I cite Gordon Fee in the following statements: “For Paul, . . . salvation in Christ is a fundamentally eschatological reality, meaning first of all that God’s final salvation of his people has already been accomplished by Christ. . . . This essential framework likewise causes Paul to see the church as an end-time community, whose members live in the present as those stamped with eternity. We live as strangers on earth; our true citizenship is in heaven (Phil 3:20). . . . Believers have tasted of the life to come; and the full and final realization of the future is so certain that God’s new people become heavenly radicals as they live in the ‘already’ but ‘not yet’ of the present age.”

In one of his book chapter conclusions Gordon Fee commented on trinitarianism in the church:

“But what does such trinitarianism mean for us? Several things. First, it means that the Spirit must be reinstated into the Trinity, where he has never been excluded in our creeds and liturgies, but has been practically excluded from the experienced life of the church. To be a Pauline Christian means to take the Spirit with full seriousness as the way the eternal God is ever present with his people.”

I am sharing wonderful comments from Gordon Fee about how the Apostle Paul considered the love of God:

“For Paul the ‘love of God’ was no mere abstraction. God’s [boundless, my addition] love, the most essential reality about his character and the absolute predicate of our existence, has been demonstrated historically in its most lavish and expansive expression through Christ’s death for his enemies. . . . But such love is not merely an objective historical event. By the presence of the Spirit, God’s love, played out to the full in Christ, is an experienced reality in the heart of the believer. This is what the Spirit has so richly ‘shed abroad in our hearts.’ If we are not thus overtaken by God himself at this crucial point, then all else is lost. . . . What rectifies all of this for us is not simply the fact of God’s love - although in some ways that would surely be enough - but that God’s love has been effectively realized in the experience of the believer. God’s love for us has been ‘poured out’ as a prodigal, experienced reality by the presence of the Holy Spirit, whom God has also lavishly poured out into our hearts.”

Fee expressed “that the love of God is the foundation of Paul’s view of salvation . . . . The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is what gave concrete expression to that love; through Christ’s suffering and death on behalf of his loved ones, God accomplished salvation for them at one moment in human history. The participation in the Holy Spirit continually makes that love and grace real in the life of the believer and the believing community. The koinonia (‘fellowship/participation’) of the Holy Spirit . . . is how the living God not only brings people into an intimate and abiding relationship with himself, as the God of all grace, but also causes them to participate in all the benefits of that grace and salvation - that is, by indwelling them in the present with his own presence and guaranteeing their final eschatological glory.”

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.”