Pentecost and the Apostolic Preaching

On the fiftieth day the promise of Joel is said to be kept: the Spirit is poured out on all flesh, and the Church begins to speak. This file sets out the Pentecost narrative and the Spirit as Acts presents him — an acting agent who sends, forbids, appoints, and is lied to — together with the Paraclete discourses of the Fourth Gospel and the Pauline material, and it concedes the untidiness of Acts’ own sequence of Spirit and baptism rather than smoothing it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Day

“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:1–4).

Four details of the account carry weight and are worth naming before anything is built on them.

The sound is like wind and the appearance is like fire, and the text says “as of” and “like as of” in both cases. St. Luke is careful; he is describing what could be perceived without claiming that what came was wind or fire.

The tongues are divided and rest upon each one. The Greek is διαμεριζόμεναι … ἐκάθισέν τε ἐφ’ ἕνα ἕκαστον αὐτῶν. The gift falls on a gathered body and yet lands on each person singly. Vladimir Lossky built a whole account of the Spirit’s work on this verse: the Son unites human nature to himself, while the Spirit communicates grace to persons, one by one, so that Pentecost is the sanctification of each rather than the absorption of all (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London: James Clarke, 1957, ch. 8). The reading is influential; it is also his, and it is reported here as his (see The Two Hands and the Order of the Economy).

The tongues are understood. The crowd’s astonishment is not at unintelligible sound but at comprehension: “how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?” (Acts 2:8), followed by the list of nations. What happens at Pentecost is xenolalia, speech in identifiable human languages, and the miracle is missionary in its very form. This is the plain sense of Acts 2 and it is the reading this repository takes (see The Charismatic Question; Orthodox Pneumatological Critique of the Charismatic Movement).

The result is preaching. The first thing the Spirit produces is a sermon — St. Peter’s, which is a piece of scriptural exegesis ending in a Christological confession and a call to repentance and baptism (Acts 2:14–41). Whatever else the Spirit does, in Acts he makes the Church articulate.

The Church’s own commentary on the day is her hymn for it, and it reads Pentecost against Babel:

“When the Most High came down and confounded the tongues, he divided the nations; but when he distributed the tongues of fire, he called all to unity, and with one voice we glorify the All-holy Spirit.”
(Kontakion of Pentecost, tone 8; Pentecostarion.)

Genesis 11 scattered men by making them unintelligible to one another; Acts 2 gathers them without abolishing their languages. The unity the Spirit gives is not uniformity, and the liturgical text says so before any theologian does (see The Liturgical Witness).

Joel, and What Peter Claims

Peter’s exegesis is the whole apostolic argument in miniature. He quotes Joel — “I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh” — and says “this is that” (Acts 2:16–21). The claim is not that a spiritual experience has occurred but that the last days have begun, and the evidence is that the restrictions of the old dispensation have fallen: sons and daughters, young men and old, servants and handmaids.

He then argues that this outpouring is the act of the risen and ascended Christ: “Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear” (Acts 2:33). Pentecost is thus attached at both ends — to the Father who promised and to the Son who pours out — and the Church’s pneumatology has never been able to detach it from either.

The sermon ends with a command, and the command is sacramental: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). The gift of the Spirit is offered not as a further and rarer experience but as the ordinary consequence of Christian initiation. Everything the Church later says about baptism and chrismation is an unfolding of that sentence (see Chrismation and the Seal).

The Spirit in Acts

After chapter 2 the Spirit is the effective agent of the narrative, and St. Luke describes him in language that is unmistakably personal. He speaks: “the Holy Spirit said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul” (Acts 13:2). He forbids: Paul and his companions are “forbidden of the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia,” and “the Spirit suffered them not” to go into Bithynia (Acts 16:6–7). He appoints: the elders of Ephesus are those “over the which the Holy Spirit hath made you overseers” (Acts 20:28). He can be lied to, and lying to him is lying to God (Acts 5:3–4). He testifies, and his testimony can be joined to the Church’s in one verb: “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us” (Acts 15:28) — the formula that becomes the charter of conciliar life and is treated in its own file (see It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit and to Us).

And the sequence is not uniform, which must be conceded rather than harmonized away. In Acts 8 the Samaritans are baptized and receive the Spirit only afterward, through the laying-on of the apostles’ hands (8:14–17). In Acts 10 the Spirit falls on Cornelius and his household before baptism, and the baptism follows because the Spirit has already come (10:44–48). In Acts 19 the disciples at Ephesus, who had received only John’s baptism, are baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus and then receive the Spirit at Paul’s hand-laying (19:1–6). Three episodes, three orders.

The Fathers read these as the special conditions of a founding period rather than as a normative pattern: the Samaritan case as securing the new mission’s dependence on the apostolic college, the Caesarean case as God’s own overruling of Jewish scruple about the Gentiles, the Ephesian case as the completion of an initiation begun outside the Church (John Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 18, 24, 40; trans. NPNF I/11). That reading is coherent and this collection follows it. It is worth saying plainly that it is a reading, and that the untidiness is in the text. What the Church has never derived from Acts 8 and 19 is a doctrine of two stages of Christian life, one baptized and one Spirit-filled — a point that becomes practically important in The Charismatic Question.

The Paraclete Discourses

The Fourth Gospel supplies what Acts does not: the Lord’s own teaching about who is coming. Five sayings in the farewell discourse are the densest pneumatological passage in Scripture (John 14:16–17, 26; 15:26; 16:7–11, 13–15).

“Another Comforter.” “I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Paraclete (ἄλλον παράκλητον), that he may abide with you for ever” (14:16). Paraklētos is an advocate, one called alongside; the word is applied to Christ himself in 1 John 2:1. Another of the same kind: the Spirit stands in the relation to the disciples that the Lord has stood in, and the word forbids treating him as a lesser thing than the one he replaces.

He teaches and reminds. “He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (14:26). The Spirit’s teaching is not a supplement to Christ’s but the making-present of it — the sentence on which the whole Orthodox account of Tradition rests (see Paradosis: The Living Memory).

He proceeds from the Father. “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me” (15:26). One sentence contains both the eternal procession (ἐκπορεύεται, present tense, from the Father) and the temporal mission (Christ sends). The Church’s insistence that these are two different things, and the controversy that followed the failure to distinguish them, belong to the Trinity collection and are not re-argued here (see Why It Is Not a Verbal Difference).

His coming depends on the Ascension. “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Paraclete will not come unto you” (16:7). This is the hardest and most fertile of the sayings. The Spirit’s coming is not a consolation prize for the Lord’s absence; the withdrawal of the visible Christ is the condition of a presence that can be everywhere and in everyone.

He does not speak of himself. “He shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak… He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you” (16:13–14). The Spirit’s self-effacement is a datum, not an embarrassment. The Fathers take it as the reason the Spirit has no name of his own drawn from a relation — no “Father,” no “Son” — and modern Orthodox writers have made it a theme in its own right: the Spirit reveals Christ and does not reveal himself, and is known instead in what he does (see The Spirit as Hypostasis).

The Apostolic Preaching

St. Paul’s letters give the Spirit’s work its vocabulary. He is the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry Abba, Father (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6); he intercedes for us “with groanings which cannot be uttered” when we do not know what to pray (Romans 8:26); he is the arrabōn, the down-payment of the inheritance (2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:14); he is the one by whom no man can say that Jesus is Lord (1 Corinthians 12:3); he distributes gifts “dividing to every man severally as he will” (1 Corinthians 12:11); he is grieved by sin (Ephesians 4:30) and can be quenched (1 Thessalonians 5:19); and the assembly is his temple (1 Corinthians 3:16; Ephesians 2:22).

The Church’s ordinary Trinitarian benediction is Pauline and pre-creedal: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14) — the verse that ends the anaphoral dialogue at every Divine Liturgy. It is a good place to stop, because it shows the shape of the New Testament’s pneumatology: not a doctrine of the Spirit stated in the abstract, but a naming of him in the act of blessing.

References

John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles 4, 18, 24, 40. Trans. NPNF, First Series, vol. 11.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957, ch. 8.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988.
Pentecostarion. Kontakion of Pentecost, tone 8.
Scripture: Acts 2:1–41; 5:3–4; 8:14–17; 10:44–48; 13:2; 15:28; 16:6–7; 19:1–6; 20:28; John 14:16–17, 26; 15:26; 16:7–15; 20:22; Romans 8:15, 26; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 12:3, 11; 2 Corinthians 1:22; 13:14; Galatians 4:6; Ephesians 1:14; 2:22; 4:30; 1 Thessalonians 5:19.