Creatura Verbi: The Sacramental Word
With the towering peaks of Christ’s ascension and Pentecost as our landmarks, we turn first to the origin of the church: not only its beginning, but the perpetual source of its identity. Nuclear to Lutheran and Reformed ecclesiologies, the notion of the church as creation of the word has received renewed attention in ecumenical discussions, as in the Reformed-Roman Catholic dialogue that nicely summarizes the theme:
The church existing as a community in history has been understood and described in the Reformed tradition as a creatura verbi, as ‘the creation of the word.’ God is eternally Word as well as Spirit; by God’s Word and Spirit all things were created; reconciliation and renewal are the work of the same God, by the same word and Spirit….This is why the Reformed tradition has insisted so emphatically that the preaching, teaching and witness of the church through the centuries—the church’s dogma and tradition—are always to be subordinated to the testimony of the Bible, that scripture rather than Tradition is ‘the word of God written’ and ‘the only infallible rule of faith and practice’…The church, like faith itself, is brought into being by the hearing of God’s word in the power of the Spirit; it lives ex auditu, by hearing. This emphasis upon hearing the word of God has been of central importance in Reformed theology since the sixteenth century. This is why the Reformed have stressed ‘the true preaching of the word’ together with ‘the right dispensing of the sacraments according to the institution of Jesus Christ’ as a decisive ‘mark of the true church.’1
The dialogue adds, again from the Reformed side,
Against the appeal to continuity, custom and institution, the Reformed appealed to the living voice of the living God as the essential and decisive factor by which the church must live, if it will live at all: the church, as creatura verbi…The church is the creation of the word because the word itself is God’s creative word of grace by which we are justified and renewed…The community of faith is thus not merely the community in which the gospel is preached; by its hearing and responding to the word of grace, the community itself becomes a medium of confession, its faith a ‘sign’ or ‘token’ to the world; it is itself part of the world transformed by being addressed and renewed by the word of God.2
As inherently social in both its act and effects, proclamation of the gospel cannot be set over against the church, as other defining practices often are in more individualistic and experiential approaches to spirituality. As living speech, it cannot be reduced to a timeless body of doctrine or ethics, yet as the speech of God who is other than us, individually or collectively, it always arrives as an external word (verbum externum) with the sovereign authority to define and re-define the church’s existence. Conceived in the event of hearing, the church always remains on the receiving end of its redemption and identity. Articulating this motif, especially with respect to the significance of hearing, is my goal in this paper.
I. Living and Active: The Sacramental Word
First and foremost, the Word is the second person of the Holy Trinity: the eternal Son, by whom all things were created and in whom they hold together, including the church (Jn 1:1–16; Col 1:15-23; Heb 1:1–4; Rev 19:13). Yet scripture also refers to specific instances of the Father’s speaking in the Son by the power of the Spirit who brings about its intended effect. In this sense, God’s word is God’s working. As our own words spread out our intentions and influence without spreading out our persons, God’s Word in this sense is not an extension of the divine essence, but the effect of personal presence and lively activity. The human words do not simply coincide at certain points with God’s Word, but are in fact God’s “breath” (2 Tim 3:16). Borrowing on J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, we may say that God does things with words.3 Although the divine essence does not emanate, God’s words do in fact “go forth” and are “sent” on their missions. The Word is that living and active energy that creates and recreates. It may harden hearts or melt them, but it is never inert, since it is the Word of the Father, spoken in the Son, made effectual by the Spirit.
Not by silent thoughts or ideas in the divine mind, but “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth” (Ps 33:6). “We are used to thinking that it was light that broke the primordial darkness” writes Stephen H. Webb, “but it was really God’s voice that shattered the silence. This is the significance of God’s appearance to Moses in the fire. Moses hears the words but sees no form: ‘there was only a voice’ (Ex 4:12). The words illumine, not the flame.”4 Although the phrase, word of God, has various meanings in scripture, notes Bavinck, “it is always a word of God which means: never simply a sound, but a power, no mere information but also an accomplishment of His will, Isa. 55:11, Rom. 4:17, 2 Cor. 4:6; Heb. 1:3, 11:3. By this word Jesus quiets the sea, Mk. 4:38, heals the sick, Mt. 8:16, casts out demons, 9:6, raised the dead, Luke 7:14, 8:54, John 5:25, 28; 11:43, etc.”5 As in the former creation and exodus, so in the new, God’s performative utterance brings a world into being (Is 55:10–11). Wherever God speaks the Son in the Spirit, a mass of individuals become the covenant people and anonymous space becomes “a broad place” of lavish abundance and freedom where the Lord dwells in the midst of Zion (Ps 18:19).
The alternative to a theocentric and trinitarian conception of the word is not autonomy, but captivity to other lords who cannot liberate. When this conception is given priority, there is a proper place for experience and doctrine. Although this canon is also a written norm and constitution, it is also “the implanted word” (Ja 1:21) that “abides in you” (1 Jn 2:14) and is to “dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). Because it comes to us from outside of ourselves, either as pious individuals or a magisterium, this word creates, renews, judges, and justifies the church; yet because it comes to us in the power of the Spirit, this word wins our consent and makes out of many one body.
The notion that the church is the creation of the word arises from the repeated assumption in Scripture itself that God’s speaking is acting, and this acting is not only descriptive and propositional but is also creative and performative. God’s word is not only authoritative because it communicates doctrinal and ethical truth—although these are not to be denied—but chiefly because it is God’s truthful praxis: God at work in bringing about the new creation. It not only tells us what God has done; it does what God tells. Any theory of language that allows only a referential function for signs will miss some of the most interesting descriptions of the word’s activity in the biblical drama.6 Preaching involves teaching, but it is much more than that. In fact, even this important didactic aspect becomes more valuable when it is comprehended under the category of the sacramental word: “The dogma is the drama,” as Dorothy Sayers put it.7
In a covenantal context of a living relationship, doctrine and life, theory and practice, creed and deed are inextricably connected. It is the drama of redemption itself—God’s activity in the world—that keeps the dogma from degenerating into mere propositionalism and the praxis from degenerating into mere moralism. As life-giving as well as informative news, the gospel creates knowledge, assent, and trust.
Given the way in which the “sacramental” is often marginalized by a purely pedagogical and regulative understanding of the concept, it is no wonder that the word written and preached is often treated as a dead letter that must somehow be supplemented by something else: either a living community or Spirit-filled individuals. When doctrine is conceived merely as timeless propositions, faith and practice, preaching and experience, drift apart and there is pressure on ministers to find a way to make the Bible relevant, practical, applicable and effectual.
On the other hand, B. A. Gerrish observes, “Calvin felt no antagonism between what we may call the ‘pedagogical’ [teaching] and the ‘sacramental’ functions of the word.”8 Life is found only in God, located in Christ, mediated by his word.9 “God’s word, for Calvin, is not simply a dogmatic norm; it has in it a vital efficacy, and it is the appointed instrument by which the Spirit imparts illumination, faith, awakening, regeneration, purification, and so on….Calvin himself describes the word as verbum sacramentale, the ‘sacramental word,’” that gives even to the sacraments themselves their efficacy.10 “It is crucial to Calvin’s interpretation that the gospel is not a mere invitation to fellowship with Christ, but the effective means by which the communion with Christ comes about… It therefore makes good sense to us when we discover that in Theodore Beza’s (1519–1605) edition of the Geneva Catechism the fourth part, on the sacraments, actually begins with the heading ‘On the Word of God.’”11 As with baptism and the Supper, the Spirit creates a bond between the sign (proclamation of the gospel) and the reality signified (Christ and all his benefits). The word is a ladder, to be sure, but, like the incarnation, one that God always descends to us (Rom 10:6–17).
Specifically, the gospel is that part of God’s word that gives life. While everything that God says is true and full of impact, not everything that God says is saving. Sometimes God’s speech brings judgment, disaster, fear, warning, and dread, Calvin reminds us.12 “For although faith believes every word of God, it rests solely on the word of grace or mercy, the promise of God’s fatherly goodwill,” which is only realized in and through Christ.13 “For in God faith seeks life,” says Calvin, “which is not to be found in commandments or the pronouncement of penalties, but in the promise of mercy—and only a free promise.”14 The only safe route, therefore, is to receive the Father through the incarnate Son. Christ is the saving content of scripture, the substance of its canonical unity.15 “This is the true knowledge of Christ: if we take him as he is offered by the Father, namely, clothed with his gospel. For as he himself has been designated the goal of our faith, so we shall not run straight to him unless the gospel leads the way.”16
Just as creation begin with a command, “Let there be….And there was…,” so too does the new creation originate in the womb of the word. The Spirit does not eliminate the need for earthly means, but consecrates them in the service of uniting us to the ascended Christ so that our life is “now hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3).
This word, then, is not only the source or norm that we appeal to in order to encourage hearers to do something or become something but is the means through which God communicates here and now the benefits of a redemption achieved then and there. We and all other creatures exist because God told us to exist. As in our redemption, regeneration, and justification, so too in our creation we are passive recipients of God’s living and active word. If Greek philosophers saw human personhood as a pure essence that exists eternally and necessarily, the dominant assumption in our culture is that personal identity is a fiction of socialization and individual self-creation. But according to the Bible’s anthropology, we are the result of God’s free speech. Our identity is neither a silent idea nor an autonomous choice but is determined by God’s eternal love, wisdom, and power.
While God’s word certainly “tells it like it is,” it is also the act by which God makes things what they are and the way that they are in the first place.17 God’s word not only warns and promises, but brings about in history that which is threatened and assured: “The Lord sent a word against Jacob, and it fell on Israel” (Is 9:8). Far from being a dead letter, the word of God “gets around.” Like the God who utters it, this word is restless until it accomplishes the reality it describes. To put it simply, the word not only sets forth; it brings forth. The word not only explains, describes, asserts, and proposes, but arrives. J. A. Moyter asks, “How did the prophet receive the message which he was commissioned to convey to his fellows? The answer in the vast majority of the cases is perfectly clear and yet tantalizingly vague: ‘The Lord came…’”18 Indeed, “the word of the Lord came to me, saying,…” is also a common expression in the prophets. The Lord came in the energy of his word, delivered through the prophets and now consummately in the One who is the Word of God not only in energy but in essence (Heb 1:1–3).
Unlike the hypostatic Word, the sacramental word is not an eternal event that is necessary to God’s very being. Rather, it is freely spoken in time—always new and yet connected to the words that have preceded it; in one sense, contingent (God could have spoken otherwise), yet never arbitrary because it always reveals God’s self-consistent character. It is a word that is never lost to the ebb and flow of history—not because it is does not really enter into it, but because it actively shapes its course and brings it to its appointed end. “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Is 40:8; cf. Mt 24:35). And that appointed end is a covenantal relationship with the only suzerain worthy of our trust and worship: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear’” (Is 45:22–23).
Yahweh’s word in human words is compared to the rain that descends and brings forth fruit: “[S]o shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Is 55:10–11). The same word goes forth from God’s mouth and the prophet’s mouth. Although it brings him nothing by reproach, this word is like a burning fire in Jeremiah’s bones compelling him to bring it to the covenant people day and night (Jer 20:9). “Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” (Jer 23:29).
God’s words are event-generating discourse; they are not only enlightening or informative, but are fulfilled (Ezek 12:28). In fact, the scene of the prophet preaching to the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 vividly portrays this living and active word that creates the reality of which it speaks. Only because the words of the prophets and apostles share in the energetic light of the hypostatic Word, but precisely because they do, they are the very word of God. Christ is the Word who upholds all of creation for the good of his church (Col 1:15–20) and gives us his word to dwell in us richly (Col 3:16).
So the word of God written and proclaimed is not an impersonal body of timeless doctrine or ethics, but is grounded ultimately in the Son as the climax of the Father’s revealing and redeeming speech in a gradually unfolding history (Heb 1:1-3) and the Spirit as its perfecting power: the source of its perlocutionary effect. “Indeed, the word of God is living and active,” exposing and judging our hearts (Heb 4:12-13). According to James 1:21, the word is an implanted seed “that has the power to save your souls.” 1 Peter 1:23-24 adds, “You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.” Furthermore, it is not the word in general but the gospel in particular that is credited with this vivifying effect: “That word is the good news that was announced to you” (v 25).
Similarly, Paul says that “faith comes by hearing the word of God,” and more specifically, “the gospel of peace,” “the word of faith that we proclaim” (Ro 10:15, 17). Salvation is not something that one has to actively pursue, attain, and ascend to grasp, as if it were far away, but is as near as “the word of faith that we proclaim” (v 8). We do not have to bring Christ up from the dead or ascend into heaven to bring him down, since he addresses us directly in his word (vv 6–9). The word of God is the source not only of creation, but of the events of judgment and redemption of history leading to the last day (2 Pet 3:1–7). From creation to consummation, we are “worded” all the way down.
Throughout the prophetic writings, scrolls are eaten and burn in bellies; they fly around like a giant parchment with razor-sharp edges bringing judgment to the ends of the earth. All of this imagery is meant to underscore the point that God’s word as covenant canon not only speaks of but actually brings blessings and curses. Its sanctions are always effectively realized. Therefore, not only as word-events, but as an enduring constitution, God’s word is living and active. By this canon, the Suzerain constructs a temple-house.19
Properly speaking, we are creatures of the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit, through the Word.
II. Creator-Spirit
The Spirit is not the architect, nor is the framework of the cosmos or of the new creation “in him” as the Word in whom all things hold together (Col 1:17). But he is the builder, carrying with him the plans of the Father and the materials purchased by the Son as he builds the sanctuary according to all that he has received. Having summarized the Spirit’s perfecting agency in the previous chapter, we now begin to explore in more detail the missions of the Spirit in God’s undivided works.
When we begin with the Spirit’s work in creation, the canvas of his operations widens. Jürgen Moltmann expresses a legitimate critique of tendencies to reduce the Spirit’s work to the inner life of the individual believer—basically, to the application of redemption. “In both Protestant and Catholic theology and devotion,” he asserts, “there is a tendency to view the Holy Spirit solely as the Spirit of redemption. Its [sic] place is the church and it gives men and women the assurance of the eternal blessedness of their souls.” He continues:
The redemptive Spirit is cut off both from bodily life and from the life of nature. It makes people turn away from this world and hope for a better world beyond. They then seek and experience in the Spirit of Christ a power that is different from the divine energy of life which according to Old Testament ideas interpenetrates all the living. The theological textbooks talk about the Holy Spirit in connection with God, faith, the Christian life, the church and prayer, but seldom with the body and nature.20
Introducing the Holy Spirit too late in the story—namely, the application of redemption, we miss much of the action. But more than this, we end up with a narrow and even distorted vision of the Spirit’s work even in this important aspect of his ministry. The new creation narrows to the Spirit’s operations in the individual soul, often seen in contrast rather than continuity with the old creation as such. Such “crude superficialities,” Kuyper complains, “confine the Spirit’s operations entirely to the elect, beginning only at their regeneration.”21
The Spirit’s Agency in Creation
The doctrine of ex nihilo creation—God’s creation of everything out of nothing—fixes forever the ontological distinction between Creator and creation. Neither divine nor demonic, this world is the theater of God’s glory. Bound by no inner necessity or thirst for self-completion, the Triune God created the wondrous speck of dust and water that we inhabit along with billions of galaxies for the sheer love of it—and of us. He created it all for his glory, to be sure, but he did not need to display his glory in this way. Love and glory become virtually indistinguishable as the motivation and final end of God’s creative act. God’s glory is his love and his love is his glory. Though far from arbitrary, the act of creation is grounded in God’s free and therefore loving speech: from the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit.
The “darkness and void” (ṯō-hū wā-ḇō-hū) that follow the announcement of God’s creation of matter is not a hypostasized deity, as in Babylonian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths.22 Generally regarded as the earliest surviving work of literature, the Gilgamesh Epic (2100 BC) bears close resemblance to the Bible’s stories of Adam and Eve in the garden and Noah’s flood.23 According to the most influential creation story, Enûma Eliš, the founding deity—ocean-goddess Tiamat—is the font of creation. A massive serpent, she is the personification of the feminine stereotype: voluptuous yet chaotic. The process of creation from chaos is a series of violent skirmishes among the gods in which the original dragon-lady Tiamet herself is murdered.24 Egyptian creation myths vary considerably from time and place. Yet, with the possible exception of the version centered in Thebes, the lifeless chaos-waters were personified in Egyptian theology as the deity Nu.25
In the context of this pagan milieu, the Bible’s opening chapters take on the appearance of an obvious polemic. It has been pointed out frequently that there are parallels between Genesis 1–2 and Enûma Eliš (not to mention, Gilgamesh). After all, a good polemic requires some parallels. Wholly incommensurable stories do not even clash, but that is precisely what happens here. However, the contrasts could not be greater.26
The chaos in Genesis 1 is simply inert matter, called into being but not yet fully formed or productive. The ocean is simply water, the skies and lights in the heavens merely natural phenomena visible to the naked eye of a farmer. Anyone who took took seriously these two chapters of Genesis would no longer stare at the sky and call it by the divine name Nut or the expanses Shu or the earth Geb or the sun Ra. Notice Job’s hymn of Yahweh’s act of creation:
He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters
At the boundary between light and darkness.
The pillars of heaven tremble
and are astounded at his rebuke.
By his power he stilled the sea;
by his understanding he shattered Rahab.
By his wind the heavens were made fair;
his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.
Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways,
and how small a whisper do we hear of him!
But the thunder of his power who can understand? (Job 26:12–14).
The first line echoes the Spirit brooding over the waters in a judicial role of separating and marking out in mathematical artistry. “Rahab” is code for Egypt—the “fleeing serpent” whose cosmology is as flawed as its oppressive politics. Yahweh alone is sovereign. The “wind” (bə-rū-ḥōw) here is another instance of a translation decision and while wind may be the best rendering, “power,” “understanding,” and “wind” are frequently associated with the Spirit’s activity in the Hebrew scriptures. Yet all of these operations are but “the outskirts of his ways.” We hear but “a small whisper” and cannot even interpret “the thunder of his power.”
Job continues the Genesis polemic, as does Isaiah in the context of Yahweh’s final judgment. “Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.” Then the Lord will “punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no more cover its slain. In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Is 26:19–27:1). Leviathan, the echo of the pagan serpent-god, is not a god at all, nothing more than a creature, and is entirely under the sovereign power of Yahweh (see also Ps 74:12–14; 104:26). The serpent’s head will be crushed finally and forever (Rev 12:7–9), just as God promised in Genesis 3:15.
And the biblical creation story lacks the intriguing, if vulgar, violence of its rivals. Evil, personified in Satan, is not something; it is not a part of God’s creation, always lurking beneath reality and vying for dominance. As noted above, not even the chaos in Genesis 1:2 is an evil force. There is no moral significance to “formless and void.” Creation at this point was simply a good house waiting to be turned into a beautiful and well-ordered home.
Evil is not ontological, but moral; not necessary, but the result of wilful rebellion. It is the corruption of that which is essentially good, the depravity of personal agents who abuse their freedom to turn their back on the good Creator. Even the demons are (like Lucifer himself) good angles turned bad. Just as the Triune God was plotting our redemption in view of the fall, the demons were in assembly with their “Stalin” to plot the downfall of God’s kingdom. This world arises not out of an ontological rift between good and evil divinities or forces but out of the freedom that is proper to a self-complete God who needs nothing and no one because he is who he always will be: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is not yet any discordant note of tragedy, only comedy—the beautiful sound of laughter between co-conspirers in a venture of creative love.
Genesis 1 exhibits the following subplot:
v. 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” a comprehensive summation of ex nihilo creation. The Father created the world through the Son who “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb 1:2-3). In fact, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (11:3).
v. 2: Chaos. Again, not a divine something—divine or demonic, or both—but just the sort of thing that one expects from an artist’s studio. The chaos is merely the material creation called into being and as yet unformed into an ordered cosmos. The Spirit was hovering over the waters, both to organize and fertilize it but also to cherish it.
vv 3-10: “‘Let there be….’ And there was….” This set of events fits the ex nihilo variety: the creation of light (cf. vv 14–19), land, and expanse. Each has its separation that makes the two into something without setting them in dualistic opposition: the light separated into day/night; the land separated into oceans/continents; the expanse separated into heavens/earth.
Yet from this point the narrative reports a different type of speech-act. Alongside God’s fiat word, “Let there be light!” there is the continuing speech that keeps creation reverberating with God’s life-creating word in verses 11–25: “‘Let the earth bring forth…’ And the earth brought forth….’” This too comes from God, but it is different. Under this heading of “‘Let the earth bring forth…’” are the vegetation bearing its own seeds, waters swarming with swarms of swarming things (literally in the Hebrew) and birds flying across the heavenly expanse. There is no hint here of creation out of nothing; that initial act has occurred already. On the contrary, now in these speech-acts creation is now conceived of as growing and propagating on its own steam, as it were. Yet it is not quite on its own steam. Every putting-forth of a leaf now appears to be a new miracle of God, yet it is not a miracle, at least in the fiat (“‘Let there be…’”) sense; rather it is the result of a wondrous working of the Spirit within nature. Both are the result of God’s speech, but one brings a world into being while the other brings it to maturity. We will meet this distinction again throughout this study: the fiat type of word (an immediate act of creation) and the “Let the earth bring forth…” type of directive (the Spirit’s work within creation to bring about the intended effect of the Father’s command, in the Son).
In the biblical conception, nothing in creation—including angels or the human soul—is divine. There is the Triune God and then there is everything else: Creator and creation, with nothing in between. Yves Congar observes,
Rûah-breath is not in any sense opposed to ‘body’ or ‘corporeal.’ Even in profane Greek and the language of philosophy, pneuma expresses the living and generating substance that is diffused in animals, plants and all things. It is a subtle corporeality rather than an incorporeal substance. The rûah-breath of the Old Testament is not disincarnate. It is rather what animates the body. It is opposed to ‘flesh,’ but then ‘flesh’ is not the same as ‘body.’ ‘Flesh’ is the purely earthly reality of man and is characterized by the fat that it is weak and corruptible…The Greeks thought in categories of substance, but the Jews were concerned with force, energy and the principle of action.27
Thus, when the New Testament draws its contrast between the flesh and the Spirit, it is not the difference between material bodies and spiritual or intellectual essence, but an eschatological contrast between this present age, under the dominion of sin and death, and the age to come that Christ has inaugurated by his resurrection from the dead. The age to come is the new creation and it is the age of the Spirit because the Holy Spirit is bringing creaturely reality into the sphere of Christ’s eschatological life.
The qualitative distinction between God and the world, emphasized by the doctrine of ex nihilo creation, ensures that the cosmos is grounded in divine love and freedom rather than necessity and ontological violence. Creation is not a necessary emanation or overflowing of being from a divine fountain down the ladder from angels to ants. Multiplicity is not the result of an ontological fall from the unity of being: first, because the source of all being is the Triune God, with the plurality of persons being as ontologically real as the unity of essence; second, because the diversity of creatures belongs to the divine benediction (“It is good”) in creation. Whatever oppositional dualisms that emerge later in the story are the result of the wilful pride of human beings and their refusal to be grounded in this free act of divine love and its peace. In other words, the oppression of spirit over body, male over female, rich over poor, and so forth, is ethical rather than ontological. It is blasphemous to consider them somehow grounded in “the way things are,” by the action of the Holy Trinity in creation. Rather, they are the result of human pride in opposition to God’s order. In spite of terrible failures, there is no religion that that affirms a view of the God-world relationship that is worthy of falling so far short in reflecting in its own life.
To say that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life is to affirm that while he does not depend on creation, creation depends on him. The Father spoke creation into existence; the Son is the archetypal image of God, according to whose likeness we were created, but Adam became a “living being” (ne-p̄eš ḥay-yāh) when God breathed into his nostrils “the breath of life” (literally, “the breath of lives”). The same idea is conveyed in 2 Timothy 3:16, where it is said that the Scriptures are “God-breathed” (theopneustos) or when Jesus breathed on the disciples and they received the Holy Spirit (Jn 20:22). The soul is not therefore the eternal, immortal, and divine part of human beings, but is as much a part of creation as fingernails and livers. Adam’s existence as a physical body preceded his being endowed with a soul—that is, before he became a “living being.” Already we recognize the Spirit as the one who brings order out of chaos and clothes the human representative with royal dignity and beauty. (Later, the priests will be similarly adorned, representative of the role that had been given to Adam in the beginning.)
The Spirit gives the kiss of life to mortals in creation, preserves them in natural life, raises us from spiritual death in regeneration, indwells us and renews us in supernatural life. The Spirit will raise our bodies from the dead and glorify us by his perfecting energies. Life, both natural and supernatural, comes from the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. As European nations were debauching humanity in 1918, Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed Christian confidence in the indefatigable persistence of the Creator-Spirit in his poem “The Grandeur of God”:
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
III. Loosened Tongues
Whenever humanity has assembled together in a synaxis of autonomy and pride that parodies the public gathering of the nations in the Spirit through word and sacrament, it is to take heaven by storm. Yet the same Spirit who descended in judgment on Babel, scattering its workers and dividing their languages, descended in grace at Pentecost to unite receivers around the word of Christ.
Although the word comes first of all to de-center the self deluded in its claims to autonomy, it is with the goal not of drowning out the voice of the servant but of training the voice to sing the “amen.” It is striking that Scripture records not only the direct “Thus says the Lord,” but the histories, laments, praises, proverbs, and interpretations of God’s people as they wrestle with how they will answer back in the historical circumstances of this relationship.
Thus, God has not only given us his word of judgment and grace, but our own appropriate lines in the script of faith and gratitude. This re-creative word arrives not to subvert human poesis, but to overthrow the presumption that this is an original (archetypal) poesis rather than a responsive (ectypal) one. Our speaking and making are always analogically related to God’s, never identical to the ex nihilo speech that is the heartbeat of reality. Therefore, God’s word does not render us silent; it gives us back our voice—or, rather, gives us back the appropriate lines in the script intended for us. As Webb describes the Reformation view of the word in preaching and liturgy, “Words could spring forth as praise because God had already said the Word that releases us from our sin.”28 Once more we see that the forensic word generates an effective economy that is as extensive as it is intensive.
The word that rules is the word that first of all liberates. Unlike the other words of other sovereigns to which we give our allegiance, this word brings about a liberating captivity and a captivating liberation. Yet it is always something strange, something to which we must be converted by the Spirit. And this is true as much for the community as for the self, neither of which can be exempt from this sovereign grace that refuses to let define ourselves, which would be our death. Like Isaiah, we are “undone,” yet only to be forgiven, clothed, and sent out with good news on our lips and in our hearts.
While the church is not the master of the text, it is the amphitheater in which the word creates the reality of which it speaks, the place where a valley of dry bones becomes a resurrected community (Ezek 37). “The Church is the place of fruitful and hopeful repentance; and it is nothing else,” Barth wrote in connection with Romans 10:
When the Church crashes up against this point, it is overwhelmed with disgust at its convulsive attempts, at one moment to—ascend into heaven, at another to—descend into the abyss; it is appalled that it should have tried to be both ‘height’ and ‘depth,’ to occupy them, speak of them, point them out, and apportion them. There is a certain horror at all attempts to bring about the work of God, to effect the incarnation of divinity or the resurrection of humanity, by employing the dynamic, demonic power of the Church’s own word. The Church may refine its liturgy; popularize its technical language; broaden the basis of the education of its clergy; see that its administration is made more efficient; yield hurriedly to the demands of the laity, however doubtful they may be; encourage theological journalism; approximate more closely to the uncertainties of the ‘spirit of the age,’ to romanticism, liberalism, nationalism, and socialism; may, in fact, –‘bring Christ into the picture’! But when He is brought into the picture, it is discovered that we cannot introduce Him thus, either by bringing Him down or by bringing Him up. For Christ is not the exalted and transformed ideal man. He is the new man.29
Only when we are silenced can “all moralizings and sentimentalities” give way to the word of the cross. Yet even this word must not be transformed into a descent into the abyss: “a gospel of demolition,” which would just be another way of moralizing.30 Barth wonders, “Shall we never permit our hands to be empty, that we may grasp what only empty hands can grasp?”31 Yet even this emptying of our hands is the judging and liberating work of a God who is too gracious to let us have the last word.
