Some Brief Words in Defense of the Salvific Importance of the Holy Spirit

By Joshua Daniel Leavitt

We ought to do his will, yes; our hands and our feet must of course do Jesus' bidding. But, let us
not misinterpret what Paul says when he calls the Church the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 5:23;
Col. 1:18, 24)
The Son, now seated at the right hand of the Father (Acts 2:23), remains and presumably will
always remain incarnate. He indeed at various times has since his ascension appeared to some of us in
visions as he did to Paul, but those feet which are truly those of his body will not touch the Earth again
until the day he returns in glory. To that end, our feet are not his actual feet with their holes, nor our
hands his precious pierced hands. Ours are not the brows that were marked by that crown of thorns.
Until that blessed day when our promised husband at last comes into his kingdom, we are but his
betrothed brides, minding his property in his stead, ideally managing it according to his instructions.
United together as one, we are his vessels; we are his body.
When our betrothed first descended to us, he purchased us (1 Cor. 6:20) collectively as his
bride, a bride chosen by the Father before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4). He alluded to us as
such in John 14:2-3, and referred to himself as the groom at a pre-wedding event filled with feasting in
Mark 2:18-20. Near the close of the Bible, he showed us a forthcoming wedding supper the supper of
our wedding to him (Rev. 19:6-9). Paul in Eph. 5:32 disclosed to us that our marriage to the Son had
been prophesied in Scripture from the beginning, in Genesis 2:24, saying of the passage: "This mystery is
great, but I speak of Christ and of the church." And indeed our promised husband did leave the Father
(who transcends both paternity and maternity and thus fulfills both) and come down to us, and take on
our flesh God becoming us "that we might be made God" (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54:3).
Having been bought by him, and promised to him by the Father's decree, we are as one his bride, his
body, his "vessel" (Thess. 4:3-4). We are his body, and he, our promised husband, is our head (Eph.
5:23).
So it was not to deny the continuation of our betrothed's incarnation that Paul wrote that we
are the body of Christ. We together are indeed a body, and we indeed belong to our betrothed (cf. 1
Cor. 11:3). And having been designated by him to manage his household in his stead according to his
laws (cf. Prov. 31:26-27), we have received the charge of executing his will accordingly while we wait for
his glorious return. We multitudes of virgins await our promised groom, doing our best to keep our
candles burning bright in anticipation of that arrival (Matt. 25:1-13).
But, he is not the one who inhabits us, not the one who dwells in us, establishing as a holy
temple the material body of each of us (Rom. 8:9; 1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19; 2 Tim. 1:14). He is not the one who
is directly creating in each of us a new heart and renewing the mind such that it reflects the very mind of
our beloved (Luke 24:45; Rom. 8:29; 12:2; 1 Cor. 2:16; Col. 3:9-10; Eph. 4:23; Heb. 6:4; 10:32). Our
betrothed is not the one who speaks to us only what the same hears from our betrothed (John 16:13b).
When we as his bride beckon to our beloved, "Come!" it is not his but someone else's voice that flows
also from our mouths (Rev. 22:20; and see also Matt. 10:19-20; Eph. 6:18). If we as the Church can be
called the body of the Son by virtue of eternal ownership, how much more so can we be called the body
of the Spirit by virtue of eternal indwelling?
"For with Him," wrote Irenaeus of God, "were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son
and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things, to whom also He
speaks, saying, 'Let us make man after our image and likeness.'"
At this time when most of us evangelicals seem content to reduce the Third Person of the Holy
Trinity to a barely conscious and effectively impersonal cloud of divine energy who functions as nothing
more than a Bible app, heavenly tattoo, and an enhancement for the conscience a nebulous entity

included within the Trinity for unknown reasons1 let us not fail to remember and affirm the real
personhood of the Holy Spirit, and the immeasurable importance of the sames role in our salvation.
Neither let us forget that the Son of God remains incarnate as a human being, albeit one who has
undergone the same glorification that shall befall us at our own resurrection. In these ways, we can
avoid the heresy of modalism, and affirm the dignity of the Holy Spirit.

Emmert, Kevin P. "New Poll Finds Evangelicals Favorite Heresies." Christianity Today. October 28,
2014. Accessed November 17, 2014. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/october-webonly/new-poll-finds-evangelicals-favorite-heresies.html.