Missio Spiritus – In the last days

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).

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the Spirit as well as the gifts of the Spirit that are given liberally for the edification of all and for the common good (1 Cor. 12:7-11).338 The apostolic empowerment by the Spirit thus also enabled them to work miraculous signs and wonders, including healing the sick, exorcising demons, and even raising the dead. These continued the pronouncement regarding the imminence of the coming kingdom even while precipitating its arrival. As people of the eschatological Spirit, the apostolic message was proclaimed ‘not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power’ (1 Cor. 2:4). In this sense, then, the church as the people of the Spirit glimpses through the eschatological mirror dimly (1 Cor. 13:12), even now enacting the works of the kingdom in anticipation of the full glory that is to be revealed. There is a fundamental sense, then, in which the Spirit is both present (having already introduced the coming reign of God) and yet also absent (still to fully establish the righteousness of God).

Yet the eschatological work of the Spirit is not merely anthropocentric but has a cosmic scope. The apostle Paul wrote: ‘We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies’ (Rom. 8:22-23). On the one hand, the outpouring of the Spirit upon all flesh has already begun the final transfiguration, to the point that the sun, the moon and the heavenly elements have also begun to anticipate the great and coming Day of the Lord (Acts 2:19-20); on the other hand, the gift of the Spirit here in the second Act has done no more than initiate the eschatological conditions under which the fulness of redemption – the third Act – will be fully accomplished in the coming reign of God. While Easter Sunday has occurred in the resurrection of Christ and in the regenerating work of the Spirit (the ‘already’ of the Spirit’s presence), yet the world nevertheless remains also amidst the Holy Saturday of the present fallen order, betwixt and between the times anticipating the resurrection of all flesh (the ‘not yet’ of the Spirit’s eschatological activity).

But beyond the resurrection of dead bodies, this final eschatological revelation of the Spirit signals the completion of the divine work begun in the creation of the world and brings to fruition what was set in motion in the hovering of the ruach Elohim over the primordial waters.339 All

338. For more on my pneumatological theology of the charisms, see God is Spirit, God is Love: Love as the Gift of the Spirit (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), chap. 7. 339. See Yong, In the Days of Caesar, chap. 8.3.

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