Missio Spiritus – The Doctrine of Redemption

this can be understood both christologically and pneumatologically. On the pneumatological plane, however, when read in the light of ancient Israelite perspectives (above), humans are pneumatically interrelated not only with one another but also with non-human animals since all of life throbs with and through the breath given by the ruach of God. In this sense, Christian mission is thus always and primordially missio Spiritus.

But there is one more layer to pneumatological mission theology of creation that should be lifted up before turning to the doctrine of redemption. Divine redemption is required because although the ruach Elohim both hovered over the primordial waters and became the breath of life for all living creatures, nevertheless with the fall of creation, the cosmos and all of its creatures remain alienated from God the Creator. Paradoxically, then, the ruach Elohim is both present to all creatures – enlivening and vivifying the creation – and yet also absent from them – in the estrangement creatures feel towards other creatures and to their Creator – simultaneously. In anticipation of this redemptive work, then, the promise is given in the Hebrew Bible that God will redeem the world pneumatologically through the chosen or elect nation of Israel.

There are two moments constitutive of such a pneumatological promise. First, God pledges to Abraham that, ‘in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’ (Gen. 12:3). Second, however, even the divine promises are insufficient to preserve and ultimately save the people called of God. Rather, God needs to accomplish an internal work, a work of the Spirit: ‘A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances’ (Ezek. 36:26-27). This anticipates the later gift of the Spirit in Christ. But for our purposes at this juncture, it is important to point out that the creational mission of the Spirit not only infuses the dust of the ground with life but also looks ahead to another pneumatic outpouring and infilling. In other words, the creation as a whole, as well as its creatures, is primed to receive the redemptive fulness of the Spirit.

Missio Spiritus – The Doctrine of Redemption

The second moment of the missio Spiritus moves us from the universality of the Spirit’s presence and activity in the creation to the particularity of the Spirit’s historical work in redemption. This redemptive history involves the incarnation of the Son via the power of the Spirit, followed by the Son’s gift

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of the Spirit to the people of God. But why are both essential? For at least two reasons, one historical and the other spiritual: historically, the Son came in order to renew and restore Israel as the people of God, and this renewal and restoration was intended both to serve as a template for the kingdom of God and to inaugurate that kingdom.336 But God’s offer of restoration and renewal in the Son was rejected and he suffered a violent death; yet his death became salvific for his people because it served as a scapegoat that prevented further outbreaks of violence (at least for one generation). Spiritually, the life and death of the Son represented the obedience that served as the basis of reconciliation of human beings in particular and the world as a whole with God; then the resurrection and ascension of the Son confirmed the potentiality of the world’s transfiguration in the presence and power of God. Hence, as the ancient church confessed, the Son became human so that human beings might be redeemed as children of God; by extension, the Son was clothed with the dust of the earth so that the creation itself might be renewed as the dwelling place of God.

But the mission of the Son cannot be divorced from the missio Spiritus; in fact, they are inextricably intertwined. The Spirit is the power not just of the Son’s breath of life but also of the Son’s conception and generation in the womb of Mary; just as the ruach Elohim hovered over the structural ordering of the primordial chaos, so also did the Spirit both overshadow and come upon Mary (Luke 1:35). Then, the Spirit descends on the Son at his baptism in the Jordan (Luke 3:22) so that he can be filled with the Spirit for his public ministry, itself launched by his spiritual confrontation with the demonic powers of the world (Luke 4:1, 14). Thus does Jesus pronounce that his mission is that of the Spirit’s: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18-19). The rest of his public ministry unfolds this agenda according to the power of the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:38).

If Jesus accomplished the saving works of God – proclamation of the gospel to all, in particular to the poor, healing the sick, delivering the oppressed and the captives, and inaugurating the Jubilee year of divine favour and redemption – through the power of the Spirit, then so also

336. Here I am in basic agreement with the central thrust of N.T. Wright’s interpretation of the mission of Jesus; my own appropriation of Wright’s account is in my In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), chap. 3.

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did his original disciples. They were initially told to wait in Jerusalem for ‘power from on high’ (Luke 24:49) and then later promised: ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). Whereas Jesus came first to renew and restore Israel, with forays into Samaria, the Spirit-filled ministry of the earliest followers of Jesus took them to the ends of the earth.

The outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost brings to historical fulfilment two promises made to ancient Israel. First, if ancient Israel had been disobedient to the covenant with Yahweh due to hardness of heart, the newly reconstituted people of God were no longer merely bound externally by law but were empowered internally by transformed hearts that had been touched by the Spirit. This is one of the central messages of the New Testament: that the Hebraic law provided for sacrifices for sins but the gift of the Spirit enables the evangelical obedience that produces sanctified and holy lives (see Heb. 9:13-14 and passim). In other words, the divine breath of life in every person as a result of the creative work of the Spirit is now, potentially, the divine breath of holiness as a result of the redemptive work of the Spirit unleashed on the Day of Pentecost.

Secondly, the Pentecost outpouring of the Spirit inaugurates the promised redemption of the nations derived from the covenant made with Abraham. This occurred in two ways: through the presence at Jerusalem at the Pentecost feast of ‘devout Jews [and proselytes] from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem’ (Acts 2:5, 10), and through the apostolic missionary movement that not only went from Jerusalem to Rome (as recounted in Acts) but also commissioned others to take the gospel in other directions (i.e. as did the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8). The missio Spiritus thus generates ongoing surprises that involve the crossing of borders so that agents of mission continually find a blurring of the lines between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ – at least on this side of the eschaton when we all see through a glass dimly – in the divine scheme of things.

The lack of formal closure to the book of Acts invites readers in every place and time since to participate in the work and witness of the Spirit of God in Christ as part of the book’s 29th chapter, as it were. The Spirit who empowered the Son and who was poured out upon and filled the apostles is the same Spirit who continues to accomplish the redemptive work of God in Christ and through the church in this post-apostolic period. This ongoing work in history, then, leads us to the third and concluding act of the missio Spiritus.

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