Acts 19:2: Did You Receive the Holy Spirit?

Paul has just arrived in Ephesus to begin a major evangelistic effort. Priscilla and Aquila have perhaps already established a house church and laid the groundwork, but Paul's arrival will trigger the major thrust. As he proclaims repentance in the face of the kingdom of God, much as Jesus did before him, he is informed that there are other "disciples" like him in the area. On meeting them he apparently senses something different among them, so he asks the diagnostic question of Acts 19:2. This is certainly not the question we would expect to ask today. Their response, however, might not be untypical of what many modern churchgoers might give: No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. Paul then takes a step backward and asks a second diagnostic question about their baptism, another question that sounds strange today. They had been baptized with John's baptism. Proclaiming that John's baptism pointed forward to Jesus, Paul rebaptizes them into Jesus, places his hands on them, and they receive the Spirit, prophesying and speaking in tongues. Why, we ask, did Paul rebaptize them? This is not what happened in Acts 8 when there was a separation between baptism and receiving the Spirit. Were these disciples Christians before they received the Spirit? Why this strange (to us) evangelistic procedure? What does it tell us of the role of the Spirit in the church today?

The messages of John the Baptist and Jesus were very similar. Both announced the coming of the kingdom of God and demanded repentance. Both called for baptism as the outward step of repentance (Mk 1:4, 14-15). They differed, however, because John stated that One who was coming was stronger than he, while Jesus indicated that the kingdom had come in his person (Lk 17:21). It is not until after Pentecost, however, that the mark of John's Coming One is seen in Jesus. That is, John predicted that the Coming One would baptize with "fire and the Holy Spirit" in contrast to his own baptizing with water, which does not happen in any of the Synoptic Gospels. All of this is significant to Acts, which begins with the prediction and fulfillment of the promise of the Holy Spirit.

Paul came to Ephesus, then, proclaiming the kingdom (Acts 20:25). The mark par excellence that the kingdom had come in Jesus was the presence of the Holy Spirit. When Paul meets people who claim to be disciples but do not display any of the effects of the Spirit, he asks his question. Their negative answer indicates that at the least the instruction they had received was defective, for from Pentecost onward the promise of the Spirit was part of the gospel proclamation (see Acts 2:38), especially among Jews for whom the Spirit was the sign of the coming age, the kingdom. Throughout the early church Christian initiation consisted of four discernible steps: repentance, commitment to (faith in) Jesus, baptism into his name and reception of the Spirit. Having discovered that these "disciples" were defective in the last step of initiation, Paul wonders how much of the whole process was defective. By moving backward one step Paul gets the information he needs. These folk were not Christians. They had gone through the first step, repentance, but they had yet to hear about Jesus. Their baptism was a sub-Christian baptism. It was then natural for Paul to lead them through the final three steps of complete Christian initiation.

This situation differs from that in Acts 8 where there was no question about the adequacy of the preaching and belief. Philip, a trusted Christian leader, had done the preaching. The baptism was clearly "into the name of the Lord Jesus," so it in no way had to be repeated, for Christian baptism is once for all. The situation in Acts 19 also differs from Acts 10, in which Peter proclaims a proper gospel, but God sovereignly gives the Holy Spirit without the usual laying on of hands in order to convince Peter and the others to accept the Gentile Cornelius as a full disciple and therefore to baptize him. (One wonders if Peter would have dared to make such a step without the sign of God's acceptance in the Spirit.) Pentecost is different yet in that all of those in the upper room were believers in Christ and baptized. Only the empowering for mission in the Spirit was missing. In that situation, of course, no one could lay on hands.

The situation in Acts 19, then, is similar to the others in that the Holy Spirit is seen as the experience of normal Christian life. Furthermore, as in all Scripture, Old or New Testament, when the Holy Spirit comes something happens. The most frequent manifestation in Acts is speaking in tongues (Acts 2, 10, 19), with prophecy second (Acts 19; in Acts 8 something observable happens but we are not told what it is). In his letters Paul does not mention any particular gift as being characteristic of receiving the Spirit, but he does indicate that the Spirit is a concrete experience, a down-payment on the full experience of Christ in heaven. Thus we can safely say that Acts gives us historical precedence for the initial experience of theSpirit as evidenced in tongues or proph- ecy. These gifts are, of course, easy to observe. Presumably any of the gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 or Romans 12 might besimilarly produced, although, for instance, a gift of healing would be difficult to manifest if there was no one around who was ill. (In Gal 3:5 Paul associates the Galatians' reception of the Spirit with their working miracles, which may be another example of gifting.) The important issue for Paul, which Acts illustrates, is not how the Spirit manifests (according to 1 Cor 12 that is under the sovereign control of God), but that believers know that they have the Holy Spirit (see Rom 8:9).

Thus it was natural for Paul, given his theology of conversion, to ask if people claiming to be "followers of the Way" or "disciples" (as the early Christians were often called) had received the Spirit. This experience, however it was manifested, was the indication that Christian initiation was complete. It was equally natural for him to lead those who had not had a full Christian experience (for instance, had not yet committed themselves to Jesus as Lord) into that experience and then to baptize them and pray that they might receive the Holy Spirit. He was simply completing the preevangelism that John the Baptist had begun. What would be quite unnatural would be for Christians to rebaptize individuals who had already committed themselves to and been baptized into Christ, even if their doctrine were somewhat faulty. Likewise it would be incorrect to take the historical precedent of Acts and turn it into an invariable rule of how conversion and Spirit-filling must take place. Still, "Have you received the Holy Spirit?" is as appropriate a question today as it was then, for it is not only a historical question in Acts, but an underlying question in Paul's letters and 1 John as well.

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See, for example, J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), or Baptism in the Holy Spirit (London: SCM, 1970), for an exhaustive treatment of this theme.

For a full explanation, see David Pawson, The Normal Christian Birth (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989). This book is about the process of Christian initiation and its implications for the church today.

In Acts 18:24-26 Aquila and Priscilla meet Apollos, who "had been instructed in the way of the Lord" and "taught about Jesus," but "knew only the baptism of John." While it may be that this account is very compressed, we do not hear of them rebaptizing Apollos, only of their "explain[ing] to him the way of God more adequately." If the basic commitment to Jesus is already there, even if somewhat defective, only further instruction, not rebaptism, appears to be necessary.