The Dual Procession; the Spirit and the Human Nature of Jesus Christ

Vas I Creator Spiritus, was the thought

with which our previous chapter closed. Let us begin again with the same. In following ‘the scriptural traces of the doctrine of the blessed Spirit we will remember that He is the promised “Guide into all the Johnxvi.z3. truth.” By Him we will seek “a right judgment in all things” concerning His revealed glory, such a judgment that we may “evermore rejoice in His holy comfort,” the comfort of a happy insight into what He is as Comforter.

I propose to treat in this chapter of two important sides of the doctrine of the Spirit: the Forthcoming of the Spirit in the Holy Trinity from the Father and the Son (“the Dual Procession”), and the work of the Spirit in relation to the Human Nature of our Lord Jesus Christ.

ced

1. The words Procession of the Spirit can scarcely be spoken or written without calling up associated thoughts of strife and division within the Christian Church, and the hardly less unhappy remembrance of that ultra-speculative treatment of divine truths which has — too often proved a fruitful source of divisions. Not seldom even the most pious and reverent minds have been beguiled into discussing the Nature of God and the eternal Relations of the divine Persons in a tone which would be justified only if we had actually “found out the Almighty unto perfection” and saw Jobxi.7. before us, arranged in a series of absolutely certain premisses, major and minor, all that He knows about Himsetr. Hence in no small measure arose that great controversy of East and West upon the Dual Procession which led to a final rupture about the year 1050, a rupture never since healed, nay so little healed that as recently as 1863* a declaration was issued from Constantinople con- -démning as heresy the Western belief, confessed

1 See Smeaton, Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, p. 259.

in our two longer Creeds and in the Fifth Anglican Article.

But notwithstanding all this it is fully possible, I trust, to treat this subject of the Dual Procession, great and also tender as it is, without either a long discussion of the history of belief* or an unconscious imitation of the speculative tendency referred to. All I ask now to do is to take this doctrine, which our Church, both before and after the Reformation, has as a fact avowed to be Scripture truth, and to look upon it in the serene and blessed light of the revealed and experienced work of the Lord the Life-Giver in His ministry for Christ in the Church and in the soul. We shall surely find it to be no mere phantom of abstract and unlicensed speculation, but a truth of life and love.

What then in effect do we mean when we speak of the Procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son? We mean that in the revealed inner relations of Godhead, in those eternal and necessary relations (‘ necessary” in

the well-understood sense that they are relape a te ate ect ea

1 For a brief conspectus of the history I may venture to refer to my Outlines of Christian Doctrine, pp. 146, etc.

tions lying in the very Nature of God, relations which in that Nature wzust dc, even as holiness must be in it), while the Father is the eternal Origin of the Eternal Spirit, the Son is concurrently His eternal Origin also. We mean that Godhead is eternally in the Spirit because of the Son as well as because of the Father. We do not mean that the blessed Son is thus the Spirit’s Origin in an independent and separated way. 4/7 that the Son is, as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, He is “of the Father,’ and of the Father alone. To this He bore abundant personal witness ‘in the days of His flesh.” But we Johnv.2s, ete. believe that the ‘‘all” which He thus eternally derives includes zxz¢ter alza this — that He is, with the Father, the concurrent Origin of the Holy Spirit.

Such a humble belief is neither an arbitrary and barren demand upon a bewildered or unreflecting assent, nor a thing so sublimated and vanishing as to find no point of contact with life and love. In the first place, it throws some

1 See Pearson, Exposition of the Creed, p. 136, etc.

precious light of its own upon that Sanctum Sanctorum of life and love, the inner relations of the Persons of the blessed Godhead. He who is at once the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, and One with Both — is He not, in His blessed personal existence, the Result, the Bond, the Vehicle, of Their everlasting mutual delight and love? That such: He is was the belief of Christians long ago, a belief resting not indeed upon direct revelation, but upon inferences deep and lawful suggested by it. It is put into articulate statements by St Augustine, in his treatise Ox the Trinity, vi. 5. It falls in with the doctrine of the Dual Procession in a true harmony. And surely the study of anything which casts light on the revelation of that Mutual Love is full of practical blessing to thoughtful faith, for it is a contribution to the study of that inexhaustirJohniv.8,16. ble text, “God 1s Love.” Yes, not only does God do acts of love, however great. - In the inmost heart and secret of His Being Fienscas 4Love.’!

And when we come from the revealed inner life of Godhead to the divine work of redemption we find a manifest aid and blessing in the belief of the eternal Forthcoming of the Holy Spirit from the Son as well as from the Father. In the light of this belief, every part and detail of the work of the Spirit in connexion with the Person and work of Christ gains indefinitely in our view in respect of closeness and tenderness of contact. In the light of this belief, He who “testifies of’ Christ, and “glorifies” Him, and imparts Him, does all this blessed work not only as the holy Messenger and Co-operator of the Saviour but as the Stream from Him the Fountain. Deep must be the harmonies of such co-operation. Absolute must be the truth and fulness of such testimony. Close, unspeakably close, must be the union effected by such an Intermediary.

Meanwhile the scriptural basis for this belief is strong, and capable of simple statement. In Scripture the Spirit is as freely called “the Spirit of the Son,” ‘the Spirit of Rom, vii. Christ,” as “the Spirit of God,” +Pe-ir. “the Spirit of the Father.” And impact He is as freely said to be ‘‘sent” by the Son as by the Father. But we gather from

Scripture, with abundant fulness, and in many directions, that the works of the blessed Three Persons in redemption bear always a deep and steadfast reference to their eternal inner relations. Thus the Eternal Father of the Son, and not the Son, is the Father of the believer. The Eternal Son, and not the Father, is the First-born among many brethren. Therefore, by the rule of a deep and holy analogy, we believe that the relation of the Spirit to the Son in respect of saving work rests upon their relation in respect of eternal Being. Him who is “the Spirit of the Son, sent by the Son,” for us men and for our salvation, we humbly and adoringly believe to be related to the Son in the inner sanctuary of Godhead after the manner of an unbeginning and unending Procession, Forthcoming, of Divine Life.

If such is indeed the truth, let our insight into it rise higher, infinitely higher, than any mere analysis or record, however careful, of a great Church controversy. It isa thing which can and should lead us up to look upon the very springs of life eternal. It is one of the mighty truths which converge upon the inexhaustible glory and preciousness of our Lord Jesus Christ; upon His central position for us in the plan of salvation; upon the close connexion with Him, the infinitely close connexion, of all parts of that plan and work; the parts which concern our holiness as truly as these which concern our acceptance.

2. This last thought leads me to a few considerations on our second present topic; the work of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Human Nature of our Lord Jesus Christ. On this topic I dwell in order above all to emphasize some practical spiritual truths about the Spirit’s regenerating and sanctifying work for us who come to Christ and are in Him.

It is but rapidly, and as collecting specimens of illustration, that I need remind my readers of the large and deep connexion revealed in Scripture between the Holy Spirit and the Son or Man.

The Holy Spirit was the immediate Agent in the Immaculate Conception of ‘‘that Lukei.ss. holy Thing.” Not that He was therefore the

— —

Father of the blessed Son; but He was the. vehicle of the Paternity. Not again that He so acted that the Son as God had nothing to do with the act of the Incarnation. The Son, in divine will, willed to assume our nature, and so assumed it; but again the blessed Spirit wrought the process whereby that will was carried out. And then, thirty years later, the Spirit descended upon the youthful Lord at His baptism,- in some in-Matt.iii. x6;ete. Scrutable speciality of presence and Lukeiv.r power. In this ‘ power of the Spirit” He went forth first to temptation and then to ministry. It was in the Spirit, ‘given without measure,” that He ‘spoke the words Jonn iti. ai Of God.” It was “by means of the Eternal Spirit,” wonderful phrase, that He Heb.ix.u. ‘Offered Himself without spot to God.” We find indications that the Spirit had great things to do with the bodily resurrec-Rom. viii.1x. tion of the buried Lord. After resurrection it was “by the Holy Spirit” that Actsiin, He “gave commandment to the Apostles.” And when in the Revelation the glorified Jesus, as the slain One risen again

— —

and ascended, speaks to the seven Churches, the voices of the Saviour and of the Spirit are aS one. Rev. ii. 1-7, etc. With the reserve of humblest reverence, may we not say that the Manhood of our dear Redeemer was produced, and maintained all along in its absolute and unalterable perfection, not by His own action as God the Son but by that of God the Holy Spirit? His own divine act in the matter’: was, as we have said, and as Owen said long ago,’ to assume the Manhood, but no more. Never indeed, not for one moment from the first, was that Manhood dissociated from the Godhead of the Son. Never for a moment had it a personality independent of that of God the Son. The very Person who said, in the days of His flesh, “Before Abraham was, I am,” the Person Jobn viii. ss. who under His great humiliation said to a whole world of sin and sorrow, ‘‘ Come unto Me,” was then and there as truly att.x 2. God’ as He was before the world was. But

1 See Pueumatologia, bx. ii., ch. iii.

2 And not God in abeyance, as some have seemed to say, giving to His Kemdszs (Phil. ii. 7) a meaning not borne out by Scripture. On the theory that He so “made Himself void” as o all this leaves untouched the sacred truth that the Manhood He took was, in the divine order and law, manhood begun and maintained in its perfect holiness and power by the Holy Spirit as the immediate personal divine Worker. It is accordingly by the Holy Spirit that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Second Man. It is by the Holy Spirit that He, as the Second Man now glorified, is the Receptacle, the Reservoir, the Fountain-head, of that “all fulness” which dwells in Him for us.

We pass almost instantly in the treatment of such a subject into regions beyond our analysis. But we see enough to deepen and

COUNT IO’
li, 9, 18.

to become liable to mental error, mistakes of fact and reasoning, for example about the age and nature of the Old Testament Scriptures, see by all means Liddon, Lampton Lectures, Lecture viii. It may be enough here to point out that to view such a voluntary fallibility on our Lord’s part as an instance of His blessed sel/-humitation involves a certain confusion of conceptions. It would stand, supposing it to be true, under a very different description from, for instance, His voluntary liability to fatigue, sorrow, and death. A rich and refined philanthropist, bent on elevating a degraded tribe, would give a beautiful instance of self-humiliation in consenting, if it were expedient, to be as poor, and as badly lodged, as they. But if, while coming as their teacher, he consented to share their ignorance (were it possible) on matters on which he undertook to teach them, he would deprive himself to their loss and disadvantage.

strengthen our ‘faith in the operation of God,” to impart a growing definite- co. ii 2. ness of view, and a fuller peace in the heart, and a more humble adoration, as we ponder our own transition, by the power of the Spirit, ‘from death unto life,” and onwards always to “life more abundant.” For in this recollection of the truth of the Spirit’s work on and in the Manhood of our

John v. 24;
xX. 10,

blessed Head we are brought directly to a fuller recollection also of the PLace or Curist (if I may express myself so) in the Holy Spirit’s saving work for us. Let us take this up as our closing topic for this chapter.

We who believe indeed in the Lord Jesus Christ know on the evidence of God’s Word that we owe our saving faith to the Lord the Spirit, “the Spirit of faith.’ We cor. iv.r3. who were once “dead in trespasses Eph. ii.r. and sins,” and who now live, know on the same evidence that we were, in ‘abundant mercy,” “born of the Spirit,” and Johniii.s, that every step which we take in that life we take “by the Spirit.” Is the Galv.os. “sound” of regenerate vitality and action a

“heard,” in however small a whisper yet audibly, in our souls and in the outward life which manifests their condition? It is the blessed Spirit’s presence in special grace. It is the evidence, the one evidence, of our real new birth, new creation, by Him. I say, it is the one evidence of this. For let us remember that across all the problems of sacramental operation we must read always those words of our Lord about the mystic Wind. Wherever that Wand is, yes, wherever it 1s, by its very nature as wind z¢ moves; it is not merely latent; it is heard: ‘Thou hearest the sound thereof; so zs every one that is born of the Spirit.” But on this I do not linger now.’ Our concern now is with the experiences of the life of grace in Christ, and their connexion with the personal working of the Spirit. AccordrPet.ii2, ingly, “in the sanctification of the Spirit,’ that is to say in His whole work of our separation to God, we were by Him at Jonnxvi.s, first brought through conviction rPe.ii2, ‘unto obedience to, and blood-sprinkling of, Jesus Christ.” And when the

1 See further below, p. 74.

a — — — — — — —

last step of the blessed process shall come, and we shall rise transfigured from the grave, possessing “the adoption, to wit Rom. viii. 23. the redemption of our body,” it will still and for ever be ‘because of the Spirit Rom. viii. 1. who dwelleth in us.” Between this Alpha and this Omega of our personal salvation all is of “the same Spirit.” Does the peaceful power of grace pervade our regenerate being, and claim effectually for our Lord all we are and all we have, and bring spirit, soul, and body into a delightful captivity and bondservice to our Head and Possessor? It is Eph. v.x8. “the fulness of the Spirit.’ Do we day by day ‘“‘mortify the deeds of the body”? It is “by the Spirit.” Do we in truth Rom. viii 13. breathe “the Abba, that prayer of faith alone”? It is the Spirit, the Spirit of adoption, the Spirit of God’s Son in our hearts. gon viiiers,s7 Do we pray in truth the prayer of aoa holy faith and love, the prayer that asks according to His will? It is “in the Judezo Holy Ghost” it is ‘the Spirit making intercession for us with groanings that Rom. viii. 2. cannot be uttered.” Do “we wait by faith for the hope of righteousness,” the glory reserved Galw.5. for (the: qustihede pit) is“! by the Spirit.” Does “Christ dwell in our hearts by faith?” It is because the Spirit has “strength-Eph. iii. x6. ened us with might in our inner man, ’

Am I needlessly dwelling upon truths which are, thanks be to God, our most familiar friends among the treasures of the Gospel? It is not wholly for argument that I do so. To me there seems to lie in the very recitation of our creed of the Hidden Life a charm and power which the Spirit Himself can wonderfully employ to revive or to develop in the soul the realization and the use of the precious things which are in some respects so familiar.

But I come now to what was my. main reason for this review of some of the blessings given us by the Lord the Life-Giver. I come to say something of the Place of Christ in the Spirit’s work.

And here for the present I will speak not only briefly but in one direction alone. I will not dwell upon the all-beloved truth of the propitiating Cross, and upon the Spirit’s witness to it in our awakened hearts. I will not dwel

Se

at all indeed upon the Spirit’s wetness to the Lord Jesus. I look at present in the direction only of our Union with Jesus Christ in new birth and life by the Spirit.

The Spirit, as our Communion Creed confesses, is the Life-Giver, the Maker-alive.* But what is the Lire which He gives, with which He works? I listen, and I hear another Voice, which is yet as if also His; jonni os; mice it says; “ib am jthe +Life,” as febher) ie. Eternallis in. the Son: He that hath the Son hath the Life.” Johny. x. I read these great, these blessed words in the light of what we have recollected now ot the Holy Spirit’s work on and in the Holy Son of Man; and I thus see in them a remembrance that what the Spirit does in His free and all-powerful work in the soul which He quickens into second life is, above all things, to bring it into contact with the Son. He roots it, He orafts it, He embodies it, into the Son. He deals so with it that there is a continuity wholly spiritual indeed but none the less most real,

1 TS Zworroiy unfigurative, and efficacious, between the Head and the limb, between the branch and the Root. He effects an influx into the regenerate man of the blessed virtues of the nature of the Second Adam, an infusion of the exalted life of Jesus Christ, through an open duct, living, and divine, into the man who is born again into Him the incarnate and glorified Son of God. I see on the one hand the blessed Spirit poured without measure upon the Head. I see Him on the other hand, not independently of that Head but in deepest relation to Him and union with Him, pouring Himself richly into the member. I see Him the divine Factor in the becoming and being of the Manhood of the Second Adam. I see Him equally the divine Factor in the new creation of the sinner into a true child of God, a true regenerate member of the new race. And all this combines to remind me that the blessed process all the while has Jesus Christ for its inmost Secret. What does the Holy Life-Giver impart, infuse, develop? What is my Life Eternal in the last analysis? Not Himself, the blessed Worker and Conveyer, but my incarnate, sacrificed, and glorified Redeemer and Head. The Spirit pours into me Him, to be my Eternal Life for deliverance, for victory, for peace, for service, as truly as He the same Saviour is my pardon and righteousness in His once-wrought propitiation.

The Life-Giver is the Giver of Christ who

is our Life.

“Deep through the springs of mind and soul Thee the great Comforter inspires; Thy savereign thoughts our thoughts control, Thy love our love divinely fires.”

We live in a time when every fundamental of the old and blessed Gospel is too often denied, or disparaged, or minimized, even by commissioned ministers of the Word, in favour of something alleged to be more large, and loving and living. Let us not be moved. Let us not “drift away” with the stream. Let Heb. ii.:. us not, for lack of taking heed, for lack, above all, of taking heed in secret for ourselves, go away with the multitude. John vi. 66, 67. But meanwhile let our steadfastness and persistence manifest itself never in mere negatives of rebuke or caution, but more and more in the presentation of our glorious positive. In the tranquil power of the Giver of light and life let us evermore bring into our faith and into our teaching that blessed fulness of the truth as it is in Jesus which is nowhere found more certainly than when we view in their harmony, and use them as we view them, those twin treasures of the old unique Gospel — the saving work of Him who is the one Life, and the saving work of Him who is the one Life-Giver.