“YOU CAN BUY THE HOLY SPIRIT FOR A DIME”

This is the way one of our leading preachers would explain one’s relationship to the Holy Spirit, and it is barely an overstatement of the position our people have taken all along. The brother did not mean to be irreverent, to be sure, but rather to dramatize what to him is the truth about the mission of God’s Spirit, which is that he functions only through the written word of God, the Bible, and that the more the Bible becomes a part of one the more the Spirit will be in him.

It is a daring way to say it, to hold an inexpensive vest Testament before an audience and declare that the Spirit of God can be had for a ten cent piece. One can just see some naive soul making his way to the five-and-ten cent store and besieging a bewildered clerk with “one Holy Spirit please.” Or one can imagine some penny-pincher complaining to a friend, “The Holy Spirit cost me a lot more than a dime!”

This is to suppose that our brother preacher was (or still is) equating the Holy Spirit with the word of God; that is, the Bible is the Holy Spirit, and thanks to mass production a copy can be purchased for a very small sum of money. Almost certainly he does not mean this. He rather means what our people have been saying since the time that Alexander Campbell debated N. L. Rice and affirmed the proposition “In conversion and sanctification the Spirit of God operates on persons only through the Word.” This means that there is no attending, mystical influence, that one is converted by hearing (or reading) the gospel and responding to it with heart and head. It was Campbell’s way of opposing the Calvinistic notion that the sinner is to look to some mysterious influence rather than to the facts, commands, and promises of the gospel as set forth in scripture.

Campbell’s friend and later his biographer, Robert Richardson, who eventually wrote a book on what the Holy Spirit means to the believer, urged Campbell not to argue such a proposition with Mr. Rice, for Richardson simply believed that his friend was wrong in supposing that the Guest of heaven functions in people’s lives only through the scriptures.

But in the debate itself, as well as in other writings, Campbell, whether influenced by Richardson or not. leaves the door wide open as to what the Spirit might do for the believer. Campbell’s point was that for man to be saved he is to respond to the gospel, the only source of which is the Bible. It is not by experiencing visions or dreams, or seeing lights or shadows, or even by praying through on the mourner’s bench.

Speaking of the Spirit’s ministry, Campbell said in the debate: “To what extent He may operate in suggestions, special providences, or in any other way, is neither affirmed or denied in the proposition before us. It has respect to conversion and sanctification only.”

This opposition to extreme Calvinistic theology has bequeathed to us an odd heritage. We have gone far beyond what Campbell was contending for against Rice, which he believed negated human responsibility. As he said to Rice: “If God, by some mysterious power, without light, knowledge, a new idea, view or reflection, touch the soul of A, B, or C, and make it holy by ‘infusing a holy principle,’ if he does this without any thought, motive, or argument, instantaneously and immediately, what comes of the doctrine of human responsibility?”

But when Campbell talks about what the Spirit does in the life of the believer he says: “As the glory of the Lord equally filled all the tabernacle and the temple, so the Spirit of God animates, consoles, and refreshes the whole body of Christ. He that enjoys the favor of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, has all the fulness of God, and is as blessed as mortal man can be.”

Campbell would not likely say, in the light of the foregoing, that one can buy the Spirit at any price. He certainly does not equate the Bible with the Spirit. Moreover he says that the Spirit has a ministry of animation and consolation in the life of a believer.

And yet this idea that we have all there is to the Spirit when we have the Bible is very much with us. An odd heritage indeed. It has left us with the notion that all the Spirit does for us is to give us the Bible. The term “only through the Word” is fuzzy enough as it is, and we have made it mean that the more of the scriptures we can learn or memorize the more we have the Spirit. Since “only through the Word” is not a scriptural term and has to be belabored to be given any theological respectability, it may be just as well to forget it. What does it mean anyway? If it means that God’s Spirit does not operate in any way that contradicts the scriptures, then there will be little argument. If it means that any communion a disciple has with the Spirit, any encouragement, consolation or illumination, must result from a corresponding experience of reading those precise things in scripture, then it would be more questionable.

It is not saying too much to say that we are ignorant of the Spirit, and as a consequence we are denied that spiritual union with God that is the very purpose of Christ. Hazy as we are in reference to the spiritual universe, we are hardly conscience of the reality of Satan. And our legalistic bookishness dims our view of the grace of God. Once the veil is lifted and we see the war that is waging between flesh and spirit, within ourselves as well as in the universe, then the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will take on meaning. We are hardly a people in need, for we have grown adequate through loyalty to creed and church. It is when one sees the measure of his sin and his utter dependence on God that he becomes hungry and longs for God’s indwelling.

As a Bible loving people we should realize that it is the Bible that speaks of the Holy Spirit really dwelling in us (Rom. 8:9), and that same verse insists that if the Spirit does not dwell in us we do not belong to Christ. It is inconceivable for one who really believes such a passage to talk about buying the Holy Spirit when he purchases a Bible. When Paul wrote those words the only “Bible” the church had was the Old Testament scriptures. The Spirit was in the Body of Christ, the church, dwelling with it and in it so as to encourage, direct, comfort, witness, seal, renew, illuminate, and intercede, long before the church had the New Testament scriptures.

It is also the Bible that instructs us to be filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18), which is really saying, in the light of the context, that we are to be influenced by the Holy Spirit within us as a drunkard is influenced by the “spirit” that is within him. Can one really believe that the command to be filled with the Spirit is a mandate to learn as much of the Bible as we can? Acts 5:32 teaches that God gives the Spirit to all those that obey him. This has to be something besides a knowledge of scripture.

2 Tim. 3:5 warns us against “holding a form of religion but denying the power of it.” Let’s face up to it, what do we know about the power of religion? Forms are easy enough to preserve, and forms (like prayer, baptism, Lord’s Supper) are God ordained experiences. And yet these can be held on to by a people who deny the power of a Spirit filled life. A charade about buying the Holy Spirit at a five-and-ten could well reflect a form of godliness that denies the power of it. That a leading preacher among us can say such a thing and get by with it is an indication that the viewpoint at least approximates the value we give to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

We want to believe that such a depression is a thing of the past, that the church has turned the corner in another direction, and that we are now a people through whom the love of God is shed abroad through the indwelling Spirit. This is true enough that we can all take courage and work and pray for a better tomorrow. But still there is a great deal of resistance to the Churches of Christ becoming Spirit filled. We are still far from being a people who bear the fruit of the Spirit in our lives — love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness.

Maybe this is why the Spirit appears to be “overdoing it” in our generation, not only among our people but throughout the Christian world. He may have our charismatics in our hair (or we in their hair!) in order for us to see, to our embarrassment, how far we have gone from the Spirit.

That the Spirit is indeed staging a revolution in the modern church is evident enough. The question is how the most of us are going to respond. Now is our chance to ride the crest of a spiritual thrust to a far more responsible Christian witness. Jesus is more of an exciting reality to an increasing number of professed believers than almost any other time in history. Love is becoming something far more than an ideal in book or creed. There is growing concern for mission, real mission with a real Jesus for suffering humanity.

And amidst it all the Holy Spirit is making us one in Christ, the only unity that has any value anyway, despite all the efforts of ecumenicity for some kind of structural union. Oneness is the Spirit’s gift to a people who really hunger to be the Body of Christ.

The more we taste this heavenly gift the more we realize that it is not for sale at any price. And there is no way to capture it all in paper and ink or limit it to the pages of a book, however precious that book.

“We who believe are carefully joined together with Christ as parts of a beautiful, constantly growing temple for God. And you also are joined with Him and with each other by the Spirit, and are part of this dwelling place of God” (Eph. 2:21-22). — the Editor