Tag: spirit

What is man, O LORD? Since man has Him, the Spirit is certainly in man—in his soul and through his soul in his body too. It is the nearest, most intimate and most indispensable factor for an understanding of his being and existence. But while He is in man, He is not identical with him. We have seen already that this would imply a transformation of man into God, which is excluded by the fact that Spirit is a conception of activity. The Spirit is not transformed into the soul of man, although He first and supremely creates the soul…

Telford Work in his chapter on mapping a modern view of the Holy Spirit offers a really nice index of how that gets expressed under the pressures of secularism. Let me share how he sketches that; this is under a section he calls a Dysteological Pneumatology (think something like a Dystopian doctrine of the Spirit). For Nietzsche these spirits are individual wills vying for power. For Freud they are the dark psychological forces that drives single minds and whole civilizations. Among humanity’s countless groups and subgroups they are the countless human structures that Paul calls stoicheia or “elements” of the…

Here is John Calvin commenting on Colossians 1:15: The sum is this — that God in himself, that is, in his naked majesty, is invisible, and that not to the eyes of the body merely, but also to the understandings of men, and that he is revealed to us in Christ alone, that we may behold him as in a mirror. For in Christ he shews us his righteousness, goodness, wisdom, power, in short, his entire self. We must, therefore, beware of seeking him elsewhere, for everything that would set itself off as a representation of God, apart from Christ,…