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Langham Creative Projects - Ivan M. Satyavrata

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78 pages

English

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It is impossible to love God and at the same time be dispassionate about the study of God. Deep devotion to Jesus and an all-consuming desire to see his glory fill the earth should fuel the passion of anyone who ventures to write about God and help illuminate other people’s understanding of God and his ways. Few themes call for as much of a blending of mind and heart as that of the Holy Spirit.
The global spread of Pentecostal Christianity, often in context of urban poverty, has attracted much attention. The movement highlights a hunger for the experience of God in our world and provides millions of poor believers with hope for social transformation. Yet spiritual experience needs a fully biblical understanding of the Holy Spirit with which its claims can be properly assessed.
Ivan Satyavrata provides an introduction to the Bible’s teaching on vital issues and questions, many of which have been, and continue to be, a source of confusion and controversy amongst Christians. Combining scholarly enquiry with accessibility, his deep theological reflections and passion for unity will contribute to constructive dialogue and appeal to a wide readership.

Informations

Publié par	Langham Creative Projects
Date de parution	14 février 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781907713224
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0025€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Holy Spirit
Lord and Life-Giver
Ivan Satyavrata
Series Editor: David Smith
Consulting Editor: Joe Kapolyo

Contents

Series preface
Preface
1: The Wind Blows Where It Wills
2: The Spirit and the Church
3: I Will Pour Out My Spirit
4: The Spirit of the Living God
5: The Two Hands of God
6: The Spirit of Truth
7: Life in the Spirit
8: The Community of the Spirit
9: Keeping in Step with the Spirit
Bibliography

‘We believe . . . in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord and the Life-giver . . .’
The Apostles’ Creed
For Sheila, Rahul and Rohan
God’s precious gifts . . . my pride and joy!

Series preface
This book forms part of The Global Christian Library series published by Langham Literature, a subdivision of the Langham Partnership International.
The twentieth century saw a dramatic shift in the Christian centre of gravity. There are now many more Christians in Africa, Asia and Latin America than there are in Europe and North America. Two major issues have resulted, both of which The Global Christian Library seeks to address.
First, the basic theological texts available to pastors, students and lay readers in the Majority World (sometimes referred to as the Developing World) have for too long been written by Western authors from a Western perspective. There is now a need for more books by non-Western writers that reflect their own cultures. In consequence, The Global Christian Library includes work by gifted writers from the developing world who are resolved to be both biblically faithful and contextually relevant.
Second, Western readers need to be able to benefit from the wisdom and insight of our sisters and brothers in other parts of the world. Given the decay of many Western churches, we urgently need an injection of non-Western Christian vitality.
The adjective ‘global’ in the title of this seres reflects our desire that biblical understanding will flow freely in all directions. We pray that The Global Christian Library will open up channels of communication, in fulfilment of the Apostle Paul’s conviction that it is only together with all the Lord’s people that we will be able to grasp the dimensions of Christ’s love (Ephesians 3:18).
Never before in the church’s long history has this possibility been so close to realization. We hope and pray that The Global Christian Library may play a part in making it a reality in the twenty-first century.
Joe M. Kapolyo
David W. Smith

Preface
It is impossible to love God and also be dispassionate about the study of God. Deep devotion to Jesus and an all-consuming desire to see his glory ﬁll the earth should fuel the passion of anyone who ventures to write about God and help illuminate other people’s understanding of God and his ways. Few themes call for as much of a blending of mind and heart as that of the Holy Spirit. The spate of literature on the topic in recent years, while indicating growth in interest, also reﬂects sometimes divergent – often strongly disputed – perspectives on various aspects of the Holy Spirit’s person and work.
The heat and dust generated by debate over some controversial questions has, however, frequently obscured essential underlying concurrence on more crucial issues among those with a shared commitment to the authority of Scripture. I am thankful to the Langham Partnership International and the editors of the Global Christian Library project for the opportunity to outline a biblical and theological basis for these common affirmations, while acknowledging with sensitivity real differences of interpretation on some matters among evangelicals around the globe.
My gratitude and appreciation to LPI extends beyond this writing project to John Stott’s imaginative vision for strengthening the foundations of the church in the majority world by investing in the development of potential leaders from the non-Western world. As a participant and beneﬁciary of this project I am deeply grateful to Uncle John himself, Chris Wright, Merritt Sawyer and others within the LPI family for their faithful stewardship of this vision and strategic investment towards the cause of Christ in the majority world.
I am conscious of my indebtedness to a large community of family, friends and colleagues who have through the years helped shape my faith experience and life in Christ. While they are too many to list by name, this work reﬂects the cumulative inﬂuence of teachers, scholars and colleagues at Southern Asia Bible College, Bangalore; Union Biblical Seminary, Pune; Regent College, Vancouver, B. C.; and the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, Oxford.
This book would not have reached its present form or have been successfully concluded without the wise and patient counsel of the editors, John Stott and David Smith. David has been a constant source of encouragement and pastoral support, especially during some difficult moments in the course of this project. I am grateful for the professionalism of Philip Duce and the staff at IVP, who have been both extremely thorough and immensely supportive in preparing the manuscript for publication. My wife, Sheila, and sons, Rahul and Rohan, have walked closely with me along this journey. As with everything else, I could never have made it without their support and encouragement.
I pray that this book will be a worthy tribute to the blessed Holy Spirit and his gracious workings. I pray that regardless of its shortcomings, it will help make the praise of our triune God more glorious!
Ivan Satyavrata
Kolkata, India, August 2008

1: The Wind Blows Where It Wills
The Spirit and Religious Experience
The train was due to arrive on the platform in five minutes. Although I was carrying study tapes, books and work with me, I was still not looking forward to the twenty-hour train journey ahead. It was really a thought rather than a prayer: Lord, I really don’t feel up to a debate or argument with anyone. It would be nice if during the train journey I could meet someone who was a genuine seeker – someone whom the Holy Spirit had already prepared . Three hours later the conversation began.
Priya was a creative designer, probably in her early forties. Obviously well educated, she had lived abroad, was married to a successful corporate executive and was the mother of two boys. ‘I am a teacher of theology’ was my polite answer to what appeared to be a casual social query, and was surprised by the response. Her face lit up and she moved a seat closer: ‘I am interested in knowing how I can have a deeper experience with God. I am a seeker – can you tell me more?’
I spent the best part of the next four hours listening and sharing as the lady described various experiments in her journey within contemporary Hinduism, and I shared how my own search for truth and meaning in life had been fulﬁlled in Christ. Halfway through our conversation a quiet young man who had been paying close attention to our conversation began to express deep interest. He was also a sincere seeker on his way to visit a famous guru whom he believed would guide him to spiritual enlightenment. To my astonishment, later in the evening, two middle-aged couples in the adjoining compartment, fellow-travellers who had been listening to our conversation, also began to participate in the discussion. They were on their way back after having just concluded a religious pilgrimage to several temples in the south. The evening ended with our exchanging visiting cards and my praying with Priya: for her mother who was dying of cancer, for the difficulties in her family situation and for the living Christ to ﬁll the God-shaped vacuum her life.
This experience was a forceful reminder to me of what is undoubtedly the most critical question of our times: Can I have a genuine experience of God in the here and now? In most parts of the non-Western world, people have always been at home with the notion of religious experience. Thus the vast majority of cultures outside Europe and North America have always viewed nonphysical realities as having real existence. These cultures include followers of the primal religions found in Africa, Asia, Latin America and other parts of the world, as well as Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and devotees of other Eastern religions. They routinely accept the reality of the spirit world and accordingly view people as having the capacity for two kinds of experience, one, of the physical world, and the other, of the non-physical world, both of which exert a powerful inﬂuence on human life.
The post-Enlightenment West, on the other hand, for the most part, has relegated this dimension to the realm of poetic imagination or the pre-modern world of superstition, along with fairies, genies and ghosts. This modern attitude of scepticism towards the non-physical and the supernatural has its roots in the seventeenth-century Enlightenment project’s quest for certainty in knowledge and its conviction that true knowledge is obtained only through sense experience. The Enlightenment thus led humanity into a space-time box, programmed by the laws of natural science within which there was no room for a genuine experience of divine-human encounter. Under the Enlightenment inﬂuence a liberal and critical Christian tradition developed, which nurtured an intellectual scepticism towards miraculous elements in the Bible and virtually denied the possibility of a direct experience with divine reality.
The latter half of the twentieth century, however, witnessed the abandonment of many of the intellectual assumptions of the Enlightenment. Many discoveries of physical science,