8 - Spirit, newness, life: the Pauline antecedents

Summary

Because “spirit” is the most life-giving, and God is the author of life.

Philo, De Opificio Mundi

The question of the correct starting-point for the examination of the Spirit in Paul's letters was posed several decades ago by Otto Kuss, and again recently by Gordon Fee. It is no small irony that Fee, a (neo-)Pentecostal, begins with eschatology, while Kuss, a Roman Catholic, begins with glossolalia. Few would now doubt the correctness of Fee's approach, without implying any criticism of Gunkel's emphasis on the dynamic and ecstatic element associated with the Spirit in the New Testament. Kuss was correct, however, to insist that the Old Testament was decisive for Paul in that it provided him with an eschatological framework and categories with which to interpret his experience of the Spirit, and at this point Kuss stands with the consensus. In sketching the Pauline antecedents, I will restrict myself to two prominent and easily discernible lines of tradition which were not only picked up and continued by Paul, but were intertwined by him as well: the Spirit as the sign of the eschaton, and the Spirit as the creator of life.

The Pauline antecedents

The Spirit and the eschaton

The association of the age to come with an outpouring of God's Spirit is a familiar theme in Israel's prophetic traditions, and did not go unnoticed by the early church as it sought to explain its own experience of the Spirit. Joel's prophecy of a universal outpouring was eagerly appropriated toward this end (Acts 2; cf. Rom. 10.13), and this is but one text in a rich archive of material which must have shaped the self-identity of primitive Christianity.