Note: From The Holy Spirit: An Introduction (Crossway 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Normally when we grow in our knowledge of people, we say that while we knew them already, now we know them better. But in the case of the Holy Spirit, something more subtle and paradoxical takes place. The Holy Spirit is more than just the next person to know. To encounter him is to be caught up into an act of knowing that claims us altogether and sets us free, that expands our theological horizons while regathering our mental powers, that suspends us in his power and grounds us in his truth. You can’t just walk up to him and say hi. Meeting the Holy Spirit, in whom we live and move and have our being, requires a special approach because knowledge of the Spirit is a special kind of knowledge.
We will approach the doctrine of the Holy Spirit obliquely because of who he is and how he acts. The Holy Spirit points in three different directions: he points to the Son, he points back to us and he points to all truth.
Deflective
1. The Holy Spirit points to the Son. He is deflective, turning our gaze away. There is something slippery about this, because even when the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see and understand his work, what he primarily directs our attention to is not himself but Jesus Christ. Think of the steps by which our knowledge of the Spirit advances. We start with Jesus. As we understand Jesus Christ more fully, we recognize him not in an isolated way but as the one sent by God the Father. You cannot know one without the other. When Jesus is in the foreground, God the Father is, so to speak, in the background as the one who so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son. And then, finally, as we become more aware of this Father-Son relation, we become aware that our awareness of it is being brought about by the Holy Spirit. So when the Holy Spirit, the life-giving Lord of all, effectively accomplishes his work on our hearts and in our minds, he unveils the fact that he has already been at work in us as he has been successfully directing our attention to Jesus.
The Spirit is expert at deflecting attention away from himself and toward the Son. He tends to deflect attention best at exactly the moment when he is most powerfully present in us! As Pentecostal and charismatic Christians have often pointed out, the people who talk the most about the Holy Spirit are not necessarily the people most influenced by the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, the people most influenced by the Holy Spirit are usually the ones with the most to say about Jesus Christ. This is because the Spirit is powerful and effective at deflecting our attention to the Son rather than drawing it to himself.
Reflexive
2. The Holy Spirit points to our own spiritual knowledge. He is reflexive, turning our gaze back to itself. While the Holy Spirit is always at work everywhere, his special ministry involves opening our spiritual eyes to the fact that he is already at work everywhere. God gives us the gift of salvation, which includes the Holy Spirit. But he also gives us that same Holy Spirit precisely to open our eyes to the gift itself: “We have received….the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God” (I Corinthians 2:12). That is, the Spirit within us is a kind of God-given power of reception by which we understand what God has already given. This work of the Spirit is reflexive, because thinking about the Spirit turns our eyes back upon their own act of seeing, so to speak.
There is something inherently eye opening in all the work of the Holy Spirit. Think of the Trinity’s revelation. If the Father is the speaker and the Son is his Word, the Spirit is the one who personally causes our understanding of that Word. So to begin thinking about the Spirit is to begin thinking about thinking, or about the one in whom you’ve already been doing your thinking, meeting somebody you already know. As Hermann Witsius (1636-1708) said of the Spirit, “He cannot be seen, but in his own light; he cannot be known or acknowledged, but by his own kind and gracious agency.” [Sacred Dissertations on the Apostles’ Creed, vol. 2, p. 303] Knowledge of the Spirit is spiritual, and the only way into it is by the Spirit.
Of course there’s more to the Holy Spirit’s work than just enlightening our minds; he produces life and imparts power, and does a whole list of other things that are not merely cognitive or mental. The Holy Spirit is not just in your mind! He brings with him a reality that is more than thoughts and ideas. But his great illuminating work on the Christian mind is what gives the study of the Holy Spirit its paradoxical character. Thinking about the Holy Spirit is like faith looking at its own eyeballs. Talking about the Holy Spirit is like faith saying why it’s saying what it’s saying while it’s still saying it. When you try to focus on pneumatology, you realize that there are at least two meanings to the word vision in the ancient Irish hymn “Be Thou My Vision.” When you sing it, you are asking, with the saints of all the ages, for God to be the object on which your mental eye focuses (what you see; the vision before you), and also to be the power by which the mental eye can focus on such an object (how you see it; your vision). You are asking God to be simultaneously the vision you see and the vision by which you see. “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light” (Psalm 36:9).
Connective
3. The Holy Spirit points to all truth. He is connective. These first two reasons why it is paradoxically powerful to give sustained attention to the Holy Spirit already suggest the third reason: the Spirit uniquely connects all truths to each other. When the Holy Spirit illumines a mind, his work is not so much to bring in a few new ideas (though he can and does do this), but to connect all true ideas about God and salvation in a meaningful way. The Spirit uniquely binds every Christian doctrine to every other Christian doctrine, weaving together the spiritual truth of our faith in an integral way. To think specifically about the Holy Spirit, you have to reach into the very heart of Christian life and doctrine and pull out something that is linked to everything else, something that is always theologically functioning whenever anything at all is theologically functional. And as you drag it out into the light and begin to analyze it by itself, it starts to look strangely isolated and disconnected. That’s because in the very act of dragging it out and analyzing it, you have in fact isolated it and disconnected the most connected thing. If we call this third reason the connective aspect of the Spirit’s work, it is because of how enmeshed Spirit-knowledge is in all theological knowledge. It is paradoxical to focus our attention on the work of the Spirit in particular, and in isolation, because the work of the Spirit is characteristically connective, consummating, holistic and synthetic.
Even when we focus directly on the Holy Spirit as the object or content of our study, he is always more. He is its motivating force, its context, its presupposition, its condition, its meaningful form, its inner power, its atmosphere, its element, its idiom, its orientation, its governor, its medium, its carrier. He is all this for any doctrine we study: divine attributes, creation, providence, salvation, church and the rest. In studying any of these, as we focus our attention on a specific theological topic, it is only in and with and by the Holy Spirit that we reach true understanding of each spiritual topic. And then when the time comes to study the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, we are at work on something special, because in this doctrine, someone special is uniquely at work within us for knowledge of himself. That someone is at work within us as we think and write and read about him. He is the teacher of the lesson that is himself.
Think of it this way. A pulmonologist, in writing about the functioning of the respiratory tract, obviously doesn’t need to disconnect and dissect actual lungs. There is no need to tear them out of the chest! But pulmonology is an extremely apt analogy for pneumatology; to think accurately and meaningfully about the lungs as functioning organs in your chest requires thinking about the entire respiratory system. The subspecialties of pulmonology work their way out from the lungs to consider the circulatory system so that the quality of the blood and its movement from the heart are directly implicated. Not only are the body’s other systems and behaviors drawn into the relevant analysis but so is the quality of the environment around the body, most notably the ambient air as it makes its way into the breather. This is the kind of doctrine pneumatology is; it involves the lungs of theology and therefore also the heart and blood and breath of theology. It is here in this doctrine that we ought to recognize the divine environment in which all true theology takes place.
It is tempting to say that this connective aspect of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit makes it an especially difficult area of theology. Perhaps it does. But it is also true that pneumatology is the doctrinal location where we are invited to recognize the spiritual character of all doctrines, of theology itself. It is especially here that we are summoned to see that studying theology is a holy task. The great Methodist theologian William Burt Pope (1822-1903) declared of theology that “every branch of this science is sacred. It is a temple which is filled with the presence of God. From its hidden sanctuary, into which no high priest taken from among men can enter, issues a light which leaves no part dark save where it is dark with excess of glory. Therefore all fit students are worshippers as well as students.” [A Compendium of Christian Theology, vol. 1, p. 5] All theology should be done in the Spirit; what wakes us up to this is the recognition that the theology of the Holy Spirit should be done in the Spirit. Theology itself is, as it were, haunted by the Holy Ghost.
Content taken from The Holy Spirit: An Introduction by Fred Sanders, ©2023. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
Fred Sanders, professor of theology, Biola University
