The Spirit of the Atonement: The Role of the Holy Spirit in Christ’s Death and Resurrection

Abstract

In this essay, we marshal resources from a range of biblical, trinitarian and soteriological commitments, set within a broadly Barthian framework, to offer a doctrinal proposal for the Spirit’s role in the triune God’s work of at-one-ment. We argue that the Spirit plays a vital role in the atoning work of the triune God, as the Spirit is the love of God directed toward the incarnate Son a two-fold manner: (1) in the mode of wrath against our sin born by Christ our representative, and (2) in its mode of blessing in the resurrected and ascended Christ, the exalted one in whom we receive the promised Holy Spirit. Seen in this light, Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s two-fold act of love in the Spirit: the two-fold means of making our representative, Jesus, a fit receptacle for the promised Holy Spirit, that in him all the peoples of the earth might be blessed through his recapitulation of Israel. Key to this thesis are two commitments: (1) seeing a changing economic relationship between Jesus and the Holy Spirit integral to Jesus’ recapitulation of Israel, and (2) viewing wrath as a mode of God’s love, and therefore a part of, rather than something alien to, the work of the Spirit. With these doctrinal resources in hand, we have the necessary conceptual tools to affirm that the Spirit, just as much as the Father and the Son, is the one who saves us in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

1. Introduction

This article offers a constructive proposal for what we take to be one of the more neglected aspects of the doctrine of the atonement: the role of the Holy Spirit in the death and resurrection of Jesus.1 Gregory of Nazianzus writes:

Christ is born, the Spirit is his forerunner; Christ is baptized, the Spirit bears him witness; Christ is tempted, the Spirit leads him up; Christ performs miracles, the Spirit accompanies him; Christ ascends, the Spirit fills his place. Is there any significant function belonging to God, which the Spirit does not perform?

(Gregory of Nazianzus 2002, p. 139)

Indeed, there is not—but skipping from Christ’s miracles to his ascension is disappointingly representative of the tradition, which offers relatively scant reflection on this lacuna—an omission likely due to Scripture itself having little to say beyond the fact that it was “through the eternal Spirit” that the Christ “offered himself without blemish to God” (Heb. 9:14).2 For the sake of consistency and the enrichment of the doctrine, it is both fitting and pious that we seek to account for the role and activity of the Spirit in Christ’s saving work; for surely we must envisage the Spirit “as having as full a place in the divine economy of salvation as the other persons” (Webster 1983, p. 6).

In this essay, we marshal resources from a range of biblical, trinitarian and soteriological commitments, to offer a doctrinal proposal for the Spirit’s role in the triune God’s work of at-one-ment. We argue that the Spirit plays a vital role in the atoning work of the triune God, as the Spirit is the love of God directed toward the incarnate Son in a two-fold manner: (1) in the mode of wrath against our sin born by Christ our representative, and (2) in its mode of blessing in the resurrected and ascended Christ, the exalted one in whom we receive the promised Holy Spirit.3 Seen in this light, Christ’s death and resurrection is God’s two-fold act of love in the Spirit: the two-fold means of making our representative, Jesus, a fit receptacle for the promised Holy Spirit, that in him all the peoples of the earth might be blessed through his recapitulation of Israel. Key to this thesis are two commitments: (1) seeing a changing economic relationship between Jesus and the Holy Spirit integral to Jesus’ recapitulation of Israel, and (2) viewing wrath as a mode of God’s love, and therefore a part of, rather than something alien to, the work of the Spirit. With these doctrinal resources in hand, we have the necessary conceptual tools to affirm that the Spirit, just as much as the Father and the Son, is the one who saves us in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

2. The Background: Trinity and Representation

Atonement and monotheism go hand in hand, for this is not the work of three gods, but of the one God, who in and of himself and from eternity is who he is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The acts of God reiterate the fundamental reality of God’s oneness: they are the single, variegated act of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, “for the holy and blessed Triad is indivisible and one in itself. When mention is made of the Father, there is included also his Word, and the Spirit who is in the Son” (Athanasius 1951, p. 94). The works of God are undivided: opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (Vidu 2021). Fully God, the Son is eternally one with both the Father and the Holy Spirit, a claim true both of the immanent life of God, and God’s economic acts, including the incarnation: “the Father was present by approving the incarnation, while the Holy Spirit cooperated with the Son who carried it out” (Blowers 2016, p. 147).

The challenge of the atonement in relation to the Spirit is to give an account of Christ’s progressive and seemingly changing relationship to the Spirit and the Father in the course of his Passion. For that which we easily affirm of the immanent Trinity (its undivided unity), is far more difficult to affirm in the life of Christ, where “this is my Son in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17), becomes the Father’s silence in response to: “if it is possible, let this cup pass” (Matt. 26:39), and ultimately the far more dramatic silence to Jesus’ cry: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). From speech to silence to unbearable silence: how do we account for this change? One possibility (which we reject) is to favor a more social model of the Trinity, allowing for rupture, division or separation between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, such as one finds in Moltmann.4 Rather, we explore the trinitarian implications of Christ’s representative sin bearing, which introduces a new dynamic into the relations between Father, incarnate Son and Spirit, which must be overcome by God himself as, to revise Athanasius’ famous statement, God makes our sin God’s own, that the unity which is properly God’s might be ours (John 17) (Athanasius 2011, p. 167. Cf. Maximos the Confessor 2014, p. 37; von Balthasar 1988, p. 362).

At the heart of this thesis is Jesus’ identity as our representative: what happens to him happens to us, for we (the baptized) are in him (Johnson 2018). Along these lines, Paul writes that he died and was raised in Christ (Gal. 2:20; Col. 3:1). But lest we take this individualistically, Jesus is the representative of Israel, the one in whom the history of Israel is taken up and repeated, and likewise the one in whom the future of Israel is brought near and fulfilled (Leithart 2016, p. 200). Jesus, while fully man, fully individual, is simultaneously more than that: he is the representative of Israel. Jesus “accepts personal responsibility for all the unfaithfulness, the deceit, the rebellion of this people and its priests and kings…. for in the one Israelite Jesus it was God Himself who as the Son of the Father made Himself the object of this accusation and willed to confess Himself a sinner, and to be regarded as such” (Barth 1988, p. 172). Jesus is the representative of Israel, he was “Israel in person” (NT Wright 2013, p. 828), the Israelite in whom the history of his people is repeated in all its suffering and judgment, and the one in whom all its promises are fulfilled. As Fleming Rutledge puts it, “As far back as Irenaeus and further still to Paul and John, Christian thinkers have understood that God in Christ somehow incorporated the entire history of the human race in his one truly human (vere homo) person and, in doing so, made us participants in his eternal victory” (Rutledge 2015, p. 552. Cf. Graham 2017; Hart 2019, p. 162).

But to affirm Jesus as the representative of Israel in whom God takes to himself the curse of God’s chosen but rebellious people, that in him they might receive the fullness of God’s blessings and promises5—that is a powerful but still generic statement; for what was the curse that God took upon himself in Jesus, and what were the blessings which he sought to share? And how do the answers to these questions help us connect the work of the Spirit to the doctrine of the atonement?

3. The Holy Spirit: The Curse and the Blessing

The curse and blessing of Israel are inseparable from the person and work of the Holy Spirit. It was the Spirit that hovered over the waters of creation (Gen. 1:2), who led the Exodus of Israel, bringing them to their rest and instructing them (Is 63:11–14; Neh. 9:20), who set apart judges, prophets and kings (Num. 11, Judg. 3:10, 6:34, 11:29, 14:6,19, 1 Sam. 10:6–7, 11:1–11). And it was Israel’s great hope that it would receive the Spirit in a lavish form at some point in its future. Isaiah and Joel tell of a time when God will pour out the Holy Spirit on Israel’s offspring (Is. 44:3) and “all people” (Joel 2:28–32), and Ezekiel writes of God’s promise to “give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you”, concluding his great vision of the valley of dry bones with God’s promise: “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land” (Ez. 37:11–14). This is a corporate matter, for the fate of Israel is the fate of a people, at the center of which is the Spirit-filled tabernacle: the place consecrated for the presence and glory of the Lord, at the center of the life and liturgy of Israel.

The Spirit of the Lord, the blessed presence of God’s glory among God’s people and temple, is no optional addition, no “bonus” for creaturely existence. Rather, the presence or indwelling of the Spirit is the aim and goal of creation, its perfection and completion (Fee 1996, pp. 49–61; Torrance 1993, pp. 228–31; Webster 2016, pp. 97–98). Life in its fullness is life in the Spirit. When the Spirit departs, creation reverts to what it was—dust and chaos (Gen. 6:3, Ps. 104:29–30, Eccl. 12:7) (Christopher Wright 2006, p. 29). To be human is to be called to be the people of God, and to be such is to be a people indwelt by the Holy Spirit. The New Testament draws on the Old Testament vision, affirming that we “are God’s temple and God’s Spirit dwells in us” (1 Cor. 4:16). This is the aim of creation, its proper end, as bestowed by its Creator. Fallen creation, nothing but a valley of dry bones, longs for the breath of the Lord, for God to put the Holy Spirit upon us (Ez. 37:1–14).

The withdrawal of the Spirit, on the other hand, whether from the individual, the people, or the temple/tabernacle, is not a return to a state of neutrality or balance, but an act of judgment on the part of God.6 “The Holy Spirit is not a harmless dove”, but “the sovereign God. He brings judgment through the history of revelation” (Horton 2017, p. 177). The Lord washes away the filth of the daughters of Zion by a “spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning (Is. 4:4)”. The Spirit of God “brings the impact of his divine power and holiness to bear directly and personally upon their lives in judgment and salvation alike” (Torrance 1993, p. 192), and witnesses, both in their defense and against them (Horton 2017, p. 109)! Because the Spirit’s blessing is God’s telos for creation, removing such blessing is a curse, an act of judgment. Before the Creator God, our alternative is not between generic life and blessing, but between life and death, blessings and curses (Deut. 30:19). God’s rejection of Saul is the Spirit’s work: “the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him” (1 Sam. 16:13–14). Much the same happens in the judgment and rejection of Israel, as Ezekiel chronicles the gradual departure of the glory of God from the temple, synonymous with the departure of the Spirit (Ez. 9:3, 10:4,18,19 and 11:23)—leaving the temple desolate and the people scattered among the nations (Block 1997, p. 326). The Psalmist knows that to experience the absence of God’s Spirit is to sink into the pit, into Sheol—departure is an act of judgment, a way of speaking of the removal of the blessings of the Spirit. More generally, Scripture uses the distinctive characteristics of the Spirit, breath and fire, to speak of the Spirit’s work of judgment, binding judgment closely to the being and work of the Spirit.7 In short, the Spirit is the vehicle of both God’s blessing and God’s curse, and ultimately there is no neutral ground between these two, before the maker of heaven and earth.

To this biblical evidence for the Spirit’s role in judgment, we add a systematic insight. The conjunction of the Spirit and love is a powerful and pervasive one in discourse on the Trinity,8 taking its shape from the economy of God’s acts (i.e., it is through the Spirit that God’s love is poured out into our hearts (Rom. 5:5)). And this insight provides a powerful support for the role of the Spirit in the wrath of God,9 for wrath is not a distinct attribute in the life of God—God is not a God of eternal wrath, and wrath does not shape and characterize the immanent life of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Rather, wrath “belongs to [God’s] perfection as a mode” of God’s love against sin and opposition (Wynne 2010, p. 173).10 Barth writes of God’s love as pure, and therefore as resisting and judging sin:

In Him, of course, there is no sin which He has first to resist. But…. He is Himself the purity, which as such contradicts and will resist everything which is unlike itself, yet which does not evade this opposing factor, but, because it is the purity of the life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, eternally reacts against it, resisting and judging it in its encounter with it, but in so doing receiving and adopting it, and thus entering into the fellowship with it which redeems it (Barth 1980, p. 368).

The love of God is a holy and pure love. In himself, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there is no sin, no contradiction, nothing to resist. The holy purity of the love of God is as such simply the life of God. But this purity of God’s love “contradicts and will resist everything which is unlike [or opposed to] itself”, which “eternally reacts against it, resisting and judging it in its encounter with it”. And it is this which we refer to in the language of modality.

The attributes of God, or perfections, as Barth calls them, are “modes” of the divine being (Barth 1980, p. 353). But they can and do take on a further mode of activity in the presence of sin, where the purity of the life of God opposes that which is opposed to it, not because God is changing from being loving to being wrathful, but because the creature is changing, and opposing him. By our sin we call forth what is variously called a mode, aspect, form, dimension or characteristic of the character and perfection of God which in the eternal life of the Trinity is not experienced as such, given the lack of opposition or negation. But this is not merely relative to us and our experience: wrath is not merely in the eye of the sinner. God’s “wrath is his response to something outside of himself”, for the “holy, loving God acts differently toward us in different circumstances” (Lane 2001, pp. 146, 163)—not that God acts inconsistently, or at odds with himself. Rather, as the living and active God, God extends godself and therefore God’s character toward the creature in a manner fitting to its condition. Divine wrath is the exercise of divine love toward the sinful creature (for “His wrath is not separate from but in His love” (CD II/1, 363)), but the exercise of a love which opposes and destroys that which opposes, threatens, or perverts it or its beloved. “Binding Israel to Himself, He becomes to it the inextinguishable fire whose flame is nothing else but the flame of His love” (Barth 1980, p. 367)—a love which, in order to be faithful to itself and retain its own identity and dynamic, must, by the intensity proper to itself, oppose, consume and destroy that which violates that fundamental pattern and vitality. As Murray puts it, “the wrath of God affirms that the love of God will not tolerate evil, nor will the love of God provide amnesty toward that which is evil. If God’s love were bereft of wrath, then this would be a love that does not protect, deter, or adhere, a love without convictions or commitment”, either to itself or to its beloved (Murray 2011, p. 261). Love of goodness, in other words, entails a fundamental opposition to, and destruction of, that which threatens and opposes that goodness. The “becoming” here does not signify a change in the character or will of God, but a condition permeating Israel, calling forth the love of God in its oppositional mode, the character of God extended toward God’s sinful people.

For this reason, love and wrath do not need to be balanced in God: the problem is sin, not the balance of love and wrath within the divine life (Moltmann 1993, p. 272). But if the Spirit is the love of the Father and the Son, and wrath is a mode of love, then it follows that the Spirit is likewise the wrath of the Father and the Son: their love in the face of sin. The Spirit must be an essential part of a fully trinitarian account of both wrath and the atonement.

4. The Spirit and Christ, Part I: A Changing Relationship

How then does Jesus recapitulate Israel’s relationship with the Spirit of God (Tan 2019, p. 255)? To understand this, we begin with Luke’s nuanced relationship between Jesus and the Spirit: the two baptisms of Jesus (Luke 3:21 and 12:50), paired with his twofold receiving of the Spirit (Luke 3:22 and Acts 2:33). “The Holy Spirit”, the same being true of the Eternal Son, “being in God, must be incapable of change, variation, and corruption” (Athanasius 1951, p. 130). The new dynamic in the relation between the incarnate Son and the Spirit is not a “change” in the Spirit or the Son, for “what the Spirit does among us is repeat or reiterate the Spirit’s acts within the eternal life of God” (C. Holmes 2017, p. 79). But it can be a new mode of relating within the same fundamental dynamic: the same relationship, the enactment of the same divine character or attributes in a new mode determined by the human nature taken on by the eternal Son in the incarnation, and the sin-bearing this entails.11

Luke records that “the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:22), to which the Gospel of John adds “and it remained on him” (1:32). Though the divine Son is in full participation with the Father and Spirit, here in the “descending” and “remaining”, Jesus relates to the Spirit in a new, but potentially ambiguous way. Was this the inauguration of the Spirit’s permanent and salvific indwelling (akin to that of Pentecost for the disciples), or an experience in keeping with the Spirit’s coming upon different Israelites throughout the Old Testament? (Strauss 2012, pp. 266–67) Dunn advocates that “what Jordan was to Jesus, Pentecost was to the disciples” (Dunn 1970, p. 40), but such a view encroaches upon the new reality initiated through Christ’s death and resurrection, prematurely drawing the incarnate Son into a participation in new creation prior to his elevation as the first-born of Creation (Col. 1:18). The communicatio idomatum notwithstanding, Dunn’s interpretation assumes Jesus can partake in the benefits that stem from the act of the atonement as a whole prior to the full accomplishment of this atoning work, running contrary to the drama established by Luke’s narrative (found generally throughout the Gospels), emptying the necessity of the second baptism with which Jesus must be baptized (Luke 12:50; Mark 10:38)—and the necessity of Jesus going away, to receive and send his Spirit (Luke 24:49; John 7:39, 14:15–31, 16:7).12

Taking a different approach, N.T. Wright speaks of the Spirit’s descent as one that looks back to the Spirit’s anointing relationship “under the Old Covenant: Jesus’ reception of the call to act as Israel’s Messiah” (NT Wright 1996, pp. 536–37; Menzies 1991, p. 151; Turner 1996, pp. 197–201). As the great prophets, judges, and kings are empowered by the Holy Spirit for the sake of their ministry, so is Jesus empowered by the Spirit at his baptism, to “represent Israel in himself” (Wright 1996, p. 537). The finalization of this work, and its extension to the humanity represented in Jesus, is reserved for the work of the atonement as a whole, with particular emphasis on the resurrection and ascension (Turner 1996, pp. 199–200).

The key is to explain the difference between the roles of the Spirit in Jesus’ baptism and his ascension. Acts 2:33 tells us that “God has raised this Jesus to life…. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear” (Acts 2:31–33). What is the difference between the Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism and his reception of the promised Holy Spirit following his ascension? The difference, vital to understanding Jesus’ atoning work, maps onto the Old Testament distinction between the Spirit empowering Israelites, and the promise of the Spirit running throughout the prophets. Like Moses, Saul, David and others, Jesus received the Spirit’s empowering presence in his life, ordered to the fulfillment of his ministry, only to receive the great promise flowing throughout the writings of the prophets upon his resurrection and ascension.

The Spirit’s relationship to the incarnate Son recapitulates the Spirit’s changing relationship with different Israelites (and Israel herself): for “Israel’s role is taken by her anointed king, and this Messiah has acted out her victory in himself” (NT Wright 1992, p. 28). This change (not in the eternal Son of God per se, but in the “one God-human” (McCormack 2009, p. 55)) allows for Jesus’ full representation of the human condition—embracing all that it entails, and transforming it from within. Prior to his own atoning work, Jesus entered “the way of penitence and obedience” at his baptism, and was there empowered and anointed for his ministry (Barth 1988, p. 265; NT Wright 2013, p. 258). Christ’s calling was to represent not only mankind as a whole, but Israel in particular, that through Israel, all the families of the earth might be blessed (Gen. 12:3). His baptism marks initiation into his recapitulatory role as faithful Israel in the sight of the Father (Barth 1988, p. 259), as the proper participant of the Old Covenant (Barth 1988, p. 282; Turner 1996, p. 199). But the climax of this recapitulation comes in the role of the Spirit in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the promised giving of the Spirit anticipated throughout the Old Testament.

5. The Spirit and Christ, Part II: The Transforming Change

A recapitulatory reading of Christ’s relation to the Spirit generates room for understanding Christ’s death as the judgment of God, and therefore the Spirit, upon sinful Israel in its representative Messiah.13 As Christ takes on human nature, he embraces the nature that is in need of saving, entering deeply and intimately into “our fallen, guilt-laden humanity... our sin... our violence and wickedness” (Torrance 1992, p. 74; Johnson 2015, p. 46).14 Jesus became “the one great sinner” (Barth 1988, p. 251), sinlessly taking up and overcoming a reality which he himself did not will: the sinless God becoming sin in man’s place (2 Cor. 5:21) (Torrance 2009, pp. 79, 82). He brought humankind fully into his very being in order to renew and remake him from within (Torrance 2009, p. 82). How does God make good God’s creative purpose for humankind? And how does God do so while dealing with the problem of sin? In Jesus Christ, the one in whom we are represented, sanctified (John 17:19), and filled with the Holy Spirit.15 It is this dynamic of representation which makes the atonement possible, and that illumines the work of the Spirit in the event of Jesus’ death, for Christ’s sin-bearing profoundly shapes the nature of his relation to the Spirit in his atoning death (von Balthasar 1988, p. 349).

It is on the cross that Christ drinks to the dregs his role as the “Judge judged in our place” (Barth 1988, p. 204): Jesus is the guilty in need of judgment, such that “we are crowded out of our own place by Him in that He made our sin His own.... Made sin for us, He stands in our place” (Barth 1988, p. 234). But he stands in our place before the Spirit, whose role at Christ’s cross was to act as the agent of his judgment in response to his being made sin, in continuity with the Old Testament model Jesus recapitulates. For as we have seen, the Spirit acts as the primary agent of divine judgment in response to disobedience and sin in the Old Testament. The Spirit departs from Saul in I Samuel 16:14, leaving an evil or troubling spirit in its place; in Psalm 51 David cries out, “Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me”. This Spirit’s departure is God’s “alienation from the temple”, God’s judgment in response to Israel’s sin and wickedness, where God withdraws God’s saving presence, allowing chaos and death to take its place (Block 1997, p. 326).

To take this line of thought into a fully trinitarian key, some (such as Moltmann and Lewis) are inclined to make the Spirit the bond of love and unity between the otherwise divided Father and incarnate Son in the rupture endured on the cross (Lewis 2001, pp. 251–52; Wynne 2010, p. 172; Cole 2009, pp. 166–67; Moltmann 1993).16 But this appeal to the Spirit risks making “the Son’s forsakenness on the Cross… a directly trinitarian event” (von Balthasar 1988, p. 322), failing to incorporate the way that the Incarnation of the Son, and in particular his sin-bearing, changes the mode of relating between Father, incarnate Son and Holy Spirit. It is likewise unworthy of the way the triune God actively and unitedly wills the cross of Jesus, and the way God extends God’s self, God’s love, to God’s sinful creation, God’s sinful people. God’s mission is to extend or repeat in time God’s life with that of the creature.17 God’s love, when extended or repeated in time, and therefore directed (at least in part) toward sin, takes the form, the mode, of wrath, abandonment and judgment. The Spirit, who is God, and therefore is love (1 John 4:8), is the wrath of the Father and the Son when directed against sin, for God’s nature is “indivisible, and [his] activity is one. The Father does all things through the Word in the Holy Spirit” (Athanasius 1951, p. 135), a claim which is just as true of God’s love in the mode of wrath as it is of God’s love per se, for God’s wrath is God’s love, in an oppositional mode.18 To Maximus’s claim that “the Father was present by approving the incarnation, while the Holy Spirit cooperated with the Son who carried it out”, we can and should add that in the cross, the Father pours out wrath upon sin through the sin-bearing incarnate Word, by the work of the Holy Spirit, and in this way the triune God loves, and therefore judges, sinful humankind in Jesus. The Spirit is thus the unity and love of the Father and the Son, as shaped by the latter being the incarnate sin-bearer (von Balthasar 1988, p. 346);19 as such, the Spirit is the wrath of God against sin. “The Son bears sinners within himself, together with the hopeless impenetrability of their sin, which prevents the divine light of love from registering in them. In himself, therefore, he experiences… the hopelessness of their resistance to God and the graceless No of divine grace to this resistance”(von Balthasar 1988, p. 349)—the “No” which is the wrath of the Father, directed toward sin in the sin-bearing Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. The unity of God is just as true in the act of opposing sin in the sin-bearer, as it is in the eternal life of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

What was the role of the Spirt in the atonement? To be the love of God directed toward the sin-bearer; to be the love of God in its mode of wrath. Such a view does not posit, with Moltmann, any sort of rupture within the Trinity. Rather, it reaffirms the Trinity in unity precisely at the point of the cross, exercising itself against sin for our sake and for our salvation. It does so by acknowledging the love and therefore wrath of God against sin—not toward us and our destruction, but taking these up within the life of the triune God via the sin-bearing of Jesus, that through the united work of Father, incarnate Son and Holy Spirit, God might make the problem of sin God’s own, dealing with our problem on the basis of the resources proper and unique to the divine triune life (Johnson 2015, pp. 59–87).

Jesus, the Old Testament man commissioned for ministry at his baptism by the descent of the Holy Spirit, continues under this Old Testament paradigm through his death, and is judged as the representative of Israel by the Father through the Holy Spirit at the cross. Only in this judgment, only in experiencing the Spirit’s nourishing and empowering presence in its mode of judgment upon sin is Christ’s consistent representation of sinful Israel preserved. Only through the Spirit’s judgment can Christ “deliv[er] up sinful man and sin in His own person” (Barth 1988, p. 246).

6. Resurrection, Ascension and the Gift of the Spirit

But delivering up sinful humanity is not the goal of the Messiah. Peter tells us that “this Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing” at Pentecost (Acts 2:32–33). And Calvin writes that “Christ indeed does not cleanse us by his blood, nor render God propitious to us by his expiation, in any other way than by making us partakers of his Spirit, who renews us to a holy life” (Calvin 1979, p. 219). The question is: what is this promise that Jesus received, and how does it bear upon our understanding of the Spirit’s role in the atonement?

The atonement is not merely a matter of overcoming evil, but first and foremost of establishing goodness (in part through overcoming evil): “an act of perfecting grace, completing what was begun when the Spirit, who long ago brooded over the waters brought forth life on earth…. [Which] fully establishes the communion between God and man at which God was already aiming in creation itself” (Farrow 2011, p. 122). And while the former may be entailed in the latter, the order is vital. God became human not simply to die, not merely to judge sin, but to bring God’s creative project to completion in the Messiah of Israel, through him blessing every family of the earth (Gen. 12:3). While the judgment of the Spirit is therefore a vital part of Christ’s work, this is but a preliminary though necessary step toward a higher purpose, a part though not the whole of his recapitulatory work. For the true goal of the Messiah, in whom the history of Israel and therefore creation itself was to be completed, lay in the prophesied Holy Spirit. As Edwards put it, “The Father provides the Saviour or purchaser, and the purchase is made of him; and the Son is the purchaser and the price; and the Holy Spirit is the great blessing or inheritance purchased, as is intimated, Gal. iii. 13, 14; and hence the Spirit is often spoken of as the sum of the blessings promised in the gospel” (Edwards 1986, p. 162).20 In short, Christ became a curse for us, so that in Christ Jesus we might receive the blessing of the promised Spirit (Gal. 3:13–14)—a summary of the Gospel we are now able to appreciate pneumatologically, for Christ’s work of becoming a curse and suffering judgment was just as much a work of the Spirit as was Christ’s reception and sharing of the Spirit upon his resurrection and ascension.

Jesus’ first baptism (by John) was necessary, but its true goal was his second baptism, the baptism of his death and resurrection, in which we participate through our own baptism (Rom. 6:1–14). The judgment of the sin-bearer was necessary that he might be sanctified (Cyril 1995, p. 100; Torrance 1966, p. 248), “sanctifying our humanity entirely in his own person” (Farrow 2011, p. 123), that he might be cleansed of the sin he was bearing (for Jesus, too, the Spirit is the “Spirit of sanctification” (Athanasius 1951, p. 87; Thomas 1981, I.42.7)), that after his resurrection and ascension, he might prove to be a fit temple for the full blessing of the Holy Spirit, and as such, might share the Spirit with those built up in him as a part of his temple, as a part of his body (Scully 2011, pp. 218–19; Leithart 2016, pp. 169–74). “Only when a man has been cleansed from the shame of his evil, and has returned to his natural beauty, and the original form of the Royal Image has been restored in him, is it possible for him to approach the Paraclete”—a claim as true of the sin-bearer as those represented and recapitulated in him (Basil 2011, p. 144). Why did God become human? That as human he might be made fit for, and receive, the promised Holy Spirit, sharing it with those united and represented in him, bringing creation to its Spirit-saturated end, to its goal as the city of God, where men and women “live according to the spirit” of Jesus Christ (Augustine 1998, p. 581; Tanner 2010, pp. 170–71). “Henceforth the Holy Spirit reposes upon the God-man” and those united to him by faith, “just as He eternally reposes on the Logos” (Bulgakov 2004, p. 256; McCormack 2009, p. 55). God became man that as human he might partake of the Holy Spirit as fully as does as the divine Son—that he might share the Spirit with those who have been justified and sanctified in him.

7. Conclusions

It is when the life of Christ is seen to mirror and fulfill Israel’s relationship to the Holy Spirit that we find a consistent understanding of the Spirit’s role in Christ’s atoning death, resurrection and ascension. The Spirit’s resting upon Jesus sets the stage for future movement within the Spirit’s relationship to Jesus Christ, anticipating the judgment of Jesus as the sin-bearing recapitulation of Israel by the Spirit at the event of his death. The Spirit proves to function as the main agent of Christ’s judgment, akin to the Spirit’s role in Israel and the temple in the Old Testament, as the mode of God’s love in the presence of sin: wrath. The fulfillment of the Spirit’s work, however, lies in the further work of the Spirit in Jesus, sanctifying and filling the incarnate Son in the full sense anticipated in Old Testament prophecy, that Jesus might share the Spirit with all those united in him.21 The atonement, we conclude, is a work not merely of the Father and the Son, the benefits of which are applied by the Spirit; the atonement is the one work of the one God: Father, incarnate Son, and Holy Spirit.