A second way in which the community experienced the Spirit
was through sacrament. Further going beyond what Hebrews explicitly states, the
epistle argues that the reason that the Christian community can hear and obey
GO’s words is that the Spirit has been poured out upon them. At the outset of
the letter, the author writes, “Therefore I, who also am hoping to be saved,
congratulate myself all the more because among you I truly see that the Spirit
has been poured out upon you from the riches of the Lord’s fountain” (Barn.
1.3). Thus, the author of the epistles claims to have first-hand evidence of
the experience of the Spirit in this community, perhaps related to his
observation of the community’s possession of Christian character in the form of
faith, hope, and love (Barn. 1.4). The epistle seems to imply elsewhere that an
individual’s experience of the Spirit began with the sacrament of baptism,
citing a sequence of Old Testament passages that cluster around images
involving wood and water (Barn. 11.1-11). As indicated throughout the epistle,
for Barnabas, God revealed everything pertaining to Christ in advance, and baptism
is no different: the epistle informs us that the Lord “took care to foreshadow
the water and the cross” (Barn. 11.1). In concluding his analysis of this
subject, the author of the epistle claims that those who enter the waters of
baptism, just as the Spirit is active in calling those whom the Spirit has
prepared (Barn. 19.7). In light of the contrast that the author of the epistle
is drawing between Christian and Jewish baptism (Barn. 11.1), the implication
therefore seems to be that the Jews, lacking the baptism of the Spirit, are
thereby unable to rightly understand the Scripture inspired by that same
Spirit. (Kyle R. Hughes, How the Spirit Became God: The Mosaic of Early
Christian Pneumatology [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2020], 44-45)
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