Idolatry: Both Horizontal and Vertical

I don’t know if I’m right in the following thoughts. These are just some connections I’ve been making in my own mind and blogging seemed to be a good place to lay them out there. As I’ve been reading in Romans 1, the thought occurred to me, the problem with idolatry isn’t just giving allegiance to another deity (bad as that is). The problem of idolatry in Paul’s perspective is that the idols imprison the truth in injustice.

That is, idolatry is the manifestation and cause of a world where both individuals and communities practice injustice against one another and thereby deny the truth of one another’s humanity. It is the manifestation and cause of a world where neither individuals nor communities can challenge or change (or even desire to change) these unjust practices and structures that dehumanize people created in God’s image.

The truth, both on an individual and collective level, becomes imprisoned within the unjust practices and agendas of various human cultural systems. And therefore the truth is not readily obvious – for we have traded what could be known about God for gods made in our own image, gods that will support rather than challenge our unjust hearts and communities.

Wrath then becomes God’s response to human injustice. Wrath is not the unbridled passion of a heartless God. It is the inevitable outcome of a God who values just relationships both on vertical (human to God) and horizontal (human to human) planes. Wrath exists because human injustice is so grave and terrible, and our hearts so apt to imprison the truth in injustice such that we can never see the truth about ourselves or God, that creation itself becomes perverted and inverted.

And this inversion of creation takes us back to idolatry, specifically the collective idolatry of the entire human race. It is an idolatry which perpetuates and is perpetuated by injustice.

Even in the OT, idolatry wasn’t just about the differences between Yahweh and the pagan deities. Rather, in scripture, idolatry always carries with it the practical implications of unethical behavior, specifically blood shed unjustly. In other words, idolatry is both a violation of a person’s vertical relationship with God and also a violation of their horizontal relationship with other persons. When we imprison truth in injustice, this is not just a violation of our relationship with God, but is a violation of our relationships with those created in his image.

Idolatry is thus dehumanization of my neighbor (among other things).

I therefore maintain, that even if one calls on Jesus and then uses the name Jesus to dehumanize another person, or somehow uses Jesus to promote injustice, then that person is participating in idolatry even if they are using the right language. The God of scripture cannot be reduced to my ideological agenda, he will not be shackled to anyone’s unjust causes, and he will not be associated with the dehumanization even of my enemy. Idolatry is, therefore, both a horizontal and a vertical injustice.

 

So, what do you think? Do you have anything to add to this random collection of thoughts? Where have you seen idolatry and injustice combined in obvious ways? How does this change the way we talk about the gospel?

Musings on the Message #8: The Word Made Flesh

Christian preaching is sacramental.

What I mean here by “sacramental” is that when Christian preaching occurs Christ is both proclaimed and proclaiming. Christ is present in the sermon. The sermon is the means by which He is revealed as present to the congregation. Every time Christ is preached people can leave the service announcing that they heard Christ on this day – they heard him preaching.

The preacher and the Word made flesh are brought into a sacramental union during the proclamation in such a way that, though Christ uses the preacher’s voice, it is Christ Himself proclaiming Himself.

But Christ is also in the congregation. The Spirit of Christ dwells within them and when it hears Christ proclaim himself, the Spirit desires to respond and accept the word.

Christ’s presence within the sermon, the preacher, and the congregation is one often overlooked and lost in our homiletical theology and ecclesiology. But without it, I don’t think the sermon is either preachable nor hearable.

In a church world where preaching is reduced to entertainment and audiences are reduced to passive recipients, a sacramental view of preaching provides an avenue by which we can once again begin to take preaching seriously both as speakers and hearers. And more than that, I think it’s another avenue by which preaching can regain a place at the worship table as a necessary aspect of Christian worship – not just a boring afterthought to the cool music.

Preaching is at it’s best when speakers and hearers deem it important to abandon themselves to the Triune God and dwell in His narrative of creation, redemption, and consummation. A narrative proclaimed, embodied (sacramentalized), and given life in the sermon.

Musings on the Message #4: The Participatory Nature of Preaching

Christian preaching is more than a lecture or a speech. Those rhetorical acts can happen with a passive audience. But Christian preaching demands an active audience and an active God because Christian preaching is participatory.

God Participates by Empowering

In preaching, we seek to invite both the Triune God and the congregation of God to participate in the sermon. The Triune God participates through the words of the sermon by empowering the it, the preacher, and the audience to understand better and hear better, and simply believe. Preaching is entirely reliant upon the presence of Christ through the word proclaimed. Without this aspect, Christian preaching ceases to exist and becomes merely a lecture or a speech.

The Participation of the Trinity

The practical implications of such a view of preaching are huge (and have to do with Musing #2). The Trinity is about communion and invitation to participation in the loving, community of God. Preaching naturally, then, lifts the audience into that divine love – the interpersonal love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Triune persons are in continual communion with one another and in love with one another. Their love and communion is poured out onto creation in the proclamation of the crucified messiah. Preaching is an extension of this act of love because it is God’s means of inviting creation to participate in the Triune dance of love.

Audience Participation

The audience is the community of God who, upon hearing the word of God proclaimed, have a deep need to respond. This may take on various forms and the preacher can be creative in eliciting these responses. But in the end, if the sermon does not involve the people of the congregation, that is lift them up to participation in the divine truth being proclaimed, then it is not a Christian sermon. Audience participation in the form of affirmation, especially, is a prerequisite for the sermon to be a sermon instead of merely a lecture or speech.

This may involve a lot of work on the pastor’s part in teaching the congregation how to participate since most congregations seems to be used to sermons that allow them to be passive listeners. Genuinely participatory sermonizing generates a need in the audience to respond, and then provides the mechanism by which that response can be actualized.

Therefore, Christian preaching is participatory in that it is empowered by the Holy Spirit who brings the word to us, it is participatory in that it invites both preacher and audience into the Triune community of self-giving love, and it is participatory in that it brings the audience to a place where they simply must do something with the God set on display in the message.

Musings on the Message #2: Preaching as Trinitarian Sacrament

If Christian preaching is not Trinitarian then it is neither “Christian” nor “preaching.” Christian preaching is from first to last a sacramental revelation of the Triune God revealed as Father, Son, and Spirit. This God existed from all eternity as a community of persons, each distinct, each connected to the other in a loving union. This Trinity of persons provides not only the content of Christian preaching, but also the model for Christian preaching – a model which emphasizes unity, diversity, the necessity of incarnation (an embodied living out of the message preached – ethos), a dwelling within the story of redemption, and overflowing love which humbly and selflessly reaches out to creation and elicits praise to the Father. Without these essential aspects, we do not have Christian preaching. We cannot.

The Triune God heralded in our message has not only created but has also redeemed. A fully Trinitarian theology of preaching cannot separate creation and redemption. For the God who created (Gen. 1), through the Son (Col. 1:15-29) with the assistance of the Spirit (Gen. 1:2) is the same God who redeems and restores the creation through the Son’s death and resurrection, and indwells the believing church in the person of the Holy Spirit. Because creation and redemption of the entire cosmos, not merely individual humans, are the main themes of the biblical narrative pointing to the Triune God, if Christian preaching forgets or ignores these aspects then it will continue to limp along without a sense of purpose outside of entertainment and retrenchment (Clapp, Peculiar People).  Instead of participating with the Triune God in the restoration of all things, preaching will continually misunderstand its role in the modern world, assuming it exists for merely to meet felt needs, but offer little in the way of confrontation with the holy and self-giving Three-in-One God who has made himself and his kingdom a concrete reality in this world. 

Last, it cannot be overstressed that preaching is not only about the Trinity, preaching is a sacramental embodiment of Triune God because it is empowered, enlivened, centered and given its form by the Trinity. By contrast, de-centered preaching is not centered in the active word of God for our unique, concrete contemporary communities. De-centered preaching assumes that the Triune God spoke in the past, but does not do so in our day. Trinitarian preaching, however, understands that the Father works in the present. In the past he enacted the story of redemption by commissioning the Son and the Spirit to work among the church for the world. Through the current work of the Son and the current indwelling of the Spirit, the Father is at work in the world through the preaching, proclaiming church. Only when preaching is contextualized within the larger narrative of Trinitarian doctrine will preaching have anything valuable to communicate to contemporary audience.

A Radical Review: What was Missing: The Final Post

I had two other posts I wanted to include, but I realized that they were really just rants against a particular theological point of view. I figured my time was better spent doing something constructive. So this is the final post in my review of David Platt’s Radical. I hope you have enjoyed the series. You can read them all right here (though you should note they are in reverse order). 

 

What Was Missing

A more robust Trinitarian theology would’ve helped strengthen every single point David Platt made and would’ve kept him from a number of the errors into which he ventures.

Why do Evangelical pastors and theologians assume the Trinity has nothing to contribute to the conversations the church is having about politics, justice, evangelism, and social ethics?

I know this may seem like an abstract question about an abstract doctrine that is better left to the dusty bookshelves of Moltmann, Barth, and Augustine. We figure it’s something those old timers in church history argued about, but who cares about it now? We moderns have more important things to talk about like God’s hatred for sinners and His love for his own self-glorification

 

But the Trinity? We assume, to our own detrmiment, that it’s a doctrine merely for scholastic reflection, but doesn’t really touch down in everyday life.

I want to propose, instead that the Trinity is a necessary prerequisite to understanding what Christians are to do in the contemporary culture and Platt has missed a great opportunity to make his argument much stronger. I want to suggest that the Trinity matters to what we have to say about caring for the poor. I want to argue that we have shot ourselves in the foot in the Abortion debate because we’ve missed the power of the doctrine of God’s Tri-unity to help shape, engage, and live out our beliefs.

And more specifically, I want to argue that the persons of the Trinity provide an Evangelical model for social interaction, and David Platt has walked right past his best theological weapon, not even giving a second thought to it.

The basic rundown is this:The three persons of the Trinity, though distinct from one another, are united in a loving union. This union of perfect love created the world out of an overflow of love – perfect love desires nothing more than to give itself away. When creation fell into sin under the guidance of Adam and Eve, God took His perfect love a step further. Though they did not need to, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit gave themselves up for their enemies. The Son, the most physical example of this, gave up His glory to become a human. He humbled himself even to the point of death, even death on a cross – the most humiliating death in world history. He later, by the power of the Spirit, resurrected from the dead in defeat of death and the forces of evil and chaos in the world. This, in short, is called the gospel and it is from first to last about the Trinity.  It was planned by the Father before the creation of the world, enacted by the Son, and is continued in the church by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.

Now, this is a quick rundown of a complex doctrine. But here’s what we have:

• God’s central character attribute is love. This love was core to his character prior to the creation of the world. Indeed, it was the reason for creation.

• That love was self-less (not self-centered). Each member of the Trinity loved the other members with self-giving love. That self-giving love extended to the creation – and then later to fallen creation. David Platt could argue that in God’s unity the persons loving each other mean that God loves himself. Okay, that’s fine. But the Trinitarian description of such a love moves it into the self-less category, not the selfish category.

• The Triune God’s self-giving love is most clearly exhibited in Jesus. He didn’t just stand aloof to our brokenness and say, “Don’t worry, I love you.” No – he entered into our history, our brokenness and died under it’s weight! The incarnation of Jesus is  the ultimate manifestation of Triune, self-giving love. And that is why it is at the core of our “good news.”

Therefore: If we are to be called the people of the Triune God…

1) We are to be people known for our self-giving love. Our political involvement is not about power and preservation of our comfortable way of life. Our political involvement must be self-giving, humble, and willing to die for those we are in disagreement with. Disagreement is inevitable. But the way we disagree is an indication of whether we are emulating the Triune God or the ways of the world. This is a radical idea. 

2) We are to be people who are willing to love our enemies and others considered ‘unlovable.’ Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Much of our contemporary rhetoric in the political world (I’m thinking here of “Obamanation”) is filled with hatred and vitriol and has no redeemable quality to it. We may need to criticize certain political stances, but demonizing people is not the way of the God who exhibits love to the entire world by being crucified by the world! This is a radical idea. 

3) The love of the Triune God is not abstract. It is concrete in its expression – we must enter into someone’s life in order to let them know that they are loved. Indeed, we must be willing to die for them and their brokenness. Paul tells us, in his poetic description of love in I Cor. 13, that it does not matter if we have all knowledge (read: truth) if we do not have love! And that love gets it’s hands dirty. That love doesn’t just stand back and proclaim truth – it necessarily embodies the truth! Like Jesus, that kind of love is truth “in the flesh.” This is a radical idea. 

The Trinity matters to truly radical living. It is only in modeling our ministries after Triune, self-giving love that we can ever truly live radical lives. 

This doctrine isn’t for dusty books and obscure academic journals. It’s for the everyday life of people struggling to bring God’s kingdom to earth. It’s for people who are looking for serious alternatives to American Dream living, for people trying to navigate the moral morass that is the the suburbs. The Trinity provides an alternative model for those of us looking to engage this world with the gospel, not just make it endurable until we can get to heaven.

Platt wanted to call us to mission. The Father sent the Son to die and rise and the Spirit to empower and indwell; is there a better understanding of mission than that?

Platt wanted to call us to social justice. Is there a better example of seeking justice on a systemic level than Jesus, who was sent from the just and good Father to challenge (political and religious) systems of oppression and injustice that marginalized and dehumanized the first century poor?

Platt wanted us to preach the gospel. Is there a better place to begin sharing the gospel than with the Father who loved the Son so much that their love poured out onto a broken creation when Jesus took on human flesh? The incarnation wasn’t just something the Father and Jesus decided to do one day. It is the natural overflow of their mutual love for one another! The gospel begins there and only there.

All of this was missing from Platt’s book. And all of his good points (and some of his not-good points) could’ve been made stronger by building on this beautiful, mysterious, and, yes, accessible doctrine.

Review complete. Mischief managed.

 

 

Receive the Spirit? What Spirit? Huh?

Reading through the book of Galatians the other day, I came across this interesting question Paul asks in 3:2:

I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?

Now, Paul’s larger concern here is that this church not be deceived into thinking their salvation or sanctification has anything to do with obedience to the law. They did not enter covenant with Jesus Christ, nor are they sustained in that covenant, because they were/are circumcised.

But the thing that caught my attention in this question has little to do with that larger theological discussion he’s having. Rather, it’s the one he’s NOT having…the one he’s assuming…the one even the Galatians are assuming: That the Spirit’s activity and dwelling among the Galatian church is an objective reality.

When Paul asks this question about the Spirit, his assumption is that the answer will come back unanimously, “by believing what we heard.”

In other words, both Paul and the Galatians are assuming the objective reality of the Spirit in their midst. It is so objective that it is assumed.

This is quite the contrast to the present day church. If someone were to ask the American church, “Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?” we would probably say, “Receive the Spirit? What Spirit? Huh?”

I’m not sure that I have anything theologically profound to say here. I’m in awe of the Spirit’s obvious manifestation to the Galatian church and Paul. And I feel a bit of sorrow that such a manifestation is not nearly as objective in my life…and that so many of us would feel the same way I do.

I would like to be clear here, though. I DON’T think the seeming lack of objective movement by the Spirit in our midst is because we don’t believe the gospel as much as the Galatians did. In fact, quite the contrary, Paul’s problem with the Galatians here is that they don’t believe it like they should…they’ve abandoned it. And yet, even in the midst of it, he can still appeal to the objective reality of the Spirit in their midst.

So why does it seem so different with us? Is the Spirit an objective reality in your life? Your church?

Why the Worship Wars Miss the Point

A few months ago I interviewed for an Associate Pastor position at a wonderful church with wonderful people. The only problem, really, was that they were fixated on a particular style of worship. When they asked me about my preferred style of worship I told them I basically think the Worship Wars miss the point altogether.

You see, for me, I am much more concerned with what worship does and says than any particular style.

What if the worship wars have missed the point? What if our preferences and our distastes don’t matter at all? What if worship is not primarily about us, or is only about us in a secondary sense?

I have heard people say that they “can’t worship” to this particular style or that particular style of music. But what if such people miss the point because they assume that worship must arise from within them? What if our acts of worship are prompted, not by the sounds of drums, organs or inner, subjective feelings, but by the living God who through the Holy Spirit draws us to Himself? In other words, what if worship isn’t even primarily our act to honor God, but God’s prior activity whereby He moves first, through the Holy Spirit, in the lives of believers to offer praise? What if He is the first cause in the church’s worship?

And what if worship means something to the world outside these four walls…say, in the political sphere? What if worship is the church acknowledging and announcing that it is the risen Jesus Christ who is king, not an earthly ruler; it is Jesus Christ who is sovereign, not any nation or state? If this is the case, worship is both the honoring of God for who He is and the calling of the nations to repentance in acknowledgment that Jesus Christ is the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all human life.

These are the first of many reasons why the worship wars have missed the point. God in all His fullness, seeks to creatively call the nations to acknowledge who He is, and challenge the church to greater faithfulness to His image. But He is the primary Actor, He is the one who provokes our worship; it does not arise from within us because we bring nothing worth offering on our own anyway.

Very few worship services actually accomplish these things. It may require a great deal of imagination and humility on our part as the church – the worshipping community, but I want this to be the first* word in a very long discussion on the meaning of worship. Our preferred worship style, then, is not guitar vs. organ, but is worship that, arising out of the promptings of the Holy Spirit, seeks doxological excellence, honors the Triune God for who He is and what He’s done, and calls the nations to submit to Him.

                       

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*Yes, I do know that this isn’t the ‘first’ word, many have written on it before and have done so more eloquently than I am. But for many readers, this may be the first time they’ve heard such an idea, because they go to churches who pride themselves on the Contemporary vs. Traditional debate. I want to challenge them to think beyond this dichotomy an imagine an alternative possibility.

Rethinking Sabbath: Abide in Me

For many Christians, their understanding of the Sabbath is limited to it being “a day of rest.” This is really unfortunate because, though it is certainly a day of rest, it is so much more than that.  Partially this misunderstanding is because by ‘rest’ most of us mean a day of relaxation and leisure. But biblically speaking, Sabbath is much more than mere relaxation and leisure.

Sabbath is a weekly reminder that we are not what we do, a weekly reminder to us that we are created by God (see the first Sabbath in Genesis 1!) and that our value is in that reality, not in the reality of a 40 hr. work week or  in what we produce. Our value is not in what we do “for a living” (as if “living” is encapsulated in a large 401k!). Our value is not in the amount of money we make. Our value is not in our contributions to society. Our value is solely and completely found in the fact that we are created in God’s image!

The weekly Sabbath is a reminder, in the midst of a hectic work week filled with schedules, deadlines, bills to pay, food to be put on the table, and chores to be finished that these things ultimately do not give us our identity. Sabbath is a weekly ritual that reminds us to just “be” who we are in God instead of being consumed with what others want us to “do.”

Sabbath is not about having one more thing to do. Sabbath is about finding our identity in the One who created us to rest in Him, not in our toils and labors. Sabbath is about seeing our own worth within the larger story of the God who created and redeemed us, not in the myth of a big paycheck or loaded billfold. Sabbath reminds me that my toils mean nothing, but my residing and abiding in God mean everything!

You see, when Christians find their identity primarily in what they do, then it is easy from there to hold contempt in our hearts for those who don’t “do” as much…those who are unemployed, those who are disabled, those on welfare, or stay-at-home moms (or dads). This leads to pride and arrogance because it assumes that “because I work I am more valuable to society and God than that person who doesn’t.”

But, you see, God does not see it that way. He does not find the most value in those who do the most for Him or for the nations. God finds the most value in the one who sits at His feet and abides, rests, and dwells with Him. Sure, this will produce “doing,” but it would be a mistake to assume that our value is attached to doing.

Sabbath is much more than about leisure. It’s much more than about attending worship services. It is much more than pot-lucks and Blue Laws. Sabbath is about resting in the God who created and redeemed us. It is about ceasing our labor for a single day each week to remind ourselves that our identity is not in the work week, but in the wonderful God who became incarnate in Jesus and now indwells us by His Spirit.

God as Father: Rethinking the Proximity of God

During college I was completely convinced that people need first and foremost to hear about their sin and their depravity. My conviction was that we have a Christian culture too comfortable with God as “Father” and this coziness with the Father metaphor, I believed, led to lax ethical standards and an assumption that God is closer to Santa Claus than a wholly transcendent (removed) “Other.”

Today, I am not convinced that this conclusion is entirely off base. However, I am increasingly convinced that it is not entirely correct either. I believe this appealed more to my Calvinistic leanings which tended more toward seeing God as so transcendent and Other that immanence (closeness/intimacy) is almost beyond Him.

I want to suggest here that this over-emphasized image of a transcendent (removed) Father is actually hurtful in our culture. While it is important to maintain the transcendence of God, we live in a culture that experientially knows fathers as absent and removed from their children. Even fathers who are in the same home as their children are often mentally removed – thinking always of work, sports, or finances. They are there physically, but really there are anywhere but “there.”*

I’m not saying Christians should avoid discussion of sin or references to God as transcendent. I’m merely saying that we live in a culture which understands the brokenness of the world (the old notions of moral, spiritual, and material progress are nearly gone in the postmodern world), and the absence of father figures. No doubt, this brokenness needs a theological context, but that is to build people up in God’s great mercy, not to tear them down  in violent fear of Him.

Because I am no longer convinced that we are cozy with the metaphor of God’s fatherhood I am convinced that we need a renewed interested in the immanence (closeness) of God. Because I’m convinced that we simply do not understand what it means for God to be our Father, we need a renewing of our teaching/understanding of the Trinity, what it means to be “in Christ,” and the Spirits indwelling  work within us. A recovery of the transcendent necessitates a recovery of the immanent – both are at stake.

Rather than forsaking (in a reactionary theological move) the immanence of God, as some new-Calvinists and even Arminians have done, we need a reawakening, a re-defining of the immanent, close, and inviting Fatherhood of God. Jesus’ prayers to the Father were not cheap and neither do ours have to be. “Our father in heaven”. The immanence and transcendence of our God are both magnified in this statement. They are NOT held in tension – they are both accepted in their fullness. To understand God as transcendent we must understand Him as immanent. And to understand Him as immanent we must understand Him as transcendent. I’m not calling for balance – I’m calling for full realization of both un-opposing realities.

We need a re-awakening of our notions of God as Father in a world with absent, abusive, and faulty fathers. Fathers are both transcendent and immanent, which is why the metaphor works so well.

*And this doesn’t even take into account those who grow up with abusive fathers. It occurred to me recently that maybe some of these people  have no problem with the wrath and violence of God because their own fathers were wrathful and violent. Their image of God, then might really be a perpetuation of a familial cycle of violence – they have found their identity in someone who abuses them and now they look for that same attention from God. They know of no other way to relate to father-figures.

The Spirit is Not the Marlboro Man

The Enlightenment, autonomous individual, that rugged, Marlboro man who needs nothing but his own cigarettes and skepticism, has fallen on tough times. To some extent[1] Postmodernity is the driving force of decay, falsifying our sense of self and reviving the idea that humans find their truest identity within community. I’m skeptical of what kind of community can ultimately be produced under a postmodern worldview, but whatever the case we can at least rejoice in the resurgence of the old axiom, “No man is an island.”

 

So it is with the Spirit: The Spirit of God is not an autonomous self. The Spirit finds identity within two communities: The community of the Trinity and the community of Ecclesia – the church. Ever longing to bring these two communities into union, the Spirit actively comes forth from the Father in wooing joy, enjoining the church to greater participation in the divine nature.

 

Trinitarian Community

The biblical picture of the Spirit is divine power and life. Within the Trinitarian community, the Spirit as power and life is the means by which the persons of the Trinity love one another. In Augustine’s terms, as cited earlier, the Spirit is the “bond of love” within the Trinitarian dance.

 

As the bond of love, the Spirit is seen here in terms of relationality. The Spirit relates to and submits to the other persons of the Trinity without losing individuality and identity. The community is not forced upon the Spirit in the sense of overshadowing the Spirit as an individual person. But neither is the individual person of the Spirit the primary concern overriding the community. Within the Trinitarian community there is a dance of love whereby each member sacrificially loves the others and places the others above themselves. This is essential to the nature of God and therefore to the nature of the Spirit.

 

Community of Ecclesia[2]

The Spirit is not restricted to heavenly relationships, but has willfully and ecstatically chosen to participate in the human community we call the church.[3] “Spirit brings persons together in heaven and on earth, being both the medium of the communication of Jesus with the Father and the medium of our communication with brothers and sisters.”[4]

 

The Spirit is the bond of love between the church and her savior. She sweeps the church up in her arms, carrying us to the Father, urging us to further sanctification, and all the while liberally lavishing on us the love of our Lord.

 

Yet the Spirit is not merely a force pushing us to God; the Spirit leads us with a chord of gentleness and compassion, convicting us when we fall behind, bestowing grace on us when we fail, and grieving with us when we mourn.

 

Furthermore, the relationship of the Spirit to the church is not just vertically oriented. The Spirit moves us to further union with our brothers and sisters in Christ. The Spirit works amongst Calvinists and Arminians, Complementarians and Egalitarians precisely because none of these systems can fully conceptualize Ruach. The wind cannot be constrained in our canisters of theological conjecture.  

 

The love of the Trinitarian community was perfect before the Creation. Yet that perfect love desired (did not need) someone to share its love with. God created humanity and called out Israel and then the church as the object of His affection. God desires to draw us, through the Spirit, into that Trinitarian dance of love whereby there is mutual submission and communion. The Spirit is the church’s answer to its individualism and self-focus by wooing us to participation in Trinitarian love. We were “created in the first place to reflect God’s own perfection, and [our] destiny is to participate in the very life of God.”[5]

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[1] I qualify this statement because there are aspects of Postmodernity which cling ferociously to the myth of the autonomous individual. So, it is neither the final answer nor is it the only challenge to individualism.

[2] I hope to expand on these thoughts later, so excuse what is left out in this brief rundown.

[3] Let me add at this point that I do not think the Spirit is restricted to Ecclesia either. But I will spell that out in a later post.

[4] Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love. 39.

[5] Pinnock, 41.