Book Review
JT Martin
Originally turned into Dr. Madison Grace for SYST 3073 OX at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
June 24, 2022
Bibliographical Entry
Yarnell, Malcolm B., and Heath A. Thomas. 2019. Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person. Nashville, TN: B&H Academic. 160 pp. $20.00
Biographical Sketch of the Author
Dr. Malcom Yarnell currently serves as a research professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.[1] Having received his education during the 20th century it is no surprise that his efforts in pneumatology are in response to the trends of the topic in that century. Yarnell notes, “in the early twentieth century, most Western Christian traditions paid significant attention to the work of the Spirit in its more spectacular manifestations”[2] Yarnell distinguishes his efforts from previous centuries of Pneumatology by focusing on the Person of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity it is from this focus that the volume in question was born.[3] Yarnell offers a pastoral and theological reflection on the Person of the Holy Spirit in Who is The Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person.
Summary of Contents
In this volume Dr. Yarnell sets out to reflect and wrestle with the personal identity of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity, dealing with an impressive score of issues regarding Pneumatology and narrowing the lens of thought and reflection to the person of the Holy Spirit in response to the lack of modern thought on the subject. Yarnell recounts a conversation with one of his daughters whose comment on the difficulty of answering the question of who someone is, is such that people deduce who someone is by what that person does rather than by an answer to the first question. Yarnell utilizes this same type of methodology throughout the volume.
Chapter 1 focuses on answering the question: Where do we begin? This chapter discusses what the Spirit is based on a close reading of Genesis 1 and builds the book’s foundational principles of pneumatology from the verses. Yarnell outlines the chapter to emphasize three principles, that the Spirit is mysterious, that the Spirit is the mover, and that the Spirit is mighty. He concludes each chapter with a summary of key points.
Chapter 2 addresses the question of the Holy Spirit’s divinity specifically answering whether the Spirit is God. Yarnell draws his answers and discussion from 1 Samuel 10-19 emphasizing that the Spirit is God, is Sovereign, and is the Lord. Chapter 3 addresses the question, “Why call the Spirit ‘Holy’?” and Yarnell builds his answers from Psalm 51 emphasizing that we call the Spirit Holy in response and as part of the act of confession both of God and of sin. In the summary of chapter 3 Yarnell concisely presents a picture of the Holy Spirit as the active changer of human hearts in the process of confession building on the foundational principles outlined in chapter 1 and reinforcing the divinity of the Spirit outlined in Chapter 2.
Chapter 4 continues the Trinitarian investigation into the Person of the Holy Spirit by focusing on Jesus’ understanding of the Person of the Holy Spirit as expressed in the Gospel recorded by Matthew. Yarnell draws the following four conclusions about the Holy Spirit in this portion of the volume, that the Holy Spirit conceives, commissions, and is the companion of Jesus while also sharing in Jesus’ divinity. Chapter 5 utilizes the Gospel of John as a central focus to highlight who the Spirit is in relation to God, Believers, and the World.
Chapter 6 in a way serves as a narrowing lens of investigation which isn’t completed till chapter 7. Yarnell builds on the Spirit’s relation to believers to identify the Spirit as one of Life, adoption, and intercession based on the teachings of the Apostle Paul in Romans 8. Chapter 7 is the concluding chapter of the volume and is addressed to the reader, it is meant to serve as an existential guided reflection on the readers relationship to and theology of the Holy Spirit dealing with Negative and Positive expressions of theology alongside worship.
Critical Evaluation
Where do we begin? Yarnell’s response to that question is simple, Genesis, because Yarnell views it as the beginning of scripture and thus the best possible place to begin a study of the Holy Spirit. He acknowledges that Genesis is a text which has been the subject of debate among serious scholars and as such employs a hermeneutical axiom by interpreting the difficult passages through more clear passages of scripture.[4] He claims that the Holy Spirit is mysterious, but wrestles to make the point clearly. Rather, his arguments seem to point merely at the incomplete picture of the Holy Spirit in Genesis 1, not that the Spirit as a person of the Trinity is mysterious in nature. Thus, while Yarnell makes good points throughout the section and definitively offers a careful consideration of the interpretive options he fails to concisely show that the Holy Spirit in and of Himself is mysterious.
He claims the Holy Spirit is the mover. Yarnell does the explanation and argumentation for this point clearly and succinctly, culminating in the powerful observation that “the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the waters for the purpose of guiding his creation and protecting it.”[5] Moreover, Yarnell goes on to claim that the Spirit of God “is intimately involved with his creatures and their progress.”[6] In contrast to his first point, Yarnell’s work in the claim about the Holy Spirit as mover is clearly and effectively argued. There is no confusion about whether Yarnell is discussing the revelation related to the Spirit or the Spirit Himself.
Thirdly Yarnell claims the Holy Spirit is mighty, and he clearly articulates the Spirit’s involvement with and power to create, guide, and recreate life in many different circumstances. It is the sense of the Spirit’s involvement with the creative power and provisional power over life that Yarnell discusses the Spirit’s might and in that regard, Yarnell accomplishes the task before him to communicate the point with precision and practical engagement with an audience that might misunderstand the Spirit’s role in the Bible due to “His metaphorical association with a bird.”[7]
Chapter 2 is entirely focused on the trinitarian concern of the Spirit’s sameness in essence with the Lord God who is Sovereign over all things. However, his orthodoxy does not confirm in any way shape or form the adequacy of his work in addressing the question. Yarnell claims that the Spirit is God. His coverage of 1 Samuel 10 does adequate work to at least guide readers toward the conclusion that at minimum there is a concrete and tight connection between the activity of the Spirit and the activity of God as well as the presence of the Spirit and the presence of God.[8] Thus, Yarnell rightly claims that “the author of 1 Samuel believed in the essential unity of the Spirit with God.”[9] Yarnell’s second and third points are related and come naturally from the conclusion of the first. If the Spirit is God and God is Sovereign, then so is the Spirit. If the Spirit is Sovereign and the Lord is Sovereign, then one can conclude that the Spirit is also the Lord. Setting these basic points aside it is worth noting that Yarnell acknowledges the complexity of the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility as he introduces the second point.
In one way, Yarnell’s work in the third chapter can be seen as a continuation of and or consequence of his work in the preceding chapter. God is holy, and thus it becomes necessary for Yarnell to consider whether the Spirit is holy or as he words it “Why Call the Spirit ‘Holy’?”[10] Yarnell quite effectively uses Psalm 51 to illustrate his points from the scriptures, though perhaps a better question he could answer is why the Spirit must be holy.
Psalm 51, in his estimation, encompasses confessions and petitions. Among the confessions there are jointly things about God and things about himself and man, from this Yarnell observes David’s use of holy as indicative of the otherness of God and since, as Yarnell rightly argues, the Spirit is involved in the process of humans being made holy and thus, can be understood and called holy. Though perhaps a simpler fashion in which Yarnell might have argued this is by focusing on God’s apparent holiness and then connecting it to the Spirit’s holiness more concretely via the Spirit’s identification with God as argued in preceding chapters.
The Spirit, as Yarnell argues, is identified with Jesus in four ways. As conceiver, commissioner, companion, and ultimately as one who shares divinity with Jesus. Yarnell draws these four identifications from the Gospel of Matthew and spends the most significant amount of space on the identification of the Spirit as commissioner. In this section, Yarnell emphasizes Baptism as the commissioning of Christ into the three-fold office, claiming that Christ alludes to the past, present, and future within Matthew’s text. In this regard, Yarnell seems to tie the commissioning to the allusions. Perhaps the most significant part of this chapter comes in the summary where Yarnell observes that “The distinct persons of the Trinity may not be encountered by humanity apart from an encounter with the entire Godhead as one, for God is One yet Three.”[11]
The fifth chapter is in essence a transition from describing who the Holy Spirit is in the context of trinitarian thought to an emphasis even more heavily on the Holy Spirit in relation to believers and the world. Chapter 6 finishes the transition by asking the question “Who Is the Holy Spirit to Believers?”[12] Yarnell expertly weaves the final chapters toward a guided existential reflection in the conclusion that helps the reader ponder their relationship with the Holy Spirit and how they conceive of him.
Bibliography
“Malcolm B. Yarnell III – SWBTS”. SWBTS, Last modified 2022. https://swbts.edu/staff/malcolm-b-yarnell-iii/.
Yarnell, Malcolm B., and Heath A. Thomas. 2019. Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person. Nashville, TN: B&H Academic.
[1] “Malcolm B. Yarnell III – SWBTS”, SWBTS, Last modified 2022, https://swbts.edu/staff/malcolm-b-yarnell-iii/.
[2] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), xvii.
[3] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), xvii.
[4] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), 10.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), 11.
[8] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), 12.
[9] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), 23.
[10] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), 35.
[11] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), 75.
[12] Malcolm B. Yarnell and Heath A. Thomas, Who Is the Holy Spirit? Biblical Insights into His Divine Person (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2019), 97.
In Step With God 