Missio Spiritus – In the last days We began with the work of the Spirit in creation and have in the preceding discussed the Spirit’s redemptive work in Christ and the Pentecost outpouring that constituted the church. Now we turn to the eschatological work of the Spirit anticipating the final renewal and restoration of the creation as a whole. This eschatological work was inaugurated in the redemptive work of the Spirit in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. As the apostle Peter said (quoting the prophet Joel, at least as recorded by Luke the evangelist): ‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh…’ (Acts 2:17, citing Joel 2:28; italics added).337 Again, there are two dimensions to this eschatological work of the Spirit: the christological and the ecclesiological. Christologically, the eschatological work of the Spirit is most clearly revealed in Jesus’ proclamation regarding the coming kingdom and his accomplishing the signs of the kingdom. These latter include his miraculous deeds, his healings, and his exorcisms of evil spirits. These are signs of the coming kingdom precisely because they can be understood either as enacted by suspensions of the present order of things (i.e. the ‘laws of nature’ as currently conceived) or as anticipations of the ways in which the coming world will operate. The Spirit enables Christ to accomplish the works that bring about the shape of the coming kingdom, in the process announcing the end of the present cosmic order. Most importantly, however, the Spirit announces the arrival of the kingdom in the resurrection of Jesus. If death is the most ubiquitous sign of the world as we know it, resurrection life provides us with a foretaste of the world to come. Yet even christologically, the fulness of the Spirit is not yet manifest in and through the Christ for that awaits the parousia, the return of the anointed Messiah that will finally and fully establish the coming reign of God. As the author of the first Johannine epistle writes: ‘When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2). But again, the work of the Spirit in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is now available to the followers of Christ, the church – the body of Christ and the fellowship of the Spirit. We now also have received 337. Pentecostal mission has by and large been motivated by this eschatological impulse: e.g. James R. Goff, Jr, Fields White unto Harvest: Charles Fox Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), and D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
159
