Criswell
Theological Review 5.1 (1990) 15-29
Copyright © 1990 by
LUKE'S
PRESENTATION OF
THE SPIRIT IN
ACTS*
F. F. BRUCE
Buxton, Derbyshire,
I
Like
the other evangelists Luke tells how John, who came baptizing
with water; claimed to be the forerunner of one
stronger than himself,
who would administer a baptism with the Holy
Spirit. This is described
as a baptism with wind and fire, as when the wind
blows the chaff away
from the threshing floor, leaving only the wheat
behind, and the fire
consumes the chaff when it has been swept
together.
Nothing more is said about this
baptism with the Spirit in Luke's
first volume. The subject is taken up again at the
beginning of his
second volume, when the risen Lord repeats John's
promise and assures
his disciples that they will soon experience its
fulfillment: "Before many
days you shall be baptized with the Holy
Spirit" (Acts 1:5).
Yet the first volume is by no means
silent about the Holy Spirit
himself. John the forerunner was filled with the
Holy Spirit from his
birth, if not even earlier (Luke 1:15, 41-44).
Indeed, the whole nativity
narrative is dominated by the Spirit: John's
parents are filled with the
Spirit
of prophecy (Luke 1:41; 67), and it is the Holy Spirit (the power
of the Most High) that enables Mary to become the
mother of the
Messiah (Luke 1:35). John's endowment with
the Spirit equipped him
for his prophetic ministry, but he had no power to
pass this endowment
on to others. The Coming One who was to baptize
with the Spirit was
shown to be Jesus, on whom at his baptism in
*
F. F. Bruce died days after correcting the galley proofs of this article, which
reflects one of the last, if not the last, works
of his long and prodigious career. We shall
miss him.
16 CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
descended and remained: this was the occasion when
"God anointed
Jesus
of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power" (Acts 10:38).
The
outpouring of the Spirit was coincident with his baptism in water,
but distinct from it.
Jesus returned from Jordan
"full of the Holy Spirit," and by that
Spirit
he was led for 40 days in the wilderness of temptation (Luke 4:1).
Then
he returned to
his keynote announcement in the
himself the words of Isa
61:1, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
because he has anointed me to preach good news
to the poor" (Luke
4:18).
It has been argued indeed that in Mark (followed by Matthew),
Jesus'
ministry represents his promised baptizing of others with the
Spirit;l however that may be, it
is not true of Luke's record (or of
John's). Luke certainly intends us to understand
that the whole course
of Jesus' earthly ministry is the outworking of
that anointing of which
he spoke in the synagogue of
outpouring of the Spirit on others had to await his
departure from his
disciples after he rose from the dead.
After the inaugural preaching at
tivity of the Spirit are
seldom mentioned explicitly in Luke's narrative
of Jesus' ministry, but they are implied
throughout. Some of the places
where Luke's narrative makes reference to the Spirit
are paralleled in
Matthew
or Mark: Jesus' warning about blasphemy against the Spirit
(Luke
12:10) is paralleled, for example, by both the other Synoptists
(Matt
12:32; Mark 3:29). Luke may illustrate this particular blasphemy
later in the episodes of Ananias
and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11) and of
Simon
Magus (Acts 8:18-24).
Again, in Luke 12:12, when Jesus
tells his disciples not to plan their
defense in advance when they are brought to
trial for their faith,
because "the Holy Spirit will teach you in
that very hour what you
ought to say," the Matthean
counterpart says, "It is not you who speak,
but the Spirit of your Father speaking through
you" (Matt 10:19).
(However,
the parallel in Mark 13:11, "It is not you who speak, but the
Holy
Spirit," is altered in Luke 21:15 to a form in which Jesus replaces
the Spirit: "I will give you a mouth and
wisdom.")
There is one place in such parallel
passages where Matthew's
version of a saying has a mention of the Spirit
which is absent from
Luke's:
in Matt 12:28 Jesus says, "If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast
out demons. ..," whereas Luke 11:20 reads
"by the finger of God."
But
more often it is Luke who mentions the Spirit where Matthew does
not: in Luke 10:21, Jesus "rejoiced in the
Holy Spirit" when he thanked
1 J. E. Yates, The Spirit and the Kingdom (London: SPCK,
1963).
F.
F. Bruce: LUKE'S PRESENTATION OF THE SPIRIT IN ACTS 17
God
for revealing to babes things that were concealed from the wise
and understanding, whereas the Spirit does not
appear in the Matthean
parallel. Luke's specific introduction of the
Spirit here may be related
to the prophetic quality of the utterance that
follows Jesus' words of
thanksgiving. Again, in Luke 11:13,
in a "how much more" argument
from the natural benevolence of earthly fathers to
the heavenly Father's
generosity to his children, it is emphasized that
he will give "the Holy
Spirit"
to those who ask him, whereas in Matt 7:11 he will give them
"good things." Possibly Luke understands the future
tense "will give"
of the post-Pentecostal situation.
Here too may be mentioned the
scantily attested but striking
variant for "thy kingdom come" in
Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer:
"Let
thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us" (Luke 11:2).2 This
has been thought to be a Marcionite
spiritualization of the original
wording; even so, it reflects insight into the
fact (to which Acts and the
Pauline
epistles bear witness) that much of the teaching about the king-
dom of God in the Gospels
is fulfilled after Pentecost by the ministry of
the Spirit.
II
In the interval between his
resurrection and the day when a cloud
finally "took him out of their sight"
(Acts 1:9), Jesus taught his disciples
more about the
them at the same time to stay in
promised baptism with the Holy Spirit. It was
probably something he
said during those days that prompted their question:
"Lord, will you at
this time restore the kingdom to
commonly been regarded as the last expression of
their this-worldly
and nationalist hopes. But Jesus treated it
seriously. No timetable of
corning events would be disclosed to them;
instead, they would be
given something much better-power of a different kind
than that
required for the building up of a political
kingdom.
The disciples' question, indeed,
echoes the kind of language that
Gabriel,
in the annunciation narrative of Luke 1:32-33, had used about
the Son of Mary: "The Lord God will give to
him the throne of his
father David, ...and of his kingdom there will be no
end." This
promise repeats those made by OT prophets
regarding the perpetual
kingship of David's house. But the manner in
which these promises
were to be fulfilled is repeatedly made clear in
Acts. Peter, on the day
2 See B. M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New
Testament (Lon-
don/
18
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
of Pentecost, affirms that the oath sworn by God
to David, "that he
would set one of his descendants upon his
throne" (Ps 132:11), was
fulfilled in the resurrection and exaltation of
Jesus, the Son of David
(Acts
2:29-36). Similarly Paul, in the synagogue of Pisidian
Antioch,
announces that the promises to David were
fulfilled when, from David's
posterity, God "brought to
Jesus
from the dead that God fulfilled his undertaking to his people in
Isa 55:3, "I will give you the holy and sure
blessings promised to David"
(Acts 13:23, 34). And James, at the Council
of Jerusalem, sees the
prophecy of Amos 9:11-12, that David's fallen
tent would be set up
again and his dominion over Gentile nations restored,
brought to pass
by the widespread proclamation of the gospel,
through which more
Gentiles
than David ever controlled were now yielding glad submission
to the Son of David (Acts 15:15-17).
It was, then, along these lines that
the disciples' question about the
restoration of the kingdom was to be answered. In this restoration they
were to play a full part, and they would be
empowered to do so when
the Holy Spirit came upon them. Then, said the
risen Lord, "you shall
be my witnesses. . . to the end of the earth"
(Acts 1:8).
The coming of the Spirit, then, was
essential for effective witness
bearing. In this, as in some other respects,
there is a remarkably close
relation between the narrative of Acts and the Paraclete promises in the
upper-room discourses of the Gospel of John.3
When the Paraclete
comes, said Jesus' to his disciples on the night of
his betrayal, "He will
bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses,
because you have been
with me from the beginning" (John 15:26-27).
"We are witnesses to
these things," said those same disciples to the
Sanhedrin when testify-
ing to the exaltation of
the crucified Jesus, "and so is the Holy Spirit
whom God has given to those who obey him" (Acts
5:32).
Luke's second volume is the record
of the apostles' witness, and
at the same time it is the record of the Spirit's
witness. So completely
is Acts pervaded by the presence and power of the
Spirit that it has
been called (with Chrysostom4 in the 4th
century and A. Ehrhardt5 in
our own day) "The Gospel of the Holy
Spirit"; or (with J. A. Bengel6
3 See w. F. Lofthouse, "The Holy Spirit in the Acts and the Fourth
Gospel," Exp
Tim 52 (1940-41) 334-36.
4 Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts, 1. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (14 vols.,
ed.
by P. Schaff;
5 A. Ehrhardt,
The Acts of the Apostles (
1969) 129.
6 J. A. Bengel, Gnoman Nom Testamenti (3rd ed.;
F.
F. Bruce: LUKE'S PRESENTATION OF THE SPIRIT IN ACTS 19
in the 18th century and A. T. Pierson7
in the 20th) "The Acts of the
Holy Spirit."
III
The promise that the disciples would
be baptized with the Holy
Spirit
a few days after Jesus so assured them was fulfilled on the day of
Pentecost-seven weeks after his resurrection. The promise is called
"the promise of the Father" in Acts 1:4 because God the
Father is the
primary giver of the Spirit; it is called
"the promise of the Holy Spirit"
in Acts 2:33 because the Spirit is the substance
of the promise; he is, as
another NT writer says, "the Holy Spirit of
promise" (Eph 1:13).
Luke's Pentecostal narrative recalls
earlier biblical motifs. The
"mighty wind" and "tongues as of fire" which
accompanied the descent
of the Spirit (Acts 2:2-3) are reminiscent of the
wind and fire which, in
John
the Baptist's preaching, were to be the instruments of the Coming
One's
purifying ministry (Luke 3:16-17).
Pentecost originally marked the
presentation to God of the first-
fruits of the wheat harvest (Exod
23:16; 34:22), but by the beginning of
the Christian era it had come to be observed also
as the anniversary of
the giving of the law from Sinai. On that occasion,
according to one
rabbinical tradition, the voice of God "went
into seventy tongues, so
that every nation heard the law in its own
language"; so now visitors
"from every nation under heaven" heard the celebration
of God's
mighty works from the apostles' lips "each. . . in
his own native lan-
guage" (Acts 2:5-11). It
is possible, moreover, that a reversal of the
confusion of tongues at
who were present, despite their diversity of
language, understood the
message.
By the end of that day the reception
of the Spirit was not an
experience confined to the apostles and their
companions; many more
enjoyed the heavenly gift. For Peter's closing
exhortation was: "Repent,
and be baptized every one of you in the name of
Jesus Christ for the
forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the
gift of the Holy
Spirit"
(Acts 2:38). Repentance and baptism were the twin condi-
tions--the one inward, the
other outward--for receiving the gift. Many
did so repent and receive baptism, to the number of
about three
thousand. Luke does not say that they "were
all baptized in one Spirit
into one body," for that is Pauline language (1
Cor 12:13); but these
7 A. T. Pierson, The Acts of the Holy Spirit (2nd ed.;
1913).
20
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
words sum up very well what took place. Their baptism
in the name of
Jesus
and their reception of the Spirit made them members of a new
community. This was no solitary experience; its
communal character
was manifested in a number of ways, not least in
their practicing
community of goods. The inward change in each
which made such
spontaneous generosity possible was described later
by Peter when he
told how God "cleansed their hearts by
faith" (Acts 15:9).
From the risen Lord's words,
"John baptized with water, but. . .
you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit"
(Acts 1:5), it might have
been expected that baptism in water would henceforth
become obso-
lete, being superseded by
baptism in the Spirit. In fact this did not
happen; believers in Jesus continued to be baptized in
water, but their
water baptism now proclaimed them to be his people,
and was ac-
companied (not replaced) by the baptism in the Spirit.8
The precise
relation between their water baptism and baptism
in the Spirit remains
to be considered when the further evidence of Acts
has been surveyed;
and even then some relevant questions will remain
unanswered.
IV
When the outpouring of the Spirit on
the apostles was marked by
their speaking "in other tongues" (Acts
2:4), Peter explained to the
crowd of Jerusalemites and visitors who were
attracted by this phe-
nomenon that what they saw and
heard was the fulfillment of God's
promise: "In the last days. . . I will pour
out My Spirit upon all flesh"
(Joel
2:28). True, "all flesh" did not receive the Spirit on that day, but
those who did receive him then were the firstfruits of a great harvest of
others. In Joel's wording the outpouring of the Spirit
is to take place in
the indefinite "hereafter," but the
quotation in Acts 2:17 replaces "here-
after" by the more definite "in the last
days." The coming of the Spirit,
that is to say, is the token that the "last
days"--the days for "establishing
all that God spoke by the mouth of his holy
prophets from of old" (Acts
3:21)--have
been inaugurated by the ministry, death, and exaltation of
Jesus.
Jesus' resurrection and enthronement at God's right hand have
fulfilled specific OT prophecies, Peter affirmed
(Ps 16:8-11; 110:1;
132:11).
He and his fellow apostles speak as witnesses to Jesus' resur-
rection, and to their testimony
the Spirit adds his own.
8 "The reception of
the Spirit is involved in the very notion of baptism if the rite
represents Christ's baptismal anointing at the
account
for the adoption of baptism in the Church)," says G. W. H. Lampe,
"The Holy
Spirit
in the Writings of St. Luke," Studies
in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R.H.
Lightfoot (ed,
by D. E. Nineham;
F.
F. Bruce: LUKE'S PRESENTATION OF THE SPIRIT IN ACTS 21
This eschatological note is not so prominent in Luke's writings as it
is in some of the other NT documents, but the
whole record of Acts
presupposes that the "last days" stretch
from the exaltation of Jesus to
his coming as judge (Acts 10:42; 17:31), and the
presence and activity of
the Spirit provide unmistakable testimony to the
fact that the last days
are here.
V
The record of Acts also illustrates
in a variety of ways the role of
the Spirit as the animating principle of the
community's life. Jesus, as
we have seen, told his disciples at an earlier
stage in his ministry not to
be concerned about the form of words they should
use when called to
account in a court of law: the Holy Spirit would
tell them what to say.
They
realized the truth of this assurance on the first occasion when they
were challenged by the Jewish authorities in
a congenitally lame man in the temple precincts
attracted a large
crowd, and Peter improved the occasion by announcing
the fulfillment
of ancient prophecy in God's raising up Jesus, and
called on his hearers
to repent and have their sins blotted out. The
congestion in the outer
court of the temple was such that the temple police
intervened, and
Peter
and John (apparently with the man they had cured) were locked
up overnight. In the morning they were brought
before the chief
priests and their colleagues and asked by what
authority they had acted
as they did. Peter then, "filled with the
Holy Spirit," replied that the
cripple had been healed by the power of the
crucified and risen Jesus,
and went on to charge the judges with being the
"builders" of Ps 118:22
who had rejected the "stone" which God
had nevertheless exalted to be
"head of the corner." He concluded his
"defense" by affirming that the
name of Jesus was the only "name under heaven
given among men by
which we must be saved" (Acts 4:8-12).
The power of the Spirit in the
believing community is underscored
in quite another way by the incident of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts
5:1-11).
The temptation to acquire credit for being more
generous than
one really is has not gone out of fashion.
Community of goods was
practiced in the
tion in the matter of
property was excluded from the common meal for
a year and deprived of one quarter of his daily
ration of food. But in
the case of Ananias and Sapphira the offense was treated much more
seriously. So closely was the community identified
with the Spirit that a
lie told to the community was a lie told to the
Spirit. They had not
realized the enormity of the action; when it was
brought home to them
22
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
that they were guilty of such a serious offense
against the Holy Spirit,
they were so appalled that first the one and then
the other fell down
dead.
When the time came that the apostles
could no longer take care of
the daily distribution from the common fund to
needy members of the
community, seven men were appointed to take charge
of this business.
The
qualifications laid down for them were that they should be "of
good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom"
(Acts 6:3). One of them,
Stephen,
is specially singled out as "a man full of faith and of the Holy
Spirit." He showed these
qualities not only as an almoner, but even
more so as an advocate for the new Way; when he was
challenged in
the Hellenistic synagogue which he attended in
ents "could not withstand
the wisdom and the Spirit with which he
spoke." When they therefore accused him of
blasphemy before the
Sanhedrin,
and his defense filled his judges with such rage that his
condemnation and execution must
inevitably follow, Luke describes
how "he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into
heaven. . . and said, 'Be-
hold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man
standing at the
right hand of God'" (Acts 6:5, 11; 7:55-56).
Another member of the seven, Philip,
experienced the Spirit's di-
rection in his evangelistic
ministry; when, for example, he had preached
the gospel to the Ethiopian traveler and baptized
him, the Spirit of the
Lord
caught him away "and the eunuch saw him no more" (Acts 8:39).
It
is difficult in this particular narrative to distinguish between the
Spirit's
agency and that of the "angel of the Lord" who commanded
Philip to go to the place where he would meet
the Ethiopian.
A further instance of the
community's awareness of the Spirit's
centrality in its life comes to expression in the
letter sent to the Chris-
tians in
council's decision was introduced to them with the
words, "It has
seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us"; that
is, "The Holy Spirit has
decided, and so have we" (Acts 15:28). The
spontaneity and matter-of-
factness of this declaration are
impressive. The apostles and elders do
not stay to justify their claim that the decision
was primarily the Holy
Spirit's
and only secondarily theirs; it was a matter of experience to
them that this was so, and they expected that the
Gentile churches to
which the letter was sent would find it equally
obvious.
VI
Those who believed the apostolic
message in
Day
of Pentecost evidently received the Spirit as soon as they were
baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. It was
otherwise with those who
F.
F. Bruce: LUKE'S PRESENTATION OF THE SPIRIT IN ACTS 23
believed some time later in response to Philip's
preaching in
"They
were baptized, both men and women," Simon Magus among
them, but they did not there and then receive the
Spirit (Acts 8:12-13,
16).
At this stage the leaders of the mother church
maintained a fair
degree of supervision over the extension of the faith
beyond the fron-
tiers of
John,
it appears, were well pleased with what they found, but they
discovered that one thing was missing. The
Samaritan converts had not
received the Spirit, so the apostles prayed that
this deficiency might be
made good. "Then they laid their hands on them,
and they received the
Holy
Spirit" (Acts 8:14-17).
Luke does not say why there was an
interval on this occasion
between the converts' believing in Jesus and
their receiving the Spirit;
he leaves the reason to be inferred. One popular
explanation has been
that the interval corresponds to the interval
between baptism and
confirmation in the historic
Christian churches; this, however, is bound
up with a theology of the Spirit which cannot be
substantiated from the
NT.9
Many Bible students find themselves faced with a problem here
through failure to distinguish between Luke's
terminology and Paul's
on this subject. For Paul, it has been observed,
"'To receive the Spirit'
is to begin to experience the Spirit as . . . mediating
the presence of
Christ
and as the Spirit recreating in us Christ's nature and filial rela-
tionship to God," whereas
for Luke it means to receive him as
the organ of (usually charismatically expressed)
communication and reve-
lation between the disciples
and the Father or the risen Lord. As a result
the senses of 'receive the Spirit' in the
respective communities [Pauline
and Lukan] are
complementary, and indeed overlap significantly, at a
deep level, but they are not simply the same.10
In the context of Acts 8: 14-17, the
most natural explanation of the
interval is that when at last the Spirit fell on
the Samaritan believers,
they received the assurance--not from a freelance
evangelist like Philip
but from the authoritative leaders of the church--that
they were no
longer outcasts but were incorporated as full members
of the people of
God of the new age. The imposition of the
apostles' hands was a token
9 This view has been
effectively answered by G. w. H. Lampe, The Seal of the
Spirit (London: Longmans, 1951)
70-72 et passim.
10 P. Cotterell
and M. Turner, Linguistics and Biblical
Interpretation (
SPCK,
1989) 166-67; see also M. M. B. Turner, "The Spirit of Christ and
Christology,"
Christ the Lord: Studies
in Christology Presented to D. Guthrie (ed. by H. H. Rowdon;
Leicester/Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,
1982) 168-90.
24
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
of this new fellowship. With the outpouring of the
Spirit on the Samari-
tans, a new nucleus of the believing community was
established, and
the gospel could now radiate out in power from this
new center.
It is plain that the Samaritans'
reception of the Spirit was attended
by the same audible signs as had marked his
reception by the believers
at Pentecost; only such external manifestations
would have impressed
Simon
Magus. It was not the sanctifying influence of the Spirit in the
believer's life that he craved the power to
reproduce.
Another advance into new territory
followed shortly afterwards,
when Peter accepted the invitation to visit the
Roman centurion Cor-
nelius at
representative of the Twelve; rather,
being temporarily resident in
Joppa
on the Mediterranean coast, he received the centurion's invita-
tion, and--under the
unmistakable guidance of the Spirit--went to
visit him in
witnesses. On his arrival he explained to his host
that he had never
entered a Gentile house before or taken food at
a Gentile table, and
that he would not have done so now had God not
taught him not to
look on anyone as "common or unclean."
Then, at Cornelius' bidding,
he related the gospel story from John the Baptist's
ministry to Jesus'
death and resurrection, and concluded with the
affirmation that through
this Jesus, crucified and risen, forgiveness of sins
was available to every
believer, and that he was moreover the appointed
judge of living and
dead (Acts 10:34-43).
Peter had barely finished speaking
when the Holy Spirit fell on his
hearers, as suddenly as on Peter himself and his
colleagues at Pentecost,
the experience being attended by the same outward
signs as then. Both
Peter
and the six men whom he had taken along with him were
astounded at what they saw and heard. Had this not
happened-had
Cornelius
and his friends simply asked, like the
the earlier occasion, "What shall we do?"
(Acts 2:37)--Peter might not
have been sure how to frame his answer. But here
they were, "speaking
in tongues and extolling God"; God had
clearly shown his good plea-
sure in the matter by sending his Spirit on them,
confronting Peter with
a fait
accompli. Peter had no option but to acquiesce in this act of God;
“These
people,” he said to his companions, “have received the Holy
Spirit
just as we have; can anyone forbid water for their baptism?” So
he ordered them to be baptized in the name of
Jesus Christ (Acts
10:44-48).
Here, then, we have a further
sequence: the believers in
had received the Spirit immediately on being
baptized; the believers in
receive the Spirit until apostles laid hands on
them; the Gentiles at
F.
F. Bruce: LUKE'S PRESENTATION OF THE SPIRIT IN ACTS 25
there and then, and Peter's ordering them to be
baptized in water was
his recognition of the divine initiative. Nothing
is said in the Cornelius
story about the imposition of apostolic hands, either
on the spot or
subsequently.
Peter's visit to the house of
Cornelius had not been approved in
advance by the other
called him to account. But the account he gave them
was so convincing
that their criticisms were silenced, and they
glorified God who had
extended his grace even to Gentiles (Acts 11:18).
The implications of this divine
initiative are manifest everywhere
in the subsequent narrative of Acts, with its
record of successful Gentile
evangelization. It may be that
Philip's preaching the gospel to an
Ethiopian
antedated Peter's preaching at
could not commit the church as Peter's did,
especially when Peter's
action was ratified by his fellow apostles. Henceforth
Gentile evan-
gelization was approved and
promoted (even if there was some dis-
agreement about the terms on which Gentiles might
be admitted to
membership of the community). No wonder that the
inauguration of
this new phase of the expansion of the gospel was
marked by the
spontaneous outpouring of the Spirit, as spontaneous
as his initial
outpouring on the Day of Pentecost.
The next significant outpouring did
not have the same epoch-
making character as that in the house of Cornelius.
The incident of the
twelve Ephesian disciples
(Acts 19:1-7) presents several problems, but
it displays a pattern of Christian initiation
different from those con-
sidered already.
Those disciples, whom Paul met
shortly after he took up residence
in
Baptist;
but to think of them in these terms is probably a mistake. When
Luke
uses the word “disciple” without qualification, as he does when
introducing these men, he means disciples of Jesus.
And that they were
indeed disciples of Jesus is implied in Paul's first
question to them, “Did
you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” By “when
you be-
lieved,” Paul plainly means “when
you believed in Jesus”; he would not
have expected them to have received the Holy Spirit
otherwise. The
clause “when you believed” is literally “having
believed,” an instance
of the coincident aorist participle, which occurs
in a similar context in
Eph
1:13, “Having believed in him [in Christ], you were sealed with the
Holy Spirit.” Paul himself had been filled with the Holy
Spirit at Damas-
cus when he recovered his
sight and was baptized (Acts 9:17-18).
The idea that the twelve men were
disciples of John has been
reinforced by the inference sometimes drawn from
the Fourth Gospel,
26
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
that disciples of John, who were disposed to exalt
their teacher's status
at Jesus' expense, survived in proconsular
century. Whatever be the validity of this
inference, it is not directly
relevant to the interpretation of Acts 19:1-7.
Those disciples at
tion, that they knew nothing
of the Holy Spirit, and when he asked
them about their baptism, he learned that they had
received "John's
baptism," not Christian baptism. John's
baptism was a baptism for the
forgiveness of sins, and so was Christian baptism
according to Acts
2:38;
but there was at least this difference between the two: Christian
baptism was administered in the name of Jesus,
while John's baptism
evidently made no reference to him. Christian
baptism involved the
confession of Jesus as Lord, and this set it apart
from all other ablutions.
Paul
went on to explain that John's baptism had a forward-looking
significance, as John himself
indicated when he pointed on to the
Coming
One, and it met its fulfillment in Jesus. When they
heard what
Paul had to say, they made good the
defect in their religious experience
thus far by receiving baptism “into the name of the
Lord Jesus”--the
same form of words as is used of the baptism of the
Samaritan converts
in Acts 8:16. But whereas an interval separated
the Samaritans' baptism
from their receipt of the Spirit, no such interval
was necessary for the
Ephesian disciples: as soon as they were baptized
"into the name of the
Lord
Jesus," Paul laid his hands on them, and they received the Spirit
with the gifts of glossolalia
and prophecy.
The situation of these Ephesian disciples has been compared with
that of Apollos, whom Luke
introduces in the preceding paragraph: the
only baptism he knew was John's. Apollos
nevertheless was acquainted
with the story of Jesus, which (thanks to his
mastery of OT Scripture)
he presented eloquently and persuasively. But it
is not said that Apollos
lacked the gift of the Spirit; indeed, if the phrase
"fervent in spirit,"
used of him in Acts 18:2-5, has the same force as it
has in Rom 12:11, it
implies that he was full of the Holy Spirit,
"bubbling over," in fact.11
Nor
is there any suggestion that Apollos was rebaptized. To speak
more positively on this point would be to argue from
silence, but if the
Ephesian disciples had been converted under Apollos' early preaching
(as some have thought), one would have expected them to know
more
than they did. One who knew the story of Jesus so
accurately as
Apollos did would have known that Jesus,
according to John the
Baptist
himself, was the one who would baptize people with the Holy
Spirit;
this the Ephesian disciples did not know. As it is,
theirs is the
only instance of rebaptism recorded in the NT.
11 See Lampe, "The
Holy Spirit in the Writings of St. Luke," 198; E. Kasemann,
Essays on New Testament
Themes
(London: SCM Press, 1964) 143.
F.
F. Bruce: LUKE'S PRESENTATION OF THE SPIRIT IN ACTS 27
G. Lampe has argued that the
experience of those Ephesian dis-
ciples marked out the
beginning of Paul's residence in
“another decisive moment in the missionary history.”12
be a new center for the Gentile mission, and these
disciples probably
constituted the nucleus of the church there. By this
extraordinary
procedure they were integrated into the missionary
program.
According to Acts, then, the
reception of the Spirit might take
place (I) immediately after the exercise of faith in
Christ and submis-
sion to baptism in his name,
(2) with the imposition of apostolic hands,
a considerable time after the exercise of faith
and submission to bap-
tism, (3) while hearers
listened in faith to the preaching of the gospel,
before baptism and (apparently) without the imposition
of hands, or
(4)
after baptism in the name of Jesus and the imposition
of apostolic
hands, in the experience of some who had in a certain
measure become
disciples of Jesus already.
Various elements in the process of
Christian initiation are men-
tioned: faith in Jesus,
baptism in his name, imposition of hands, and
receiving of the Holy Spirit. Quite evidently,
however, no one se-
quence of these elements is
presented as normative rather than any
other. One of them, the imposition of hands, is not
always included.
The
onus of proof rests on those who maintain that it must always have
taken place, even when it is not mentioned. Those who
maintain this
generally regard the imposition of hands in the
apostolic age as the
precedent for the order of confirmation, in which
the Spirit is imparted
to believers with the laying on of hands of one
who stands in the
apostolic succession. But this view requires too
much reading into the
biblical text; moreover, it is difficult to
square it with the experience of
Paul
himself, who received the Spirit when the hands of Ananias,
not
an apostle, were laid on him (Acts 9:17). (Ananias was certainly the
risen Lord's authorized messenger to Paul, but he was
not an apostle in
Luke's use of the term).
VII
If God's bestowal of his Holy Spirit
is his response to the exercise
of genuine faith, then the withholding of faith--especially
on the part
of those who have heard his voice--is construed as
resistance to the
Holy
Spirit, and there can be no deadlier sin than this. Those who in
earlier days would not pay heed to the prophets
resisted the Spirit who
spoke through them, and the consequences for them
were disastrous;
so those in apostolic days who refused to
acknowledge Jesus as the one
whom God uniquely anointed with the Spirit are
consummating the sin
12 Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit, 76.
28
CRISWELL THEOLOGICAL REVIEW
of their spiritual ancestors, and therefore there
can be no hope of
repentance or restoration for them. This is the
point of Stephen's
charge: "You always resist the Holy Spirit: as
your fathers did, so do
you" (Acts 7:51). The same point is made by
Paul in his application of
Hab 1:5 to the synagogue congregation in Pisidian Antioch: "Behold,
you scoffers, and wonder, and perish; for I do a
deed in your days, a
deed you will never believe, if one declares it to
you" (Acts 13:41). He
makes it again at the end of Acts when he applies to
the leaders of the
Roman
Jews the warning of Isa 6:9-10 about unhearing ears
and
unseeing eyes: “The Holy Spirit was right in
saying to your fathers
through Isaiah the prophet: ‘Go to this people.
. .’” (Acts 28:25-28).
What
the Spirit said through the ancient prophets he continues to say
today.
The Spirit who spoke through those
OT prophets continues to
speak in the church through prophets of the new age,
as well as through
its recognized leaders (as in the apostolic letter
of Acts 15:23-29, cited
above). Through the prophet Agabus,
for example, he foretells the
great famine of Claudius' day, enabling the
timely steps to provide for their fellow believers in
11:27
-30). It was probably through one of the prophets in the church of
the special service for which he had selected them
(Acts 13:1-2). He
directs the course of Paul and his companions,
as he had previously
done for Philip (Acts 8:29) and Peter (Acts
10:19-20), indicating which
routes they must avoid and which they must follow
(Acts 16:6-10). It is
difficult to decide if there is a distinction
between "the Holy Spirit" in
Acts
16:6 and "the Spirit of Jesus" in v 7; the latter expression perhaps
implies a word of prophecy uttered explicitly in
the name of Jesus. In
any case, the interaction of the Spirit's guidance
and farsighted mis-
sionary planning in the record
of Acts is an interesting study.
VIII
The Holy Spirit in Acts, then, is
the divine agent and witness of the
new age. He imparts life and power. To receive him
the prime pre-
requisite is faith in Jesus (which involves
repentance from everything
inconsistent with such faith). Faith
in Jesus was visibly attested by
baptism in/into his name. All who believed in
him and were baptized
in his name received the Spirit--usually at once,
sometimes after a
considerable interval, and on one
occasion even before baptism. What
is important is not the sequence of these
components in Christian
initiation but their presence. The receiving of the
Spirit was customarily
manifested in external signs; the chronological
variations between one
F.
F. Bruce: LUKE'S PRESENTATION OF THE SPIRIT IN ACTS 29
Lukan account and another may be due, in part at
least, to Luke's
thinking rather of the outward signs than of the
inward grace. (It may
be remarked here, although it does not arise
directly from the exegesis
of Acts, that the fruit of the Spirit, as
described in Gal. 5:22-23, provides
surer evidence of his presence than do the gifts of
the Spirit: the gifts
may be imitated, but not the fruit). The receiving
of the Spirit seals the
incorporation of believers into the
divinely created community of the
new age, and baptism in water is the visible token
of that incorporation.
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