Brief Thoughts on the Holy Spirit
THE HOLY SPIRIT EMPOWERS (2)
A single text, Ephesians 3:14-21, will suit our purposes for this piece. Ignoring critical concerns, Paul is the writer and he is writing to the Ephesian Christians. In this section he prays that God will strengthen them, that He will strengthen them by His Holy Spirit and that He will strengthen in the inner man.
For now let us ignore what “the inner man” means or might mean and ignore the question whether Paul is speaking of a “corporate” or “individual” strengthening. For now let us take it that a corporate strengthening [that is, the strengthening of the Church – local congregation or the universal Body of Jesus] will have to have an effect on the individual parts of the Body, which is the Church of Jesus Christ.
For the purposes of this essay, our question is how the Holy Spirit strengthens the Church and its individual members.
Augustine [of Hippo] spent nine years as a lay-follower of the Manichean sect which had a strong underlying dualistic understanding of reality. They believed in a God who was very powerful but not all-powerful and a Satan figure who was God’s enemy. The creation was a spin-off from this conflict and matter [including human bodies], while not evil in and of itself, was permeated and ruled over by the evil force. Human sin, then, was not so much the human sinning but the power that dominated the human. The cure for it, the Manicheans thought, was the way of knowledge – hence the Gnostic strand in their teaching. Augustine went along with this for nine years and was not quite free of it for longer than that, even after he had pretty much broken with the sect.
Augustine still retained the notion that sin was unavoidable, but now he maintained that the problem lay completely in the human will. The human will was so corrupted that it could do no other than express itself in sin. Augustine wanted to hold humans accountable for their sin. The modern quip, “The Devil made me do it” would not work for Augustine [does it work for anyone?] and he wanted to stress human accountability. [He would later systematize his thinking and come up with the proposal that humans were born with a will so corrupted that it was not possible for them to choose anything but sin. He obviously did not see that the Manichean conclusion and his own both destroyed human accountability.]
In any case, by the time he offered his matured theology he had concluded that every human born was totally committed to evil and altogether opposed to goodness. [This generated serious questions about accountability – “how could people be fairly held accountable for what they never chose to do?] The cure for this total depravity was not knowledge [Augustine had had enough of Manichean doctrine]; a moral miracle had to be wrought by God on the individual, freeing his/her will so that they could/would choose to do good. This, Augustine insisted, was the way the grace of God empowered people. It was not that the powerless sinner learned truth and that that truth freed the will or enabled it; it was that God used the truth to free the will of the person. He does not deny that the truth was a tool God used; he insisted that there was something in addition to the truth, some act of illumination, a regenerating of the mind and will so that the truth could be recognized as truth so that the person could turn to God.
God’s Word was not enough because many heard the Word of God and were not changed. Those who were transformed at the hearing of the Word were transformed because, Augustine believed, God did something in and to them that He refused to do in or for the others. [This raised other issues, of course, such as God’s arbitrariness, His lack of good-will toward those He refused to give illumination to and His unwillingness to save all sinners. This in turn led to “limited atonement” – the notion that Jesus did not die to save all humans but died to save only those God wanted to save. That again led to other proposals.]
The Word of God [Gospel truth] was preached to everyone and it was God’s call to them but only those in whom God worked that moral miracle received an “effective” call. The difference between the general call and the “effective” call was that special empowering which God worked in certain people by His Spirit.
Augustine did not stop to explain the psychology of all that – he simply insisted that God’s empowering was a special added something imbedded in all the tools God uses to save and strengthen His chosen ones. The Gospel preached to the people who refused to believe was the same Gospel preached to those who came to faith but there was something extra in the process – a spiritual enabling. It was more than truth [and all the other elements that attach to truth]; it had an added dynamic that gave his chosen ones power to believe and live to please God.
This is how passages like Ephesians 3:14-21 are characteristically understood in the evangelical world. This next statement is crudely put, but hopefully fairly stated: it is as if God gave a boost of spiritual strength, an infusion of power; as if the Spirit touched our spirits and our spirits got renewed and extra energy; the way the body gets energy when we drink an energy-boosting drink.
But is it true? When believing individuals ask God for power to live more fervently, more devotedly, more purely, more generously, is that what they are asking for – for the Spirit to touch their spirits in some kind of immediate booster, a “direct operation” in addition to all the other elements He uses [like friendship, Bible teaching, godly environment]?
People who already enjoy these blessings from God still find themselves wrestling with besetting sins, still find themselves disappointed at their lack of spiritual maturity and they long for better. So they ask for – what? An immediate injection of Holy Spirit power, something like a spiritual blood-transfusion?
