2. If now we denote this striving for unity by the expression ‘common spirit,’ we mean by this exactly what we mean in any earthly system of government, namely, the common bent found in all who constitute together a moral personality, to seek the advancement of this whole; and this is at the same time the characteristic love found in each for every other. Hence up to this point no objection can easily be made to our proposition. But if one compares its content as there explained with the heading, and rightly infers thence that this common spirit is meant as the Holy Spirit, and the communication of it as the communication of the Holy Spirit, then the suspicion may easily arise that the expression Holy Spirit’ is being taken in an entirely different sense from that given it in Scripture. But the thought-forms that have arisen owing to the place of the Holy Spirit in the doctrine of the Trinity (partly to explain it, partly to refute it, as, for example, when the Holy Spirit is represented as a separate higher Being, indeed, but only a created one) ought none of them to be taken as equivalent to New Testament statements, which as a matter of fact represent the Holy Spirit to us as always and only in believers. He is promised to the whole community,⁶ and where an original communication of the Spirit is spoken of, it comes by a single act to a multitude of people,⁷ who eo ipso become an organic whole, who are urged on to like activity and stand in for each other. In all, however, He is represented as being one and the same, the various effects produced by Him in various people being distinguished from Himself as His gifts.⁸ And this is not meant as if merely to indicate an advantage or superiority which some individuals possess; which would naturally mean that the Spirit was a particular quality of the personality of each, resembling and generically the same as the quality of anyone else’s; which is how we conceive the matter in the case of special talents and perfections. No: on the one hand the Spirit is represented as a true unity through which the multitude of Christians also become a unity and the many individual personalities become a true common life or moral personality; and, on the other hand, the Spirit is not assigned to people as it were in a random and unconnected fashion—a phenomenon here one moment and gone the next. The presence of the Spirit rather is the condition of anyone’s sharing in the common life;⁹ for, only when this common spirit of the whole begins to show itself at work in a given person can it be known that he is a constituent part of the whole;¹⁰ just as if anyone joins himself to the whole, it can be taken as certain that he will receive a communication of the Holy Spirit.¹¹ Now in the sphere of thought there has always been controversy over questions of this kind, as to how far what exists in many is still one, or whether and in what degree it can be rightly said that an idea or a motion of the will common to many is one, or is something particular in each. Here we do not have to decide such differences of opinion, whether on their own account or because we had prematurely represented one view or the other as incompatible with this element of the Christian faith. We prefer not to enter on this field at all, but merely to lay down two points as expressions of our Christian self-consciousness. The first is that the unity of the Spirit is to be understood in the same sense as the unity which everyone attributes to the characteristic form taken by human nature in a nation; even those who ascribe being only to the separate individual may still say that each man’s personality is the national character modified by the original basis of his own nature. Similarly, we say that the new life of each is an activity of this common spirit manifested in the same fashion in all others, an activity conditioned by the state in which regeneration finds him; and the Christian Church is one through this one Spirit in the same way that a nation is one through the national character common to and identical in all. The second point is that this common spirit is also one, because in all derived from one and the same source, namely, Christ; for everyone is conscious of the communication of the Spirit as being connected in the closest fashion with the rise of faith in him, and everyone recognizes that the same is true for all the others. For faith only comes by preaching, and preaching always goes back to Christ’s commission and is therefore derived from Him. And as in Christ Himself everything proceeds from the Divine within Him, so also does this communication, which becomes in everyone the power of the new life, a power not different in each, but the same in all.

3. Another possible objection is this. Starting from the point that all other religious fellowships are destined to lose themselves in Christianity, and hence that all nations are destined to pass over into the Christian fellowship, the common spirit of the Christian Church would then be the common spirit of the human race. Now by analogy with the common spirit of a nation such a thing as this latter must exist, and we do not know how to describe it otherwise than by the expressions, racial consciousness, or love of humanity as a species. But in that case the race is one in the same sense as the Church is one, and as there cannot be two living unities for the same whole, what we wish to denote by the expression ‘Holy Spirit’ would be exactly the same thing as the racial consciousness. This would mean either that the latter was something supernatural, which no one would desire to maintain, or that the former must be natural, and if derived from Christ, then from the human in Him. This would make the communication of the Holy Spirit nothing more than the awakening by Christ of a pure racial consciousness. For the subject about to be dealt with, this is the most logical form of the view which regards the awakening and expansion of a universal love to men as the proper and essential fruit of the appearance of Christ. To us, however, not only is it certain that our participation in the Holy Spirit really belongs to the things which we are conscious of having had imparted to us by Christ, but also that in Christ everything derives from the absolute and exclusive power of His God-consciousness. And if on the other hand we take into account our self-consciousness as still betraying our participation in the common life of sinfulness, we find in it such a variety of interests belonging to the merely individual though also enlarged personality that the pure racial consciousness cannot prevail as a practical motive any more than could a law of morality couched in different terms; it merely serves as a barrier against personal and social selfishness. Of course it was first through Christ (as Founder of a society which is capable of embracing all men, and which, while attaching individuals to itself, looks simply to the fact of their being human) that the racial consciousness, along with the God-consciousness and with the same object in view, has become a powerful practical motive. But just for this reason, this power is no mere natural principle that would have developed of itself out of human nature as human nature would have remained without Christ. On the contrary, we recognize it for the most authentic expression of the Holy Spirit as a consciousness of the need to be redeemed that is alike in all, and of the capacity, alike in all, to be taken up into living fellowship with Christ; and the universal love of humanity we know only as one and the same thing with the will for the Kingdom of God in its widest compass. It is only in this sense that for us the common spirit of the Christian Church, and every Christian’s universal love for men as a love alike for those who have already become citizens of the Kingdom of God and for those to whom this experience is yet to come, are the same One Holy Spirit.

§ 122. Only after the departure of Christ from earth was it possible for the Holy Spirit, as this common spirit, to be fully communicated and received. 1. Let us compare this proposition with what is most often taught on this point and is stated not only when the subject is dealt with in presence of a congregation, but predominantly in the public teaching given, where the procession of the Holy Spirit is indeed set forth in the doctrine of the Trinity as timeless and eternal, but the outpouring of the Spirit, as the beginning of His activity within the Christian Church, is connected with the event of Pentecost. The first point needing defence is this, that as has at least been indicated in our argument, the Holy Spirit must already have been at work, even though incompletely. Now it certainly is true that Christ Himself makes His going away a condition of the sending of the Spirit;¹² but it is equally true that He Himself communicated the Spirit to them before His final departure from earth,¹³ and indeed that He even assumed that the Spirit had been already present with them; for whatever is a divine revelation in the soul relatively to Christ¹⁴ is also a work of the Spirit. Now these various statements are not easily to be harmonized, unless what Christ is said to have expected at His Ascension in Jerusalem¹⁵ was simply a complete filling with the Spirit. If now we start from the position that the Holy Spirit is the inmost vital power of the Christian Church as a whole, we must go back to the two most elemental aspects of life, the living susceptibility and the free spontaneous activity; for these together, in their reciprocal relations, are that by which life is constituted—life being the more complete and the more fully developed, the larger the sphere covered by each of the two, and the more exact their mutual correspondence. In company with Christ the susceptibility of the disciples developed, and in their steady apprehension of what He offered to them there was laid the foundation of their future effectiveness as workers for the Kingdom of God. Hence, as they related their apprehension entirely to the Kingdom of God preached by Christ, each recognized this susceptibility in the others as the very same thing, grounded and upheld in the same way in them all. There came to be among them a fellowship in apprehension, and as face to face with Christ each was able to represent the rest in question and answer,¹⁶ this susceptibility revealed itself as an essential factor in the common spirit. In this sense the right apprehension of Christ is itself ascribed to the Holy Spirit.¹⁷ On the other hand, they had at that time no really spontaneous activity of their own. What Christ suggested to them in that line was practice, not performance proper, and just for that reason it was not free activity, but one that needed on each occasion a new special impetus. One step in the transition towards complete spontaneity is shown in the communication of the Spirit, just referred to, in the forty days after the Resurrection. For the right binding and loosing of sin is in the main just an expression of a fully formed susceptibility for what relates to the Kingdom of God. This expression, however, is inconceivable except as having a reaction on those whose sins are bound or loosed; it therefore marks a transition to free spontaneous activity; and obviously the susceptibility reveals itself most distinctly as the common spirit in expressions which presumably are unanimous.

2. The common spirit was, however, as yet incomplete; hence during the personal presence of Christ there can have been no completely common life representing at that time the Kingdom of God. And this, as a matter of fact, was the case. For the more a common life depends on an individual life, the less is it an existence in common. In part it is so far not equipped for permanent identity amid the changes of death and birth; in part a common life ought to be one whole, but not an individual person. The more all depend on one, each receiving his impetus from him, the more all are merely his tools or members, and the whole is just the enlargement of this one personality. Or if we consider the multiplicity of individual lives, the whole is really more like a household or a school than an existence in common. The ancients viewed the State in which all are unconditionally subject to the will of an individual, as an enlarged household, where various living tools move at the command of one master; and school for us means a spiritual life in common which entirely depends on the thinking power and art of making disciples possessed by an individual, who puts a common stamp on them all. In this sense, of course, Christ’s life in company with His disciples was both a household and a school. But a house is scattered on the master’s death, and if its members are not caught up in some new bond, they disperse. So, too, in a school, if no other common motive comes to replace the original thirst forlearning and personal attachment, no further progress takes place after the master’s death, and the previous bond of union gradually dissolves. We find the disciples in the mood thus to disperse after Christ’s death, and up to the time of His Ascension their life together was so much interrupted and decreased as to become quite formless. But even when Christ was alive it could not but be that each felt mainly dependent on Him, and sought to receive from Him; no one of them all considered himself ripe for free spontaneous activity in the Kingdom of God yet to be formed.

3. If we do not wish to insist that the Holy Spirit is a divine communication of a quite specific kind, which though conditioned by Christ is yet not thus homogeneous with His earlier influence, it is certainly possible to argue that the distinction here sought to be drawn is untenable. For according to our own statements, in the living fellowship of the regenerate with Christ everything derives from Him, which means that, strictly speaking, there is to be found in every Christian only susceptibility, not spontaneous activity. And hence, it may be said, the life in common is no more now than then a common existence; for the spontaneous activity then as now was wholly in Christ, and believers’ life together even yet is just the mutual impartation of what each has received from Christ. But to this it must be rejoined that when formerly we studied the way redemption is realized in the case solely of the individual by himself, that was an incomplete view of the matter, and at the moment we safeguarded ourselves by a reference to what we are now considering. We said that ab initio preparatory operations of grace arising out of the common existence reach everyone. The statement that everything in the regenerate derives from Christ held good of the communication of His sinless perfection, which simply consists in a pure will directed to the Kingdom of God; in particular aims and purposes this is no longer present. If therefore we ask how our particular aims arise out of that pure will, the answer is that it happens only in the common life. They no longer come to anyone directly from Christ; no one is given a special command by Christ, as was the case with the disciples. But as no isolated individual can achieve anything in the Kingdom of God, so no one can really form any purpose but one in which he foresees that he will have the support of others and of which the germ is therefore already present in others. And again, through every such common movement only so much progress will actually be made as has a true common consciousness behind it. Here therefore there is more in the individual than susceptibility, and his really spontaneous energetic activity is more than the activity of Christ merely passing through him. But the common spirit expressed in this spontaneous activity is only the Holy Spirit in so far as the activity it induces is a prolongation of Christ’s own activity. And no more than in Christ’s lifetime is the individual’s susceptibility open merely to what proceeds directly from Christ; it is also a susceptibility to the spontaneous activity of others.

If now we wish to apply here the general canon that everything essentially connected with our participation in redemption must be the same in us as in the first disciples, we shall say that as long as all spontaneous activity was in Christ alone, but in them mere susceptibility, the Kingdom of God in the narrower sense was confined to Christ alone—the disciples representing only the outer circle of the preparatory workings of grace, where there is nothing but susceptibility, and just as then in the disciples, so now in everyone the reminiscent apprehension of Christ must grow into a spontaneous imitation of Him. This common spontaneous activity—which indwells all and in each is kept right by the influence of all, and prolongs the personal action of Christ—in its unity and identity we have full right to call the common spirit of the Christian Church; it corresponds to all that Christ promised by the Holy Spirit and to everything that is represented as the Spirit’s working. Taking everything together, we are thus able to say how it was that after Christ’s departure the disciples’ common apprehension of Christ changed into a spontaneous prolongation of His fellowship-forming activity, and how it was only through this activity so related to the fixed apprehension of Christ becoming the imperishable common spirit, that the Christian Church arose. So, too, everyone within the circle of preparatory grace, who through the influence of Christian life upon him and in the activity of others flowing through him, possesses this Christian common spirit merely in the form of susceptibility, must, when through faith the rule of the Kingdom of God has been established in his life, refashion his attitude to the apprehension of Christ accepted within the common life into a spontaneous activity of this kind; and this is the communication of the divine Spirit. If now the justifying divine activity be conceived under the form of particular divine actions, we should have to say that now this communication is in each case, as it were, the latest element or stage of this activity; in the lifetime of Christ this final act was, so to speak, put off until after His departure from the earth. But as we do not admit the reality of any individual and temporal divine acts, we are not compelled to adopt any such paradoxical formula; and we shall state the parallel between the first disciples and ourselves equally well if we say that already, even when Christ was with them, and just because they were taken up into living fellowship with Him, they had the principle of the new life, and had it not merely as susceptibility but also as spontaneous activity; although as long as Christ was with them it took the form exclusively of a continuous desire to receive from Him, and therefore only afterwards could become truly common and manifest itself as Holy Spirit. It is these aspects that are described with more precision in the following theorems.

§ 123. First Theorem.—The Holy Spirit is the union of the Divine Essence with human nature in the form of the common Spirit animating the life in common of believers. 1. When in connexion with the doctrines of Christ we were discussing the union in Him of the divine with the human, we put entirely aside the question whether or not this divine, apart from its union with human nature, was something special, as being the second Person in the Godhead, and something relatively distinct in the Divine Essence. So here too, in proposing a similar formula for the Holy Spirit, we must (although the Trinity is now completely before us) in the same way leave this consideration out of account. What we have to treat here is simply this relation between the highest Essence and human nature, in so far as in its operations it meets us within our Christian self-consciousness. Since these operations are fully expounded only in the next division, and the content of the following section has already been prescribed for us, a summary view of these relations in the doctrine of the Trinity can only be given at the close of our whole exposition. But in advance we must here make a different point. Our discussion is not in the least meant to embrace all the passages in our Holy Scriptures where this expression occurs, or all the ways in which it is used in dogmatic works. Here we have only to do with the Holy Spirit in the Christian Church, and do not raise the question whether, as used apart from this relation, the expression means the same thing or not. But this is equivalent to saying that the Holy Spirit here discussed is not the same as the Spirit to whom a participation in the creation of the material world is ascribed,¹⁸ or the Spirit whose indwelling is the cause of all sorts of extraordinary talents,¹⁹ or even the Spirit mentioned in connexion with the incarnation of Christ, at least so far as a physical effect is there ascribed to Him,²⁰ even though, strictly speaking, a connexion with the Christian Church does exist here. Indeed, we even put aside the common way of speaking of the Holy Spirit as already active in the prophets before the appearance of Christ,²¹ so as not to feel compelled to identify the common spirit of the Jewish theocracy and that of the Christian Church. And here, however much the letter of Scripture may seem to contradict us, the spirit of the New Testament is on our side. In Christ’s promises of the Holy Spirit of truth²² there is nowhere the slightest whisper that this Something had been present earlier and had vanished only temporarily, or indeed that He is anything at all except as He is for the disciples of Christ. Otherwise the disciples would obviously have been prophets, and Christ could hardly have said that prophecy ended with John.²³

2. If now (provisionally leaving on one side what we have established in the two last propositions) we return to the point that in the Church from the beginning, and therefore already in the New Testament, all the powers at work in the Christian Church—and not merely the miraculous gifts, which in this connexion are quite accidental—are traced to the Holy Spirit;²⁴ and if we ask what is thus supposed to have been present from the very start, the following admissions have to be made.

First, these powers are not to be found outside of the Christian Church, and hence they neither arise from the general constitution of human nature (which would make Christ superfluous) nor from any other divine arrangement.²⁵ Second, this Spirit is not something supernatural and mysterious though not immediately divine, a higher yet created essence putting itself in secret ways into relation with men. The Church has properly rejected this in the same way and on the same grounds as all representations of Christ with an Arian bias. For as in Christ, too, the human would be no more human if we had to conceive it united with a higher nature in one person, so our own life and the life of other believers would no longer seem to be humanly interconnected if we had to conceive our consciousness and action as determined by the influence of a superhuman nature. Third, the Holy Spirit is not something that, although divine, is not united with the human nature, but only somehow influences it from without. For whatever enters us from without does so only through the senses and never becomes more than an occasion for our action. What action is to follow on this occasion is determined from within, and only this, and not the former region of the senses, is the sphere of the Holy Spirit. That occasions are given us from without does not preclude the unity of our self-consciousness and self-determination. But this unity would at once be dissolved if determinations were given from without. And if there are passages in Scripture largely influenced by prophetic language that in terms seem clearly to assert such an external influence,²⁶ these have the letter of other passages quite as definitely against them.²⁷ There is indeed no way of imagining how the Spirit’s gifts could be within us,²⁸ and He Himself remain without, or how He is to influence us from without except through human speech and significant action—which just means that He is already within, and influencing, someone else. And the man on whom the Spirit works is not thereby made a participator in the Spirit. Only one in whom and through whom He works²⁹ has received the Spirit. Thus in everyone He brings His gifts to pass, and we are not conscious of the gifts as inward, but the power that effects them as outward: what we do is to distinguish him on whom the Holy Spirit is still at work, as thus being one in whom no gift is yet produced, from one within the state of sanctification, in whom the Holy Spirit is producing gifts.³⁰ Thus, as Scripture also says, we are conscious both of the Spirit and of His gifts as something inward; of the gifts as being different in different individuals, but of the Spirit being one in different people in spite of the difference of gifts. This explains the testimony of the first possessors of the Holy Spirit, who describe Him as a specific divine efficacious working in believers, though not one to be separated from the recognition of the being of God in Christ. The two things are strictly interdependent. For if in the Person of Christ nothing divine had entered into human nature, while there were something divine in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, then this divine element could not proceed from Christ, but would have to be communicated individually in some utterly miraculous fashion. In that case, however, it would always be thus communicable, although, on account of the absolute arbitrariness of the proceeding, no such supposed possessor of the Spirit would be able to make any claim whatever to be recognized as such by others. Thus all reciprocal influence and co-operative activity would be abolished, and everyone who had the Spirit would have Him all by himself; an idea that the Church repudiated from the very first as contradicting its self-consciousness. If, on the other hand, something divine did really enter human nature through Christ, but did not remain in human nature on earth after the disappearance of His Person, then nothing could remain in human nature of that which in Christ was dependent on the being of God in Him; and so there would be no communication of the sinless perfection and untroubled blessedness of Christ.

3. That the testimony of the first disciples agrees with what has been stated in the two last propositions concerning our consciousness is clear; and all that remains is to justify by means of both of them the language of the proposition we are now discussing. Now if the Holy Spirit is an effective spiritual power in the souls of believers, we must either represent Him as bound up with their human nature, or we shall have to surrender the unity of their being, if on the one hand they are such that in them human nature shows itself in operation, and on the other, such that in them the Holy Spirit is acting in separation from human nature. To adopt such a view would produce so entire a dualism within human life that it could never be maintained. The theory of a definite activity of the Holy Spirit has indeed been carried to this extreme, not, however, when this supposed activity was still taking place, but only long after it had ceased. All that remains to explain is the fact that this union is realized in the form of a common spirit. Now everything (even in human nature viewed apart from redemption) that as spiritual power is absolutely the same in all individuals of a race and is incapable of any individualizing modification, and above all, reason, we regard as something not varied according to the individual, but as in all and in each the same. Now if we separate the Spirit from the gifts, which are of course individually modified and personal, then the Spirit is, in all who share in Him, one and the same, without being increased when the participants multiply, or being diminished when they grow fewer, and without being anything whatever in one that He is not in another; except that, still being the same, He shows Himself stronger in one, and it may be weaker in another. He is, however, not only one in all in so far as His life and work in one cannot be distinguished from His life and work in another, but as already explained, because, as no one can attain the new life except in and through the fellowship, he has his share in the Holy Spirit, not in his personal self-consciousness viewed by itself, but only in so far as he is conscious of his being part of this whole—that is, he shares the Spirit as a common consciousness. Hence also the union of the divine with the human nature in believers is not a person-forming union, otherwise it would be indistinguishable from the union of the natures in Christ, and the distinction between Redeemer and redeemed would be lost. If we consider the individual as existing in an inborn and hereditary common life, no such distinction obtains there, as the formula stated above shows.³¹ But if the reference be to the common life into which the individual only enters after his personality has reached a certain point of development, it cannot in that case be said that the personality is simply the common spirit taking a specific form, though more and more it comes to be just that. If we could isolate the new life of the individual that begins with regeneration and construct it by itself, then we should certainly be able to describe it as a life absolutely determined by the Holy Spirit, and the new creature would simply be the Holy Spirit Himself in conscious possession of this specific complex of natural human powers. But as a matter of fact, the new life is not a self-identical whole and does not uniformly penetrate the entire organism of the personality. On the contrary, the person, the continuous unity of self-consciousness, is a mingled separation and union of the divine and the human; and even if someone were actually to reach the point of having the new life diffuse itself over his entire essence, yet the portion of his life spent before his regeneration would still form part of his personality. Finally, the divine activity constituting the new life in the individual is common spirit for this additional reason, that it is in each without regard to personal peculiarities, provided only he belongs to the fellowship through the influence of which his regeneration was conditioned, and out of which, by preaching in the widest sense of the word, this new life was transmitted to him, exactly as it took shape in the disciples through the power of the self-communicating life of Christ; partly, too, because it only takes possession of the individual with a view to fellowship, and moulds him solely for one end—in order that, and in the manner that, it may best work through him for the whole. § 124. Second Theorem.—Every regenerate person partakes of the Holy Spirit, so that there is no living fellowship with Christ without an indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and vice versa.

4. Up to this point the question as to how redemption is realized in the human soul has been answered by saying that it happens through being taken up into living fellowship with Christ. Now the demand is made that everyone must partake of the Holy Spirit. This, however, is not at all to be understood as meaning that the experience is actually in two parts, and that some new and special thing happens to a regenerate person when he becomes a partaker in the Holy Spirit. Neither in fact nor in point of time are the two things to be distinguished, but in strictness we must say that everyone, as regenerate, also receives a share in the Holy Spirit. For being taken up into living fellowship with Christ includes at the same time being conscious both of our sonship with God and of the Lordship of Christ; and both in Scripture are ascribed to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.³² We therefore cannot imagine how one could exist were the other absent. If, to indulge in a flight of fancy, we suppose that we could find ourselves placed in a similar common life representative of the Kingdom of God, and led by the Holy Spirit as its common spirit, with only this difference that we knew nothing of any such Founder as Christ is; yet we should not, when contrasting that condition and the sinful common life, be able to derive the first from the second; and at the same time, since in all the members of that common life sin, while not willed, is yet present, we should have to hold that the sinful common life is not something grounded within itself (that is to say, something such as it was in its first origin), for otherwise it must have been capable of originating in the same way also at other points. This, we remark in passing, is also the reason why those who start from so imperfect and partial a divine revelation always so easily recognize one another, even in their hostility. So long, therefore, as we do not admit that other similar kingdoms of God may arise independently of the Christian Church at other times or places, we are compelled to accept for it a single origin outside of the common life of sin, from which the divine communication found within it is derived. Membership in this common life therefore means at the same time being set within the sphere of operation of the sole Founder. Thus we find expressed the belief that such an outpouring of the Spirit would only have been possible after the appearance of the Son of God, and on the basis of His personal influence; and this carries with it the implication that our participation in that Spirit and our own bond with the living influence of Christ are one and the same thing.

On the other side, the same thing holds good. If we begin with Christ and hold to the proposition that the union of the Divine with His human personality was at the same time an enrichment of human nature as a whole, it follows not only in general that even after His departure this union must continue, but also (since this continuation is to proceed from the union itself) that wherever it exists there must be a bond with Christ, and vice versa. And since after the departure of Christ the enlarged range of connexion with Him can only proceed from the fellowship of believers, these three facts—being drawn by that union into the fellowship of believers, having a share in the Holy Spirit, and being drawn into living fellowship with Christ—must simply mean one and the same thing.

2. In this connexion it is very natural to ask what is the relation between the two expressions used by the same apostle, that Christ liveth in us, and that we are led by the Spirit.³³ When the same Apostle says that those who are led by the Spirit are God’s children, either he is contradicting (and that no one can believe) him who says that those who have received Christ are God’s children, or else here too these two things, the life of Christ in us and the leading of the Holy Spirit in us, are one, both within that third thing, being children of God. Either there are two different kinds of children of God (which we should all deny as much as Paul or John), or else these two things are the same. If we are to answer the question from the connexion in which the expressions are used in the Church, we notice to begin with that the second is peculiar and characteristic in a higher degree than the first, and has therefore obtained a larger place in the language of the Schools and in the usage of devotional religion which attributes special value to what is easily understood. On the other hand, the first is very far from prominent in the language of the Schools, and has won a special place in the devotional vocabulary usually known as ‘mystical.’ Now, if we consider that the Holy Spirit is also called the Spirit of Christ, it follows at once that we say more particularly in one context that the Spirit of Another lives in us, and in a different context that the Other Himself lives in us, without intending to mean anything different by the two phrases. Indeed, in any case nothing different could be meant. If we add the thought of the union of the Divine and the human in Christ, obviously the human can be in us only as a rightly apprehended picture or representation, but the Divine as a powerful impulse, even although in us it does not, as in Him, exclusively determine our whole personality, but only works in and along with His rightly apprehended picture, which again can only take shape in our minds in the measure of truth and perfection in which the Divine glorifies it before our thought. But just this is the work of the Holy Spirit—to bring Christ into memory and glorify Him in us. Thus however they are regarded, the two things are one and the same.

The same result is reached if we compare the content of the two expressions with reference to the effects they indicate. If we conceive ourselves as perfectly within the living fellowship of Christ, then all our actions can be regarded as His. But the Holy Spirit also, when leading us through the knowledge of Christ into all truth, cannot possibly lead us to any other actions than those in which Christ can be recognized; the fruits of the Spirit are therefore nothing but the virtues of Christ. To recognize in our souls any leading of the divine Spirit which could not be brought into connexion with what Christ’s words and life have conveyed to us as His way of acting, is to open the door to every sort of visionary fanaticism that the Protestant Church from the very start has most steadily opposed. The leading of the Holy Spirit is never other than a divine incitement to realize the standard of what Christ, in virtue of the being of God in Him, humanly was and did. And the life of Christ in us is nothing but activity in behalf of the Kingdom of God which embraces men all together in the grasp of the love flowing from Him; that is, it is the power of the Christian common spirit.

From this it is also clear how, if to believe in Christ and to have Christ living in one are the same thing, it may be said on the one hand that the Holy Spirit produces faith, and on the other hand that the Holy Spirit comes through faith.³⁴ For through the activity of those who already have a share in the Spirit, He effects faith in others who are brought by them to recognize what is divine and saving in Christ; in these, thereby, the Holy Spirit becomes the moving principle. And so, since the Divine Essence was bound up with the human person of Christ, but is now (His directly personal influence having ceased) no longer personally operative in any individual, but henceforward manifests itself actively in the fellowship of believers as their common spirit, this is just the way in which the work of redemption is continued and extended in the Church.

3. If then in content the two aforesaid expressions mean the same thing, we must not censure either those Christians who prefer to describe their experiences in the sphere of grace as the immediate being and life of Christ within them, nor those who rather (and almost exclusively) find the explanation of their new life in the indwelling of the Spirit of God. Dogmatic terminology is bound not only to keep both forms, but also to point out the appropriate way of using each, so as to indicate the dangers of a one-sided use; and this in order that the former, believing themselves to enjoy the immediate influence of Christ, may not break away from the fellowship, or the latter fancy that the Spirit active in the fellowship could carry them on when severed from Christ or lead them beyond Him.

It is difficult, however, to leave this subject without raising the question whether the outpouring of the Spirit is to be conceived as a new divine revelation, and one which, although conditioned by the incarnation of Christ, yet in its characteristic nature is equally original, or whether it is not rather a fact not merely dependent on the appearance of Christ, but its natural consequence. In the latter case the appearance of Christ would be, in the sense already indicated, the one and only supernatural foundation of Christianity; and following on this the whole further development of the spiritual life would issue naturally from that one source. In the former case, the original outpouring of the Spirit would be a second miracle of the same kind, and equally essential. The question is, of course, not one for Dogmatics in the narrowest sense, since we cannot decide it from our Christian self-consciousness; for to-day the communication of the Holy Spirit to the individual presents itself to each as a natural effect of the presence and activity of the Spirit in the whole formed by the Christian fellowship. But this implies that the acceptance of the former view would have to be based on quite irrefutable testimony. Now the phenomena of Pentecost³⁵ of course bear distinctly enough the mark of the miraculous. But, for one thing, later communications of the Spirit through preaching (and this is quite analogous to our present situation) are described in exactly the same way and with emphasis on the identity of the phenomena;³⁶ so that in this case the miraculous does not belong to the essence of the matter, and we can argue thence that it did not at Pentecost either. On the other hand, it is difficult to assert that the Pentecostal outpouring was the first communication of the Spirit to the disciples, for we are told that already on an earlier occasion Christ had communicated the Spirit to them,³⁷ and neither the language used nor the treatment of it in the creeds permits us to regard it as a mere promise. On every account, therefore, we do well here to regard the miraculous as not of the essence of the matter but as belonging to the circumstances of the time, and leave the whole question to exegesis. But apart from these accompanying phenomena, the communication of the Spirit cannot be any more or less a miracle in one case than in another; and in this connexion it may be said that while the gradual dissemination of the Spirit may be in no case a miracle, if regarded as the effect of the living power of the Church, and was no miracle when effected by the living power of Christ, it always is a miracle if regarded as a sudden leap from partially aroused susceptibility into a common and coherent spontaneous activity. As such it broke forth on the day of Pentecost, bearing in token of this originality the miraculous in its train; and even to-day, in similar cases, the more conversion appears to be something sudden, the more are we inclined to regard anomalous accompanying circumstances as miraculous in character. § 125. Third Theorem.—The Christian Church, animated by the Holy Spirit, is in its purity and integrity the perfect image of the Redeemer, and each regenerate individual is an indispensable constituent of this fellowship. 1. Fixing our attention on the Redeemer in the maturity of His human life, we see in the totality of His powers an organism adequate to the impulses proceeding from the being of God within Him. The individual as regenerate can never in this respect be regarded even as an image of Him, because the condition of varied sinfulness in which divine grace found him does not permit of an exact correspondence in the relationship of his psychical capacities to the impulses of the Spirit. But if the Christian Church is a true common life, a unified or, as we say, a moral personality though not indeed an inherited or natural one, it cannot on this latter account be the same as a personality arising from the person-forming activity of Nature, for in the two cases growth and decay are related in very different fashion; but none the less it can and must be an image of such a personality. For since the Divine Essence is one and everywhere self-identical, then, even if its mode of being in the individual, Christ, and in the common life is not the same, it follows that the impulses proceeding from it must be the same in both cases. Hence the modes both of comprehension and of action are the same in the Church as in the Redeemer, because there are present in every member, and therefore in the whole, the very same powers which in Christ’s case were taken up into unity with the divine principle. Such an aggregate of human powers in a certain sense exists in every organized mass of people, where the most important contrasts which human life offers are ordinarily found side by side. In the primitive Church, too, in spite of its limited size, the same truth was exemplified by the fact that it very quickly spread among Jews and pagans, and thus included what in this respect was the most significant contrast of all, with the result that thus every further development through the inclusion of minor contrasts was prepared for and introduced. If, however, we are seeking the image in its true perfection, we must regard the Church in its absolute purity and integrity. Manifestly we see its purity only if what we view as an element of the Church is not the entire life of regenerate individuals, even subsequently to regeneration, but only that in their life which constitutes its good works, and not that which belongs to its sins. It follows at once that the absolute integrity of the Church is only to be seen in the totality of the human race. For just as in the first pair (viewed as the common ancestors of all) there can be imagined no distinct differences of temperament or constitution simply because it was from them that all differences, whether climatic or more individual, were to develop, and therefore their perfect image is found only in the fundamental types of all human races taken together, and of all the tribes into which they are subdivided—which tribes again are completely represented only by the totality of all the individual beings belonging to them—so too is it in regard to Christ as the actually given spiritual archetype and original. If we recall our explanations regarding His sinless perfection on the one hand and the basis of the sinfulness of all others on the other hand, it follows that each individual is not merely in each of his individual characteristics an imperfect image; even considered as a whole he is an image of a one-sided and partial kind, which requires to be supplemented on every side. From this it follows of itself that the perfect image of Christ is only to be found in the sum-total of all the forms of spiritual life based on the varieties of natural foundation; for it is only so that one-sided tendencies fully supplement each other, and the imperfections compatible with one are cancelled by the others. We reach the same result if we regard the work of Christ rather than His Person, and in that relation view the Church as an organic body, equipped for a sum-total of activities in which the perfection of each vital function is conditioned by the integrity of the various members.³⁸ For various functions can be properly apportioned only if the apportionment is based on a variety of gifts, and this again, if it is to arise in a natural way, presumes a variety present in the personal living unity. In this way the two facts harmonize well, that the Church is called the body of Christ, ruled by the Head,³⁹ and that the more it becomes externally complete and inwardly perfect, the more it is also said to become the image of Christ.⁴⁰

2. From this there now follows the second half of our proposition. In reference to this last point it can indeed be said without hesitation that everything any single person contributes by his activity to the maintenance and growth of the whole can only be replaced by the concurrence of several others, else Christ would have been wrong in saying of each that he was all the same an unprofitable servant.⁴¹ Yet, in reference to what was said earlier, in spite of all his imperfection and one-sidedness every individual, as a subordinate unit in the whole, is a part irreplaceable by any other. For even in the sphere of the new man there are several fundamental forms, corresponding to what are national peculiarities in the natural man; and each of these fundamental types includes a multitude of subordinate varieties which we can neither count nor measure, but which nevertheless our Christian sentiment (just as in the natural sphere our race-consciousness does) compels us to regard as integral and each a whole by itself. And for this we find a justification not only in the Biblical figures already cited, but also in the recognition we are commanded to give all such peculiarities, without limit or exception.⁴² Accordingly, we must say also of the development of the Christian fellowship in time that nothing would happen in the Church as it does, unless each individual were what he is. With this is connected the fact that everything in it is common action and common work, therefore common merit and common guilt; not manifested in individuals, however, in quite the same ways. Accordingly, the Church only gradually attains to be the perfect image of Christ, and the divine ordinance seen in the gradual addition of individual members and the widening compass of the whole can be expressed in the formula that the advance comes about in such a way that not only is the whole, at every particular moment viewed by itself, as complete and inclusive as possible, but also each moment contains within itself a basis for the largest possible integration in the moment succeeding. At the same time this is only grasped by faith and can never be proved by experience.

Postscript to this Division.—The immediately foregoing discussion concludes our treatment of the many points that have emerged, some of them indirectly related to the previous doctrine, others directly; a parallel having been shown to exist between the relations of the doctrine of regeneration to the present doctrine and to the preceding one, there can be nothing strange in our thus grouping them together under one Division. Rather it must appear quite natural that the elect are elected to receive the communication of the Spirit. At the same time, this discussion forms the transition to the next Division. In the present Division, we could mention no more than the communication of the Holy Spirit; in the next, since the Church can be preserved only by the same principle to which it owes its origin and renewal, the continuous operation of the Holy Spirit will be described as we deal with the fundamental features of the Church’s life. What will then be set forth will be identical with the content of the doctrine of sanctification in the same sense that the subject-matter just treated of is identical with the content of the doctrine of regeneration.

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Footnotes

1. Acts 1¹³ff. 2⁴²ff. 4³²ff. 5¹²⁻¹⁴ 9³¹. ↩

2. Rom. 12³⁻⁶, 1 Cor. 12⁴ff., Eph. 2¹⁷⁻²² 4¹⁶, 1 Pet. 2⁵⁻¹⁰. ↩

3. John 6¹⁵. ↩

4. Eph. 4¹¹⁻¹³. ↩

5. Eph. 2¹⁹ Tit. 2¹⁴, 1 Pet. 2⁹. ↩

6. John 16⁷ff., Acts 1⁴·⁵. ↩

7. John 20²²·²³, Acts 2⁴. ↩

8. 1 Cor. 12⁴. ↩

9. 1 Cor. 12³, Rom. 8⁹. ↩

10. Acts 10⁴⁷, 19². ↩

11. Acts 2³⁸. ↩

12. John 16⁷. ↩

13. John 20²². ↩

14. Matt. 16¹⁷. ↩

15. Acts 1⁴·⁵·⁸. ↩

16. Matt. 16¹⁶, John 14⁸· ⁹· ¹¹ff. ↩

17. 1 Cor. 12³. ↩

18. Gen. 1², Ps. 33⁶; cf. Augustin., de Gen. ad litt. cap. 4. ↩

19. Ex. 31²⁻⁵. ↩

20. Matt. 1¹⁸, Luke 1³⁵. ↩

21. Isa. 34¹⁶ 61¹, Mic. 3⁸. ↩

22. John 14¹⁶· ¹⁷ 16⁷ff. ↩

23. Matt. 11¹³, Luke 16¹⁶. ↩

24. 1 Cor. 12, Eph. 1¹⁷, 2 Tim. 1⁷. ↩

25. Gal. 3²⁻⁵. ↩

26. Acts 1⁵ 2³ 8²⁹· ³⁹ 10¹⁹· ⁴⁴. ↩

27. Mark 13¹¹, Rom. 8⁹· ¹¹, 1 Cor. 6¹⁹, Gal. 4⁶, Jas. 4⁵. ↩

28. 1 Cor. 12⁷. ↩

29. Acts 10⁴⁴⁻⁴⁷. ↩

30. Gal. 5²², Eph. 5⁹. ↩

31. 121, 2. ↩

32. 1 Cor. 12³, Gal. 4⁶. ↩

33. Gal. 2²⁰, Rom. 8¹⁴. ↩

34. 1 Cor. 14³, Gal. 3⁵. ¹⁴. ↩

35. Acts 2²ff., ↩

36. Acts 10⁴⁷ 11¹⁵. ↩

37. John 20²². ↩

38. I Cor. 12, ↩

39. Eph. 1²³, Col. 1¹⁹, ↩

40. Eph. 4¹³, I John 3². ↩

41. Luke 17¹⁰. ↩

42. I Cor. 12¹⁹⁻²⁶. ↩