The Breath of the Risen Christ

The identity of the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the resurrected, reigning Jesus.

This Sunday is Pentecost.

Pentecost marks neither the birthday of the church nor the arrival of a heretofore absent person of the Trinity. As Robert Jenson argues, the whole doctrine of the Holy Spirit is problematic for the notion of the “spirit” is very often a way for Christians to revert back to religion unreformed by the gospel. The spirit celebrated at Pentecost is seldom the triune identity but rather an “indistinct and undemanding God.” Ubiquitous appeals to the Spirit as the breath or wind of the LORD are just such an example of drift away from the God of the gospel and back to barren deities we can fashion in our own image.

Published over forty years ago, Robert Jenson’s edited two volume survey Christian Dogmatics is a neglected gem of a resource for preachers. Jens’ second offering in the collection on the Holy Spirit is itself worth the price of both books. He begins his essay by noting the importance of the genitive case in speaking of the Holy Spirit. In other words, there is no kind of being called spirit: “There is no spirit-reality as a kind of thing; spirit is always of some individual or individual group.”

In the case of the Spirit called holy there is only the particular Spirit of Jesus and the one he addresses as Father. Because the Holy Spirit is spirit of the Son and his Father, the Spirit is not third in the order of importance, but third in the order of “God’s dramatic self-givenness.” The Holy Spirit is the one through whom the triune God communicates and completes his life in and with the world. “The Spirit,” Jenson writes, “is the enabling freedom of the triune life, God’s own future as opened for others.”

The Holy Spirit has the power of God’s own future bears decisive implications. Very often preachers proclaim the third person of the Trinity as the presence of the absent second person of the Trinity. Nothing could be further from the biblical truth. The Spirit is how God comes to us and stays with us—not from a distance— from within the risen Jesus.

• Pentecost is not the arrival of an alternative to the vanished Jesus.

• Pentecost is the revelation of the person who makes God’s identity communicable— who words the colloquy that is Father and Son to us.

As Jens writes:

“The Spirit is God as he opens himself; the Spirit is God’s own life as it goes beyond itself to include others.”

Just so, the Spirit that spoke by the prophets is not especially identifiable with mystical intuition or religious experience but with the speech and presence of Christ—God’s Word carried forward in time. This is why, for example, in Romans 8 Paul pairs “flesh” and the law of sin and death” as antonyms of Spirit such that everything Paul says of the Holy Spirit can likewise be said of the gospel.

As God’s Word carried forward in time, the identity of the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the resurrected, reigning Jesus.