Who does the Spirit "lead into all the truth"?

A few weeks ago (Trinity Sunday as it happened - this was the lectionary gospel reading this year), I preached on John 16:12-15. That passage includes this sentence concerning the Spirit:

"But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth."

The question is, who is "you"? Who, exactly, does the Sprit promise to lead into all truth?

In the sermon, I treated this as referring to the 12 apostles. (Well, the 11 apostles, because Judas had left by this point. Well, the 15 or so apostles, because they were later to replace Judas with Matthias, add in James the Lord's brother, the writer of Hebrews, and maybe one or two more.)

But why did I make that move? I sought to explain it during the course of the sermon. This flows out of three themes that have been unfolding in John's gospel: The revelation of the truth of God, the role of the apostles, the ministry of the Spirit. We must not treat this one verse in isolation; it brings those three themes together, and John has already said a lot about each of them.

But I thought I'd stick a blog post here, too, with a few footnotes. There are some good quotations in the commentaries that articulate this interpretation very compellingly.

Let's start with Carson:

“We are to understand that Jesus is the nodal point of revelation, God’s culminating self-disclosure, God’s final self-expression, God’s ‘Word’ (1:1, 14). All antecedent revelation has pointed towards him, and reaches its climax in him. That does not mean he himself provides all the details his followers will need; it does mean that ‘extra’ bits the Holy Spirit provides after he is sent by Christ Jesus, consequent upon Jesus’ death/exaltation, are nothing more than the filling out of the revelation nodally present in Jesus himself.” (Page 539)

… and this:

“Because of this theme of the finality of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, the church has always been rightly suspicious of claims of still further definitive revelation that is binding on the consciences of all Christians.” (Page 539)

And then he draws it all together with this:

“It is important to recognise that the disciples who will directly benefit from these ministrations of the Spirit are primarily the apostles. In two of the other Paraclete passages, explicit reference is made to reminding the disciples of what Jesus said during the days of his flesh (14:26) or to the fact that they had been with Jesus from the beginning of his ministry (15:27). Both references rule out later disciples. Here, too, the primary focus of the Spirit’s ministry is doubtless on those who could not, when Jesus spoke, bear more than he was giving them (v. 12), but who would need to be guided in all the truth of the revelation of God in Christ Jesus that they had been privileged to witness. At least part of the consequence of that unfolding is this Gospel of John.

“Derivatively, we may speak of the Spirit’s continued work in the disciples of Jesus’ today. But that is not the primary emphasis of these verses; and in any case it is impossible to think of such continuing ministry of the Spirit leading men and women to stances outside the enriching and explanatory ministry he exercised amongst the first witnesses, which is crystallized in this book.” (Page 541)

Then, if you can get a copy, FF Bruce's fine commentary on John is always worth a read:

“Jesus himself is the embodiment of truth (John 14:6); the truth which the Spirit will disclose is not truth additional to ‘the truth as it is in Jesus’; it is the further unfolding of that truth.” (Page 320)

… and then this:

“When the Paraclete comes, he will not speak on his own initiative. He has no message over and above that which is implicit in the incarnate Word; it is his function to make that message explicit. We are no doubt intended to infer that the Gospel of John provides a prime example of the fulfilment of this promise.” (Page 320)

Lastly, John Calvin, colourful as ever. We have to remember that his setting was not the same as ours. In our day, the groups most likely to claim that they have some fresh, authoritative revelation from the Spirit are likely to call themselves "liberals". You might possibly get this from Christians who call themselves "charismatics", although (in my experience) charismatics tend not to treat the Spirit's fresh revelations as binding on all Christian people. In Calvin's day, he's got the Roman Catholic church firmly in his sights. His rhetoric is influenced by this, but the force of what he says applies just as much in our own, different, historical setting:

“The Roman Catholics, who put forward their own inventions as the oracles of God, wickedly abuse this passage. ‘Christ,’ they tell us, ‘promised the apostles new revelations, and therefore we must not stop at the Scripture, for here he promises his followers something beyond Scripture.’ First, if they want to talk with Augustine, the solution will be found easily, for he says, ‘Since Christ is silent, which of us is to say it was this or that? Or if someone does dare to say, how will he prove it? Who is so boastful and impudent, even if what he says is true, as to affirm without any divine testimony that those are the things which the Lord did not wish to say at that time?’”

I said he was colourful.

All in all, it's pretty compelling. If we read John 16, and ask what Jesus meant as he said those words, and what John meant as he compiled them into his book — it's a clear promise that the apostles will know all they need in order to discharge the ministry Jesus left them with. Anything else, and we're reading back into those words wishes from our own day, rather than reading out of those words the precious promise Jesus was leaving.

Of course, just because the promise only applied to the apostles, it does not follow that this text in John has no applcation for today. It has plenty. Which was the subject of my sermon.