THE

BIBLIOTHECA SACRA.

ARTICLE I.

THE OFFICES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

BY THE REV. E. H. JOHNSON, PROFESSOR IN CROZER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, CHESTER, PA.

AMONG the more important themes alike of theological and of practical interest the work of the Holy Spirit would perhaps be generally regarded as most in need of study. The settlement of this doctrine has been postponed because the time had not come when its settlement could be reached. The church gives herself to but one great subject at once, and takes centuries instead of years to arrive at a lasting decision. The lesson of history upon this point, although familiar, is hardly the less startling. It is natural that so abstruse a doctrine as that of the Trinity should wait nearly four hundred years for definition, and that the problem of the relations of divine to human in Christ should not be worked out to the general satisfaction until near the close of the seventh century. But how explain that it took the Western church a good part of five hundred years fully to recognize so obvious a fact as that men are born depraved, and more than eleven hundred years before her Anselm gave to the atonement, that is to the Good News itself, the enunciation which begins all modern thought upon this subject? VOL. XLIX. NO. 195

I

And we must review the whole complex process of church history if we would understand why the application of the atonement, or justification by faith, had to wait a full millennium and a half in order to receive a sufficiently simple and sufficiently wide publication.

No one then should be surprised to find John Wesley, about half way from Luther's day to ours, first making it understood that a new begetting by the Holy Spirit and a definite progress in the new life, together with the Spirit's witness to his own work, are within reach at once. Up to Wesley's time emphasis had been laid upon what the Holy Spirit does for the church, that he gives authority to her teachings and efficacy to her sacraments; Wesley preached the work of the Spirit in the individual. His contribution to the development of Christian doctrine was as timely as Luther's, and left as much for further inquiry within the very range of truth which he took in hand to expound. It was a sense of guilt for past sins on which Tetzel traded, and which was fully satisfied in Luther's doctrine of justification by faith. It was the spectacle of sin yet reigning in the church which inflamed the zeal of the young Methodists at Oxford, and which found its corrective in the offices of the Holy Spirit. But just as Luther's doctrine of justification invited an antinomian perversion, so Wesley's doctrine of immediate regeneration, sanctification and witness to the same, inevitably led to unwarrantable opinions about the nature of the changes actually wrought, and to a fanatical misunderstanding of the Spirit's attestation to his own work. What our time demands is a union in life and a reconciliation in doctrine of the benefits which Luther and Wesley proclaimed. We need more fully to apprehend both in thought. and in experience the relations of the work of Christ to that of the Holy Spirit. Justification for Christ's sake must be seen to go into effect through regeneration by the Holy Spirit in order either to bring opposite doctrinal tendencies

into accord, or to show that any reality underlies either doctrine. This is too much for a Review article to undertake; but it may not be immodest nor wholly profitless to attempt an orderly statement of what our generation may claim to know as to the offices of the Holy Spirit.

Common opinion has lit upon a distinction fundamentally correct, and helpful in the present inquiry; namely, that the dealings of God with men fall under two dispensations which, as regards the work of Christ, are called dispensations of the Law and of the Gospel, and as regards the work of the Holy Spirit, dispensations of the Letter and of the Spirit. This latter distinction is what Paul had in mind when he wrote, in a chapter devoted to the contrast between the two covenants, that "the letter kills, but the spirit makes alive" (2 Cor. iii. 6). John also contrasted the baptism which signalized his work with the baptism of the Spirit which was to distinguish the ministry of Christ (Luke iii. 16). But Christ in turn put off the gift of the Spirit until his own departure to the Father (John xvi. 7).

An answer to the question why the Holy Spirit could not come until Christ had gone, will lay open the whole subject of the Spirit's work. Two answers may be given, one of which seems to have escaped general notice. Christ could not send the Holy Spirit so long as he was himself in the position of a servant. All authority was given him in heaven and in earth only after the resurrection, an event which was completed in the ascension. A comment of John upon an earlier promise of the Holy Spirit recognizes this fact: "The Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified" (John vii. 39). It is not denied, it will presently be affirmed, that the Holy Spirit was already at work in the world. It is not forgotten that, after he rose and before he ascended, Jesus breathed on the disciples, and said, "Receive ye the Holy Spirit" (John xx. 22). But the same

evangelist records that the special gift of the Spirit could not be conferred while Christ yet walked among men. Another reason why this could not then be done is more immediately pertinent to our theme: The distinctive office of the Spirit under this dispensation is to testify of Christ (John xv. 26), but that testimony could not be given until the work to be attested was complete. Here we reach a view of the one allinclusive office of the Holy Spirit; namely, to minister the truth. The truth may be either revealed or applied by the Holy Spirit; but, in one form or the other, a ministration of truth is all that the Bible unequivocally asserts or experience attests. The scope of the ministration will depend upon the nature of the truth to be administered. This fact, and nothing in the way of arbitrariness, fixes the boundary line between the old and new dispensations.

Under the old dispensation the people were in a state of pupilage, and the truth was embodied largely in symbols. An immediate result was restriction of the truth to those who had a symbolical fitness to make use of the symbols. So far then as the practice of Levitical rites was limited to the priestly nation of Israel, so far the work of the Holy Spirit was limited to that nation.

A predominantly ritual religion is subject to a still further limitation: its ceremonies are apt to hide what they are intended to show. The more they mean, the less meaning they actually convey. This is a familiar reproach against the Romish ceremonial, and our objections are graded to the importance of the service which a symbol is intended to render. Once there was universal Puritan objection to crosses on houses of worship; now not only meeting-houses wear crosses, but Protestant ladies carry the cross as an ornament, if it happens to be the fashion in jewelry. Yet we never see a painting of the crucifixion behind the pulpit of a church known as evangelical, nor a carved crucifix set up before the

eyes of all the worshippers. But why not the crucifix, if the cross? Because the cross but hints what the crucifix exhibits. The crucifix means too much. Hence the risk that the worshipper will let his mind rest where his eyes are fixed, and an idol usurp the place of Christ. Not even the rites appointed by our Lord are simple enough to escape this liability. It was because baptism so vividly sets forth a spiritual dying and rising that it was credited, perhaps before the last apostle had died, with conferring the new life. It was because the bread and the wine so vividly picture the broken body and shed blood, and because it was so important to "discern the Lord's body," that men began, one can hardly tell how soon, to believe the very body and blood were present in the symbols of them. And so it is quite probable that few of those who strictly kept the Levitical law looked through its emblems to realities, and the work of the Holy Spirit could not but be correspondently restricted.

The priestly office tends to aggravate this difficulty." Priests are not forward to simplify ritual; on the contrary, they elaborate it, lay stress on their own share in it, lay so exclusive a stress upon the correct performance of functions as eventually to release thought itself from any part in worship. The truth thus passes wholly out of sight, and the Holy Spirit is banished from the temple. It is worthy of note that this tendency ruled far beyond the family of Aaron, and that the scribes, who gave themselves with exhaustless ardor to the study of the Law, in attempting to fence in the law fenced out obedience. Hence among the many who listened to Christ, there was no class more out of sympathy. with the essentially spiritual character of his religion, than the scribes and their most ardent adherents, the Pharisees.

Again, it is a singular proof of the radically anti-spiritual character of a too highly symbolical religion that, whereas the methods of the kindergarten are early laid aside in secular education, the clumsiness of object-lessons in religion