Raymond Brown helpfully observes, “For the Christian the life-giving moment of the Spirit was not simply the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus in the form of a dove, but the Spirit flowing from within Jesus after his death. And the flowing blood, the sign of the sacrificial victim, showed that Jesus’ death was an atoning sacrifice for sin.”
If Jesus is just a container of Spirit, the life He has remains His alone. He has to be opened up, split and divided on the cross, in order to give the Spirit to us. Brown’s comments also suggest a neatly Trinitarian account of the atonement: Jesus had to die in order to release the Spirit His Father had poured upon Him.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
