The Holy Spirit and the Gospel

The most important missiological contribution the Lausanne networks and Congresses have made is, in one important respect, to make no theological contribution at all. Lausanne has been deliberate about staying within the biblical parameters. It, therefore, has never seen its task as being inventive and it has been quite content to make no new contribution on the Holy Spirit.[290]

Early in the Church’s life, Tertullian observed that his first principle was that ‘Christ laid down one definite system of truth which the world must believe without qualification.’[291] It was this truth that the Church immediately sought to define and protect and, in time, it produced its classic creeds like Nicea and Chalcedon. Behind each word in these creeds lay conflict and debate but the church was determined to speak out of a common understanding on the core doctrinal issues such as the Trinity, the person of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit.

With respect to the Holy Spirit, this early consensus is what was heard, for example, in Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto where, after some initial hesitations, he came to a full Nicene view of the deity of the Holy Spirit within the Trinitarian framework. This understanding was carried forward. In the sixteenth century, the Protestant reformers reaffirmed it. And it was these same truths that informed the great, nineteenth-century missionary conferences that finally led up to Edinburgh 1910. Lausanne deliberately stands in this tradition with respect to the doctrines of the Trinity, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

At the same time, Lausanne has had to articulate this understanding in a theological context today of considerable diversity. Furthermore, we live in a world which, in the west and parts of Asia especially, is highly modernized. The challenge that Lausanne has taken up, then, is how to affirm and practise historic orthodoxy while, at the same time, interfacing with the many different contexts in which it seeks to make known the Christian Gospel. It is these connections that I wish to explore a little in this essay.

First, though, I need to summarize the position Lausanne has stated with respect to the Holy Spirit and this will lead into a brief consideration of the other religions. Then, second, I will review the rather extraordinary discussions that took place in the 1970s and 1980s between representatives of Lausanne and of the Vatican as these related to the Holy Spirit. Finally, I need to make some observations about Lausanne’s reckoning with modernity.

Biblical Affirmation

The three Lausanne Congresses assume, and briefly state, the church’s historic understanding of the Trinity and Christ’s incarnation. They further state what is a Protestant understanding of his substitutionary death on the Cross. This is the theological setting for understanding the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

The most complete summary of the Holy Spirit’s work came from Manila. It is interesting to note that it appears under the heading, ‘God the Evangelist’. This was, in fact, the title of the book that had just been published and which contained the substance of the deliberations of Lausanne’s Theological Working Group’s Consultation on the Holy Spirit. This Consultation was held in Oslo in 1985. Under the book title’s heading, the Manila Congress stated:

For the Holy Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth, love, holiness, and power, and evangelism is impossible without him. It is he who anoints the messenger, confirms the word, prepares the hearer, convicts the sinful, enlightens the blind, gives life to the dead, enables us to repent and believe, unites us to the body of Christ, assures us that we are God’s children, leads us into Christ-like character and service, and sends us out in turn to be Christ’s witnesses. In all this the Holy Spirit’s main preoccupation is to glorify Jesus by showing him to us and forming him in us.[292]

Statements from Lausanne Congresses, like this one, are brief summaries. They are only intended to give the doctrinal basis for the evangelistic action which they want to focus and spur. However, at the Oslo Consultation that preceded the Manila Congress, time was given to exploring the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

It was the Incarnation of the Son and the giving of the Holy Spirit that made the fact of the Trinity inescapable. The Old Testament contains material that certainly points in this direction but after the Incarnation and the giving of the Spirit, this truth was made explicit and unmistakable. Indeed, it would be true to say that the Trinitarian nature of God is the presupposition of all New Testament soteriology.[293] The Father, after all, ‘sent’ the Son into the world (John 4:34; 5:23-4) and ‘sent’ the Holy Spirit to bring conviction about sin (John 16:8-10), to point men and women to Christ and, upon belief in the Gospel, to take up residence in their hearts (Gal 4:4‑6). The key point to note here is that the missions of the Son and that of the Spirit are linked together.

This is the important transition that occurred as the Old Testament ended and the apostolic period began. In the Old Testament, there are almost a hundred explicit references to the Holy Spirit. They speak to the fact that the Spirit was active in creation, in history, in giving gifts, in teaching God’s will and ways, and in giving prophetic utterance. However, none of this was explicitly related to Christ except, of course, for the prophecies. How could it have been? Christ had not yet come.

After the Incarnation, this changes. Now, what Scripture tells us about the Holy Spirit’s power and work is all directly related to Christ. Indeed, this is now the exclusive focus. Undoubtedly, as the agent of creation (Gen 1:2), the Holy Spirit continues to be present to all of life, but once the Incarnation had occurred, it is his linkage to Christ that is to the fore. The reason for this is that their respective work is correlated and co-ordinated.

This gave, in the post-resurrection period, a structured Trinitarian shape to Christian life. Believers are reconciled to the Father, through the substitutionary death of the Son, by the work of the Holy Spirit who imparts the will and ability to believe. More than that, it is the Holy Spirit who imparts a new nature in regeneration and thus applies to sinners what Christ had secured on the Cross.[294]

So it is that this Holy Spirit is given to abide with those who are Christ’s. He is ‘the Spirit of your Father’ (Matt 10:20) even as he is also ‘the Spirit of his Son’, (Gal 4:4). He is the ‘Spirit of life’ (Rom 8:2) who has set us free in Christ from sin and death. He is, therefore, the ‘Spirit of grace’ (Heb 10:29). This ‘Spirit of truth’ is the possession of believers but, Jesus said, ‘the world cannot receive’ him because it does not know him (John 14:17).[295] In fact, he is known only in and through Christ, and Christ is known only because of the Spirit’s work.

This is why, in the New Testament, the work of the Son and of the Spirit are correlated, not only theologically, but also linguistically. Father, Son and Spirit are seen as working together in a single plan of grace (e.g. Eph 1:3-13; 4:4-6; 2 Thess 2:13-4; 1 Pet 1:2). And this correlation is made plain in the fact that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. He who is the ‘Spirit of God’ (Rom 8:9) is also ‘the Spirit of Christ’ (1 Pet 1:11), ‘the Spirit of his Son’ (Gal 4:6), and ‘the Spirit of Jesus Christ’ (Phil 1:19).

The Cape Town Commitment reiterated these same truths within a larger summary of the many different aspects of the Holy Spirit’s work. This was placed within a fully Trinitarian framework, and the soteriological connections between the work of the Son and that of the Spirit were declared. The statement then went on to say that our ‘engagement in mission, then, is pointless and fruitless without the presence, guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.’[296] Indeed, it said that there is ‘no authentic biblical mission, without the Person, work and power of the Holy Spirit.’[297]

This linkage is of enormous missiological consequence today. The unmistakable implication is that there is no legitimate claim to the saving presence of the Holy Spirit in the world today unless that presence has produced trust in Christ’s substitutionary work on the Cross. The first Lausanne Congress had asserted this.[298] And Manila built upon it recognizing that in the New Testament period there were ‘many gods and many lords’ so religious pluralism, such as we know today, is no novelty. Yet it noted that the apostles boldly ‘affirmed the uniqueness, indispensability, and centrality of Christ’. We, it said, must do likewise. Its reasoning was that since there is only one incarnate Christ, only one Cross, only one work of divine salvation, there is only one Gospel. We, therefore, must reject the relativism that accepts as valid other religions and spiritualities as well as the syncretism that is content to add other beliefs to those that are biblical.[299]

The fundamental insight here is that, contrary to what much modern theology has asserted in different ways, the Holy Spirit cannot be said to be at work in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam or any other religion. The Holy Spirit does not validate other religions, is not present to them in redemptive ways, and does not create in them alternative paths to the Father. There is only one path and it goes through Christ. It is, therefore, only to Christ that the Spirit points men and women that they might be regenerated, converted, justified, and accepted by the Father.

In the nineteenth century, Protestant theology in Europe was dominated by the thought of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack. It had turned away from the orthodoxy of the Reformation period and, instead, made its peace with Kant. Often, as with Schleiermacher, this peace came way of a kind of pantheism. Schleiermacher claimed that religion consisted in the ‘immediate feeling of absolute dependence.’[300] This feeling was at the base of all religions.[301] The divine was to be found in the depths of human beings where it gave to all a kind of Godward direction. In time, of course, this produced the ‘history of religions’ school which looked for divine reality in all religions. Nor were they alone. Later in the century, on the Catholic side, the Modernists made much the same argument. George Tyrrell, for example, the leader among the English Modernists, said that religions are ‘but the languages in which men hold converse with God. And these languages are of one family and one origin, human and divine; the work of God through man, and of man under God’.[302] It was a viewpoint he pursued relentlessly until his excommunication.

The period of neo-orthodoxy on the Protestant side that was dominant from roughly 1920 to 1960 put an end to this liberal outlook. And in Rome, the encyclical Pascendi Gregis in 1907 put a stop to Modernism. It was followed, in 1910, by the institution of the Oath Against Modernism that every priest was obliged to swear.

There matters stood for a while. But on both sides of the equation, the question has been revisited more recently. On the Protestant side, the door has been opened wide to the other religions, notably by John Hick.[303] The cause has been taken up by many in the World Council of Churches. On the Catholic side, the Second Vatican Council also revisited this issue. The result was a rather different attitude than had been traditional as we shall see.

Although this is an enormously complex story, we can at least see where the distinctiveness of Lausanne’s position lies. It is that natural revelation is not supernatural and it is not saving. Furthermore, the work of the Holy Spirit is not to validate human spirituality but to bring the knowledge that no human striving, no religion, no obedience of a moral kind, can provide the basis for a saving knowledge of God. Other religions, therefore, are not different paths to the same end. The only truth which the Spirit validates which is of a saving kind is that of the uniqueness, centrality, and indispensability of Christ’s redemptive work.

Natural revelation cannot provide this basis because there is, in fact, a boundary between God and sinners. This boundary cannot be crossed from below. It can only be crossed from above, by God himself, and that is what he did in the person of the Son. It is in John, in particular that this theme is taken up. The Son, he says repeatedly was ‘sent’ into the world (John 10:36; cf: John 3:31; 13:3; 12:46; 16:27). He came from ‘above’ (John 8:23). It is to this unique break-in that the Holy Spirit points men and women. Faith is not about the human spirit questing upwards. It is about the Holy Spirit working to create repentance from sin and trust in Christ as alone the sin-bearer and resurrected Lord of life. The Holy Spirit has no other mission than to apply what the Son achieved on the Cross.

An Opening to Catholicism

The Second Vatican Council concluded in December 1965, committing itself to work toward ecumenical discussion, toward ‘that continual reformation of which she always has need’,[304] and to a fresh study of Scripture. It was less than a decade later, in 1974, that the first of the Lausanne Congresses also concluded its work. After this Congress, it was clear that there was a fresh, evangelical consensus about evangelism that had emerged. It was shortly after this, then, that the Vatican, through the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, made an approach to the Lausanne Committee. It proposed some meetings to explore afresh differences and similarities between Catholicism and this resurgent evangelicalism. It was a reasonable request but it created a delicate situation for the evangelicals. The Lausanne Committee feared that, were it to engage with the Vatican, there might be a perception among some of its constituents that it was ‘negotiating’ with Rome. The fear was not without foundation. Later, in 1994, a similar set of meetings in the USA produced the document, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and this caused a firestorm. The Lausanne Committee therefore decided to keep the meetings unofficial. John Stott, the principal drafter of the Lausanne Covenant, was asked to lead the dialogue. This took place in three sets of meetings in three locations: Venice (1977), Cambridge (1982), and Landevennec in France (1984).

Although there was a diplomatic tone to these meetings, they were also remarkably frank and the theological differences were never obscured. Common areas of agreement certainly emerged but so, too, did the quite different conceptions of what is entailed in the Gospel mission and hence of the Holy Spirit’s role in that mission.

The differences start with the Gospel itself. Evangelicals see Christ doing in his death what he did not do in his life. He ‘became sin’ for us (2 Cor 5:21) and ‘a curse’ for us (Gal 3:13), thus propitiating the wrath of God by absorbing our punishment in himself and thus turning God’s wrath away from its rightful objects. Christ’s death was, in this way, substitutionary. Thus the Gospel is a message of deliverance from sin, punishment, and death. It is so because of Christ’s death and hence it is by grace alone. Believing this Gospel and entrusting ourselves to the Christ of this Gospel results in pardon, renewal, and the Spirit’s indwelling.

Catholics, on the other hand, see Christ’s death as the continuation of his life in the sense that it was his final act of obedience. It was offered to the Father in love. In this sense, he did not do in his death what he had not done in his life. This thought of obedience then lays the conceptual foundation for our doing what Christ did. ‘In consequence, we can enter into the sacrifice of Christ and offer ourselves to the Father in and with him.’[305]

The rather deep difference here in the alternative understandings of the Gospel is what also explains the differences over Mary. Evangelicals expressed their dismay over many of the titles and terms used of her like her ‘salvific Motherhood’ and the Second Vatican Council’s statement that ‘Mary is rightly seen as co-operating in the work of human salvation through free faith and obedience’. Although the Council did not itself use the term Mediatrix, the idea was certainly there. To ascribe an active role to Mary in securing our salvation is, the evangelicals countered, to detract from Christ who, in fact, secured it all. The evangelicals in this dialogue therefore made a counter point. Catholics wanted to see Mary as modelling their understanding of the Gospel. That is, it is a message of human co‑operation with the divine through obedience. However, that is not the model we have in Scripture. We co-operate with God in proclaiming the Gospel; Mary, Catholics were saying, co-operated with God by procuring it.[306] It was that which the evangelicals vigorously disputed. Mary herself, they countered, needed a Saviour and they rejected the idea that she was born sinless.

This has significance for the different conceptions of the role of the Holy Spirit. In Scripture, the evangelicals said, this role ‘is to honour Christ the Son, not Mary the mother’.[307] Clearly, the missiological role of the Holy Spirit is shaped entirely by how several other questions are decided. If Christ alone secured our redemption and justification, then to Christ alone does the Spirit point men and women. If salvation can be secured through co-operation with Christ, or even simply though living a virtuous life, then the Holy Spirit’s mission becomes something entirely different.

When the Catholic church emerged after Vatican II, it was flush with the progressive spirit. This is evident in many of the conciliar documents. But a decade later, when this evangelical/Roman Catholic dialogue began, it was rather evident that the Vatican was applying the brakes. The influence of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, was quite clear in this.

In fact, Vatican II had explored the matter of the other religions rather adventurously. Some of what was said at the Council was even reminiscent of what the Modernists had said. This question of the other religions therefore became unavoidable when this evangelical/Catholic dialogue began.

Vatican II declared the church to be ‘the sacrament of salvation’. As such, it is the visible representation of God’s presence in life and it is, in particular, the dwelling place of his glory and the source of his grace. Christ uses the church ‘as an instrument for the redemption of all’.[308] The church both signifies and effects this salvation.

Although the Council did not use Karl Rahner’s language of ‘anonymous Christians’ being present in the other religions, the thought was certainly there. The Council’s use of the ‘people of God’ was quite elastic. It included others who were not Catholic. This was true of the Eastern Orthodox and Protestants though they were both viewed, of course, as being incomplete. But the Council ranged even further into the non-Christian religions, searching for evidences of truth and of the divine presence in them. And it even went to so far as to say that atheists, without rescinding their atheism, are not denied the help they need from God ‘for salvation’ provided they ‘strive to live a good life, thanks to his grace’.[309]

What this means, then, is that the Spirit is present throughout human history working to bring liberation from sin, suffering and oppression, and that this happens sometimes without explicit reference to Christ. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn and the evangelicals rejected it. The ‘history of salvation,’ they said, is not ‘coterminous with the history of the world’.[310]

In contrast to Catholic teaching, then, Lausanne showed itself to have a rather tautly argued view on the Holy Spirit’s role in salvation. It is not a redemptive presence in other religions, or liberation movements, nor does he validate earnest moral striving. The Spirit works, instead, to bring that striving, that longing for freedom which is found in human life, to rest by trusting in the finished, substitutionary work of Christ. That is the Spirit’s only role in salvation.

The Modernized World

In the almost four decades between the first Lausanne Congress in 1974 and the third in Cape Town in 2010, there have been staggering changes in the world. Among these, has been the shifting centre of gravity in the Christian world from the global north to the south. This is due, on the one hand, to the effective evangelism that has occurred in the global south and parts of Asia and, on the other hand, to the decline of Christian faith, numerically speaking, throughout the west. On a typical Sunday in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, attendance at any church at all is only between 2% and 5% of the population. By contrast, in Zambia, for example, about 80% will attend some church. Why is this? Why is Christian faith so hard to sustain in highly modernized contexts, and why is the Christian Gospel apparently also so hard to believe?

The problems created by modernization were beginning to dawn on people when the first Congress was held in 1974. In that Congress, this theme was addressed but nothing was said in its final document. This, though, had changed when Manila took place in 1989 and modernization was given some attention in its statement. Since the world is becoming increasingly modernized, and what the west has long experienced is increasingly the experience of many countries outside the west, one might have expected the Cape Town Congress, in 2010, to have addressed this reality even more intentionally than had Manila. That did not happen. There were a few addresses, only one plenary,[311] on some of the themes of modernization. There was a recognition that truth is one of the chief casualties of what modernization produces. The Cape Town Commitment, furthermore, does speak of the reality of technology, of the importance of the media, and of why truth in this kind of world is sometimes hard to find. What is missing in its statement, though, is a coherent understanding of how all of these components of the modern world cohere together, interact with one another, and create a public environment which is really hostile to Christian faith. Manila had, in fact, already gone down this road but in Cape Town, in 2010, it was as if the earlier progress had simply been forgotten.

Modernization, to be sure, is an enormously complex matter. What makes it especially difficult to grasp is that these are global processes which also look a little different in different cultural contexts. The face of modernization in the west is not quite the same as in Asia. And none of these developments ever stands still. Each is in constant flux.

And yet, while this is true, modernization is also profoundly changing our world. Manila had said that ‘we have become concerned about the impact of “modernity”, which is an emerging world culture produced by industrialization with its technology and urbanization with its economic order’.[312] It went on to say that these factors combine to produce a cultural and psychological environment ‘which significantly shapes the way we see our world’.[313] There are, undoubtedly, enormous benefits that come from modernization but they come with costs attached. As a part of this picture is the fact that where secularism has taken root, belief in God becomes meaningless and unnecessary and where the media dominates our consciousness, truth is devalued. This loss of truth has an enormous impact both on the message which many are preaching as well as on the motivation to evangelize.

The Manila Congress had recognized how slow evangelicals have been to understand these changes. ‘We confess,’ it said, ‘that we have not struggled as we should to understand modernization.’ Not understanding it, we do not see its dangers and so, very often, we have ‘used its methods and techniques’[314] when doing evangelism and therefore have often done it in worldly ways.

Not long after this Congress in Manila, and well before the Congress in Cape Town, the Theology Working Group took up this theme at a Consultation in Uppsala in 1993.[315] James Hunter set up the theme by saying that “nearly everyone nowadays senses deep within themselves a visceral unease about contemporary life”.[316] This is not simply the realization that for Christians this world is not their home. “No, the tension, the dissonance, the emptiness is more unsettling than just that. Something, we sense, is unique about the nature and direction of our personal and collective existence and it is not all agreeable to us.”[317] This is the internal signal that we are receiving that something profound is afoot. It speaks to the disintegration of some of our most basic institutions and the disappearance of some of the core ideals of our western civilization. And while this has been going on, Hunter said, evangelicals have been in “a deep but restless and agitated slumber”.[318] Unfortunately, this slumber was not really interrupted in Cape Town.

All of this may seem to be far removed from the work of the Holy Spirit. There is, though, an important point of connection. It is that technology and the media greatly magnify human powers and foster an illusion about human ability that is simply false when it comes to the Kingdom of God. The point about the historic doctrine of the Spirit is that it underscores human inability. The reason that the Gospel does not take root without the work of the Spirit is that we are, by nature, disinclined to hear the Gospel or believe its truth, unwilling to change our ways, incapable of that trust in Christ without which there can be no redemption. All of these things the Spirit enables us to do. By contrast, modernity greatly heightens the sense of human ability.

So it is that some have imagined that the church is but a business, with a product, which simply needs to be sold to customers as any other product might be. We can generate our own success. Christian faith thus is ‘produced’ with very little reference to truth. Indeed, the fact that so much success has been had in the Christian world without much biblical truth is a testimony to the power, not of the Holy Spirit, but of the tools of the modernized world. This is what Manila had had in mind when it spoke of the worldly techniques which now abound in the evangelical world.

It ought to be impossible to hold the historic view of the Holy Spirit and be unaware of the worldliness inherent within modernity. But it plainly is not. Many of those engaged in the marketing of Christian faith would be shocked to learn that their practices are at odds with such an important doctrine. But they are!

This is a doctrine that functions within a theological framework. Too much of our evangelism, at least in the west, has been carried out within a non-theological framework. This is one of the most profound consequences of our prolonged exposure to modernity. Manila plainly put this matter on the agenda. Perhaps, if there is another Congress, it can be taken up once again more intentionally.

The distinctive missiological contribution Lausanne has made, then, has been to reaffirm the Church’s longstanding doctrine of the Holy Spirit and to do so in a theological context. Central to this are two considerations. First, it is God who must establish his own Kingdom for we cannot do it by ourselves. We can pray for it, seek it, want it, but it is God alone who can establish it. And this he has done in and through Christ.

This leads to the second point. The work of the Holy Spirit, in this Kingdom, is focused on, and linked to, Christ and his saving death on the Cross. The Holy Spirit gives no validation to other religions and is not at work redemptively in them. His sole work is to point men and women to Christ and enable them to trust in his grace alone for their salvation.