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247 Chapter 15 The Promise of the Spirit of Life in the Book of Ezekiel Ezekiel 36–37, with its promise of a new heart and spirit and the famed vision of the valley of dry bones, appears to have exercised extensive influence upon the development of early Christian pneumatology. F. W. Horn, for example, recognizes the importance of Ezekiel 36–37 as a foreground to Pauline pneumatology: “insofern es sich hier explizit um den Geist Gottes als Gabe an die endzeitliche Gemeinde handelt, die mit dieser Gabe zu einem neuen Handeln befähigt wird . . . Übereinstimmend mit den ntl. Aussagen ist jedoch, dass die Gabe des Geistes, für Ez zukünftige Gabe, hier als gegenwärtige Grösse functional endzeitliches Verhalten eröffnet.”1 M. V. Hubbard similarly connects Ezekiel and Paul: “Like Ezekiel before him, Paul perceived the chief significance of the eschatological Spirit to lie in its ability to produce life.”2 J. D. G. Dunn, therefore, is hardly alone in observing that the ubiquitous phrase, “give the spirit,” and its variations may ultimately have been derived from “Ezek. 37:6, 14, part of Ezekiel’s so powerfully evocative vision of spiritual renewal.”3 This unique volume, which honors the achievements of scholars who have emerged from disparate Jewish and Christian traditions to discover a meeting-point in which Judaism and Christianity share so much in common, provides an exceptional opportunity to observe and examine one important dimension of the early Christian appropriation of Jewish scripture.4 Viewed from the perspective of much of Pauline scholarship, Ezekiel’s vision of a “new creation” becomes single-dimensional . It becomes an eschatological gift of the spirit that has the ability to produce life, an evocative, though fairly flat, vision of spiritual John R. Levison renewal. This appropriation of Ezekiel focuses principally upon Ezekiel 36–37, eclipsing related texts from Ezekiel that are of no less importance . For example, even in an otherwise detailed recent analysis of the Hebrew scriptures, F. Philip analyzes the notion of a “new heart and spirit” in Ezekiel 36–37 without comparing it to related texts in Ezekiel 11 and 18.5 What can be lost in such a construal of Ezekiel are the textures of his visions, the painstaking way in which Ezekiel’s visions of the spirit were metamorphosed, as historical realities pressed upon him and his people.6 The contribution of this study is to recapture those textures within Ezekiel’s vision of a new creation that have been lost due to the unintentional and subtle tendency to isolate individual scriptural texts on the basis of their presumed relevance for Pauline theology. What emerges in the powerfully positive visions of Ezekiel 36–37 is the end of a long process that encompasses as well Ezekiel 11:17, 21 and 18:31-32. Taken together, these visions convey the distinct impression that the process of revitalization is not a simple one; the life-giving procedure takes its time. A central thrust of this essay is to say just this, that the spiritual renewal that is envisaged in the writings of Ezekiel is a protracted process, one far more protracted than a reading of Pauline literature would suggest. It is possible to track the way in which Ezekiel’s own take on the action of spiritual renewal shifted in the course of a few debilitating decades. As the situation in Jerusalem deteriorated with successive deportations during that first and fateful decade of the sixth century B.C.E., Ezekiel adapted his view of renewal by the spirit. His earliest oracles of restoration are less trenchant and more optimistic. Later, however , Ezekiel receives an oracle to preach to a disheartened Israel, and here his conceptions of the spirit begin their metamorphosis. Only in these subsequent oracles does Ezekiel grapple with the protracted process that is required to lead Israel from its old ways, from its familiar, faulty worship to a new way of life in the land of Israel. Yet this place is still not the end of the road; the truest end is a valley of very many, very dry bones. Here, in the valley of the shadow of death, Ezekiel reckons with the discontinuity that surely must divide the ghastly present from a splendid future. A New Heart and Spirit Human Initiative As the Babylonian noose tightened around Israel’s neck, some Israelites naturally, and probably justifiably, raised the question of responsibility. 248 John R. Levison [18.218.61.16] Project MUSE (2024...

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