In the last post I developed the idea of flesh/spirit, particularly from the angle of eschatology. To understanding the Spirit biblically, it must be considered in light of eschatology because the Spirit is the life and power of the age to come. The Spirit is not simply a force or power, but a person who is drawing the entire created order towards God’s future, renewing life and overcoming the powers of death and disorder. Understanding what the “flesh” is, has extremely practical implications for the life of faith and the orientation of one’s focus with regard to sanctification.We all know the “flesh” is bad and we should be against it, therefore the identification of this enemy is crucial in warring against it. In the last post I employed the methodology that we start with the solution and then explicate the problem rather than vice versa. Instead of beginning with a description of the flesh, we first described the nature of the Spirit and then were able to discern the contours of our enemy “the flesh.” In that post we looked at the Spirit through the lens of eschatology. Now we will look at the Spirit through the lens of the Trinity and seek to explicate “the flesh” from that perspective.

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that God’s own being resides in the inter-relations between Father, Son and Spirit. The foundational underlying reality of God’s being is not the individual persons of the Godhead, but their communion of love with each other. Since humans are made in God’s image, this tells us that contrary to Boethius, the “basic atomic reality of humanity,” the essential indivisible constituency of humanity is not the individual, but the community. The existence of the community is ontologically and biologically prior to the individual. Our true humanity is only expressed, not as individuals, but as persons in loving relationship. This illuminates the fundamental characteristic of holiness – perfect love. The holy person is the person who loves in relationships. Notions of holiness cannot be abstract, detached or impersonal. Rather, they must be concrete, involved and relational.

The Trinitarian understanding of human relationality also illuminates the negative dimensions of human existence that holiness and sanctification seek to overcome. Sin is often understood as either “pride” or alternatively “self-centeredness.” Advocates of both views often claim Augustinian grounding. Some see understanding “self-centeredness” as an improvement over “pride” in that it is rooted in a Trinitarian theology of love. Sin is disordered and inwardly focused love rather than simply pride. The phronema tes sarkos, the “mindset of the flesh” is thus understood as a “self-centered mind-set” or “mind set purely on human goals and values.” The problem with humanity is that it is inwardly bent in pursuit of self-sovereignty, self-glorification, self-promotion, self-sufficiency, self-importance and self-gratification.

However, what the doctrine of the Trinity tells us is that we cannot allow the individual to be the fundamental unit of reality. Thus our foundational concepts of sin and depravity cannot be at center individualistic. Sin and the flesh cannot be confined to the isolated disorder of the individual. They cannot solely be understood or explicated in terms of self-centeredness. They cannot be explained only with reference to the self if it is truly impossible to rescind one’s relational nature. As long as one exists in relationship, others are involved. Therefore the nature of sin and the disordered motivation of the flesh are better viewed as an active anti-love or even hatred towards others. One’s attitudes towards one’s self and the actions of one’s self always involve others in the form of their presence or absence.

Self-sovereignty always means other-subjugating. Self-glorification always means other de-valuing. Self- promotion always means other-diminishing. Self-sufficiency always means other-rejection. Pursuit of self-importance always means other-insignificance. Misbegotten self-gratification always entails the utilitarian exploitation of others or the refusal to be generous to others. The sin of “self” is in fact not merely the “sin of self.” It must always be interpreted and articulated in the light of the relationality that one fails to exist without. Hence, these self-bending sins are all in fact forms of anti-love, or even hatred.

This demonstrates that the application of the centrality of relationality to harmartiology (the doctrine of sin) does not “reduce” a concept of sin. Humans are not in fact indicted for “selfishness” alone but for various forms of hatred and violence against others. The concept of sin through the doctrine of the Trinity seems to actually radicalize the doctrine of sin. This furthermore necessitates that any solution to the notion of sin, as manifested in a form of positive holiness and sanctification, must radically address that while humans have an insatiable craving for relationship and an instinctual urge to abscond their unavoidable sense of loneliness, they simultaneously possess an, at times insidious and at times unambiguous, fear, aversion and hostility towards the very thing they crave.

Related posts

• The Person and History of the Holy Spirit Part 2: Trinitarian Ecstasy (0)
• The Person and History of the Holy Spirit Part 2: Trinitarian Ecstasy (cont.) (0)
• We’ve Been Unbabeled – When the Day of Pentecost Had Fully Come (Part 2) (1)
• The Ability to Love is Within Each of Us (0)
• Spirit and Flesh – Part 1 (1)

12: No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us…
16b: God is love, and  whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

13: By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

In verses twelve and sixteen love brings forth the abiding of God. In verse thirteen, the Spirit takes that role. In fact, in either verse, Spirit and love seem virtually interchangeable.  Paul adds an additional insight when he adds that “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5.5)

Altogether, we see that “the gift of God is the Holy Spirit. The gift of God is love. God communicates himself in the Holy Spirit as love.” The Holy Spirit is Love itself. “The basic and central meaning of what the Holy Spirit is and what he effects is ultimately not “knowledge” but love.”

What sets the Holy Spirit apart, that is, what makes the Spirit Holy, His set-apart-ness is love. This gives us a crucial window into the “wholly otherness of God.” God’s holiness, his transcendence is not abstractly manifest apophatically, but concretely in love and relationship.

Apophatic theology refers to a theological method in which God’s nature is expressed through negations. Because God is infinite and uncreated any actual description would be false. Examples include:

• Self-existence – God’s existence is un-derived
• Self-sufficiency – God’s existence is non-dependent
• Eternity understood as a-temporality (timelessness)
• Infinitude – without limits
• Simplicity – God is in-divisible
• Immutability – without change
• Immovability – without movement, unable to be moved
• Omnipresence – in-definable by any of our concepts of space and location

This passage indicates to us that God’s transcendence, specifically the holiness of the Spirit is not primarily to be found it negative descriptions of God, but in love. Love forms the foundation of a cataphatic theology, in which we can truly make affirmations about a God whose essential nature is relationship. His essential nature is not difference. Such would be impossible. Neither is the most we can say about God that which concerns difference. Such would make him utterly unknowable.

Certain theologians throughout history have only been confident about understanding God through the negations of all we know (matter, earth, time, space, even ourselves). Understanding God in the fellowship of the Spirit, the Spirit who is love (indeed the God who is love), we can be confident in affirmations about a God who has made himself known beyond the difference that exists between us.

Related posts

• The Person and History of the Holy Spirit Part 2: Trinitarian Ecstasy (0)
• Spirit and Flesh Part 2 (2)
• We’ve Been Unbabeled – When the Day of Pentecost Had Fully Come (Part 2) (1)
• The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God – IHOP Outpouring/IHOPU Awakening (2)
• The Ability to Love is Within Each of Us (0)

Last time I began discussing the need to understand spirituality, the present activity of the Spirit in our lives, through a Biblical understanding of the person of the Holy Spirit as revealed in his primary roles in history. Through looking at the history of the Holy Spirit we hope to learn about the person of the Holy Spirit. By this route we hope to more clearly understand spirituality via pneumatology (the doctrine of the Holy Spirit).

Our study of the Holy Spirit’s history must find its initial bearings in the infinite and eternal Fellowship of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit comes to us ever only as one of the distinct but inseparable persons of the triune God. Everything we understand and express about the Holy Spirit must have its foundation on the revelation of the Trinity, the God who has not, does not and will not exist apart from relationship. One of the most fundamental articulations we can make concerning the Spirit is that forever He has and will be a member of the most deeply enjoyable, poignantly loving and profoundly ecstatic communities of persons in existence. This is the chronological starting point for understanding the Spirit’s person and work, since before the world was born the Spirit possessed eternal pre-existence. In this pre-existence, the Spirit’s primary occupation was the enjoyment of the intra-trinitarian relationships.

2 Corinthians 13.14 – “May the grace of the Lord Jesus the Messiah, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

In this verse it is curious as to why fellowship is specially linked with the Spirit, while grace with the Messiah and love with the Father. It seems that the Spirit’s unique role and offering in redemption is fellowship, koinonia. This fellowship is a deep interpersonal sharing, the participation of one person in the life of another. Koinonia is shared life.

What is the fellowship that the Spirit gives? The fellowship of believers with himself? The Spirit’s fellowship in the Trinity? Fellowship between all believers? It is difficult to know with certainty if only one of these is intended. It seems that the Spirit both gives and forges community by his presence and also brings people into fellowship with Himself.

If the Spirit does not only bring people into fellowship, but is himself a participant in the community he creates, and he himself becomes their sharing in each other, then fellowship is not simply something the spirit gives, it is something he himself is. Fellowship is the Spirit’s own elemental nature. The fellowship is truly the fellowship of the Spirit.

The Spirit only exists as part of the Trinitarian relations with the Father and the Son. There the Spirit is fully engaged in an eternal movement of vibrant delight, love and self-giving. It is out of that fellowship that the Spirit is sent forth and it is in correspondence to that fellowship that the Spirit fashions fellowship with and amongst believers. The Spirit proceeds from the triune life of relationality and opens that fellowship for human beings to participate in.

This fellowship is “with you all.” This means that it is a dynamically open fellowship. Despite the many problems and difficulties that existed in the Corinthian community, all were invited to participate in the triune life of God. All were invited to partake of a shared life together with each other and God.

Here we learn that first and foremost, the Holy Spirit operates in and for relationship. Our first consideration in any present interpretation of the Spirit and its activity must take into account its eternal occupation and preoccupation. Ever and always the Spirit is consumed in love, receiving, giving, fashioning and forming relationships of deep and intimate affection.

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• The Person and History of the Holy Spirit Part 2: Trinitarian Ecstasy (cont.) (0)
• Spirit and Flesh Part 2 (2)
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• God is with us – When the Day of Pentecost Had Fully Come (Part 3) (0)
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For about the past five or six years, one of my passions has been studying the subject of the gladness of God’s heart – that he is not mostly mad or mostly sad, but is indeed mostly glad. He smiles much more than He frowns. In fact, His radiant gladness is inexhaustible, flowing from the infinitely enjoyable relationships He (Father, Son and Spirit) shares in the Fellowship of the Trinity. The reason why I been so passionate about this subject is because I have experienced how powerful it is in my personal life. The more I have set my heart to study, meditate on, and behold His gladness, I have found my heart increasingly falling in love with God, enjoying Him to a greater measure, experiencing feelings more deeply, being more inwardly stable and centered and moving more freely in love toward others. It has been a remarkable journey and I know I’m not finished yet. I am excited about what another five years, and 10, 20, 30 years beyond that will do to my heart as I enjoy the happy God.

As I have explored this subject, I have been compiling a list of every verse in the Bible which I have found to relate to the subject. Some of course are more clearer and significant that others, but regardless, I included everything I could find. I currently have 551 verses and counting. I have split them into two lists – one of verses that explicitly refer to God’s happiness and another with verses that imply his joy. I’ve posted both of them on the Resources page, along with some of my thoughts on the gladness of God in the fellowship of the Trinity. I invite you to check them out and let me know if you find them helpful or if you find any more verses!

Related posts

• The Person and History of the Holy Spirit Part 2: Trinitarian Ecstasy (cont.) (0)
• The Person and History of the Holy Spirit Part 2: Trinitarian Ecstasy (0)
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