THE COMMUNION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

MILDRED BANGS WYNKOOP, Ph.D.
(Professor, Bible and Theology, Trevecca Nazarene College)

I. Introduction

The Holy Spirit was the solution to the key problems of the early church, both practical and theological, not an added difficulty for faith to hurdle. Everything the Holy Spirit is and does contributes understanding and meaningful communication relative to divine revelation and to every step in the progress of redemption in the practical lives of men. He is the solution to the problem of personality in God and man. He sheds light on the Trinity. His work preserves theology from abstraction and salvation from becoming discrete from the most intimate details of daily life. Without Him rationalism or mysticism prevails in theology and life. With Him divine revelation remains dynamic and relevant, and God is dynamic and man is a rational creature.

A doctrine of the Holy Spirit is too often regarded as speculative, or as abstract and hence good only for sentimental and pious readers.

"One ought to honor the Holy Spirit," it is said. And when the verbal honor is accorded the doctrine is hung up among other holy relics to be forgotten because it is "so impractical" and even dangerous. It is dangerous, it is said, because it deals with subjective things which can be disruptive to right thinking and life. The Holy Spirit is objectified by identifying Him with the words of Scripture. He is imprisoned in a book. Or He is given a sort of extra-personal character, as a power that pushes men's wills into line against their own objection.

But of all the doctrines of the church we believe that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the least abstract and impractical. It is precisely the Holy Spirit that makes all Christian doctrine practical and relative to life. This is because the Holy Spirit personalizes all Christian truth. The Holy Spirit explains the trinity rather than obscures the meaning of it. The Holy Spirit personalizes the historical Christ and universalizes Him. He pulls together all the tag ends of truth and right into one consistent whole. His name is fellowship and His nature, communion. Nothing is less abstract. Philosophically, He is ultimate Truth; religiously, He is moral purity and wholeness; theologically, He is the universal spirit; and to a Christian He is spiritual life and continuity. Theology is itself abstract without the Holy Spirit who cannot be separated from the whole of existence and will not permit Himself to be so abstracted.

We shall develop our thesis along three lines; (1) The Holy Spirit and the nature of personality, (2) the relation of Jesus to the Holy Spirit, and (3) the relation of the Holy Spirit to humanity.

II. The Holy Spirit and Personality

Philosophy has always had trouble with a concept of God. To be God, or the Ultimate Being, uniqueness, singularity, oneness, is demanded by thought. A plurality of Gods simply negates the idea of God. The idea of oneness carried to its logical conclusion inevitably ends in Something actually impersonal, an Ultimate Mover, or a Universal Mind which lacks moral quality. God may be the Wholly Other of Neo Platonism, or Spinoza's immanent orderliness of the earth as God's body. He may be the All of Christian Science or the developing deity of Alexander's system. He could be a finite God struggling to overcome an internal reluctance, or the universal memory into which all experience is poured and preserved. He could be the elan vital or creativity, or the magnificent but blind power back of the scientist's universe. But philosophical gods fade off into abstractions and lose that peculiar quality necessary to godness which we know as personality. Personality is the despair of the philosopher.

It is difficult to attribute intelligence to the god of philosophy and impossible to make him the locus of moral integrity. Personality requires the concept of rationality and morality but these things cannot have significance. outside of community, and since uniqueness cancels out the social contest the problem is insoluble.

Very simply put the problem is this: how can the social dimensions of personality so essential to intelligence and morality be consistent with the singularity of God? The Holy Spirit is the answer to this problem. He changes logic to personality and mechanism to moral freedom.

May it be suggested that the hard core of the problem may arise from our conception of personality? We tend to absolutes our limited ideas and project them into infinity and call our projection "God". Our current ideas of personality then dominate the idea of God and determine orthodoxy. The Biblical idea, says Alan Richardson (in An Introduction to The Theology of the New Testament, p. 103ff), is never confused by our modern concept "of distinct personalities, hard and impermeable, each sharply distinguished from the others." Rather, persons "flow into one another." This never means a loss of identity but an overlapping of mutual concerns so that a man lives in his sons, or he may receive the spirit of another and in some sense be that other man. Our Western individualism tends to create a problem relative to the trinity that is not necessarily in the fact of the tri-personal nature of God. Rather than to try to understand the philosophical formulae, "three subsistences in one substance, or essence" on the basis of our knowledge of personality it is better to let the revelation of the nature of God tell us something about personality.

Personality is congenial to community and may itself be essentially community. H. Orton Wiley makes a major point of the trinal nature of human self-consciousness. (1) We have a self, (2) that knows, and (3) that knows that it knows. This self, then, is capable of intracommunion or "communing with one's self," which makes it possible to make rational decisions, not simply impulsive and irresponsible actions. This self, also, finds its true identity in responsible relationship to other selves. This indicates both an inner and external involvement in a social context that helps us to understand what revelation tells us about God.

The social nature is the first (logical) step away from mechanistic determinism and into moral freedom. It is important to an understanding of the Christian God because precisely at this point a truly personal concept marks the boundary against the blind, causal, deterministic Power of philosophy's god. The Bible never falters in its concept of deity. In Genesis the God of creation meets us after a council session in which the decision, "Let us make," is the verdict. Nor can this be construed as polytheism. That later declaration that "God is love," is simply an elaboration and characterization of the nature of God as a social being. There is one God. says the Bible, but God is a Divine Society.

An illustration may help. If we say that "God loves" apart from the more fundamental thing, "God is love", we run into the danger of making God's godness a causal and mechanistic factor in the universe. A childless couple needed a baby in the home to complete the demands of full community and fellowship. After all too many years a child was adopted and brought into the circle where the undisciplined parental "need" to love something focused on the child and became a destructive thing to all concerned. The unfulfilled urge for parenthood became an undiscriminating demand without moral guards. The child received attention without responsibility for a suitable response to the parents. He was "spoiled" and later delinquent according to cultural behavior patterns.

On the other hand my grandparents had twelve children. Everything love is was completed and experienced in the family circle. They did not need the unhappy orphan child down the road to complete the inner demands of fellowship. But the orphan needed them. So the happy family opened its arms to the outsider and offered to take it into the fellowship. Acceptance or rejection on the part of the child would not and could not add or subtract anything essential to the love within the home. His response reacts back on himself, either as an enlarged heart or as bitter self-destruction. Perhaps this can suggest something of the meaning of "God is love," and the way He can love men without loss of moral integrity in Himself or in men.

Community is essential to love. Love is the pouring forth of the self in-to the selves of others. It is mutuality. It is self-identity accepting the identity of others in communion. There is something in the word "togetherness" that helps. It is not one will in domination over other wills, but individual wills, willing to will in harmony. All of this defines personality, and rationality and is the very essence of moral integrity under terms of freedom. In some way these elements are inherent in the Godhead and it is the Holy Spirit that preserves the nature of God from a Tyranny to a Personality. God is not under bondage to the mechanistic and logical necessities of philosophical absolutism but is free and truly moral and in the best sense a Person because of the atmosphere of community contributed by the Holy Spirit.

It must be stressed that the atmosphere in this relationship is a voluntary and deliberate dedication of each to a center of devotion not marred by self-interest or policy or shadowed by the smallest area of inner resistance. It is integrity, and integrity has no meaning in the context of coercion or necessity, nor does it have meaning where there are no alternative choices possible or where there are no other selves with wills to be respected. Holiness in God is defined by this integrity. Holiness cannot inhere in impersonal substance. It is meaningful only in personality where all the responsible elements responsibly will a harmony of purpose. It is not quite true to say that holiness is one of God's attributes. It is more true to say that God is holy and holiness characterizes all the attributes.

It is, then, the Holy Spirit that helps us to understand moral freedom in the relationships of persons. The Holy Spirit is the very epitome of what personality is in its uniqueness as a responsible and rational and moral entity. He stands squarely in the place where abstract thinking could is-sue into determinism even in God, and He forces responsible personal identity and the relationship of persons on the basis of principle not necessity. In one way the Holy Spirit shatters formal logic because He is so personal. In another way He guards the moral orderliness of the universe because He is holy and by that is meant, integrity of person, purpose and action. In any case He preserves the Logos from impersonality and insures the moral qualities necessary to personality.

Now, all of this is apropos to the nature of human personality. The creation of other personalities was a free expression of love on the part of the "Divine Society". God said, "Let us make man in our own image." God did not need man, He opened His heart to the kind of person that could enter into and enjoy the kind of love that exists in Himself. He made mankind to need that kind of love - that is what personality means. It is altogether proper to say, we believe, that man was never intended to exist apart from the fellowship of the God-head. In that fellowship was true self-realization. In it was holiness because of the proper relationship to God by the presence of the Holy Spirit. But the very nature of that fellowship and holiness demanded a free and wholly individual choice. Mechanistic necessity arising out of created possibility and inherent need must be individually personalized by responsible choice to come into true ethical holiness. Created holiness had no ethical quality until the inner moral choice was made in the presence of alternatives.

The Holy Spirit, then, not only explains personality in God but also in man. He who permeates the God-head with moral freedom and fellowship, which is the essence of love, also permeates the human spirit, enlightening it by truth and compelling decision on the basis of truth and in the presence of a proper decision sheds the love of God abroad in the human heart (Rom. 5:1). Paul's dictum, "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (II Cor. 3:17), speaks to this point. When a man "turns to the Lord," the Spirit creates the atmosphere of liberty in him, whereby he is changed from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord. The alternative is moral blindness. One is the fulfillment of created potential, the other is destruction of the self.

The only normal person, then, is the one in whom the Holy Spirit dwells on the invitation and full cooperation of the self. No man can know himself apart from this indwelling. The apparatus is intact, in fallen man, but the light is out. The will operates but self-destructively. The love impulse which defines personality becomes lust. To break fellowship with God, forfeits the Holy Spirit and were it not for the grace of God, the integrity of rationality and personality would be lost. Men are no longer persons apart from the Holy Spirit. This is not an assertion about the linear dimension of conscious existence, but about the quality that makes a conscious being a person.

III. The Relation of Jesus to the Holy Spirit

The work of Christ was to end the estrangement between God and man and to make the progress "from glory to glory" again a possibility. Justification could never be enough and forgiveness is but one factor in the total purpose. Man could not reach up and demand reinstatement in the fellowship. Only those in the fellowship could extend the privilege again by taking up the hurt and injustice in themselves and offering forgiveness freely. This reinstatement was not a simple thing. If we are to understand the atonement in a wholly objective sense we will not be able to bring the complex events relative to it and the strong moral teaching in the Scriptures into a significant whole. Easy answers leave too many ragged edges for serious thinking.

The work which atonement (and we use this word in the popular theological sense, not necessarily in the Biblical way; atonement being but one aspect of the work of Christ) had to do with the drawing together of two worlds of persons estranged by sin. This drawing together was not spacial, i.e., God's sustaining, creative presence cannot be withdrawn if men continue to exist. It was the reestablishment of a moral order, a fellowship, a spiritual rapport. This could not be accomplished by a one-sided readjustment either on man's part or on God's side. The thing that had to be done would involve both sides to the core of their beings. Only this can account for Biblical teaching. The hard truth seems to be that God could not, in the nature of the case, force His fellowship upon sinners, by election or by decree or by some subrational "supernatural" work in the soul.

What did happen? God opened His arms to receive sinners, to take them back into fellowship. Fellowship is only by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit cannot by-pass moral conditions. He is precisely the essence of moral responsibility and moral integrity. How then could the fellowship of integrity be reestablished with men who were evil? By way of the Second Person of the God-head who could and would assume human nature and a body and who would in this way bring back into the race the fulness of the Spirit which dwelt in Him without measure. Here was a New. Man heading a New Race of men with a very old principle of belonging - love, moral integrity, fellowship.

John the Baptist foresaw this when he said that Christ would baptize with the Holy Spirit. Jesus saw prayer as ultimately a communion with God by the Holy Spirit (as already indicated by the Lukan passage). He pointed urgently to the day when the disciples would be filled with the Spirit. The "high-priestly" prayer (John 17) though not speaking by name of the Holy Spirit, was a petition in respect of believers for the fellowship, oneness and communion with God that is the thing for which He died and which was only to be experienced as the Holy Spirit was given to men and accepted by them.

Christ assumed the role of priest: In one respect, the priest of death making atonement for the past (under the symbol of Aaron), in another respect, the priest of life (under the symbol of Melchisedec), administering inwardly His power through the Spirit which he gives freely. Christ does not look backward only, but becomes the mediator of the covenant of life. Theologically, this distinguishes between and relates properly justification and sanctification and the continuing life of holiness. The new covenant has meaning at the point of inwardness and spiritual reality. It is Christ who gives the Holy Spirit and who ministers through His indwelling presence.

IV. The Relation of the Holy Spirit to Humanity

All of this shows us that the Holy Spirit is not an accessory to the Christian faith, or a luxury for those with time and talents to spare. The Holy Spirit is not an added factor to normal human existence. He is the hub of the wheel of theology, the key to Christian philosophy, and the moral minimum of human experience. His presence creates and maintains the moral atmosphere in which personality may be free and responsible. The Holy Spirit is the medium of spiritual fellowship with God.

The work of the Holy Spirit is not mystical in the sense of by-passing rational intelligence. His presence does not eclipse sharp self-awareness and self-identity. Moral responsibility is not dulled in a fog of emotion. In His presence human personality is reined up to its highest capacity and stands at attention. He presses ethical demands on the person at the deepest level of rational life. His "enabling" does not weaken character but strengthens it. He keeps men human as they ought to be.

It may be said that at no point in the process of redemption is the Holy Spirit's work essentially different than at any other point. It may require different specific things on the part of the person as he is able to understand better and come into larger spiritual perspectives and as he becomes more mature. but the principle is the same. Hence, as we have noted, in the sanctified life the Scriptural counsel is "grieve not the Holy Spirit by which you are sealed. . .," "quench not the Spirit," and continue to "be filled with the Spirit," counsel that seems appropriate, too, for the sinner. And so it is.

The ultimate sin, the unforgivable sin, is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, not because this sin is different from any other but because in this way the only avenue back to God, provided by the death of Christ is cut off by it. There can be no more forgiveness because the purpose of forgiveness is despised and the Person by whom fellowship is made possible is rejected. This exhausts moral capacity, possibility and experience.

The Holy Spirit sustains at least a three-fold responsibility to men. In the most ultimate sense he makes us persons. This means that (to use a western cattle man's phrase) he "cuts us out of the herd." He forces true individuality. The continuing progress in sanctification proceeds on this deep level of spiritual life. It is not the physical impulses that constantly come up into conscious life that constitute sin. It is the attitude the self takes to them in the light of God's ownership of our lives that describes what sin is. Sanctification is not the changing of impulse from evil to good so that the moral guard may be relaxed which the conscious self con-tributes to personality. Sanctification is the moral guard reinforced by the Holy Spirit who strengthens the inner man by His presence. Paul prayed, "that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man..." (Eph. 3: 16).

Another important phase of the Spirit's work is to establish us in fellow-ship with God. The first phase describes purity; this phase is holiness. These are not two things but two aspects of one thing. These three words in relation to each other preserve all of them from the error any one of them alone might suggest. Fellowship is very much more than emotional rapport or the surface agreement of shallow friendship. Purity is not an isolation from the concerns of life, some mystical quality of soul which has no real definition. Holiness is not an abstraction unrelated to reality, a mark on the soul or "state" of grace.

The "communion of the Holy Spirit" can only describe a situation (1) in which persons are involved, and (2) persons in proper moral relation-ship to each other (in this case God and man), (3) in which moral barriers have been removed (this is purity). (4) This situation describes holiness which is basically union with God in the Holy Spirit.

There is a double aspect to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. His coming on the day of Pentecost was a dispensational coming. The loss of the Holy Spirit from the race of men was now corrected. In Jesus the Son conjoined in Himself God and man in human nature. The Spirit, in Jesus, took on human experience and became available to all men. But there was a personal aspect to the Holy Spirit's coming. In fact, it must always, in every way, be personal. And the personal element lies at the moral door of individuals. To receive the Holy Spirit involves the whole of the personality in morally mature responses.

But the significance of the Holy Spirit's role in all of this is precisely that the relationship to God by the Holy Spirit is in moral freedom and responsibility. It is his peculiar function to preserve our contact with God from determinism, to keep holiness ethically structured. The "fellowship of the Holy Spirit" is the moral guard around philosophy, theology, and religious experience.

But there is a corporate aspect to the fellowship of the Holy Spirit and this can no more be disregarded than the personal relationship. The extremely individual leading which is characteristic of the highly moral relationship which the Holy Spirit requires, is for the purpose of the highly responsible interrelatedness which the "fellowship of saints" requires. This corporate unity looks two ways; to the corporate body itself, and to the task to which the "body" is obligated.

Paul's discussion (I Cor. 12) about the fellowship of the church is prefaced by a most significant statement: No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. This means that if it is the Holy Spirit which leads men out of sin into the saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, by Him we are confronted by Christ's Lordship and compelled to decision regarding it and under the Lordship we are made one with a body of believers whose Lord is Christ. No man can put boundaries around the kingdom, no man can determine the conditions of entrance, no Christian man may set up divisions within the kingdom or withhold his fellowship from others on the basis of personal judgment. We enter the Kingdom by the Holy Spirit and must live within and up to the law of the King which is to love others as ourselves.

A redeemed man is not an end in himself, absorbed in his own holiness, jealous of his own status, critical of his brethren, demanding in regard to his own interests, even spiritual interests. The redeemed man is now a "family man" whose eyes and heart and interests merge with those of the household of faith. We do not say, "my father," but "our father," not "give me bread" but "give us this day our daily bread." The unity we have with Christ is not complete, according to Jesus (John 17), until that unity includes the Father, and together with all those who are in Christ.

But even this corporate fellowship is not the end. In Matthew 10, there is a profound discussion from the lips of Jesus - the call to participate in the full measure of cost to which Jesus was called. The disciple would be identified with the Master, not simply a follower of the Master, so much so that those who received the disciple would receive the Lord (v.40). The identification would extend to misunderstandings, misinterpretations and death. The assurance was that in this identification the Spirit of the Father would be voiced through the disciples. The warning exhortation was the need for faithfulness and integrity even unto death. "Confess me before men, and I will confess you before the Father." This is the cross, without which no man "is fit to be my disciple" (Weymouth) There is no third way between unbelief and discipleship.

The "fellowship of the Holy Spirit" means that the relationship broken by sin is restored, provisionally; that the proviso is a moral revolution in the human heart by the ministry of the Holy Spirit; that every step in the revolution and restoration is in the interest of moral integrity; that it is Christ who is formed within under the Spirit's ministry; that in Christ personal purity is experienced, and corporate unity of spirit is cemented, and the fellowship of His sufferings becomes a basis for the enjoyment of the fellowship in his glory. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is not abstract but draws into relevance every thread of Christian theology.