When Peter and the apostles appear before the Sanhedrin in Acts 5, Peter declares: “We are witnesses of these things as is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him” (Acts 5:32). Both the proclamation of the disciples (i.e., the Word) and the Spirit are active in providing testimony. And this dual theme of Word and Spirit is not isolated to Acts, for a variety of NT texts “depict the Holy Spirit acting in conjunction with humanly given communication about Jesus” (p. 1). Spirit and Word work together, then, in the lives of believers to provide illumination and internal testimony of divine truth, to enable the disciples to carry out their apostolic ministry, to produce moral transformation, and so forth. Wiarda lists four goals for his study: (1) to engage in a careful exegetical study of the texts that refer to the dual agency of Word...

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