The Holy Spirit -- By: Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 43:1 (Fall 1980)
Article: The Holy Spirit
Author: Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.


The Holy Spirit*

Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.

I

Twenty years ago, when I was a seminary student, there was a slogan to the effect that the Holy Spirit was “the forgotten member of the Trinity.” Today, no one at all aware of more recent developments in the church and theology, will be able to say anything like that. The past 15-20 years have witnessed an unprecedented quickening of intense and widespread interest in the work of the Holy Spirit. While this interest has begun to show signs of levelling off over the past several years, it is still safe to say that at present no issue more preoccupies the church throughout the world than that of the Holy Spirit and his work.

This remarkable turn of events is largely bound up with the emergence and rapid spread of the charismatic movement. The phenomenal growth of this movement has no easy or single explanation, but certainly it can not be understood, at least in the West, apart from larger cultural and subcultural developments in recent decades. Among these, in particular, are a growing disillusionment with our society as a whole and its apparent direction (or lack thereof), and an awareness that things like industrialization, technology and material affluence, on which such high hopes have been set, tend by themselves to disappoint and depersonalize rather than to satisfy basic human needs and aspirations. Another factor is the “new irrationalism” of the West with its preoccupation with various Eastern religions and other forms of mysticism, in the quest for personal wholeness and experience with genuine emotional depth.

* An address, printed here with slight revisions, given at the National Presbyterian and Reformed Congress, meeting at Grove City College. Grove City, Pennsylvania, on July 17, 1979.

These trends betray a deep hunger which the Gospel alone can satisfy and it would be tragic for the church to neglect them. But they also intensify the demand to “test the spirits.” Accordingly, both within and outside the charismatic movement, there is a growing concern to counter the antitheological bias that has so often surfaced down through church history when the work of the Holy Spirit is under consideration. Efforts are under way to redress this doctrinal neglect of the Holy Spirit, so that now it can no longer be said that pneumatology is the neglected field of systematic theology. Across a broad front, contemporary theology has moved from a christological period (under the dominance of Karl Barth) into a pneumatological period. Apparently this is where it will remain for some time.

Where is and where ought the Reformed community to be in this situation? It is fair to say, I believe, that...

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