"But this he said concerning the Spirit, which they that believed on him were about to receive; for the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified. —John 7:39.
"Thus it is written, 'The first man, Adam, became a living being'; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit." —1 Cor. 15:45
Question:
"Who has the Spirit?" What are we to make of expressions of love, joy, peace, and all the other listed fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5v22) apparent in those who do not name Christ as Lord, or may not even be aware of God in many parts of the world? Are these merely "counterfeits of the real thing"? My gut feeling is that as God's image-bearers, every human being is capable of expressing something of God's beauty - good fruit - which leads me to think that all humanity has something of the Spirit as part of our image-bearing.
Fr. John Behr speaks about a distinction between the impartation of the breath of God (creation of human-beings) and of the Spirit (presumably at "conversion" what/whenever that is!). Would you explain this further, please?
Response via Fr. John Behr:
We must take seriously that the Risen Christ gives the Spirit: in the upper room in John, and at Pentecost in Acts. He tells his disciples, that (even!) they have yet to receive it.
This is vital: Christ and the Spirit are together. However, in the light of this gift, we can see that Christ and the Spirit have been at work since the beginning. As Irenaeus put it (in the passage shared with everyone, from Against the Heresies 5.1.3):
Never did Adam (the whole human race) escape the Hands of God (Christ and the Spirit), who are constantly working to bring us to the stature of Christ, which of course only happens in Christ, taking up his cross, entering into the Paschal Mystery he has opened up. And so, yes, in Christ, we can see Christ and the Spirit at work in all at all times (though of course not in everything we or others might do!), always bringing life out of death/suffering.
Thus Christ’s giving of the Spirit, breathing it upon them, recapitulates what happened in the beginning, when God breathed a breath of life into the clay: Christ now breaths the Life-giving Spirit into the belief, to be the very One by whom the believer now lives, as part of, and as, the body of Christ: thus the whole economy is a movement from animation by a (mortal) breath (mortal, because it will expire, as breath does) to vivification, through death and resurrection in Christ, by the Spirit [following Paul in 1 Cor 15].
One also has to be careful with the language of ‘in’, for several reasons: the Spirit is not ‘in’ us as ‘our own possession’, but always as the gift of God; and if the Spirit is ‘in’ us, it does not mean either that we have a part of the Spirit (as if the Spirit were ‘divided up’, as a material substance, so that we each have a part!), or that the Spirit is not elsewhere (being infinite, beyond space/time, so available to all space/time): in this life, when we receive the Spirit it is as a ‘pledge’, a promise of our future inheritance, when we will (finally) no longer live by a breath (which we still do, even while taking up the cross - we do so by the breath itself!), but, having died, rise with Christ in and by the Spirit.
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