The Unfolding Love of Spirit Baptism
Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash
From the beginning of the movement, the Pentecostal position on baptism with the Holy Spirit was controversial. This was not simply because of the role of tongues, but the way in which Pentecostal writers challenged and affirmed Wesleyan holiness views of the doctrine. Its articulation by Pentecostals represents a development within the Wesleyan tradition. By placing baptism with the Spirit in a Wesleyan framework, its theological rationale and biblical ground becomes clear.
For Pentecostals, baptism with the Spirit is a distinct operation of charismatic grace that deepens union with Christ by catching the believer up into a divine encounter of love. This divine encounter is witnessed to by ecstatic utterances and transforms the believer into a habitation of the glory of God. This succinct definition captures several elements of Wesleyanism that I need to unpack.
Grace and the Spirit
Wesley understood grace in trinitarian terms as the favor of the Father expressed in the Son and the power of the Spirit given through the Son. The former represents the love of God for us while the latter is the love of God in us. The love of God comes to dwell within a person through the Spirit’s various operations. As Wesley puts it, “By the operations of the Spirit, I do not mean the manner in which he operates, but the graces which he operates in a Christian.”
The Christian life unfolds as a journey initiated and sustained by the Spirit’s operations. This is how Wesleyans argue that Christian existence is graced from beginning to end. Regenerating grace is the operation of the Spirit by which the unbeliever’s affections begin to be ordered toward God through the infusion of love. Yet, prior to this operation is the Spirit’s prevenient activity within all human persons, guiding them through the illumination of truth in the mind and the kindling of the affections in the heart. The Spirit awakens conscience and thus restores the possibility of free decision by this prevenient activity. Building on prevenient and regenerating grace is the sanctifying grace of the Spirit, which itself could lead to entire sanctification. As an operation of the Spirit, grace unfolds in the soul in distinct ways over time.
Such a view of grace draws upon the Pauline association of the Spirit, power, and divine activity. On the one hand, Paul spoke of the diverse manifestations of grace (charismata) as different operations (energemata) of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:4-6). On the other hand, he described his ministry in terms of “the gift of the grace of God given to me by the operation of his power (energeian tēs dunameōs autou; Eph. 3:7). In both instances, there is a link between the Spirit and the operation of power in the soul.
This Pauline perspective informed the Patristic understanding of grace. The use of operatio to translate Greek forms of energeia reinforced Augustine’s view of grace as the Spirit’s activity in the heart and mind. Augustine described both the Pauline charismata (1 Cor. 12:4-11) and the Isaianic gift list (Is. 11:1-2) in terms of the diverse operations of the Spirit. These distinct kinds of activity reduce to the one gift of the Spirit by which the love of God pours into the soul causing the person to delight in godly things. Moreover, since all the Trinity’s operations are one, Augustine understood that even though the Spirit was at work principally, the entire Trinity came to inhabit the person. Grace was a dynamic participation in divine presence and power.
By talking about diverse operations, medieval theologians affirmed simultaneously that the believer received the one gift of the Spirit and yet also that grace unfolded and increased over time. Not all of the Spirit’s operations occurred in a single moment of conversion, as the sacramental life of the church reinforced. The movement from baptism to confirmation was itself a journey from regenerating grace to sanctifying and charismatic grace. Yet, the distinct operation of the Spirit available in the sacraments gave rise to further movements of grace. By the thirteenth century, Bonaventure could describe the Christian life in terms of the way the Spirit infused grace at baptism, which then grew into the theological virtues, the gifts of the Spirit, the Beatitudes, and fruits of the Spirit, and fully flowered in the spiritual senses. The one gift of the Spirit gave rise to an organic process of growth that the sacraments facilitated.
Early Pentecostals inherited this way of talking about grace and the Spirit. When they spoke of a definite “work” of grace, they understood that language to imply a distinct operation of the Spirit. In one of the earliest defenses of baptism with the Spirit, George Taylor framed the Christian life in terms of entering into full union with Christ through the bridal chamber by the Spirit’s multiple operations. While all persons received the Spirit, grace still unfolded in a cooperative venture through the individual’s surrendering to each operation, from regenerating grace to sanctifying grace to charismatic grace, or the new birth, sanctification, and Spirit baptism.
The first step in a Pentecostal defense of baptism with the Spirit involves an argument, grounded in scripture and Christian tradition, that grace is the power of God at work within and that this power unfolds over time as believers cooperate with the Spirit. The baptism with the Spirit represents the operation of charismatic grace in the soul so that the gifts may fully emerge, conforming the person to the mission of Christ. The person who has yet to surrender to charismatic grace fully may yet possess certain gifts; the Spirit’s regenerating and sanctifying work reshape natural gifts into godly tools. One should never divorce one operation of the Spirit from another. Yet charismatic grace opens up a new set of possibilities by unleashing charismatic power as part of the fulfillment of divine calling and the mission of God.
Union, Likeness, and Love
Wesley saw the Christian life as a “way of salvation” that moved from the dawning of grace in the soul to its consummation in glory. This journey was itself part of God’s own pedagogical strategy to conform grace to the human condition. In the same way that humans developed and matured biologically and psychologically through time, God initiated each operation over the course of the person’s earthly sojourn in proportion to the person’s pursuit of holiness. The ultimate aim was complete healing by conforming the believer fully to Christ. It was to become holy, which was nothing less than becoming like God.
Love played the central role in the restoration of the image because love bound together the whole person. The emphasis on love combined the Pauline idea of the Spirit pouring out divine charity (Rom. 5:5) with the Johannine idea that those united to God have charity perfected within. Wesley states, “In this image of God was man made. ‘God is love:’ Accordingly, man at his creation was full of love; which was the sole principle of all his tempers, thoughts, words, and actions.”
Each operation of the Spirit was also an infusion of divine charity into the love within the soul. If becoming like God meant becoming holy, growing in love was the path of holiness. Divine charity alone ordered human love toward God as its proper end and thus restored balance and integrity to the person. When charity rules, it orders the affections and harmonizes all interior movements. In Augustine’s words, “As charity increases, cupidity decreases until in this world that greatness is reached than which nothing can be greater.”
The journey to God concerns the increase in love until the person becomes fully like God. This means that believers deepen their union with God as they deepen their love for God because this love forms Christ within. To draw near to God requires being formed into God, which begins in the heart with the ordering of emotion and desire.
Accompanying this analysis of love in the Christian tradition was a turn toward the ecstatic and the charismatic. Augustine viewed prophetic vision and speech as an ecstatic event in which “there is a disengagement of the mind (alienatio mentis) from bodily sensation so that the human spirit, having been taken up by the divine Spirit, might be open to grasping and contemplating images.”
Medieval mystics interpreted the mind’s disengagement from the material world of sensation as the plunge into ecstatic union with Christ the bridegroom. For a writer like Richard of St. Victor, the prophetic and the ecstatic formed a single fabric because prophetic vision and the beatific vision both flow from having been captured by the object of love. Prior to the eschaton, this occurred suddenly as the Spirit’s love arrested the individual bringing about a temporary death to physical senses so that the spiritual senses could fully open up to behold the Lord. Such an event was made possible by what Richard called the “grace of contemplation,” a distinct operation of the Spirit uniting the believer with the bridegroom in love. Richard penned a short work he called “On the Four Degrees of Violent Charity” to underscore that ecstatic embrace was itself a ravishing of the soul by Christ.
What Pentecostals inherited in the early twentieth century was a Wesleyanism infused with insights from the Christian mystical tradition through writers like Thomas Upham and Hannah Whitall Smith. From this fusion came the idea that love grew in the soul by ecstatic encounters with the Spirit from which cooperation flowed. In short, the Christian life unfolded through a dialectic between crisis encounters and a maturation process. Wesley had said as much. The mystical stream merely interpreted those encounters through the charismatic-infused language of ecstasy. Love, then, matured and blossomed through ecstatic embrace with the bridegroom in the power of the Spirit.
When William Seymour claimed that the baptism with the Holy Spirit was a baptism of love, he was instinctively drawing on this tradition. While baptism with the Spirit was a distinct charismatic operation, it was also in continuity with the whole work of grace that unfolded through the shaping of human love by divine charity. For this reason, baptism with the Spirit was both charismatic and sanctifying. It further facilitated being formed into Christ even as it outfitted the person for the charismatic life. Moreover, this happened because Spirit baptism was a charismatic and ecstatic event in which the person was caught up by the Spirit into the presence of Jesus, the bridegroom.
The second step in a Pentecostal defense of the baptism with the Spirit is an argument for the growth of love in the person as the means by which the believer becomes like God in holiness. This growth in love occurs through crisis encounters, which are themselves forms of ecstatic embrace. Because prophecy occurs in an ecstatic mode as the mind, detached from earthly realities, beholds its Lord, these encounters open the person up to charismatic existence. As a distinct operation, Spirit baptism builds upon all the other operations of the Spirit in shaping the spiritual senses to behold the Lord.
In an important sense, one could describe the Christian life as occurring through love conceived and birthed (prevenient and regenerating grace), love consecrated and matured (sanctifying grace), and love commissioned and sent out (charismatic grace). Love provides the continuity among all of the operations of the Spirit because divine charity orders human love by forming it into Christ through ecstatic embrace with Christ. The baptism with the Spirit is in continuity with other forms of ecstatic embrace and yet remains distinct in relationship to charismatic grace.
Glory, Sign, and Witness
Within Wesleyan holiness writers, the journey to become holy was also described in architectural language as becoming a temple of the living God. In the same way that love increased through cooperation, the believer’s decisions helped to transform her into a habitation of God’s presence. This occurred through the cultivation of habitual dispositions that integrate the affections and thoughts into a whole. In Wesleyan discourse, it meant allegorizing descriptions of the temple so that the believer spiritually moved from the outer court to the inner court and finally the holy of holies through a process of formation. This idea closely resembled the way in which mystics like Teresa of Avila talked about constructing an interior castle. To become a habitation of God was to cooperate with the Spirit to form the soul into a temple that organized and shaped all the interior thoughts and affections.
From this angle, the distinct operations of the Spirit concerned temple construction with each operation contributing its own features. Believers were not simply growing in grace through love, they were to be about temple construction. It was in part an echo of the Pauline declaration that believers were “God’s handiwork,” which is to say that every believer became an artist in the hands of the divine artist. Regenerating grace, sanctifying grace, and charismatic grace concerned the fabrication of a dwelling place for God.
Once construction of the temple was complete, the temple was dedicated and consecrated so that the glory of God might fully come to rest upon it. It was after dedication and consecration that the temple in Jerusalem became active in service to the people of God. The shekinah or thick presence of the cloud descended upon the temple. Because in the Old Testament glory was the radiance of holiness, the cloud came with fire and light. One can see how Luke used symbols of fire and light to describe both the transfiguration and Pentecost. Both events involved the descent of glory.
Early Pentecostals interpreted baptism with the Spirit as a kind of crowning operation in which glory descended upon the person. For William Seymour, one finally enters the holy of holies and places oneself fully upon the altar where “the great Shekina [sic] glory is continually burning and filling with heavenly light.” This description was how Pentecostals tried to articulate the spiritual experience of ecstatic embrace as akin to currents of love flowing through them and giving rise to ecstatic speech.
If baptism with the Spirit is a kind of ecstatic embrace with the bridegroom in which glory flows like waves of love, then surely, Pentecostals thought, there must be a sign for such an event. They were led to ask this question in part because of Wesley’s insistence that there was a direct and immediate witness of the Spirit to the human spirit that the person was indeed a child of God. As Ken Collins and Randy Maddox point out, this doctrine of assurance underwent modifications in Wesley’s theology so that he began to think in terms of degrees of assurance. Corresponding to distinct moments of encounter, these degrees attested to the Spirit’s direct witness to the event of the new birth and of entire sanctification that gave the individual assurance the work was complete.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Wesleyans began to talk about the witness of the Spirit to each work in terms of signs accompanying the encounter. These signs were both internal and external. Internal signs were the result of love’s knowledge, an intuitive relational awareness that one was a child of God or that charity had increased to a level of maturation that it governed other interior movements. External signs usually corresponded to physical manifestations like dancing, shouting, or even falling down under the power of God. The implicit idea was a correspondence between the distinctive operation of the Spirit, the ecstatic moment of encounter, and the witness of the Spirit to that encounter.
Convinced that the baptism with the Spirit was a distinct operation of charismatic grace, early Pentecostals searched the scriptures for the witness or sign to this work. They were functioning like good Wesleyans. Ultimately, they argued for a link between praying in tongues and the role of tongues at Pentecost. Both references to tongues within scripture seemed more akin to temporary manifestations that could accompany ecstatic embrace. The fact that in every instance of baptism with the Spirit in Acts there was some concrete manifestation of inspired speech pushed Pentecostals toward this interpretation.
The final step in a Pentecostal understanding of baptism with the Spirit is that ecstatic utterances are the direct and immediate witness to the ecstatic embrace of love. This is to combine Wesley’s notion of an internal witness with the biblical narrative of tongues as the primary manifestation of the Pentecostal outpouring. Undergirding this idea of a direct and immediate witness is what Maddox called the perceptibility of grace. Grace is not simply an operation of the Spirit hidden within the recesses of the soul that the person needs to be told is present. It is a conscious experience of the power and presence of God. The whole Trinity comes to dwell in the whole person. Tongues expresses this conscious experience.
The Pentecostal doctrine of the baptism with the Spirit is biblical in the same way that the presence of Christ in the bread and the wine is biblical. It is a faithful trajectory constructed from a fusion of scripture and tradition. Its full biblical foundation and theological rationale take shape by seeing it as a development within Wesleyanism that harkens back to Christian mystical streams in the service of the Lukan, Pauline, and Johannine visions of Pentecost.
Dr. Dale M. Coulter is Professor of Historical Theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary. He also serves on Firebrand’s Editorial Board.