Gordon Fee shares that “at the heart of Paul’s theology is his gospel, and his gospel is essentially about salvation - God’s saving a people for his name through the redeeming work of Christ and the applying work of the Spirit.”

Gordon Fee shared that “most Christians have little trouble relating to the Father and the Son because of the personal images involved and the reality of the incarnation - even though they know that God is Spirit (John 4:24). But it is otherwise with the Spirit, where Christian understanding falls considerably short of personhood. . . . As Paul put it, the glory of God has been imaged for us in the one true human who bears the divine image, Christ himself; and by beholding his ‘face’ we see the glory of the eternal God (2 Cor 3:18; 4:4, 6). . . . we must recognize the same to be true about the Spirit, . . . Christ has put a human face on the Spirit as well. Not only has the coming of Christ changed everything for Paul, so too has the coming of the Spirit. In dealing with the Spirit, we are dealing with none other than the personal presence of God.”

As I have shared in my books and blogs the Mind of God thus interacts with the mind of Man through God’s created neural synaptic networks, a communion restored by the sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ in repentant believers in our time.

In his letter to the Corinthians Gordon Fee points out that the Apostle Paul appealed “to the presence of the Spirit in their lives in the context of the saving work of Christ. In ‘purchasing’ them for God’s glory, Christ also purchased their bodies, as evidenced by the Holy Spirit, whose temple they are because God now dwells not in temples made by human hands, but in temples constructed by his own hands. Thus they are not their own, to do with their bodies as they please. They belong to the God who purchased them through Christ’s [sin] sacrifice and now indwells them by his Spirit.”

“[Paul] understands the Spirit’s coming as fulfilling three related expectations: (1) the association of the Spirit with the new covenant; (2) the language of ‘indwelling’; and (3) the association of the Spirit with the imagery of the temple. . . . the Spirit becomes the way God himself is now present on planet earth. . . . the temple was always understood as the place of God’s dwelling, the place of his glory. For Paul the Spirit is how God presently dwells in his holy temple. Significantly, such dwelling takes place both in the gathered community, as one might well expect given the Old Testament background to this usage, and especially in the heart [soul] of the individual believer.”

Citing Fee, “Here, then, is one of the more significant areas where the Spirit represents both continuity and discontinuity between the old and new covenants. The continuity is to be found in the promised renewal of God’s presence with his people; the discontinuity lies in the radically new way God has revisited them - indwelling them individually as well as corporately by his Spirit.”

The outpouring of the Spirit meant for Paul that God had fulfilled his promise to dwell once again in and among his people.

This statement was posted at the beginning of Fee’s second chapter. He went on to say, “God has made us this way, in his own image, because he himself is a personal, relational being. The great problem with the fall is that we lost not only our vision of God (that is, his true character has been distorted) but also our relationship with God, and thus no longer knew his abiding presence. For Paul the coming of Christ and the Spirit changed all of this forever.”

Gordon Fee expressed a concern when Jesus Christ is the sole focus in the church, although He is rightly to be taught. He pointed out that “. . . we are less sure about the Holy Spirit. Despite the affirmations in our creeds and hymns and the lip service paid to the Spirit in our occasional conversations, the Spirit has been largely marginalized both in the halls of learning and in the life of the church as a community of faith.

“. . . too often missing . . . are two further matters that, for Paul, lie at the very heart of faith. First, the Spirit as person, the promised return of God’s own personal presence with his people; second, the Spirit as eschatological fulfillment, who both reconstitutes God’s people anew and empowers us to live the life of the future in our between-the-times existence - between the time of Christ’s first and second coming.

“If the church is going to be effective in our postmodern world, we need to stop paying mere lip service to the Spirit and to recapture Paul’s perspective: the Spirit as the experienced, empowering return of God’s own personal presence in and among us, who enables us to live as a radically eschatological people in the present world while we await the consummation.”

And through my studies I have shared the process by which, at least in part, the Holy Spirit interacts with us in repentance in our time. It is a dualist interaction created by God so that He can have a personal communion with His people.

The theological concept of “already but not yet” holds that believers are actively taking part in the kingdom of God, although the kingdom will not reach its full expression until sometime in the future. We are “already” in the kingdom, but we do “not yet” see it in its glory. The “already but not yet” theology is related to kingdom theology or inaugurated eschatology.

The “already but not yet” paradigm was developed by Princeton theologian Gerhardus Vos early in the 20th century. (https://www.gotquestions.org/already-not-yet.html)

Gordon Fee shared in the Preface to his book, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God, comments that drove the writing of his book. I am sharing several of them that should give contemporary Christians reason to be more effective in their witness to the Holy Spirit.

“The bottom line is . . . the generally ineffective witness and perceived irrelevancy of the church in Western culture. Here, it seems to me, is where the real difference between Paul and us emerges, where in a culture similar to ours the early believers seem to have been more effective than we are. I am convinced this is due in large part to their experience of the reality of the Spirit’s presence. . . . Crucial to this experience was the early church’s understanding of the Spirit as the fulfillment of Jewish hopes of the return of the divine presence . . . . What this meant for early Christians was that the Spirit was not only the personal presence of God in and among them (both individually and corporately) but that their understanding of God had to be broadened so as to become trinitarian. . . . Equally crucial to the experience of the Spirit was the early church’s self-understanding as “thoroughly eschatological,” in the “already/not yet” sense [which I have discussed in my books]. The first believers really believed that the future had begun, being attested by the gift of the outpoured Spirit, who also served as the guarantee of the future consummation. . . . This personal, powerful, experience of the eschatological Spirit not only transformed them individually but made them effective in their being the people of the good news in pagan Grego-Roman culture. And this is why I think they had the better of it, and why we would do well to recapture something of that reality.”

My next blog posts will include informative comments by Gordon D. Fee in his book, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God. I highly recommend you obtain and read the two books I have chosen from which to lift excerpts that deal with the Holy Spirit who is personal and lives.