New Birth, Adoption, and the Πνεῦμα: The Role(s) of the Holy Spirit Within Paul’s Kinship Discourse

Abstract In 2007, Caroline Johnson Hodge drew on the suggestion that Paul understood the Spirit as material in order to propose that the Spirit in Paul’s view serves as a genetic link that establishes physical kinship between gentiles and both Abraham and God. Her proposal was promoted and extended in works by Stanley Stowers and Matthew Thiessen, and it has grown increasingly popular in recent years, but it has also been criticized in articles by John M. G. Barclay and J. Thomas Hewitt. Both Barclay and Hewitt understand Abrahamic and divine descent to be established by God’s creative word. In this essay, I assess this debate and find several of the key criticisms from Barclay and Hewitt wanting. I then bring a fresh perspective to the issue by exploring how Paul relates the Spirit to the theme of inheritance. This material shows that Paul frequently includes the Spirit as either a part or a pledge of the inheritance, conflicting with Johnson Hodge’s proposal, but there is also one clear instance in which the Spirit is associated with the creation of God’s sons, which suggests that Paul was not entirely consistent on the matter.