Chapter 9: God’s Breath of Life.
God’s Spirit is the enabler and sustainer of the church, in the best sense of the word church.
“…God doesn’t give people the Holy Spirit in order to let them enjoy the spiritual equivalent of a day at Disneyland.”
God’s Spirit and God’s Future. Paul talks about the Spirit as the guarantee of our “inheritance”. That is an allusion to the Promised Land. But, instead of that being one small territory, it is now the entire world. The HS plays the same role as the pillar of cloud and fire. What role do we play then? Paul says that we are the Temple of the Living God.
“The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God’s future real in the present.”
God’s Spirit Between Heaven and Earth. This brings us back to option 3 as discussed in the beginning of the book.
Chapter 10: Living by the Spirit
The Torah is one of the places where heaven and earth meet. Pentecost and the Spirit allow us, indeed call us, to live in the intersection between heaven and earth.
Spirit, Word, and Wisdom. When the apostles spread the Word about Jesus, they were remarkably successful, in spite of the difficulty of the message. That was the work of the Spirit.
Toward Christian Spirituality. There are two distinctive features of Christian spirituality.
- It combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of his intimate presence.
- It normally a measure of suffering. “… it is precisely when we are suffering that we can most confi-dently expect the Spirit to be with us.”
Glimpsing the Triune God. It took 4 centuries to define a theology of the trinity, but it there in the gospels, Paul’s letters, and Hebrews.