Dogmatic reflection on the Holy Spirit is generally occupied with his work in redemption, specifically, in the application of Christ’s benefits to the redeemed. And if one turns from this gracious work of the Spirit ad extra to reflect on his eternal relation in the Godhead, we discover historically that notions of “Love” and/or “Gift” are often used to signify his procession from the Father and Son. Thus, the Holy Spirit is largely associated with the positive notions of grace, love, and the other Spiritual fruits (Gal. 5:22-23). What often goes unnoticed is the Holy Spirit’s role in judgment.
This paper will argue that the Holy Spirit is the Perfector of all God’s works of judgment. I will substantiate this thesis in two major parts. First, I will show, through an examination of Ezekiel, the covenantal and metaphysical connections between acts of divine judgment and the divine essence. Employing classical Trinitarian exegesis, I will conclude that acts of divine judgment are undivided acts of the Triune God inseparably tied to his nature.
In part two, I will demonstrate that Scripture appropriates the final, perfecting work of divine judgment to the third person of the Trinity. After showing that the Holy Spirit is the “Spirit of the Day” (Klein, Images of Spirit; Horton, Rediscovering the Holy Spirit) exercising judgment in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:8), I move on to show how this prototype of the Spirit’s judgment is displayed in various ways throughout the storyline of Scripture. To offer further evidence, I will then reflect upon the judicial attributes and acts appropriated to the Holy Spirit in Scripture. Utilizing this biblical data, along with the Trinitarian grammar established in the first section, I derive “principles of pneumatological judgment,” which demonstrate the thesis of this paper: namely, that the Holy Spirit himself is the Perfector of all of God’s work of judgment. Together, this will serve one final theological reflection, namely: how does the Spirit’s perfecting work of divine judgment relate to the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord?
My research here is unique in its synthesis of (1) exegesis and biblical theology alongside (2) classical, Trinitarian theology applied to the question of the Holy Spirit and divine judgment. No other scholarly treatment, that I am aware of, seeks to flesh out the Holy Spirit’s relationship to judgment and the atonement by applying the classical Trinitarian formulation that all divine acts ad extra (and in this case, acts of judgment) are undivided acts of the Triune persons according to their mode of subsistence (here I follow John Owen’s Pneumatologia). This argument, I believe, has the potential to serve global evangelical scholarship with a foundational building block for formulating a coherent, Trinitarian understanding of the death of Christ.