Board index ‹ The Holy Spirit

[Wayward]

Who is the Holy Spirit? I see it being used in various places, but I can't seem to find exactly what it is.

[jimwalton]

The Holy Spirit is a person, not an "it," and He is God.

In the NT:

• He lived in Jesus and empowered Him for ministry.
• After the resurrection, the Spirit is freed to be the Spirit of Christianity as a permanent arrangement.
• He is the functional equivalent of Jesus on Earth
• He is a Counselor and guide for Christians
• He advocates our causes before the Father
• He prosecutes the world, showing people their sin and convicting them of it.
• He makes sure there is always a testimony about Jesus on Earth.
• He guides people into truth about God and Jesus.
• He inspired the writings of the NT.

Jesus states His oneness with the Spirit in John 14.16-18. He is put on an equal par with the Father and Son in Matthew 28.19; 2 Cor. 13.14 et al. Hopefully that helps. We can talk about this more if you want.

[Pine Apples]

So is it the only part of the Trinity that is actively working on earth not just in heaven?

[jimwalton]

Great question. The first part of the answer is that the Holy Spirit, the Son, and the Father are all the same essence. If one is here working, that means they are all here.

• In John 14.15-17, Jesus says He will send the Holy Spirit, but then in v. 18 He says "I will come to you." In other words, if the HS is here, Jesus is also here.
• In Matthew 28.19-20, Jesus says He is leaving Earth, but He will always be with us. That means His physical, resurrected body would ascend to Heaven, but He would still be with believers in the person of the HS. Where the HS is, Jesus is.
• In Psalm 139, David equates the Spirit with YHWH. Where the Spirit is present, God is present.
• There are plenty of triadic, trinitarian formulas in the Bible, equating the three as equals: 1 Cor. 12.4-6; 2 Cor. 13.14; 1 Peter 1.2; Matt. 28.19.

What we believe is that even though the Father, Son, and Spirit share the same essence and are one God, In the Bible, the Trinity distinguishes between the principle of divine action and the subject of divine action. The principle of all divine action is the one undivided divine essence, but the subject of divine action is either Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. The Father can send the Son according to his power, and the Son can be incarnated according to his nature without dividing the divine essence. In that same way, the Spirit is the one who indwells, guides into truth, sanctifies us. That's his job, so to speak, even though in principle all the Persons of the Trinity are unified in doing it all.

The Apostles and early Church Fathers struggled with language that would express these truths, and such language is still tough to come by. Technically we say that the Holy Spirit is the Person of the Trinity at work on Earth now, but that's within the context of understanding that wherever the Spirit is, the Son and the Father also are.

I know it's weird to understand, but the same thing is going on in the world of science, so we have to try to grasp it. We see examples in nature and science. All physical reality has a dual nature. Mass and energy are in principle inter-convertible, through nuclear fission or fusion reactions. E = mc^2. We can, therefore, speak of the universe as a "space-light-time" universe. It is significant that this motion of light is famous for its mysterious and paradoxical complementarity. It has the characteristics of both waves and particles, and yet it definitely behaves as a wave motion under some conditions and as a particle motion under others. This duality applies both in radiations of electro-magnetic energy and in the atomic structure of matter, in which the orbiting electron likewise behaves both as a particle and as a wave. The two disciplines of modern physics known as quantum mechanics and wave mechanics have been developed from these two concepts.

There are also several principles from quantum mechanics that may show us some analogies. The first is called superposition, where subatomic particles are able to exist in two states simultaneously. The second is that of nonlocality and entanglement. The principle here is that objects in far reaches of the universe seem to “know” about each other’s states, and separate particles can behave as a single entity. These may be possible analogies, if that helps.

For another potential scientific "validation" of such possibilities, in 2017 a group of quantum scientists (University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai) successfully teleported a photon from earth to a satellite in orbit. It's called quantum entanglement. As far as our discussion here, quantum entanglement means that the two quantum objects share a wave function and share the same identity, even when separated. What happens to one happens to the other—wherever it exists. They are more than identical twins, the article said, "the two are one and the same." Apparently, according to the article, when they interact with matter on Earth they lose certain aspects of entanglement, but in the vacuum of space, they can extend infinitely (eternally). It's just interesting.

People say that the Trinity is a contradiction, but this occurred to me the other day: Mathematicians tell us that two parallel lines actually meet at infinity. Somehow we accept that as true, even though it seems self-contradictory. If we accept it in geometry, can we also accept it in theology?