One month ago I visited the abandoned Deerfield Illinois campus of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I studied there in the early ‘80s with many hundreds of students. Now the central campus pond, where a cheeky sign once warned, “Sem students, do not walk on the water!” is quiet. On this visit two swans and their brood had it to themselves. Red “X” signs are posted on each campus building: “No longer in use.” This includes the chapel where I once climbed—early in the morning—among the steeple girders as it was being built. Neighboring Trinity College, across the main campus driveway, has been closed for a few years by now.
I visited another empty campus three months earlier—Multnomah University in Portland. I studied there as an undergrad and I later served there as a full-time faculty member until 2007. More recently David, a DMin student I supervised (as an adjunct faculty member), was the very last Multnomah student to “walk” in their final graduation—in April 2024. Multnomah was purchased by Jessup University to be their northwest extension campus, but that ended after a year. Multnomah’s surviving heritage today is Jessup’s modest online-only seminary.
Is the evangelical movement losing momentum? It may be. In April I visited the headquarters of two major ministry organizations in Orlando. Their parking lots were quiet—and visits are by appointment only. Again, not encouraging. Many decades ago mainline Protestant churches faced deep declines as they lost confidence in the Bible. But after seven or eight decades of strong post-WWII growth few evangelicals saw similar losses coming their way.
Both schools had declining enrollments for two decades. Neither had deep endowments. And Covid hurt. So both institutions turned to online education—first as a hybrid option, and then as residency course replacements. Ouch! Online studies may trim costs, but they also produce thinner products. Video formats can transmit information well, but their forte is entertainment. On-site studies, by contrast, offer much more life. Not just in classrooms but in eating together, campus events, sports, and in local churches. Life together supports active reflection, debates, growing friendships, and changed hearts. Neil Postman saw this years ago in Amusing Ourselves to Death [1985]. God changes hearts as his love stirs lives, not by independent readings, studies, and sets of notes. Jesus, of course, modeled a life-changing ministry of love in his peripatetic teaching, listening, weeping and healing. Paul did the same as we read in Acts of his Miletus visit with the Ephesian Elders.
The big question, then. Is God failing? Are the collective forces of the world, the flesh, and the Devil defeating Jesus and his Church? Are we finding an unhappy answer to Jesus’ question in Luke 18:8-9, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Or in his warning of the “narrow road.” Has Gospel growth collapsed?
Let’s stay calm. The Father and Son are fine, and the promise that the Spirit is pouring out God’s love in human hearts is still active. While in many souls a love of food, movies, sports, gaming, sex and small pleasures is winning, for others God is moving. And if church numbers are declining in North America and Europe that’s not the case in Africa and South America. So, too, an appetite for real food draws souls who are starving on cultural popcorn. God’s substance becomes obvious to souls in need. So a strong crisis or two may be helpful!
Let’s remember that the Bible doesn’t promote numbers. Jesus displayed the power of love rather than a love of power. He served the poor, the blind, the sick and the weak. While the wealthy and powerful people in his day wanted him dead. His shaping value of love for the Father and for his chosen people is clear. A bridegroom delights in his beloved, not in recruiting crowds to the wedding. So, God’s spreading goodness is alive and well.
Let’s shift now to a tighter focus: to the Holy Spirit. Over time I’ve realized how understated and often misrepresented the Spirit has been in my training. Yet my Bible reading turned on some lights. He (not “It”) makes faith come alive. Jesus, at his ascension, gave the Spirit to believers. And the Spirit has a central aim: to bring believers to Jesus. The Son is his focus, not himself.
Let me emphasize three crucial features of the Spirit’s ministry to believers as we navigate life in a broken world. He is God’s means for building the Body of Christ.
First, we need to see his role at the beginning. The Spirit was active in the creation. He was the life breathed into Adam. And today the Spirit restores believers to full humanity—to the life Adam had before the fall—by sharing divine life with creatures. Second, Jesus replaces Adam’s failed paternity by restoring the Spirit’s presence lost in the fall. Jesus guides his people by sharing his “heart” in the Spirit. This gives believers access to God’s communion—the substance of spiritual life. And third, by this means all saints are invited into daily, active engagement with Jesus and the Father—now as “Abba.” It is by this bond that deep new heart desires emerge. We regain access to God’s ways—to what he values—and start to “keep in step” with God.
Is this important?
Yes. Profoundly important.
This invitation displays our creation purpose. We—all of humanity—were made by God for God. And without this insight we lose our meaning. We devolve into a devotion to the creation rather than to the Creator. We’re called to be Christ’s eternal, beloved companions—his holy and blameless bride—rather than slaves to the dirt and darkness of the accursed creation.
These claims come from the Bible and not from any natural instincts. Yet we all retain an appetite for our creation design. Call it a soul-memory from the time before the Spirit fled from Adam and Eve in Eden. Blaise Pascal called it a God shaped vacuum. Yet only when the Eden debate, “you will die!” versus “you will not die!” is answered with “yes, we died!” do we get the picture. Adam died when the Spirit-of-life left him at the Fall. From that time onward the Spirit is absent in each subsequent generation until he returns to live in human souls. That occurs when some people, but not all, are born again.
Augustine, in the 400’s, realized that the main feature of sin is a lost desire for God. That is, any desire for the true God. Adam, once naked but unashamed, turned away from God and into shame. In trying to take God’s place he embraced empty self-interest and an upside-down morality. Now curved in on himself he loved darkness rather than light and trusted the demonic Lie and Liar as his leader. This was and is Adam’s heritage for humanity—the original sin.
With their sin Adam and Eve then had flesh-based, Spirit-empty lives. Each subsequent human birth also lacked the Spirit. Jesus apparently expected Nicodemus, a teacher, to know this. John three is certainly a commentary on Genesis three. And God’s promise of a future solution to sin by the coming “seed of the woman” [Gen 3:15] was a glimpse of light in Eden’s darkness.
As a result of the fall every newborn soul must “look and live” to receive God’s Spirit-life. Jesus tied John 3:14-16 to Numbers 21:9 for Nicodemus. The story of a bronze model of a poison serpent “lifted up”—presumably speared—is where we see find life restored by faith. God alone resolves the problem, and salvation comes when a soul looks to Christ and away from self as the focus in life. God keeps this invitation to his merciful love in view throughout human history.
Jesus offered this mercy when he confronted the religious Nicodemus with a warning that he only had life in the flesh, not in the Spirit. The Pharisee needed renewed life to replace his self-shaped-morality. John underscored this in his gospel progression by next telling readers of the broken “woman at the well.” Her response was profound! As we’ve already noted, God’s calling attracts the poor, the weak, and the ordinary. Not so much the high and the mighty. They aren’t interested in giving up self-generated and seemingly successful divinity.
The second insight is that Jesus, as the God-man, lived out his earthly life by means of his unity with the Spirit. His ministry began with the Spirit both in his conception and then in his water and Spirit baptism. Thus he is both the “son of God” and the “son of man” in John chapter five. And he was overtly devoted and obedient to the Father, by the Spirit, throughout his time on earth.
Jesus extended the Spirit’s new ministry—Spirit Christicism for theologians—after his resurrection. The Spirit unites himself to all who look to Jesus. “But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” [1 Cor 6:17]. And with this the Son’s reliance on the Spirit throughout his human life is what the Spirit now uses to inform and shepherd newborn souls.
Saints before Christ—Enoch, Noah, Moses, seventy elders, Joshua, David and many others—had spiritual life by the Spirit. David’s Psalm 51:11 prayer, “Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me,” makes this plain. But after Pentecost the ways of Christ’s earthly life were the newly added features of the Spirit’s work. Before then the Spirit used the promised seed/blessing—the “gospel preached beforehand” [Gal 3:8] in Genesis 3:15, 12:1-7, !5:5 and more. Simeon, Anna and OT saints had this as their basis for faith.
This brings us to our third insight. For believers the reality of our new humanity is based on our ontology [our “being”] in Christ. In the beginning the Spirit was present as God made the male-and-female-Man “in his [God’s] image.” This revealed an ontology of one “being” with three distinctions. The unity and communion of both God in himself, and the first Man in himself, is the work of the Spirit. He constitutes the communion of the Triune God as implied in 1 Corinthians chapter two. And in regeneration humans receive God’s Spirit by responding to his inward call. It is in this sense that the single and plural pronouns in Genesis 1:25-27 for single beings—of “us” and “our”—represent the relational being of God and Man. It’s also where the “natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” [1 Cor 2:14]. Spiritual union doesn’t make sense to those whose identities are based on individual autonomy.
The marriage theme of the Bible is, in fact, crucial in the Spirit’s ministry. It sets out relational life and intimacy. God’s plan—his aim in creation—is to give a bride to the Son. One who loves the Son as does the Father. The Spirit woos the collective “bride” by revealing the Bridegroom’s heart. Jesus swallowed death, a realm Satan presumed to be inaccessible to a holy God. And with the Son’s death and resurrection we are now freed from death and made alive only because God’s love and life is poured out in all who are newly “in Christ.” Believers participate with him both in death and then in resurrection and eternal life.
A corollary to this marriage reality is another Bible thread that needs to be elevated—God’s love is never imposed. Perpetual debates between promoters of the sovereign “will of God” versus champions of the “free will” of humanity both fail to grasp God’s love as the ground of his being. Portrayals of God as “pure will” and “pure act” may satisfy Greek and Islamic theologians but it misses God’s compatibilistic love. God is a lover who woos us to the beauty of the Son. Some respond while most do not. Everyone is welcome to “look and live.” We see this in Jesus’ wedding feast story that ends, “many are called, but few are chosen.” So, too, the wealthy and moralistic “rich young ruler” walked away from Jesus. Even though Jesus “loved him.”
A sound view of Jesus and the Spirit, then, has newly born souls coming to “abide” in the Son’s person. Drawn to him by his love, his truth, his values, and his companionship. The Spirit brings God’s heart to life as the fellowship promised in Eden before sin is now fulfilled in Jesus. And our lives as believers grow as we “look and live” in a growing daily delight in him.
Let’s return to the closed campuses we mentioned at the beginning. A recurring failure among Christians is our dismissal of Jeremiah 9:23-24. “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom… but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.” Helmut Thielicke warned that Christian learning always battles the Cartesian threat of autonomous human thought. When our “informed reason” defines what is or isn’t true. When revelation, in other words, is displaced by human reason. We know, of course, that throughout history fallen human reason has been quick to dismiss biblical faith, hope and love. This bias is found in many schools and churches, even among evangelicals. I stepped away from my full-time Seminary teaching role based on this concern
And what solves it? Certainly not by angry oppositions. But by the growth of a Bible-based focus on Jesus. With an invitation to “look and live.” It’s where the life of caring spiritual communities begin to form by the Spirit’s work. Through abiding in Christ, in his word, and in his love.
God’s broad aim is for believers to become the holy and blameless bride of Christ. John chapter seventeen is a good place to start. In “knowing” the Father and the Son which brings about the Spirit’s signature work: unity in love. And this is the witness the world needs, so that they, too, may believe when they see this supernatural love active in and through Christians.
