‘No one has ever seen God; the only Son…has made him known’ (John 1 : 18). God is spirit; so we may go on to say that no one has ever seen the spirit. It is like the wind and therefore mysterious; but it is no less ‘real’ in the world. Our final thesis is that the apostolic Church, according to the author of the Fourth Gospel, is the society of men that makes the spirit known.

Jesus of Nazareth, of whom people could say, ‘Don't we know his father and mother?’ (John 6: 42), is for John no mere man, though he was that too, a man subjected to fierce ignominy and disgrace (18: 28–19: 5). Jesus is the embodiment in man of the Logos, ‘the Word that was with God, the Word that is God’; and at the last even doubting Thomas must fall down in the adoration of ‘My Lord and my God!’ (20: 28). Once visible, now he is hidden from human sight in the glory of the Father's throne. He too as the God-man is spirit and the source of spiritual life. No one in John's era could see Jesus the Son of God with the eye of the flesh; but they could see his embodiment in the Church of his disciples.

How true then was James Denney's remark that ‘to understand what is meant by the Spirit is to understand these two things–the N.T. and the Christian Church’!