Filled with the Spirit

John R. Levison’s Filled with the Spirit challenges “two-tiered” readings of biblical pneumatology such as that found in Hermann Gunkel: “The activity of the Spirit is . . . not an intensifying of what is native to all.  It is rather the absolutely supernatural and hence divine.”  Levison wants to now where this leaves the “spirit of life, the spirit that gives breath.”  The “most ambitious” thesis of his book is “the redefinition of inspiration in such a way that it will no longer be possible to define the presence of the holy spirit exclusively as a subsequent endowment, as supernatural revelation that arrives wholly in a charismatic endowment, as the onslaught of the inexplicable and the advent of the mysterious.  Nor will it be possible to caricature the initial instance of inspiration as a purely physical reality, a poor step-sister to the actual spirit.”

This creates some problems: If the spirit’s work is the core of every animate beings being, what can death be, especially life after death?  Is the Spirit’s inspiration of the prophets merely an intensification of insight and wisdom they already possessed?  If Levison is right, why does the Spirit’s work in the New Testament seem so “supernatural” and “inexplicable”?

Levison’s book sets out answer some of those questions, and not all his answers are convincing.  But the problems the thesis creates are worth the trouble, because Levison’s thesis is spot-on.  ”You take away your spirit, and they die and return to dust . . . . you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.”