Jack Levison - Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life

Praise for Fresh Air

There are few elements of our faith that are as passionately debated or largely ignored as the Holy Spirit, a topic that easily induces both fiery discourse and faint shrugs. Mystery has always made for an awkward bedfellow. Jack Levison somehow invites us to dig deep into the soil of Biblical study on the topic, unearth and examine its complex root system, and then marvel at the beauty that blooms above. Wild and growing in imperfect rows. Let it be so with my own knowledge of the Holy Spirit.

NICHOLE NORDEMAN

Levison attests to the quotidian reality of the Spirit in the actual lives of women and men. A subtext of his book is that mainline church folk have a lot to learn from Pentecostals. Fresh Air invites a re-read of Scripture and re-notice of our own lives in the power of the Spirit.

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN

Ive often asked pastors, Who is the most neglected person of the Trinity? They always answer, The Holy Spirit. In this lively andwellSpirit-filled book, Jack Levison enjoys the exploits of the Holy Spirit throughout Scripture, provoking a fresh encounter with God. Jack is uniquely qualified to lead us, combining his scholarly understanding of Scripture with his deep affection for the church, both mainline and Pentecostal. No one will think about the Holy Spirit in the same way after reading Jacks book.

WILLIAM WILLIMON

For far too long, the Holy Spirit has been treated like the junior partner in the Trinity. In a book that is at turns both challenging and practical, Levison has remedied that. His vast study of the Holy Spirit is made available to everyone. This book promises to breathe new life into individuals and congregations alike. Highly recommended.

TONY JONES

Fresh Air is, well, a breath of fresh air. Jack Levison fuses an accurate but unpretentious examination of the Holy Spirit in Scripture with a lively and generous style that invites the entire Christian community, regardless of label, to embrace Gods Spirit in the everyday ordinariness of life. Breathe deeply.

EUGENE PETERSON

JOHN (JACK) R. LEVISON (BA, Wheaton College; MA, Cambridge University; PhD, Duke University) is Professor of New Testament Studies at Seattle Pacific University. The author of many books and articles, including Filled with the Spirit, he has won major national and international awards for his scholarship. This is his first book written for a wide, popular audience.

The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life

Jack Levison

2012 First Printing
Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life

Copyright 2012 by John R. Levison

ISBN 978-1-61261-068-9

Scripture references are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levison, John R.

Fresh air : the Holy Spirit for an inspired life / Jack Levison.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-61261-068-9 (trade pbk.)

1. Holy Spirit. I. Title.

BT121.3.L48 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduce, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press
Brewster, Massachusetts
www.paracletepress.com
Printed in the United States of America

TO MY CHILDREN

Jeremy and Chloe

because, in times of both exquisite delight
and enormous challenge,
they are always a source of fresh air,
of inspiration

He loosened his tie, leaned back, and told us that the words in Pauls letter meant there would be no more spiritual gifts, no further speaking in tongues. What words, I wondered? When the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away, he quoted from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. Pope-like, he delivered this message ex cathedra to us, his audience, from the deck chair on my parents Long Island patio. The perfect Paul was referring to was the Bible, he explained. And once the Bible came, there was no more need for imperfect spiritual gifts.

He was twenty-two, a newly minted minister from somewhere in the Midwest. I was fifteen, just about the time that I was feeling the call to become a minister myself. And I was dumbfounded. With the snap of his fingers, in the blink of an eye, this man did away with one of the most distinguishing features of the holy spirit. Poof! I was stunned into silence. His incapacity for awe at the possibility of miraculous gifts floored me. His inability to be seduced by mystery bewildered me.

Even at that young age, I bristled with skepticism at this interpretation of the Bible, with which our guest discarded something so significant, something so big. So, given that I lacked even an ounce of competence or training, I tucked the question away and headed to college and graduate school. When I turned thirty and had some breathing room and a bit of skill, I untucked it. It was time to grapple with the holy spirit. During my first teaching stint, at a Methodist seminary, I developed a course on the holy spirit in the letters of Paul. Still inexperienced, I knew I needed someone with more know-how to teach alongside me, so I fetched around until I met a pastor in Kansas City who had been influenced by the so-called Third Wave movement. (The first wave was Pentecostalism, the second wave the charismatic movement of the 70s, and the third wave a movement that emerged from both but tended to focus more on prophetic revelation than speaking in tongues.)

About three or four students tended to hang around after class, so we prayed together in a way that was new to me. We laid hands on each other. We listened to God for words and images. We tried to discern together whether words we heard or images we saw while praying had resonated with something from the past or something going on in the present. One of the students, a regular after-class participant, lay back on the ground, as if asleepwhat Pentecostals call being slain in the spiritwhile we prayed. She is now probably a standard-issue Methodist minister in rural Missouri, and I imagine the people in her church would be shocked by this blip of charismatic activity during her seminary days. But it was a part of her life, as it was of mine.

And still is. I still seek invigorating experiences of the holy spirit. I still listen in prayer for inspired images and words. And I still believe that the minister on my parents sunny deck on Long Island was just plain wrong: the Bible, inspired though it is, cannot replace the gifts of the holy spirit.

Thats a starting point.

I am one of those Christians, you see, who has one foot in the mainline Protestant church and one in Pentecostalism, more or less. I have never really set my foot down in Pentecostalism, though I did once have an experience that my Third Wave pastor friend assured me was speaking in tongues. To this day, Im not entirely sure, which probably says something in itself. Whatever it may have been, I think it was a private and profound work of the holy spirit that went beyond words. That, I suspect, reflects the Pentecostal side of me.