The Spirit and the Bridge (2 of 2)

Romans 5:5 is the anchor here, and it has to be the chapter's anchor too, because the verse says with surgical compactness what the asymptote crossing actually is from the divine side:

"the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." — Romans 5:5 (NET) (NLM verification pending) Read each phrase. The love of God — not a love about God, not a love that resembles God's love, but the love that God is. Has been poured out — past tense, completed action, an actual pouring of an actual reality. Into our hearts — inside the image-bearer, not outside, not at a distance. Through the Holy Spirit — by the agency of the third person, who is the Person who bears this love personally. Who has been given to us — a gift, freely conferred, already in place for those who belong. The love that is God's essence has been deposited within the believer by the Person who is that essence subsisting. The indwelling is not influence. The indwelling is the love of God in residence.

This is what makes the bridge a bridge. The asymptote Chapter 5 named is real on the human side and on the divine side, but it is real differently. On the human side, the asymptote is the mathematical impossibility of mass reaching light by its own motion. On God's side, the asymptote is what light alone would not cross, because light is what God reveals Himself as in self-disclosing presence, and presence by itself does not move toward the one not yet present. What moves toward the one not yet present is love. Love is what crosses the asymptote from the divine side. The Spirit, who is that love personally, is what carries the crossing into the one in whom the crossing has not yet happened. The believer does not love God by trying harder. The believer loves God because the love that exists eternally between Father and Son has been deposited within and is doing its native work.

Basil of Caesarea, in his treatise On the Holy Spirit, written around 375, defended the full deity of the Spirit on precisely this ground. The work the Spirit does — the indwelling, the joining of the beloved to Christ, the pouring of divine love into the human heart — is divine work. No created influence can do it. A created influence cannot be the love that God essentially is. If the Spirit can indwell mortal bodies and pour into them the love that is the inner life of God, the Spirit is not a created thing but God.

How does this indwelling actually function? The temptation, especially for modern readers, is to read the language of indwelling as influence at a distance — God somewhere out there, exerting a moral pressure on the believer who is somewhere down here, with the gap between them filled by language and metaphor. That is not what Paul or Cyril or Augustine or Basil meant. The indwelling is real presence. The Spirit is not exerting influence from outside the believer's body. The Spirit has taken up residence within it. The believer's body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:19, using the word that meant in the first century the actual dwelling place of the actual presence of the actual God. The temple imagery is not decorative. It is technical.

The day of Pentecost in Acts 2 is the historical beginning of this fully-built architecture. The Spirit who descended on Jesus at His baptism, who anointed Him for His ministry, who raised Him from the dead, is now poured out on the gathered disciples and through them on every believer subsequently incorporated into the body. The tongues of fire are the visible sign of an invisible reality. The Spirit has come, the bridge is open, the indwelling is now the standard condition of those who belong. The book of Acts that follows is essentially the story of how this Spirit, now permanently resident in the Church, conducts the mission of the risen Christ through the bodies of the people in whom He dwells.

And this is where the disciple has to slow down, because what has been described in this chapter is the precondition of everything the next several chapters will work out. The reason eternal life can be defined as present-tense knowing of the Father and the Son, in the way Jesus defines it in John 17:3, is that the Spirit is the One who makes that knowing actual. The disciple does not know the Father at a distance, by inference from doctrines about Him, or by working up the right interior posture, or by accumulating spiritual experiences. The disciple knows the Father because the Spirit who is the bond of love between Father and Son — the eternal love that 1 John 4:8 names as God's essence, given personal existence as the third person — has taken up residence within the disciple and is, from inside, joining the disciple to the relation he indwells.

The Father is not far. The Son is not absent. The Spirit is in the believer joining the believer to both. This is what Christianity claims is the case for every Christian in every moment, whether the Christian feels it or not, whether the doctrine has been articulated or not, whether the disciplines of awareness have been practiced or not. The fact is the fact. The recognition of the fact is where the disciple's life properly begins.