If one must understand the Scriptures, but does not, whose fault would that then be? Would it be by the Scriptures themselves? In this phrase, our pitiful, limited knowledge of the ideal will of God is dramatically underscored. We think we have the avenue of prayer perfected, but how woefully mistaken we are. We sometimes pray for things which, if supplied, would be most harmful to us. Too, there are deep needs that we have, but of which we are unaware. Accordingly, we do not think to pray for them. Wuest thus renders the phrase: Though the verb is a perfect tense form technically, it yields a present tense sense Arndt and Gingrich , , which indicates that we never master the art of expressing our prayer needs adequately.
This has the precedent of Scripture itself cf. For instance, it describes the anguish of the Israelite people under the burdens of Egypt Exodus 2: But whose groanings are these?
The Intercession of the Spirit : Christian Courier
It is not impossible, though, that there may be a blending of two thoughts. One thing is certain: It is imperative, though, that we emphasize this point: His work has been divinely orchestrated, consistent with the planning of the entire Godhead. The heart-searcher of this passage is generally conceded to be God, the Father, mentioned subsequently in the verse. The word means to examine, to investigate. It is a form of the figure known as anthropomorphism representing God with human traits , the design of which, in this text, is to emphasize the all-knowing aspect of deity cf.
Similar expressions are used both of Christ Revelation 2: The present tense form argues for the concept of a God who is ever aware of our needs. Again the verb oida , employed as a present tense see above , reveals the fact that the Father and the Spirit are constantly in close communication with one another, if we may express ourselves in the same sort of accommodative language discussed just above. The Holy Spirit is delighted to operate on behalf of a people dedicated to righteousness. God the Father and the Holy Spirit operate in perfect unison in the interest of Christian people.
They function in absolute harmony. As we conclude this rather detailed discussion, perhaps we could sum up with a commentary-paraphrase that brings everything together. Just as we entertain a precious hope for the future as a result of the promised activity of the Spirit of God, in like manner, even now, the Spirit helps us by taking hold with us of our infirmity.
Especially is this true in the matter of our prayers; we just do not know how to fully address our needs in prayer. On this account, therefore, the Spirit personally pleads our case. He takes the sighs which reflect the true needs of our souls, which we are unable to put into words that form a proper request, and he conveys them on our behalf to God.
And God, who is perfectly familiar with the inner workings of the human mind, and who certainly knows the mind of the Spirit, responds to our needs. He honors the role of the Spirit who is making intercession on behalf of those who have been set apart for divine service by virtue of their obedience to the truth. Most Bible students would agree that this marvelous pair of verses, dealing with the work of the Spirit of God on behalf of Christians, is one of the most thrilling one can contemplate.
He suggests that pride, excessive passion, and other vicious habits generate within us certain prejudices that prevent us from responding positively to sacred teaching Jenkins, In other words, faith formed by charity transforms the will by allaying the strength of those appetitive obstacles that forestall love of God. On this view of faith, the person who subordinates herself to God does so not as a result of divine coercion but by virtue of an infused disposition whereby she loves God. For grace curtails pride and enables us to grasp and fairly assess what the Christian faith proposes for belief Jenkins, In doing so, it permits us to freely endorse those things that we in our sinful state would never be able—or want —to understand and embrace.
Indeed, the arguments offered in support of Christian claims often provide us with the motivation we sometimes need in order to embrace them. But does the use of reasons or argument compromise the merit of faith? Aquinas expresses the objection this way: He also quotes St. In short, human investigation into sacred doctrine threatens to render faith superfluous.
For if one were to offer a good argument for the truth of what God reveals, then there would be no need for us to exercise faith in regard to that truth. What sort of reasoning or argumentation does Aquinas have in mind? He makes a distinction between demonstrative reasoning and persuasive reasoning. Were a person to grasp the truth of sacred doctrine by means of this sort of reasoning, belief would be necessitated and the merit of faith destroyed Ibid.
Persuasive reasoning, on the other hand, does no such thing. In other words, the arguments in which persuasive reasoning consists may provide reasons for accepting certain doctrines, but they cannot compel acceptance of those doctrines. One still needs the grace of faith in order to embrace them. A closer look at some central Christian doctrines is now in order. And although there are many doctrines that constitute sacred teaching, at least two are foundational to Christianity and subject to thorough analysis by Aquinas.
These include the Incarnation and the Trinity. Aquinas takes both of these doctrines to be essential to Christian teaching and necessary to believe in order to receive salvation see ST IIaIIae 2. For this reason it will be beneficial to explore what these doctrines assert. The doctrine of the Incarnation teaches that God literally and in history became human in the person of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the Incarnation further teaches that Christ is the complete and perfect union of two natures, human and divine.
The idea here is not that Jesus is some strange hybrid, a chimera of human and divine parts.
THE BLOCKAGE OF THE SPIRIT
The idea rather is that in Christ there is a merger of two natures into one hypostasis —a subsisting individual composed of two discrete but complete essences ST III 2. Aquinas' efforts to explicate and defend this doctrine are ingenious but may prove frustrating without a more advanced understanding of the metaphysical framework he employs see Stump for a treatment of this subject.
Rather than pursue the complexities of that framework, we will instead address a different matter to which the Incarnation is intricately connected. According to Christian teaching, human beings are estranged from God. So understood, sin refers not to a specific immoral act but a spiritual wounding that diminishes the good of human nature ST IaIIae Further, Christian doctrine states that we become progressively more corrupt as we yield to sinful tendencies over time.
Sinful choices produce corresponding habits, or vices, that reinforce hostility towards God and put beatitude further beyond our reach. No amount of human effort can remedy this problem. The damage wrought by sin prevents us from meriting divine favor or even wanting the sort of goods that which makes union with God possible. The Incarnation makes reconciliation with God possible. To understand this claim, we must consider another doctrine to which the Incarnation is inextricably tied, namely, the doctrine of the Atonement.
According to the doctrine of Atonement, God reconciles himself to human beings through Christ, whose suffering and death compensates for our transgressions ST III Yet this satisfaction does not consist in making reparations for past transgressions. Rather it consists in God healing our wounded natures and making union with him possible.
From this perspective, satisfaction is more restorative than retributive. As Eleonore Stump notes: A partial list is as follows: This last benefit requires explanation. Only a supernatural transformation of our recalcitrant wills can heal our corrupt nature and make us people who steadily trust, hope in, and love God as the source of our beatitude. This brief description of grace might suggest that it is an infused virtue much like faith, hope, and charity. According to Aquinas, however, grace is not a virtue. This account helps explain why grace is said to justify sinners.
Justification consists not only in the remittance of sins, but in a transmutation whereby our wills are supernaturally directed away from morally deficient ends and towards God. In this way God, by means of his grace, heals our fallen nature, pardons sin, and makes us worthy of eternal life. Now, remission of sin and moral renovation cannot occur apart from the work God himself accomplishes through Christ. Yet such favor was not limited to Christ.
Experiences of Spirituality and Spiritual Values in the Context of Nursing – An Integrative Review
But again, the aim of satisfaction is not to appease God through acts of restitution but to renovate our wills and make possible a right relationship with him Stump, Thus we ought not to look at Christ simply as an instrument by which our sins are wiped clean, but as one whose sacrificial efforts produce in us a genuine love for God and make possible the very union we desire ST III The preceding survey of the Incarnation and the Atonement will undoubtedly raise further questions that we cannot possibly address here.
For a careful treatment of this issue, see Stump: Instead, this brief survey attempts only a provisional account of how the Incarnation makes atonement for sin and reconciliation with God possible. This section will focus on the doctrine of the Trinity with all the typical caveats implied, of course. Aquinas' definition of the Trinity is in full accord with the orthodox account of what Christians traditionally believe about God.
According to that account, God is one. That is, his essence is one of supreme unity and simplicity. Yet the doctrine also states that there are three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By distinct, Aquinas means that the persons of the Trinity are real individuals and not, say, the same individual understood under different descriptions. Moreover, each of the three persons is identical to the divine essence. That is, each person of the Trinity is equally to God. The doctrine is admittedly confounding. But if it is true , then it should be internally coherent.
In fact, Aquinas insists that, although we cannot prove the doctrine through our own demonstrative efforts, we can nevertheless show that this and other doctrines known through the light of faith are not contradictory de Trinitate , 1. Aquinas' exposition of the Trinity endeavors to avoid two notable heresies: It teaches that Christ was created by God at a point in time and therefore not co-eternal with him.
In short, God and Christ are distinct substances. The other heresy, Sabellianism, attempts to preserve divine unity by denying any real distinction in God. Aquinas' account attempts to avoid these heresies by affirming that the persons of the Trinity are distinct without denying the complete unity of the divine essence. How does Aquinas go about defending the traditional doctrine?
The challenge, of course, is to show that the claim. In an effort to reconcile 1 and 2 , Aquinas argues that there are relations in God. For example, we find in God the relational notion of paternity which implies fatherhood and filiation which implies sonship ST Ia Paternity and filiation imply different things. Thus if there is paternity and filiation in God, then there must be a real distinction of persons that the divine essence comprises ST Ia The notion of distinction , however, does not contravene the doctrine of simplicity because according to Aquinas we can have a distinction of persons while maintaining divine unity.
This last claim is obviously the troubling one. How can we have real distinction within a being that is perfectly one? The answer to this question requires we look a bit more closely at what Aquinas means by relation. The idea of relation goes back at least as far as Aristotle for a good survey of medieval analyses of relations, see Brower, For Aristotle and his commentators, the term relation refers to a property that allies the thing that has it with something else. Thus he speaks of a relation as that which makes something of , than , or to some other thing Aristotle, Categories , Book 7, 6b1.
On the other hand, the notion of relation need not denote a property that allies different substances.
It can also refer to distinctions that are internal to a substance. This second construal is the way Aquinas understands the notion of relation as it applies to God. For there is within God a relation of persons, each of which enjoys a characteristic the others do not have. As we noted before, God the Father has the characteristic of paternity, God the Son has the characteristic of filiation, and so on. These characteristics are unique to each person, thus creating a kind of opposition that connotes real distinction ST Ia Care is required before proceeding here.
Each of the aforementioned relations not only inhere in the divine essence, they are identical to it in the sense that each member of the Trinity is identical to God ST Ia From this abbreviated account we see that relation as it exists in God is not, as it is for creatures, an accidental property.
For the relation, being identical to God, does not add to or modify the divine substance in any way. This woefully truncated account of Aquinas' position presents a more detailed articulation of the very claim he needs to explain. One can still ask: Aquinas is aware of the worry. Aquinas recognizes that most people will find it difficult to imagine how something can have within itself multiple relations and at the same time be an unqualified unity.
In order to show how one might have a plurality while preserving unity, consider the following analogy. Although the authors do not have Aquinas' account of divine relations in mind when using this analogy, we may cautiously avail ourselves of their insights. If we can think of the lump of bronze and the configuration by which the bronze is a statue as a relation of two things, then we can see that relation does not concern anything that is not identical to the object the bronze statue. Such an account is similar to the one Aquinas has in mind when attempting reconcile 1 and 2. For although each person of the Trinity is distinct from each other, each person is not distinct from God ST Ia Some readers might object to the use of such analogies.
INTRODUCTION
In the present case, the relations that inhere in God are persons , not formally discrete features of an artifact. Moreover, the analogy does not adequately capture the precise nature of the relations as they exist in God. For Aquinas, the divine relations are relations of procession. Aquinas is careful not to suggest that the form of procession mentioned here does not consist in the production of separate beings.
Jesus does not, as Arius taught, proceed from God as a created being. Nor does the Holy Spirit proceed from Father and Son as a creature of both. In order to make sense of this idea, Aquinas employs the analogy of understanding, which consists in an interior process, namely, the conceptualization of an object understood and signified by speech Ibid. He refers to this process as intelligible emanation. Intelligible concepts proceed but are not distinct from the agent who conceives them. This notion is central to Aquinas' account of how Father and Son relate to each other.
For the Son does not proceed from the Father as a separate being but as an intelligible conception of God himself. These words may sound cryptic to the casual reader, but Davies helps render them comprehensible. Aquinas' attempt to render the doctrine of the Trinity coherent is controversial and involves complexities not addressed here. At such times, the mind may come under attack and become confused. The emotion may feel lonely and sad, and the will may feel tired and lifeless, unable to direct the person.
The body may feel very weak or somewhat lazy. He will appear shy or withdrawn, and he will not want to do anything in public. He will prefer to retreat to the rear of the battle line, and he will not want to expose himself. He may think that this is an enlightenment for him, but actually this is a blockage of his spirit. When he reads the Bible, he does not seem to have much energy. When he prays, he does not seem to have any words to say.
When he considers his spiritual work and experience, they seem meaningless and even, at times, silly. When he preaches, he does not sense any result and feels that he is only going through the motions. If this condition persists, the believer will come under further attack and find himself choked and muffled. This will continue unless God intervenes through other men or through his own prayer.
If a believer does not have the proper knowledge, he will become very bewildered. Usually he does not try to search for the reason, but instead allows it to go on. Strictly speaking, every spiritual experience and feeling has a cause to it. We should study it carefully and not allow it to remain in us indefinitely. Such an experience happens when there is a blockage of the spirit. The soul and body outside the spirit have been locked up, and the spirit has no chance to express itself.
Satan has imprisoned the spirit and locked it up in a dark room so that the soul no longer has the leading of the spirit. Once the thing that blocks the spirit is removed, the believer will find the outlets cleared, and he will recover his former lightness. It is very important for a believer at such times to exercise his will to speak aloud.
He should speak words of rebuke against the enemy, and he should speak out with a loud voice the victory of the cross and the defeat of the enemy. Prayer is another way. Prayer is often the way to remove the blockages. But at these times, one has to pray out loud. The best kind of prayer at such a time is to call on the victorious name of the Lord Jesus and withstand all the attacks of the enemy. One should also exercise his spirit and channel its strength to break open a way to come out. This is what the fiery darts of the enemy do.
Hence, this greatly affects a person. When a believer feels sorrowful, he thinks he is feeling sorrowful, considering this sorrow to be very natural. He does not try to find out its cause nor does he try to oppose it at all.