Gordon Fee states that “there is no such thing as Christian conversion that does not have the coming of the Spirit into the believer’s life as the critical ingredient.”

Fee addresses what it means to receive the Holy Spirit:

“Believers have received the Spirit (1 Cor 2:12; 2 Cor 11:4), been saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit (2 Thess 2:13; Rom 15:16), been circumcised in their hearts by the Spirit [their minds renewed] (Rom 2:29), and been joined to Christ so as to become one S/spirit with him (1 Cor 6:17).”

Fee summarizes what it means to be “saved” by the Holy Spirit:

“In sum: ‘to be saved’ in the Pauline view means to become part of the people of God, who by the Spirit are born into God’s family and therefore joined to one another as one body, whose gatherings in the Spirit form them into God’s temple. God is not simply saving diverse individuals and preparing them for heaven; rather he is creating a people for his name, among whom God can dwell and who in the life together will reproduce God’s life and character in all its unity and diversity.”

Fee goes on to state that “By the Spirit’s presence believers have tasted of the life to come and are now oriented toward its consummation. ‘We are saved in hope,’ Paul tells the Romans (8:24); by the power of the Spirit we ‘abound in hope.’ (Romans 15:13)”

Fee shares that “Paul’s point is simply that we can be certain that our bodies, though destined for death, will be given life, precisely because of the Spirit who indwells us. . . . the Spirit guarantees our future, including our bodily resurrection. . . . the future body is supernaturally fitted for the final life of the Spirit, totally unhindered by any of its present weaknesses.”

Fee writes, “In Paul, as Ephesians 1:13 and 4:30 make certain, the seal is a metaphor for the Spirit, by whom God has marked believers and claimed them as his own.”

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.”