From Faith to Love: The Role of Human Agency in Paul's Imperatives Regarding the Spirit

The presence of the Spirit brings and marks salvation for Paul, yet his imperatives regarding the responsibility of believers in relation to the Spirit sound a note of contingency in the success of the Spirit's program. How does Paul, as a child of monotheistic Judaism with its sovereign God of the universe, come to see the power of the divine Spirit as dependent on the cooperation of human agency? Our research will show that Paul does not derive his view either from his Scriptures or from the religious influences current in his day, but from his own experience of the Spirit and theological reflection. The necessity for believers to cooperate with the Spirit is Paul's own conclusion.;Our effort to discover the source of Paul's requirement also compels us to inquire how Paul expects believers to cooperate with the Spirit. Surprisingly, though Paul issues imperatives regarding the Spirit, he is vague about the role he expects believers to fulfill. Pauline scholarship has tended either to deal with this obscurity by collapsing the operation of the Spirit into the human mind or to avoid it by leaving unresolved the tension between the Spirit and human agency. Both options are unsatisfactory, as we will show by giving particular attention to four imperatives (1 Thess 5:19; 1 Cor 14:1; Gal 5:16; Rom 8:13). A close study of these commands suggests Paul adheres to an implicit matrix of ideas and assumptions that allows him to admonish believers to act in concert with the Spirit. First, the operation of the Spirit accompanies the gospel and comes as a charismatic power extrinsic to human abilities and faculties. Second, Paul presupposes that faith in the gospel implies a response to and participation in the charismatic, or charismatic, operation of the Spirit. Third, the charismatic power of the Spirit opens a new horizon of possibilities for human agency. Through the power of the Spirit, human agency is set free to move in response to the divine agency along a trajectory that begins with faith and reaches its full maturity in love. Thus, Paul expects believers will heed his imperatives regarding the Spirit as they move from faith to love.