Biblical Truths by Dale B. Martin

Author:Dale B. Martin [Martin, Dale B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Spirit

As in the last chapter, on Christology, I begin this one by pointing out that historical criticism is especially inept at deriving an orthodox theology of the holy spirit from the Bible.1 As much as the Hebrew Bible talks about a divine “breath,” “wind,” or “spirit” (ruach), we must not imagine that any of the human authors of those texts intended to refer to the “Holy Spirit,” the third person of the trinity. But even with the New Testament, problems of interpretation arise. As I demonstrate in this chapter, sometimes the authors use pneuma (πνεῦμα) as a reference to a human and universal substance, a form of “stuff.”2 Sometimes they seem to be using the word to refer to a part of the human self, of the body, mind, or “spirit.” Sometimes they are clearly referring to some property of God or Jesus: the pneuma of Jesus or the divine pneuma in general. Sometimes they seem to be thinking of an impersonal substance or property, though in rarer cases they seem to be thinking of pneuma as a “person” or at least something that can serve as an “actor” in a narrative. Only in the most rare cases may we read their comments to imply a “holy spirit” as the third name in a social group of three. And even in those cases we would be rash to read into those passages a full-blown reference to the trinity as defined in later Christian orthodoxy or creeds. If we limit ourselves to responsible historical criticism, we simply can’t derive satisfactory trinitarian orthodoxy from the Bible. That said, in this chapter I will experiment with both historical criticism but also more creative theological interpretation to “read” the New Testament for a theology of the spirit.

The Material Spirit

In the chapter on Christology I briefly noted that the Greek word usually translated “spirit” is πνεῦμα, a word that in ancient Greek concepts almost never referred to “immaterial substance.” I introduced the topic because I was advocating an interpretation of 1 Cor 15 in which the resurrected body of Jesus—and therefore also the expected resurrected bodies of believers—was assumed by Paul to be a “physical” or “material” body, one made up not of “flesh and blood” but of pneuma. Because this chapter concentrates on the spirit—the spirit of Jesus, of God, of human beings, of the cosmos, and the holy spirit—we need to look more expansively at the nature of ancient pneuma. And a good place to begin is to return to Paul’s discussion in 1 Cor 15.

Recall that the issue in Corinth was probably not a denial by Corinthian believers of any afterlife at all.3 What some members of the church were doubting was probably more specifically the Jewish notion of the resurrection of the body, as Paul had no doubt passed along to them in his own teaching. Especially believers with a bit of Greek education would have assumed that the body was composed of material substances that could not survive death into the afterlife.

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