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Fred Sanders on the Holy Spirit in Acts (Season 2, Episode 3)

July 17, 2024 by: Nancy Guthrie

This article is part of the Conversations on the Bible with Nancy Guthrie series.

A Reintroduction to the Holy Spirit

Join Nancy Guthrie as she talks with theologian Fred Sanders about the person and work of the Holy Spirit and specifically about his descent and indwelling of believers in the book of Acts.

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Nancy Guthrie

Saved, by bestselling author Nancy Guthrie, gives individuals and small groups a friendly, theologically reliable, and robust guide to understanding the book of Acts.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:39 - An Introduction to Someone We Already Know

Nancy Guthrie
Welcome to season 2 of Conversations on the Bible with Nancy Guthrie. I’m Nancy Guthrie, author of Saved: Experiencing the Promise of the Book of Acts. In the book of Acts, we see the enthroned Lord Jesus at work by his Spirit through his apostles. They are taking the message that salvation is available to all who will call upon the name of the Lord, first to Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And it is accomplishing its intended purpose—people are being saved. On this podcast, I’m having conversations with people who can help us to see more clearly the ways in which we see God working out his salvation purposes in the world, particularly in the pages of the book of Acts. My guest today is Dr. Fred Sanders. Fred Sanders is a systematic theologian who studies and teaches across the entire range of classic Christian doctrine but with the primary focus on the doctrine of the Trinity. Fred has taught in Torrey Honors College since 1999 and is an amateur historian of Biola’s institutional history. He’s cofounder of the annual Los Angeles Theology Conference and maintains an active internet presence via Twitter and a blog, and that’s really how I have come to know and appreciate Fred. He and his family are members of Grace Evangelical Free Church, where I got to do a biblical theology workshop recently and enjoyed that so much. Fred, thank you so much for being willing to talk with us today specifically about the Holy Spirit.

Fred Sanders
Thanks for having me. It’s great to see you here.

Nancy Guthrie
Fred is the author of numerous books, a couple that are pertinent to our conversation today. He has a book called The Triune God, which is a volume in the New Studies in Dogmatics series published by Zondervan, and then a newer book, which is the focus of our conversation today, a book called The Holy Spirit: An Introduction. And if you take a look at this book, maybe you think this is a huge topic. It is. And yet what Fred has done in this book is it truly is an introduction in that it’s not a huge, overwhelming book, but I certainly feel like I’ve got a better handle on the Holy Spirit after reading this book. It’s a volume in the Short Studies in Systematic Theology series published by Crossway. But Fred, I have to start this way: a hard hitting question for you. I learned yesterday that you call your personal website fredfredfred.com. And that tells me that though you are a serious theologian, maybe you’re not a completely serious person. Is that true?

Fred Sanders
I hope I have a good sense of humor.

Nancy Guthrie
So how did you come up with fredfredfred.com?

Fred Sanders
Well, it was a long time ago on the internet. I tried to get fredsanders.com, and a plumbing business already owned it. So I played around with different options—middle name, etc. Then I thought about when I speak as a guest in churches, people say, “Well, Fred’s an uncommon name. There’s not a lot of Fred’s out there. And that guy talked on the Trinity.” So I thought fredfredfred.com might do it. People might walk away able to type that into the search bar.

Nancy Guthrie
Okay, so when I see fredfredfred.com, I should just automatically be thinking “Trinity.”

Fred Sanders
That’s right. I’m also the third Fred in a series in my family, so there’s that.

Nancy Guthrie
Oh, well that makes sense too. You’re Fred III. Excellent. You start your book on the Holy Spirit saying that your aim is to introduce readers to somebody they already know. I just loved that. Talk to us a little bit about what you mean by that.

Fred Sanders
I was assigned the title, The Holy Spirit: An Introduction, and I didn’t really have writer’s block, but I thought that’s pretty cheeky to think I’m going to introduce the Holy Spirit to a Christian audience. By definition, a readership that’s Christian has the Spirit of Christ in them. Paul says if anyone doesn’t have the spirit of Christ, he doesn’t belong to Christ. So that’s kind of my starting point is to begin where people are in the Christian life, already in the power of the Holy Spirit, and then to begin theologically explaining that to them, connecting some of the dots. Not off away in the distance, Let me tell you about this person you don’t know anything about, but to actually invite people to start looking around at what they already know and have already experienced about the Holy Spirit, and then maybe try to assemble the big picture.

Nancy Guthrie
Why do you think it is that most of us feel like we need more of an introduction to him? We don’t want to say we’ve never heard of him before or that even that he doesn’t indwell in us, and yet we do feel like we’re not sure we know him.

Fred Sanders
I’ve noticed over the years that when I teach on the Holy Spirit, Christian people are attentive and appreciative and they fill up their notebooks and know a lot of true things from Scripture. And then about three weeks later, they’re back on the same spot thinking, Are we ever going to study the Holy Spirit? Why is that less clear? My goal here was to make teaching about the Holy Spirit a little stickier so that it would have some staying power in Christian mind. There’s probably a deep reason why the Holy Spirit keeps seeming to slide out of focus, and I think that has to do with the Spirit’s successful ministry of drawing attention to Jesus Christ.

Nancy Guthrie
Well, that really leads into my next question, because you say that the people most influenced by the Holy Spirit are usually the ones who have the most to say about Christ. So why is that?

Fred Sanders
I think it’s because the focus and center of the Holy Spirit’s work is to exalt Jesus Christ, bear witness to him, draw attention to him, apply his work. So the Holy Spirit’s a very Christ-centered minister in that way. You can have the optical illusion or the false presupposition that if we were to really study the Holy Spirit and focus on the Spirit, we’d begin talking as much about the Holy Spirit as we do about Jesus. But in fact, that’s not the case. The more you really sync up with and line up with the work of the Holy Spirit, the more you find yourself going back to the person and work of Jesus Christ, where the Spirit’s directing you.

Nancy Guthrie
What implications does that have for us who, either in our churches, maybe we think the Holy Spirit’s being ignored here because he isn’t talked about much? Do you think that’s an accurate estimation of our churches necessarily?

Fred Sanders
It’s really hard to generalize about lots of different kinds of churches. Personally, I grew up in a Pentecostal denomination, Foursquare, so I was around a lot of talk and activity around explicit attention to the Spirit. Now I’m in an EFCA church, and you could look around and say it is possible to neglect the Holy Spirit. There is such a thing as failing to pay enough attention to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the person and work of the Holy Spirit. And so if you’re habitually doing that, either in your personal devotions or your church life or the preaching cycle, definitely begin focusing the right amount of attention on the Holy Spirit.

08:16 - Neglecting vs. Overemphasizing the Holy Spirit

Nancy Guthrie
Talk to me a little bit more about that. You said in my own individual, personal relationship or my prayer life or Bible study life, how might a person be neglecting the Holy Spirit in that way?

Fred Sanders
The first line of attack here would be Scripture itself. If you’re in the habit of reading the parts of Scripture that are explicitly about the Holy Spirit and sort of accidentally glossing over it and not having any thoughts connected to it or not having anything register in your heart when you hit that phrase about the Holy Spirit, that would be a problem. I talk about the danger of reassigning the Holy Spirit’s work to other things. Every now and then you’ll hear someone in church say something about “the Father and the Son and holy Scriptures.” And you think, Oh, wait! I like all three of those things, but that was a strange triad. Shouldn’t you have completed that by reference to the third person of the Trinity? We can even—and this is more subtle because it’s less of an error, really—we can even reassign the work of the Holy Spirit to Jesus accidentally, if you know what I mean. There’s a way of being overly Christ centered. For instance, imagine a gospel presentation that says, Jesus loved us so much that he died for our sins and lives in our hearts. That’s entirely true. There’s nothing false in that presentation, but it almost goes out of its way to avoid talking about God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. We ought to say, if we are following the biblical revelation more precisely, God the Father loved us so much that he sent the Son, who died for us, and the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit, who lives in our hearts. Now of course it can get longer and more systematic after that: through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, Christ is also present to us and dwells in our hearts through faith (Eph. 3). I’m just trying to get the full Trinitarian witness. And in particular, unlearn the bad habit of glossing over the Holy Spirit or of reassigning his work to other good things.

Nancy Guthrie
Is there the opposite error that you see sometimes, Fred, a possible overemphasis on the Holy Spirit? And if so, what does that look or sound like?

Fred Sanders
And that’s why I mentioned that it’s hard to generalize because as soon as I say We need to pay more attention to the Holy Spirit, someone listening to this podcast will say, All right, equal rights for the Holy Spirit. Let’s put that name up there and let’s give equal time to the Holy Spirit and talk about him as much as we talk about Jesus Christ. And there I would say the first thing to notice is how unbiblical that is. By volume or by word count, there is a lot less about the Holy Spirit in Scripture than there is about Jesus Christ. Not because he’s less God or less active, but because his ministry is to draw attention to Christ. It’s right to be centered on Jesus Christ. That’s what the biblical message is. The gospel is centered on the person and work of Christ.

11:13 - What Is the Role of the Holy Spirit?

Nancy Guthrie
I loved your description of the role of the Holy Spirit being to connect all truths about God and salvation in a meaningful way. I don’t think I ever would have thought of that. But when I read that in your book, I thought that’s really what we all need, as many of us perhaps have a very loosely connected understanding of the things of God. So where do you get that, that the role of the Holy Spirit is to connect all the truths about God and salvation in a meaningful way for us?

Fred Sanders
Short of actual theological error or heresy—these are real problems—short of that though, once you’ve crossed the line into having a basically correct theology, the thing I fear most in the Christian life is to have all these truths of God in your mind but only as a collection— a grab bag full of twenty-seven very important things. I’m going to underline all of them, but I have no idea how they go together. I need to do a theological inventory to see if one of my doctrines is missing, because I won’t notice it missing. I have to actually like count and have a series. So it’s that sort of disconnectedness. I teach a lot of Christian college students who’ve grown up in good homes and churches, and they’ve got a bunch of true facts sort of scattered around in their head, but they don’t have any sense of how it goes together. So the sweet spot for me is to be able to show people this is an organic unity. These things all actually belong together with an inner logic that you can discover and move into and begin to trace. So you’re not just clicking things off a list or drawing them out of a disconnected grab bag.

Nancy Guthrie
So is the implication that when I’m beginning to connect the dots and things are becoming a little bit clearer to me as to God’s big purposes in the world that connects all of this disjointed biblical knowledge I have, that I could say the Holy Spirit must be at work in me?

Fred Sanders
Yes. The Holy Spirit himself is doing that work in you, making the connections, showing you the living truth of these things that could just exist as isolated, non-living claims in your mind. Also, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, when we start to focus and think about the Spirit theologically and biblically, what you’ll notice is there’s sort of a second move of the Spirit in your mind. That is to say you initially attend to God the father. You’re trying to get to God through Jesus Christ, your attention is all on faith in Jesus Christ who brings us to the Father. And then in sort of a later moment, you have this second bit of awareness where you go, If I’m focusing on God in Christ, it must be that the power of God is working in me to direct my attention and fix my mind and enlighten the eyes of my heart. What would I call the power of God at work in me, drawing me through Christ to the Father? Then you say, Oh! I’m already operating in the influence of the Holy Spirit, cognitively, as I come to know these things. So there’s kind of a waking up to what’s already happening that I think really goes with that organic connectedness.

14:18 - How Is the Holy Spirit the Breath of God?

Nancy Guthrie
One word that the Bible uses to describe the Holy Spirit, and you say it in your book, that the Holy Spirit is like the breath that we breathe. But there are also ways in which the Holy Spirit is not like our breath. Help me understand that more.

Fred Sanders
All the words that we use in any of the languages—Hebrew or Greek or even English—all the words for Spirit are related to words for breath and wind. And so we don’t hear it very much in English. We spirate or respirate, and you can hear respiration. That’s got -spir, -spirate in it. But it’s kind of a dead metaphor in our normal language. But it really is there. God has revealed about himself that he has breath and that breath is in him and it goes out from him as he breathes this influence on us. That’s what the metaphor of Spirit is. When you start thinking about that and say, All right, God said he had breath. Let me think about that. When I have breath, I’m interacting with my environment and I’m drawing part of my life from the quality of the air around me. It goes into me and provides and then it comes out of me. God doesn’t have an environment bigger than him that he lives in that he’s drawing from. So when he tells us he has breath, we think, Oh, that connects with my own life. I can think metaphorically and symbolically about that. But when we’re talking about God, he is his own breath or something like that. God is the environment that he draws on. Or you could say it negatively: there is no greater environment around God except God himself. That’s part of what’s built in to the image of breath that God reveals to us.

15:54 - The Spirit’s Work Before and After Pentecost

Nancy Guthrie
In the book of Acts, we read that the ascension is followed by Pentecost. And you say that up to this point, the Spirit has not been absent, but he has not yet been sent. I think sometimes we have difficulty articulating the difference between his presence and his action pre-Pentecost and then post-Pentecost. So would you articulate for us how we can best understand the difference in that dividing line of history that is Pentecost?

Fred Sanders
How to take seriously the new thing that’s happening in salvation history at Pentecost, while also recognizing that the Holy Spirit is eternal, is God, has always been at work. We can trace the Spirit of God doing things through the entire Old Testament. So what’s new The safest answer, I think, and the central idea that clears everything up and all the rest of it will fall into line with that is that he’s operating in the book of Acts at Pentecost and afterwards on the basis of the finished work of Jesus Christ. So it’s a little parallel to the Son. The Son of God was also everywhere doing everything and eternally present, but it’s very clear to us that there’s something different about the work of the Son of God after the incarnation. We say, Well, now he’s taken human nature to himself and died and risen again. And as an ascended human Savior, he’s taken his seat at the right hand of Father. That’s not just a statement of fact about God; that’s an event. That’s good news of a thing that God has accomplished in the Son. Parallel to that, something like that’s going on with the Holy Spirit—always present and active in the Old Testament, sometimes anonymously, but sometimes more or less by name, the Spirit of God. But what he does at Pentecost is he’s sent from heaven on the basis of the finished work of Jesus Christ. And I think you can hear that’s a phrase I’ve memorized, and when in doubt, I just say, Well, what I know is in Acts, it’s going to be on the basis of the completed work of Jesus Christ, who has died, risen, ascended, and taken his seat at the right hand of the Father.

18:03 - The Spirit’s Work in Salvation History

Nancy Guthrie
One thing that was new to me when I read your book, The Holy Spirit: An Introduction, was this statement—you said, “The two most important events in salvation history are the mission of the Son in the incarnation and the mission of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.” And so you presented those in a somewhat parallel nature of each of the members of the Trinity having a mission. Will you just expound on that a little bit? What do you mean by that?

Fred Sanders
When I think and teach about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, often people expect that I’ll be saying things about the eternal life of God or the structure of the divine life or something in itself. And there’s a lot say there. That’s big. But it also informs our understanding of the structure of salvation history. How did God do what he did to save us? And the main big picture lines are in the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son, and on the basis of the finished work of the Son, sent forth the Holy Spirit. So we tend not to think of Pentecost as a parallel event to say Christmas—the celebration and recognition of the incarnation. And it doesn’t loom large in the church calendar. It’s never loomed as large as Easter. But it is a kind of a parallel movement, and I think we can learn a lot from that. The Son who always existed came to be for us in a special way at Christmas, and in parallel a way on the basis of that, the Spirit comes and is present to us and in us in a new and special way. And so those two go together. Now, as soon as I do the parallel, which kind of gives us the through line and is a really helpful structuring way to think about the life of God in salvation history with us, you also have to remember the Spirit’s not incarnate. It doesn’t take human nature to himself. The Spirit’s mode of work is to indwell a human person rather than to assume a human nature. So obviously, the Spirit doesn’t have a created nature that he appropriates to himself, and therefore it doesn’t have a body. A descending dove or tongues of flame—these are emblems or symbols of the Holy Spirit that he uses to make his presence known. But he’s not taking human nature into union with himself like that. It’s not another Christmas as good as Christmas; it’s an incursion of the third person of the Trinity into salvation history on the basis of the work the second person.

20:31 - How Can We Avoid Neglecting the Spirit?

Nancy Guthrie
Somehow you articulating that gives me some shape and form to seeing those things as major events in redemptive history that changed some significant things—when Christ takes on flesh, and now the Spirit comes to indwell. So I found that really helpful. We’ve talked about this a little bit already, but let’s just return to it a bit. We sometimes hear that the Holy Spirit is the neglected member of the Trinity, and that perhaps we should make sure we don’t neglect him. Should that become both a personal aim in our lives? Or if we’re ministry leaders, are there actions we should take, habits we should develop in either the words we use when gathered or what we include in our gatherings or don’t include in our gatherings that make sure we’re not neglecting the Holy Spirit?

Fred Sanders
Yeah, there are. As we mentioned before, this will vary by congregation. Different churches have different places they are on this kind of thing. But in general, I would say one thing that I’ve discovered in studying the Holy Spirit is you don’t so much go out and carry out a program of directing proper attention to the Holy Spirit. You might start that way. You might say, Hey, I think we’re leaving the Spirit out. Let’s overcome that problem. What you find out when you do that is first, as we said, the Spirit will be directing your attention to Christ. But also you’re especially getting the fullness of the Trinitarian revelation when you start focusing on the Spirit. If you think about just the baptismal phrase, "Baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." As soon as I start into that phrase, “the Father,” you know what I’m going to say. And I’m not done saying it until I get through the very end of the phrase, “and the Holy Spirit.” And when I’ve said that, boom! There’s a kind of completion or a roundness to the revelation. And I think that’s really where the power comes from. To add the Holy Spirit to our ways of thinking and speaking doesn’t just satisfy our urge to give equal rights to the Holy Spirit. It does that,
and if we’re neglecting the Spirit, we should overcome that neglect. But what it does is it sort of gives you the entire doctrine of God in salvation history—the fullness of the divine being and the completeness of the work. You get this nice roundedness or completion to it. And that kind of completion or wholeness is the special work of the Holy Spirit.

23:00 - Why Doesn’t the Bible Say More about the Spirit?

Nancy Guthrie
What do you say to those of us who might wish that the Bible was more clear and distinct in regard to the person of the Holy Spirit? We hear him called the shy member of the Trinity, and I wonder if you use that phrase, but I suppose a lot of us just have a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit that we wish the Bible had told us a little bit more.

Fred Sanders
That was the part of writing a book on this subject that was a little bit of a spiritual journey for me because I found myself over and over, I’ll put it this way, I found myself wanting to correct the way the Bible talked about the Holy Spirit. Even at the level of name, you think I get Father and Son; that’s a family relation. And when I think about God the Father and God the Son, I think how they’re related to each other. The name Holy Spirit is not a family or relational name. It’s not even very distinct. Father, Son, and Spirit are all holy. Father, Son, and Spirit are all spirit. How is Holy Spirit a name? And if you’re not careful, you act like you’ve got a red pen out and you’re editing how God revealed himself. And you realize, oh, let me restate my goal here. It’s not to pay proper attention to the Holy Spirit. I want to be as Holy Spirit focused as Scripture itself is. I want to norm my understanding of the Holy Spirit to how the Holy Spirit has made himself known in Scripture. And if that means that the Spirit has revealed himself somewhat less personally the Holy Spirit has revealed the Son, then it’s not because the Spirit’s less of a person. In fact, it’s because I respect his personhood that I want to have in my mind the same level of personal characteristics and stuff that the Spirit has made known to himself. And if I find myself with a yearning or a hunger or a desire for the Spirit to be more specific so that I can picture something when I think about him, like I can sort of in the back of my mind picture Jesus when I think about the Son, sometimes I need to just extinct that hunger. Sometimes I can say it’s good that I have a yearning for deeper knowledge of the Spirit, but I should not satisfy that yearning by inventing ideas about him or pretending he’s more concrete than he is, or criticizing the Bible as if it had failed to deliver what it should have.

25:15 - God’s Plan to Dwell among His People

Nancy Guthrie
That’s helpful. Bringing this to a close, Fred, you write, “God has ordered his revelation so that the moment of the Spirit’s manifestation is not just an interesting thing in a series but ultimate and consummating that makes retroactive sense of everything.” It’s a little bit of a complicated sentence. But what do you mean by that?

Fred Sanders
Maybe the safest way to get at that is through salvation history and to notice that the biblical theme of the Holy Spirit is an eschatological theme. There’s a promise for the end times outpouring of the Spirit. Now, in one crucial sense, we are in those end times, with Christ taking a seat at the right hand of the Father. And the Spirit poured out in Acts 2 was prophesied in Joel 2 as something that would happen in the final days. And so if you think about the whole flow of salvation history, the Spirit is something that it’s all moving towards. In other words, not just the next event in the series but the thing we were always moving towards. God’s great plan has been to dwell among his people. And that dwelling among the redeemed people is all centered and focused on the work of the Spirit. In the sentence you just read, I think I was also trying to kind of shepherd that over into personal spiritual experience, that there’s a completeness once we experience and understand the work of the Spirit. It’s not just the next level or the next thing. It’s that this gives me back the entirety of my Christian experience of being adopted by the Father and redeemed by the Son. All that’s applied in the Holy Spirit. And so there’s a completion or consummation in that.

27:00 - The Spirit and the Bride

Nancy Guthrie
When you say consummation, I of course think about the consummation to come. When we get to Revelation 21 and 22, I think I can picture God the Father on the throne, making this announcement. And we know the Lamb is there, still bearing the scars, the marks of his work of redemption. And I know the Spirit is named there in the final three verses. So can you just talk to us a little bit about as we anticipate the new creation, can you help us with anticipating our experience of the Trinity? Do we know enough from Scripture to know the ways in which it will be different from our experience now?

Fred Sanders
I’m thinking about the presence of the Spirit in the book of Revelation. At the beginning, you have the seven spirits of the churches, and we could say a lot about that, but in general it’s sort the presence of the Spirit of God in the different churches. So there’s a distributed or a gifted out sort of presence of the Spirit. And then at the end when the Spirit and the bride say “come,” crying out for the return of Christ, that’s one of the places in Scripture where the spirit speaks with our voice. I don’t know if you ever noticed that. We say, “Abba!”

Nancy Guthrie
“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!.’”

Fred Sanders
The Spirit and the bride are saying the same thing. Elsewhere in Scripture we cry “Abba, father” because the Spirit’s in us. That’s in Galatians 4:6. And then in the other place, the Spirit is the one crying “Abba, father.” And if you think about that, the Spirit can’t be saying “Abba” to the Father in his own person; he’s saying our script, just as the Spirit saying to Christ “come” is saying our script. The Spirit is saying what the bride says in and with and for us. So again, you could say he’s hiding or is being shy or is not speaking in his own person but speaking in our person in order to empower us to enter into that divine life. There is a future intensification of the experience and presence of the Holy Spirit. I kind of have to lay my hand over my mouth and say I can connect a few dots and quote a few passages, but mainly it’s going to be great. What can I say? It’s when Paul talks about adoption and says of course we experience adoption now, but the resurrection of our bodies is the fulfillment of that adoption. And of course we’re indwelt by the Spirit now as believers, but there’s going to be an indwelling and a personal intimacy that will exceed that and bring it to its complete completion.

Nancy Guthrie
What is at this point unclear about the Holy Spirit will become certainly more clear. As we see God face to face, we will see the triune God in all of his fullness. Well, thank you so much, Fred, for talking with us about the Holy Spirit.

Fred Sanders
Thanks for having me on.

Nancy Guthrie

Nancy Guthrie teaches the Bible at her home church, Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee, as well as at conferences around the country and internationally, including her Biblical Theology Workshop for Women. She is the author of numerous books and the host of the Help Me Teach the Bible podcast with the Gospel Coalition. She and her husband founded Respite Retreats for couples who have faced the death of a child, and they are cohosts of the GriefShare video series. 

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