The Holy Spirit

Start with the texts that carry the weight, because the doctrine stands or falls on them and not on a grammatical curiosity. Acts 5:3-4 moves without explanation from lying to the Holy Spirit to lying to God, as if no reader would need the step spelled out. In 1 Corinthians 12:11 the Spirit apportions gifts to each one as he determines, which is a decision. In Romans 8:26-27 he intercedes for the saints and has a mind that God searches. Ephesians 4:30 says he can be grieved; Acts 7:51 says he can be resisted; Hebrews 10:29 speaks of insulting the Spirit of grace. In the farewell discourse he is sent, he teaches, he reminds, he testifies, he guides, he hears, he declares and he glorifies the Son. A wind does not will, intercede, grieve or glorify.

Then the two texts that place him in the divine identity rather than merely in the category of persons. The baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19 puts one singular name over Father, Son and Holy Spirit together. The benediction of 2 Corinthians 13:14 sets the fellowship of the Holy Spirit alongside the grace of Christ and the love of God without apology or ranking. Neither text is an argument; both are habits of speech, which is stronger evidence, because a habit shows what the writer took for granted rather than what he was trying to prove.

Now the argument you have probably heard, which you should stop using. It runs like this: the Greek word for Spirit, pneuma, is grammatically neuter, so Greek would require neuter pronouns; but John 16:13-14 uses the masculine demonstrative ekeinos, and therefore the writer has deliberately broken grammar to insist that the Spirit is a he and not an it. It is a satisfying argument and it is almost certainly wrong. A few verses earlier, at 16:7, John has used parakletos, Advocate (Helper in several translations), which is a masculine noun, and the masculine pronouns most naturally agree with that. Daniel Wallace sets this out at some length in Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics and concludes that these texts are not proof of the Spirit's personality from grammar; he also observes, which is the sharper point, that where pneuma is the immediate antecedent John does use neuter pronouns, as at 14:17.

A note on the page in front of you. The BSB prints the pronouns for the Spirit with capitals, as in He and Him at John 14:17 and 16:13. Greek has no capital letters, so that choice is the translators' judgment that the Spirit is a person, drawn from the context; it is not a mark in the Greek, and it proves nothing by itself. The case has to rest on the verbs, which is where this lesson rests it.

Drop the argument and lose nothing. The personhood of the Spirit does not need a grammatical trick, and it is worth asking why the trick became popular. It became popular because it is quick, and because an audience cannot check it. That is exactly the kind of argument this course exists to train out of you. When you have twelve texts in which someone wills, intercedes, teaches and is grieved, you do not need a thirteenth that depends on your hearers not knowing Greek.

The fourth-century church fought this out and the fight is worth knowing. Athanasius wrote his Letters to Serapion around 359 to 361 against people who held the Son to be divine but the Spirit to be a creature, a made ministering thing. Basil of Caesarea wrote On the Holy Spirit around 375, and note his strategy: he argued largely from the Spirit's place in baptism and doxology, that is, from what the church was already doing, rather than from a proof text. The Council of Constantinople in 381 gave the creed the clause Christians still say, that the Spirit is the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. Notice that the council did not use the word homoousios of the Spirit. It described him by what he does and by the worship he receives, which is a deliberately less philosophical move than the one made about the Son in 325.

Anyone who says the Spirit begins at Pentecost has not read the first two verses of the Bible. The Spirit of God hovers over the surface of the waters in Genesis 1:2. He fills Bezalel with skill and craftsmanship for the tabernacle in Exodus 31:1-5, which is worth pausing on, because the first person in scripture said to be filled with the Spirit of God is an artisan and not a prophet. He rests on the seventy elders in Numbers 11. He rushes on Othniel, Gideon, Jephthah and Samson. He comes mightily on David at his anointing and departs from Saul in the same verse, 1 Samuel 16:13-14, which is why David prays in Psalm 51:11 that God would not take his Holy Spirit from him. Isaiah 63:10 says Israel grieved his Holy Spirit. The Old Testament knows him.

So state the difference accurately, because the sloppy version of this doctrine does real damage to a reader's Old Testament. In the older covenant the Spirit comes upon particular people for particular offices and tasks, prophets, judges, kings, craftsmen, and he can be withdrawn. What is promised is not the Spirit's first appearance but his distribution: Moses says in Numbers 11:29 that he wishes all the LORD's people were prophets and that the LORD would place his Spirit on them. Joel 2:28-29 answers that wish with sons and daughters, old men and young men, menservants and maidservants. Ezekiel 36:26-27 promises a new heart and a new spirit and has God say that he will put his Spirit within them and cause them to walk in his statutes. Jeremiah 31:34 promises a covenant in which no one will teach his neighbor, saying Know the LORD, because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest.

Three words hold the change: all, within, and permanently. Peter's sermon at Pentecost quotes Joel and says this is that. And in Acts 2:33 he adds the link that makes the whole doctrine Christian rather than merely pneumatological: Jesus, exalted to the right hand of God, has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what the crowd now sees and hears. The Spirit is given because the Son has been enthroned. That is why John 7:39 can say that the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified, a sentence that would be flatly false if it meant the Spirit had not yet existed or acted.

One further question belongs here and is genuinely disputed, so take it as disputed. Were Old Testament saints regenerate? Reformed writers generally say yes, on the ground that no one has ever turned to God without the Spirit's work, citing Psalm 51:10 and Deuteronomy 30:6, and they read the newness of the new covenant as one of degree, extent and clarity rather than of kind. Others, including many dispensational writers and some Lutheran ones, hold that the indwelling described in Romans 8:9 and John 14:17 is a genuinely new arrangement and that the Spirit's Old Testament work was upon rather than within. Both readings have to handle John 14:17, where Jesus says the Spirit abides with you and will be in you, and the two prepositions are the whole argument. The text will not settle it by itself.

The Hermeneutics track has already dealt with the Spirit's role in the reading and understanding of scripture, including what 1 Corinthians 2 does and does not promise the interpreter. That lesson is not repeated here. If you have not worked it, work it before you teach this one, because the commonest pastoral misuse of the doctrine of the Spirit lives in that territory rather than this one.

Four words are used almost interchangeably in ordinary Christian speech and mean four different things in the New Testament. Getting them apart is most of what this lesson can give you practically, and it is the part on which the traditions in the next section largely agree.

Regeneration is the Spirit's act of giving life to someone who did not have it. John 3:5-8 has the new birth of water and the Spirit, with the wind image insisting that it is not under the control of the one born. Titus 3:5 says he saved us through the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, the Greek noun behind new birth being palingenesia, a re-genesis. Ezekiel 36:26 is its Old Testament promise. Regeneration is monergistic in the plain sense that the person being born is not the agent of his own birth; that much is held across the traditions, and the disputes about its relation to faith and to baptism belong to other lessons in this track.

Indwelling is the Spirit's permanent residence in the believer. Romans 8:9 says that you are controlled not by the flesh but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you, and then that if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. (The BSB's controlled by renders the Greek preposition en, in: literally, not in the flesh but in the Spirit.) Read that second sentence slowly, because it does more work in this module than any other. It makes indwelling the universal mark of belonging to Christ, not an advanced stage. 1 Corinthians 6:19 calls the body a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, addressed to the least impressive congregation in the New Testament.

Sealing is ownership and guarantee. Ephesians 1:13-14 says that having heard and believed, you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the pledge of our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession. The word for pledge is arrabon, a commercial term for a down payment that is the first instalment of the same thing rather than a token of a different thing. 2 Corinthians 1:22 and 5:5 use it the same way. Ephesians 4:30 then grounds an ethical appeal in it: do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Sealing is therefore not a second experience to be sought but a status to be lived from.

Filling is the one that is repeated, and it is the one popular usage confuses with all the others. Ephesians 5:18 commands, do not get drunk on wine, which leads to reckless indiscretion, but instead be filled with the Spirit. The verb is a present imperative in the passive: keep on being filled, by someone other than yourself. And Acts shows the repetition plainly. The same people filled in Acts 2:4 are filled again in Acts 4:31. Peter, already filled at Pentecost, is filled again in Acts 4:8. Barnabas in Acts 11:24 is described as full of the Holy Spirit and faith, a settled character, and the seven in Acts 6:3 are to be men confirmed to be full of the Spirit and wisdom, which is a qualification rather than an event.

Hold the four apart and a great deal of confused pastoral advice dissolves. Regeneration happens once and is God's act. Indwelling begins then and is permanent, and every Christian has it. Sealing is the same reality described as security. Filling is repeatable, commanded, capable of increase and decrease, and therefore the proper object of the exhortation you may have heard applied to all four. What remains genuinely open, and is the subject of the next section, is whether the New Testament also describes an experience distinct from all four.

Seven texts use the phrase. John the Baptist says in all four Gospels that the coming one will baptize with the Holy Spirit, at Matthew 3:11, Mark 1:8, Luke 3:16 and John 1:33. Jesus repeats it in Acts 1:5. Peter recalls it in Acts 11:16 to explain what happened at Caesarea. And Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:13 that in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. That is the whole evidence, and every account below is a way of holding those seven together with the four different sequences in Acts that the inquiry asked you to tabulate. Each is stated here as its own defenders state it.

The classical Pentecostal account. Baptism in the Holy Spirit is an experience distinct from and subsequent to conversion, given for power in witness, and initially evidenced by speaking in tongues. The primary text is Acts 1:8, where the risen Christ ties the coming of the Spirit to power and to being witnesses, and the pattern is drawn from the narrative Luke actually wrote: the disciples in Acts 1 are already believers and are told to wait; the Samaritans of Acts 8 have believed and been baptized and receive the Spirit afterwards through apostolic hands; Paul is converted on the road and filled three days later in Acts 9:17; the Ephesian disciples of Acts 19 receive the Spirit after Paul lays hands on them. In three of the accounts where Luke describes the reception, tongues are mentioned, at Acts 2:4, 10:46 and 19:6, which is the basis of the claim about initial evidence. Pentecostals argue that Luke is a theologian in his own right and is writing about the Spirit's empowering for mission rather than about the Spirit's work in regeneration, so reading Luke through Paul's categories is what flattens the evidence. The doctrine is confessed in the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths, articles 7 and 8, and historically it traces to Charles Parham's Topeka school in 1901 and to the Azusa Street revival under William Seymour from 1906. Pentecostals do not hold that the unbaptized believer lacks the Spirit or is unsaved, and a teacher who says they do is attacking no one.

The Wesleyan holiness account. The second work of grace is chiefly about sanctification rather than about power, and it is older than Pentecostalism. John Wesley taught in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection that after justification a believer may receive a further work in which the love of God so fills the heart that sin's dominion is broken, and he called it entire sanctification and perfect love, insisting that it was perfection in intention and love rather than freedom from ignorance, mistake or infirmity. Nineteenth-century holiness teachers, Phoebe Palmer prominent among them, increasingly named this experience the baptism of the Holy Ghost, which is how the phrase entered the vocabulary that Pentecostalism later inherited and redirected. The texts are 1 Thessalonians 5:23, where Paul prays that the God of peace would sanctify you completely; Romans 6:6 and 6:11 on the old self crucified and on counting oneself dead to sin; Acts 15:8-9, where Peter says God cleansed their hearts by faith when he gave them the Spirit, a cleansing text about a Spirit event; and Matthew 5:48 and Hebrews 12:14. Wesleyans argue that any account which makes sanctification purely gradual has no room for the crisis language the New Testament actually uses, and that the pastoral effect of denying a further work is to lower expectation to the level of experience. The tradition is carried today by the Church of the Nazarene, the Free Methodist Church and the Salvation Army.

The Reformed and broadly evangelical account. Baptism with the Spirit is conversion-initiation: it is what happens when a person becomes a Christian, and it is not a second stage. The controlling text is 1 Corinthians 12:13, where Paul says all were baptized in one Spirit into one body, addressed to a church he is about to rebuke, which makes the statement true of immature and gifted and quarrelsome members alike. The BSB prints in one Spirit; the Greek preposition en can also be rendered by or with, and the dispute is live. Read as in, the verse matches the Baptist's promise that Christ would baptize in the Spirit, which supports this account. Pentecostal writers reply that Paul here has the Spirit as the agent who baptizes into the body, a different thing from the Spirit as the element in which Christ baptizes, so that the verse does not describe the Gospels' baptism in the Spirit at all. Romans 8:9 then says that anyone without the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him, which leaves no category of Spirit-less Christian. On this account the narrative sequences in Acts are transitional rather than normative: Acts is describing the gospel crossing from Jerusalem to Samaria to the Gentiles to the disciples of John, and the visible, delayed and apostolically mediated givings of the Spirit are how Luke shows each new group being publicly joined to the one church. James Dunn argued the exegetical case at length in Baptism in the Holy Spirit in 1970, and John Stott argued it pastorally for Anglican evangelicals in Baptism and Fullness. What such writers urge instead is the repeated filling of Ephesians 5:18. It is worth recording that the Reformed tradition is not unanimous: Martyn Lloyd-Jones argued in the sermons published as Joy Unspeakable for a distinct, sovereign baptism of the Spirit chiefly conveying assurance, and he did so from within this tradition and against most of it.

The Catholic charismatic account. Since the Duquesne University retreat of February 1967 and the movement that followed, large numbers of Catholics have testified to an experience they call baptism in the Spirit while holding a sacramental theology that gives the Spirit in baptism and confirmation. The reconciliation is stated carefully and it is not a compromise: the Spirit is truly given in the sacraments of initiation, and what is called baptism in the Spirit is a release, an actualization, a coming to conscious effect of a grace already sacramentally conferred but not yet lived. Kilian McDonnell and George Montague argued in Christian Initiation and Baptism in the Holy Spirit that in the patristic sources the charismatic dimension was part of initiation itself rather than an optional extra added later, so that the modern experience recovers something the church lost rather than inventing something new. Cardinal Suenens set out the theology for the movement in the Malines Documents from 1974 onward, and the Doctrinal Commission of the international Catholic charismatic service published a study under the title Baptism in the Holy Spirit in 2012. Popes from Paul VI to Francis have addressed the movement with encouragement and with cautions about ecclesial discipline. The Orthodox have generally been more reserved about the vocabulary, while insisting through their own theologians that chrismation is the personal Pentecost of every believer, which is a structurally similar claim made in sacramental rather than experiential terms.

What is settled and what is not. Settled: the phrase is in the New Testament and means something; every Christian has the Spirit; the Spirit's filling can increase and is commanded; the sequences in Acts are genuinely varied and no tradition can quote only its favourite chapter. Not settled: whether Luke and Paul are describing one event or two, whether the Acts sequences are normative or transitional, and whether tongues function as evidence. Each account has a hard question. Pentecostals must explain why Paul, writing to churches where the Spirit is a live issue, never once urges a second reception on anyone. The holiness account must explain why the New Testament also speaks of sin as a continuing struggle in the mature, and Wesley's own careful qualifications are the beginning of its answer. The initiation account must explain why Luke narrates delays and layings on of hands at all if nothing distinguishable was happening. The Catholic charismatic account must explain how an experience is a release of sacramental grace in people who report it without having sought it and, sometimes, without having been catechised about it at all. Notice that none of these questions is fatal, and that each tradition has a worked answer its opponents rarely trouble to read.

You should be able to establish the personhood and deity of the Spirit from texts, without the grammatical argument, and to explain to someone who has been using that argument why it does not work and why they lose nothing by dropping it. You should be able to say what Athanasius and Basil were arguing against and why the creed of 381 describes the Spirit by his work and his worship rather than by a philosophical term.

You should be able to read the Old Testament without pretending the Spirit is absent from it, and to state the newness of Pentecost precisely: not the Spirit's arrival but the pouring out on all people of the Spirit whom the exalted Christ has received and given. That sentence is worth learning, because it keeps the doctrine attached to the resurrection and the ascension, where Acts 2:33 attaches it.

You should be able to take the four words apart. When someone asks whether she has the Holy Spirit, you can answer from Romans 8:9 without hesitation and without condescension. When someone asks how to be filled, you can point to a command in the present tense that assumes repetition. And when someone confuses sealing with an experience, you can show him that Ephesians 1:13-14 makes it a status given at believing.

And you should be able to state four accounts of baptism in the Spirit in the form each one's own defenders would recognise, name the texts each rests on, and name the hardest question each faces. That is the test this module will keep applying. If you can only state the account you were raised in, you do not yet know what the argument is; you only know which side you are on, which is a different thing and much less useful to the person in front of you.

One pastoral note to carry out of the lesson. The woman in the inquiry question, told she does not have the Spirit because she lacks an experience, is not a hypothetical. This teaching wounds people, and it wounds them in both directions: some are told they are second-class Christians, and others are taught to be so suspicious of experience that they cannot receive what God gives. The honest teacher holds Romans 8:9 and Ephesians 5:18 together, tells her plainly that the Spirit of Christ dwells in her, and then declines to set a ceiling on what God may yet do in her.