The Spirit and the Bridge (1 of 2)

The previous chapter ended with a body that has been raised. The body of Jesus, walked out of the tomb three days after it was buried, recognizable to the disciples who had known the man in his unraised condition, and yet transformed in the four properties Aquinas would later name. The prototype of redeemed embodiment now exists.

That is a stunning thing to say. It is also, for the disciple sitting in a coffee shop this morning, a problem.

Because the disciple has not been transformed. The mass that the disciple carries is the same mass the New Testament writers carried. The body that gets out of bed is still subject to entropy. The decay is real. The death is coming. The four properties of the glorified body are not properties the present body possesses in any directly observable way. The prototype has been raised. The user, to keep the engineer's word for it, has not.

So the question the entire next part of this volume has to answer is the question the engineer instinctively asks when a prototype exists but the production version does not. What is holding the connection between them? By what mechanism does the body that has not yet been transformed have any actual relationship to the body that has been? The two are separated by an asymptote that the unraised human being cannot cross. Something has to be doing the work of holding the bridge open from the side that has crossed.

Paul addresses this question with a precision that is easy to miss because the language is so familiar that it slides past the reader. Romans 8:9-11:

"You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this person does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is your life because of righteousness. Moreover if the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also make your mortal bodies alive through His Spirit who lives in you." — Romans 8:9-11 (NET) (NLM verification pending)

That is the answer. It is not subtle. The mechanism by which the disciple is connected to the risen Christ is the indwelling of the same Spirit who raised Christ. Not a different Spirit. Not a representative or a proxy. The same Spirit. The agent who effected the crossing of the asymptote in the body of Jesus is the agent now indwelling the one in whom the crossing has not yet happened. The bridge is not engineering of the believer's own making. The bridge is a Person, sent by the Father in the name of the Son, taking up residence in the believer in such a way that the believer's present life is now joined, in real time, to the risen life of the One in whom the crossing is already complete.

The first phrase is the binary at the front of verse 9. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this person does not belong to Him. Paul is not describing a higher tier of advanced believer here. He is naming the condition of belonging itself. The indwelling Spirit is the mark of a Christian. There is no other kind. The believer who has been brought into union with Christ has been given the Spirit by definition, because the giving of the Spirit is the means of the union. Without the indwelling there is no union, and without the union there is no Christian. Whatever the disciple's interior weather looks like on a given morning, the indwelling is not a question of feeling. It is a question of fact.

The second phrase is the paradox at the center of verse 10. If Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. Paul does not pretend that mortality is over. The present body is still dead because of sin — meaning it is still under the sentence of mortality that fell on the human race when sin entered. The decay has not been suspended. But in the very body that is still dying, the Spirit is already life. The two facts coexist. The image-bearer has not yet been transformed, and yet already has, in the present moment, the life of the One who has been transformed. Both are true at the same time. The disciple is mortal and indwelt. The indwelling does not abolish the mortality. It puts something inside the mortal body that the mortal body does not generate — something that is, in itself, the life of the age to come, present already.

The third phrase does the load-bearing work. Verse 11. If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. Read the verb tenses carefully. The raising of Jesus is past tense, accomplished. The indwelling of the Spirit is present tense, currently the case for those who belong. The giving of life to your mortal bodies is future tense, what God will do. And the means by which the future life-giving will reach the mortal bodies is through His Spirit who dwells in you — present, ongoing, the same Spirit, presently indwelling, who is also the future agent of the resurrection. The continuity is the Spirit. The Spirit is the through-line connecting the resurrection that has happened to the resurrection that will happen. The bridge runs through the present body of the believer whom that Spirit currently inhabits.

Cyril of Alexandria, writing his commentary on John in the 420s, devoted long stretches of the work to the Spirit's indwelling as the actual mechanism of the believer's union with Christ. He insists, against any reading that would make the union a mere moral approval, that the Spirit's presence in the believer is real and personal — that the indwelling is the means by which the believer is made, in Cyril's repeated formulation, of the same body with Christ. The indwelling is not poetic and it is not a private subjective state. It is the actual joining of the beloved to the risen Christ by the One who is the bond between them.

What bond precisely means is where Augustine's reading of John has to be made plain. The other Johannine anchor — the sentence that stands in 1 John 4:8 — says that God is love. Not that God loves, though God loves. That God is love. Love is what God essentially is. And if love is what God essentially is, then the Spirit, who is the third person of the one God, cannot be anything other than that love given personal existence. Augustine works this out in Book 15 of De Trinitate. He describes the Spirit as the love proceeding from the Father and the Son — the love by which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, eternal and uncreated, a Person and not a quality. When that Spirit is given to the believer, what is given is not a created influence but the personal love that is the inner life of God. The believer is taken up into that love.