Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God

As you can see, I have neglected this blog for some time. I think the best way to start back will be to do some reviews of some books I have been reading recently. Hopefully this will spur me on to once again entering more regular posts.

Over the Christmas break I had the opportunity to read Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God by Gordon D. Fee. Fee is a Pentecostal exegete who believes that the Church is in vital need of a more robust theology of the Holy Spirit. This is a topic that I have been dwelling on for some time now and have done a couple of posts on. Fee deals with this topic in a way that is undoubtedly prophetic for the Church at large and seemingly for me personally as well. He sees Paul's theology as an unfolding and explanation of the experience that he has had with the Holy Spirit. This is founded on the objective work of Christ and a forensic declaration of righteous, of course, but the way that Paul communicates his message is as an explanation of a subjective experience that he has had concerning these things.
Fee lays out a theology of the Spirit that elevates the Holy Ghost to His proper (and almost totally neglected) place in the life of the Church and the individual while remaining fervently Christocentric.

Fee sums up the heart of Paul's theology of the Spirit in nine points that are well worth "re-summarizing":

1. The key to Christian experience - While Christ is the center of Paul's theology, the Spirit must play a more vital role in terms of how the Spirit makes Christ known to us.

2. God breaking into our lives - Paul is arguing from a point of a dynamic experience of the Holy Spirit and expects it to be the norm for his churches. We must recover this expectation of a dramatic breaking in of the Spirit.

3. End-time evidence and guarantee of glory - The coming of the Spirit has fulfilled the promises of the Old Testament and now is the guarantee of the future glory that is already with us but is not yet seen in full.

4. God dwelling in and among us - Just as God dwelt with his people in the temple in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit now dwells continually among God's people who are themselves the new temple.

5. "God very God" - it is foundational for Paul that the Spirit is the very expression of God the Father and of Christ.

6. Salvation made effective - because salvation is a fully trinitarian act, Paul always reminds the churches of their salvation in terms of their experience of the Holy Spirit.

7. A people called forth - God's people are made into the united body of Christ by their common experience of the Holy Spirit and called to begin to live the future life of glory in the present.

8. Righteousness made possible - the people of God are continually described as living "in the Spirit," empowered by the Spirit to live out, as Fee says, the "ethical life in all its dimensions."

9. The key to Christian worship - in our individual lives we are commanded to pray, "in the Spirit," and as a body it is Paul's expectation that the empowering presence of the Spirit will be manifested itself among us in "charismata."

This is truly an inspiring and, I would even say, life-changing read. Fee's call to a full-orbed Trinitarian theology is exactly the thing that will flood the Church with life. This is truly the way in which we are to go about fulfilling the Reformation call to be "semper reformanda." As he states, "If we are going to count for much in the post-modern world in which we now live, the Spirit must remain the key to the church's existence."

Amen!