“The Holy Spirit alone makes the work of Christ effective to individual sinners, enabling them to turn to God from their sin and to trust in Jesus Christ.”
What are we affirming in this statement?
The Holy Spirit applies the work of Christ to us. This means that everything that is achieved by Christ’s work of atonement is applied to us as God pours his Spirit into the hearts of his people, bringing us to new life united with Christ. The Holy Spirit is also, in the first place, decisive in opening our eyes, blinded as they were by sin, and illuminating the gospel so that we can turn in faith to Christ and receive all the benefits of his work for us.
Evangelicals differ in exactly how the Spirit’s work of enabling our faith relates to the exercise of our own will in receiving Christ, but we are united in affirming the Spirit’s crucial role in the conversion of our hearts and the application of Christ’s work to us.
“The Holy Spirit alone makes the work of Christ effective to individual sinners,”
This is not to say that the Father and the Son have ‘done their bit’ in achieving salvation for us and now it is the Spirit’s turn to act independently of them. God works in unity; salvation is from the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Spirit. Though we can identify three persons in the Trinity and appropriately attribute things that are common to them as God to one specific person, nevertheless we recognise that there is one action of God performed inseparably by all three persons rather than three very closely aligned actions happening simultaneously (see 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 for a biblical example of this at work).
What we are emphasising here is that it is God alone, by his grace, who brings us to salvation without any help, contribution, or work from us to earn it. The Holy Spirit’s personal role is God’s act of saving us. Nevertheless, it is worth recognising and emphasising the things that are most closely associated with the Spirit. He doesn’t merely teach us how to be good enough for God’s favour. He is the very life of Christ breathed into us. “For the New Testament writers, there is no question that one of the most natural and fundamental ways of talking about Christian salvation is in terms of the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.” (Simeon Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, 83.)
It is only when God’s own life and presence is breathed into us that we can enjoy the benefits of Christ’s work for us. It is then that our union with him is established and his promise to never leave and forsake us fulfilled (Gal. 4:6-7, Romans 8:9-11). Throughout the New Testament, to ‘be saved’ is described, among other things, as to “receive the Spirit” (John 7:39, 20:22; Acts 7:38, 8:15, 17, 19, 10:47; Romans 8:13: 1 Corinthians 2:12; 2 Corinthians 11:4; Galatians 3:2, 14). So important is the Spirit in our appropriation of salvation that the recognisable experience of receiving the Holy Spirit was evidence that salvation itself had come to the Gentiles and not only the Jews (Acts 11:7, 18).
“enabling them to turn to God from their sin and to trust in Jesus Christ.”
At the same time that the gift of Holy Spirit is the consequence of repentance and faith, conveying everything that it means to have salvation in the present, the Spirit works powerfully in us through the proclamation of the gospel to produce that very repentance and faith in the first place. “We cannot understand what it means to be justified by faith without understanding that the Holy Spirit is the source and agent of the faith that justifies.” (Zahl, The Holy Spirit, 124.) Faith is not a deed that we perform to make us deserving of salvation but a condition of dependence upon Christ alone for salvation which is brought about in us by the Spirit through the preaching of the message of Christ.
Evangelicals of Reformed, Arminian and Lutheran persuasions differ over exactly how this work of the Spirit in enabling faith is related to our act of willing participation in response to the preaching of the gospel. What we have in common, however, is the acknowledgement that without the work of the Spirit in us, we would remain spiritually blind and the message of the cross (though it is the wisdom and power of God for salvation) would appear as foolishness and weakness to us (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). In other words, without the prior work of the Spirit, no one can turn to Christ in faith or proclaim him as Lord (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:3).
Where is this challenged or a challenge when studying theology at university?
Doctrines concerning the Holy Spirit are not typically in the cross-hairs in the secular academy. The Spirit’s role is more often neglected in modern biblical scholarship than challenged. Much of the direct challenge likely will be found more in relation to his personhood in Trinitarian belief than in his role in the application of salvation. However, dominant patterns of secular thought (by which our own patterns of thinking have inevitably been shaped) have the potential to give resistance to our appreciation of our dependence upon the Holy Spirit for faith and salvific knowledge of God in Christ.
Ubiquitous to the contemporary western, secular ‘social-imaginary’ is the sovereignty of the individual and their autonomous will and libertarian freedom (recognising that there are a variety of views on the freedom of the will in contemporary philosophy, this view nevertheless dominates the ‘air we breathe’). This emphasis, sometimes labelled ‘expressive individualism’ offers strong and often unseen resistance to the recognition that in our sinful, fallen condition we are unable to freely rise above our sin to ‘choose’ Christ. There is nothing that we cannot (and indeed should not) have the freedom to choose. The general thought patterns of the time we live in, effecting the academic mindset no less than anything else, can lead us to treat the gospel and Christ as one choice among many to be rationally weighed up in our own wisdom and strength. This doctrine helpfully challenges us to recognise our need (and the need of our friends) for the Spirit to illuminate our hearts, open blind eyes, and enable the response of faith in Christ within us.
How does this help us do Evangelical Christian theology better?
The reality behind this doctrine – that the Holy Spirit illuminates the truth, wisdom, and power of the gospel for us – is foundational to the task of Christian theology. But on top of this, conscious attention to this doctrine offers us at least two helps in pursuing faithful theology, one attitudinal and one methodological.
Starting with the methodological, considering the Spirit’s activity in applying salvation to us draws our attention to the inseparable operations of the persons of the Trinity. The Spirit is at work in the proclamation and application of the gospel along with the Father and the Son. This, not as a third actor doing a different but complementary action, but as one and the same God bringing about salvation in us. Nevertheless it is appropriate to speak specifically of the Spirit doing something in us which all three persons do together by nature of being one and the same God because Scripture often speaks in this way, attributing something that is common to all three persons of the Trinity to one in particular.
This has significance beyond this article of doctrine. When we read Scripture we should recognise that whenever one or more persons of the Trinity are described as doing anything, all three are active together in that one action. And we should be sensitive to the way that Scripture sometimes attributes these common actions of the Trinity to one person in particular in a way that is appropriate to that person (implying their relation to the other persons), taking our cues from Scripture about how we should normally talk about the activity of each person of the Trinity in the world. There is much more involved in considering inseparable operations when reading Scripture. See some of the resources highlighted below to explore this more.
Our second consideration is attitudinal. If our goal in theology is “faith seeking understanding” we are reliant on the work of the Holy Spirit in us for both faith and true understanding. This is not to bypasses the need for us to work hard and learn the technical skills of academic theology, but it is the recognition that hard work and intellect alone do not make for good Evangelical theology. We need to cultivate a dependence upon God’s Spirit, seeking him in Scripture in a way that recognises that he is not an object for our analysis but the ultimate subject who freely makes himself known through his Word and Spirit. Theology is our Spirit-illumined, humble response to this self-disclosure. This disposition of the heart is essential for faithful theology and will work itself out in thanksgiving and prayer.
