"Life-giving spirit": Probing the center of Paul's pneumatology

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 1998 by Gaffin, Richard B Jr

Here moreover the focus, more pointedly than anywhere else in Paul, is the meaning of his resurrection (and ascension) for the relationship between Christ and the Spirit. In context two closely related aspects are in view: (1) Christ's own climactic transformation by the Spirit (he is the first to receive a "spiritual body"), and (2) along with that transformation his unique and unprecedented reception of the Spirit. The result is an intimacy, a bond between them that surpasses what previously existed. The result in fact is a new and permanent equation or oneness that is appropriately captured by saying that Christ has become the Spirit.

It should be noted further that here the relationship between Christ and the Spirit before the resurrection is likewise outside of Paul's purview. Certainly elsewhere he does not deny such a relationship, and 1 Cor 10:3-4, however we settle its further exegesis, appears to have in view the conjoint activity of the Spirit and the preincarnate Christ already under the old covenant. 28 Paul's point, rather, is that now, based on Jesus' death and dating from his resurrection and ascension, that joint action is given its stable and consummate basis in the history of redemption. Now at last such action is the crowning consequence of the work of the incarnate Christ actually accomplished once for all in history.

From the viewpoint of an overall theology of the NT, 1 Cor 15:45b is fairly and helpfully seen as a one-sentence commentary on the significance of Pentecost, along with the resurrection and ascension. Paul here telescopes what Peter delineates in his Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:32-33 ("God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted therefore to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear"). As "the life-giving Spirit," (the resurrected and ascended) Christ is the one who baptizes with the Spirit.

It bears emphasizing again that this oneness or unity, though certainly sweeping, is at the same time circumscribed in a specific respect. It concerns the conjoint activity of Christ and the Spirit in giving life, resurrection (= eschatological) life. In this sense, then, the equation in view may be dubbed "functional" or perhaps "eschatological" or, to use an older theological category, "economic" (rather than "ontological"), without in any way obliterating the distinction between the second and third persons of the triune God.

Subsequently Paul also writes to the Corinthians: "The Lord is the Spirit" (2 Cor 3:17). Currently, something of a consensus seems to be emerging that here "the Lord" (o KiptoS) is not, contrary to the majority view throughout most of this century,29 a reference to Christ but applies Exod 34:34, just cited in v. 16, to the Spirit.30

This view has exegetical weight and may well prove to be correct, although the Christological view is not so implausible or so easily dismissed as those who argue for a reference to the Spirit seem to think.3" What is particularly doubtful, however, at least in some if I read them correctly, is the tendency, perhaps as overreaction against the Christological understanding, virtually to evacuate the subsequent occurrences of KUpt in vv. 17-18, as well as the verses as a whole, of anything more than the most tenuous and indirect reference to Christ.32 To say that this is "a pneumatological passage, not a christological one"33 poses a risky disjunction indeed for any passage in Paul, where as here the Spirit's activity subsequent to Christ's resurrection is in view.