Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 49:195 (Jul 1892)
Article: The Offices Of The Holy Spirit
Author: Elias Henry Johnson

BSac 49:195 (July 1892) p. 361

The Offices Of The Holy Spirit

Rev. E. H. Johnson

AMONG the more important themes alike of theological and of practical interest the work of the Holy Spirit would perhaps be generally regarded as most in need of study. The settlement of this doctrine has been postponed because the time had not come when its settlement could be reached. The church gives herself to but one great subject at once, and takes centuries instead of years to arrive at a lasting decision. The lesson of history upon this point, although familiar, is hardly the less startling. It is natural that so abstruse a doctrine as that of the Trinity should wait nearly four hundred years for definition, and that the problem of the relations of divine to human in Christ should not be worked out to the general satisfaction until near the close of the seventh century. But how explain that it took the Western church a good part of five hundred years fully to recognize so obvious a fact as that men are born depraved, and more than eleven hundred years before her Anselm gave to the atonement, that is to the Good News itself, the enunciation which begins all modern thought upon this subject?

BSac 49:195 (July 1892) p. 362

And we must review the whole complex process of church history if we would understand why the application of the atonement, or justification by faith, had to wait a full millennium and a half in order to receive a sufficiently simple and sufficiently wide publication.

No one then should be surprised to find John Wesley, about half way from Luther’s day to ours, first making it understood that a new begetting by the Holy Spirit and a definite progress in the new life, together with the Spirit’s witness to his own work, are within reach at once. Up to Wesley’s time emphasis had been laid upon what the Holy Spirit does for the church, that he gives authority to her teachings and efficacy to her sacraments; Wesley preached the work of the Spirit in the individual. His contribution to the development of Christian doctrine was as timely as Luther’s, and left as much for further inquiry within the very range of truth which he took in hand to expound. It was a sense of guilt for past sins on which Tetzel traded, and which was fully satisfied in Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith. It was the spectacle of sin yet reigning in the church which inflamed the zeal of the young Methodists at Oxford, and which found its corrective in the offices of the Holy Spirit. But just as Luther’s doctrine of justification invited an antinomian perversion, so Wesley’s doctrine of immediate regeneration, sanctification and witness to the-same, inevitably led to unwarrantable opinions about the nature of the changes actually wrought, and to a fanatical misunderst...