginning to end. The Spirit does empower ethical life in all of its dimensions, personal, corporate and in the world. Believers in Christ, too for Paul, are Spirit people, that's my translation of [Latin phrase], not the spiritual ones but Spirit people. First and foremost, they are variously described as living by the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, being led by the Spirit, bearing the fruit of the Spirit, sowing to the Spirit.

	Ethics for Paul is likewise Trinitarian at its roots. The Spirit of God conforms the believer into the likeness of Christ to the glory of God. The Spirit is there for the empowering presence of God for living the life of God in the present. For Paul, therefore, there is no Christian life that is not at the same time a holy life, made so by the Holy Spirit whom God gives his people, 1 Thessalonians 4:8. At the same time, life in the Spirit also includes every other imaginable dimension of the believers' present eschatological existence, including being empowered by the Spirit to abound in hope, to live in joy, to pray without ceasing, to exercise self-control, to experience a robust conscience, to have insight into God's will and purposes, and for endurance in every kind of present hardship and suffering, roles of the Spirit that most charismatics care little for. To be a believer means nothing less than being filled with and thus to live in and by the Spirit.

	Eight, finally, the Spirit is the key to all truly Christian spirituality. At the individual level, the life of the Spirit includes praying in the Spirit as well as with the mind. In so doing, the Spirit not only helps believers by interceding for them in their weaknesses, but also gives them great confidence in such times of prayer, since God knows the mind of the Spirit, that the Spirit prays in keeping with God's own purposes. At the same time, the Spirit's presence including his charismata helps to build up the believing community as they gather together for the worship of God. In the Pauline churches therefore, worship is charismatic simply because the Spirit is the key player in all that transpire. The Spirit who forms the body and creates the temple is present with unity and diversity so that all may participate and all may be built up.

	Well, all of this can be and is filled out in great detail in the forthcoming monograph. This, I would argue, represents the essence of the Pauline perspective on life in the Spirit which leads to my second concern, the present perspective, a contrast. With no intent to be judgmental, I would observe that in much of its subsequent history, the church has lived somewhat below the picture of the life of the Spirit just outlined.  Indeed, the general marginalizing of the Spirit by the academy, scholars are especially uncomfortable with Spirit talk. But the general marginalizing of the Spirit by the academy and the frequent domestication of the Spirit by the church, noted earlier, are part of the reason for this study in the first place.

	For a variety of reasons, items one to three, that is the dynamically experienced nature and crucial role of the eschatological Spirit, waned in terms of the church's actual experience of the Christian life with a consequence that items four, seven and eight, the Spirit is God's personal empowering presence for the whole of Christian life and for true spirituality also tended to diminish. The net result was that items, the key items five and six, Paul's Trinitarian understanding of salvation, were retained but very often more theologically than experientially. For example, both the passage of time and the necessary, but not always helpful, institutionalizing of the church.  Plus the influence of Greek thought forms on its theologizing led the church away from its fundamentally eschatological outlook, item two, in which the experience of the Spirit played the key role to its self-understanding as living between the times, between the time of the beginning of the end and its consummation at the return of Christ, in which the church lived in the world, always calling it into question but not of the world, not conditioned by its values and lifestyle.

	At the same time, the dynamic and experienced nature of life in the Spirit was generally lost. At least part of the reason for this was the result of a matter the New Testament never addresses. How do children of believers become believers themselves? At some point in time, the majority of Christians became so as the result of being born into Christian homes. Rather than through adult conversion. Indeed, much of the tension later believers feel between their own experience of church and that about which read in the New Testament can be attributed to this significant factor. All of Pauline epistles, it must be emphasized, were written to first generation believers, all of whom, at least those addressed in Paul's letters, were adult converts whose conversions had included an experience coming of the Holy Spirit into their lives.  That at least is the picture that emerges in the letters.

	But what happens to this experienced conversion attended by the Spirit for children born and raised in the homes of such converts? As much as anything, this probably accounts for the subsequent loss of the experienced nature of the life in the Spirit, and for the general marginalizing of the Spirit in the later church. Again, this is not intended to be a judgmental picture, nor do I suggest that it is true at all times and at all places, but it is of some interest that the subsequent study of church history by the church itself has far more often been a history of the institution than of the life of the Spirit and the community of faith as it lived out its life in the world. What was not lost in all of this of course was the doctrine of the Spirit, with its properly biblical understanding of the Spirit in personal terms, number four, which lead to the more formal credal expression of the Trinitarian implication of the Spirit's presence in the Godhead, number five. Therefore, of the Spirit's essential role in one's becoming a child of God, number six.

	Related to this development is both the joining of the reception of the Spirit to water baptism and the probably eventual practice of baptizing infant children born into Christian homes. That is the moment the Spirit is tied to water baptism and then the majority of children are baptized and therefore assumed to receive Spirit at baptism, the Spirit obviously can no longer be perceived as dynamically experienced, although he was still the key factor in a theology of salvation. The general loss of the dynamic and experienced life of the Spirit at the beginning of Christian life also accounts for the frequent malaise and unfortunately all too frequent anemia on the part of the individual believer through much of the church's later history. 

	This is obviously not true of all, of course. But it does in part account for the rise both of the monastic movement and the various spirit movements through the church's history. The word holy and its plural noun, the saints, which in Pauline Spirituality describes everyday Christian life became words to describe the special rather than the normal, and so too with spirituality. Spontaneity by the many gave way to performance by a few. Prayer in the Spirit became fixed in the often excellent liturgy of the church. Tongues did indeed generally cease and the prophetic word was relegated to the prepared sermon. To be sure, the church has always had its history of spirit movements of various and sundry kinds. Some of these were co-opted by the church. Others were pushed outside the church and usually became heretical and divisive. Still others became reformed movements within.

	The common denominator of most of these movements has been their attempt to recapture the life of the Spirit in some form or another to the degree that they succeeded, they have been a source of renewal and blessing. But spirit movements tend to make institutions nervous. For good reason one might add, both positively and negatively. The net result has been that the Pauline perspective of life in the Spirit as a dynamically experienced reality creating an eschatological people who live for God's glory, has not generally fared well in the overall life of the church. Finally, then, a way forward.

	If what has preceded seems to paint too bleak a picture or sounds like a denigration of the subsequent work of the Spirit in the church, let it be said again that such is not my intent nor do I think that if we could turn the clock back, all would be better. To the contrary, I for one not only recognize that one cannot turn the clock back but I also find cause for much rejoicing in the church's history. The creeds, the liturgies, the theologizing, the institutional life are not only with us, but for many, myself included, are seen to be the work of the Spirit in the subsequent life of the church. My plea therefore is not that of a restorationist, as if we really could restore the primitive church, whatever that means and whatever that would look like. Rather, it is a plea for the recapturing of the Pauline perspective of Christian life as essentially the life of the Spirit, dynamically experienced and eschatologically oriented but fully integrated into the life of the church.

	From my limited perspective, such a recapturing would have two dimensions to it. First, rather than tearing down these barns and building different ones which all too often has been the history of spirit movements, especially of the restorationist type.  Let us have the Spirit bring life into our present institutions, theologies and liturgies. The Spirit not only inspires a new hymnody in every renewal within the church but makes the best of all former hymnodies come to life with new vigor. "Can these dry bones live?" the Lord asked the prophet. "You know," he replied and then watched as the Spirit brought life to what was already there. Too much water has gone under the bridge for us to believe that somehow we will all miraculously be made into one, in terms of visible structures, liturgies and theologies. 

	But time and again, when the human factor is not getting in the way, the Spirit has given God's people a greater sense that they indeed are one across confessional lines. The church is with us. Indeed, we are it, in its present shapes and structures. May the Spirit of the living God be poured out upon us afresh, for life in the present world until Christ comes again. Second, a genuine recapturing of the Pauline perspective will not isolate the Spirit in such a way that spiritual gifts, so called, and spirit phenomena take pride of place in the church, resulting in a church that is either charismatic or otherwise, rather, a genuine recapturing of the Pauline perspective will cause the church to be more vitally Trinitarian, not only in its theology but in its life and spirituality as well.

	This will mean, not the exultation of the Spirit but the exultation of God. It will mean not focused on the Spirit as such but on the Son, crucified and risen, Savior and Lord of all. Ethical life will not, will be neither narrowly, individualistically conceived nor legalistically expressed but will be joyously communal and decidedly over against the world's present trinity of relativism, secularism and materialism with their thoroughly demonizing and dehumanizing effects. The proper Trinitarian aim of such ethics will be the Pauline one, to the glory of God, through being conformed to the image of the Son, by the empowering of the Spirit. In such a recapturing of the dynamic life of the Spirit, there will also be the renewal of charismata, not for the sake of being charismatic but for the building up of the people of God for their life together in the world. 

	What must not happen in such a renewal is what has so often happened in the past, holding the extraordinary charismata in such awe that they are allowed to exist untested and undiscerned. Every form of extremism which is so often the expressed or hidden fear over a renewed life of the Spirit in the church. Always, the answer that I get to this kind of pressing is but there's always extremes. Well, the answer to extremism is not to cut the Spirit out of the church, it's to do what Paul did, bring corrective to abuse and therefore be done with abuse and not be done with the Spirit's activity altogether. Every form of extremism is ultimately the result of the failure to heed the primary Pauline injunction in 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22. 

	“Do not quench the Spirit by despising prophesies but test all things. And in so doing, hold fast to what is good and be done with every evil form.” The failure to test the spirits has led to lack of responsibility and accountability which in turn has often led to failure on the part of some who were in prominence as well as to pain and hurt but those who were the recipients of so-called prophetic words that were either false or unrealizable. In some, I for one think the Pauline perspective to have the better of it. I also believe that that perspective can become our own, dare I say must become our own if we are going to make any difference at all in the so-called post-Christian era. But this means that our theologizing must stop paying mere lip service to the Spirit and recognize his crucial in Pauline theology and it means that the church must risk freeing the Spirit from being boxed into the creed and getting him back into the experienced life of the believer and the believing community.

	Perhaps the proper way to conclude this lecture, as I conclude the book, is with prayer. In this case, with the aid of earlier Spirit-inspired prayers, the first is from the psalter, expressing the longing of those who already know God, who long to know him more and better. It assumes the posture of the first and third beatitudes, blessed are the poor in Spirit, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, that is expressed in the passionate language of the soul that knows it has a God-shaped space within which desperately needs God to fill it with himself. Psalm 63:1, “Oh God, you are my God. Earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My body longs for you in a dry and weary land, where there is no water.”

	The second is the prayer of Moses which is very close to the surface of Paul's understanding of the Spirit as God's empowering presence. Here is that cry of desperation, that should mark church and believer alike who live as God's redeemed and redemptive people in the post-Christian era that marks the turn of the centuries and millennia. “If your Spirit does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” Finally, from Samuel Longfellow's hymn which expresses at the individual level what should perhaps most characterize the nature of our prayer for life in the Spirit, “Holy Spirit all divine, dwell within this heart of mine. Cast down every idol throne, reign supreme and reign alone.” Amen.

Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.