The Holy Spirit, Conversion

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

            You probably noticed that I skipped the last line of the Second Article, “From thence he will come to judge the living and the dead.” I plan to write on that on Wednesday when I write on the topic, “Final Hope.”

            For today I want to look at the confession of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is often the forgotten Person of the Trinity. We don’t talk about Him very much, and that’s ok with Him. The Spirit’s work is to bring us to Jesus, who in turn offers us as the fruit of His cross to the Father. The Spirit is a lot like John the Baptizer in John’s Gospel, confidently pointing at Jesus and saying, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”

            One of the uniquely Lutheran ways that we talk about that work of the Spirit is in the way we talk about conversion. The first week of my doctoral classes back in 2007 or 2008 was like the set up to a joke, “A Lutheran, a Methodist, and a Pentecostal walk into a restaurant…” And they wanted to talk about conversion. They just didn’t understand our theology of baptismal regeneration (that baptism creates faith and its new life) and conversion. They were flabbergasted (politely so) that we have no place for ‘decisions for Jesus’ in our theology or practice.

            So, first, an observation: until the late 1500s and the work of Jacob Arminius, a Dutch Reformed theologian, no one talked about decisions for Jesus. There conversations, debates, arguments about what, if anything, a man might contribute to his salvation, but the idea that a human chose to become a believer just wasn’t on the table. So, although that language of decision and choice is so prevalent in American Christianity the fact is most Christians in most ages gave the Holy Spirit credit for conversion, more or less exclusively.

            Lutherans are among those Christians who teach that the human contributes absolutely nothing to his own conversion. The reasoning goes like this: the Scripture teaches that the unregenerate human is dead in transgressions and sins (Ephesians 2:1), ignorant of the things of God (1 Corinthians 2:14), and hostile to Him (Colossians 1:21).  To summarize, we are by nature ignorant of what God wants, unable to accomplish what God wants, and disinclined to do it anyway. Our natural lives are thoroughly oriented away from God.

            But the Holy Spirit, working through Word and Sacrament, calls us to faith, creating that faith within us. Think of it like this: the unbeliever hears objective justification proclaimed—that is, that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world—and the Holy Spirit leads them to the recognition, “He did that for me.” That’s it; that’s conversion. Sometimes the Gospel is proclaimed in words; sometimes it’s proclaimed in the word embedded in water (that is, Baptism); but the Word comes first, and the Holy Spirit works through it to create new lie within us.