The First Baptist Church of Granada Hills

For quite some time meaningful commentary on the person and work of the Holy Spirit was lacking within the Evangelical community.  Theologians, ministers, and laymen often saw the excesses of some of their more charismatic brethren and decided to steer clear of the morass by passing over the Holy Spirit in virtual silence.  Thankfully, in more recent years, this trend has changed and serious students of the Bible have ventured to discuss the third Person of the Trinity with greater boldness.  While this is a much needed corrective, it does, at times, lead to comments that ought to raise eyebrows.

In the Bible, the Holy Spirit is consistently presented in something of a supportive role.  While fully involved in the lives of the faithful, the Spirit’s primary function seems to be to direct our attention to Jesus.  As Jesus said to His disciples, “[T]he Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26).  Likewise, in the Book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit enables the early Church to perform great miracles, the end result was always the same: increased visibility and credibility for the gospel, for the preaching of the Apostles that was explicitly Christocentric.

The fact that the Holy Spirit works largely “behind the scenes” (avoiding attention in order to keep the focus on the Savior) can be frustrating.  For while the Bible contains scores of passages describing the Father and the Son in great detail, the Holy Spirit remains a bit more mysterious.  And as a result Christians often try to fill in the gaps in the canonical record with ideas from outside the Bible.

As informed believers we must remember that it is perfectly acceptable to be conversant with philosophical and metaphysical thought that developed outside the Biblical world.  At times such concepts may even help to clarify and illustrate the teachings of Christianity: I’ve personally quoted from Lao Tzu, Confucius, Homer, and Shunryu Suzuki in my sermons.  Likewise, during the first few centuries of the Christian era, the early Church made generous use of Greek metaphysics to better explain the relationship between the Father and the Son and the Spirit.  The Apostle Paul himself even quoted from pagan sources on occasion, lifting lines from one poem attributed to Epimenides the Cretan and from another penned by a Cilician named Aratus (Acts 17:28, Titus 1:12). 

But at the same time, we need to be careful of exactly how we use concepts foreign to Scripture to interpret what the Bible says.  For quite simply, there is an ocean of difference between clarification and control, and while it is entirely appropriate to use extra-biblical material for help with the former, it must never come to exercise the later.  This seems to be a danger to which our understanding of the Holy Spirit is particularly subject.  For while the Bible says relatively little about the Spirit, the ever-trendy faiths of the East speak volumes on the notion of spirit in general.

To use an unfair generalization: Eastern thought tends to speak of “the ultimate” as an impersonal substance or force or unity which can be “tapped” and utilized much like a spiritualized version of solar power or wind moving a sailboat along.  Conversely, when the Bible speaks of “the ultimate” it is quite clear that we are dealing, not so much with a force, but with a personal being– with a God.  And while this understanding applies, rather obviously, to God the Father and the Son, it also applies to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  In the Gospel According to John, Jesus’ words concerning the Holy Spirit are recorded in chapters 14 and 16.  And in both cases, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as “He”, not “it”.  As such, the relationship between the believer and the Spirit is, to use Martin Buber’s words, an I/Thou relationship, not I/It.  That is to say that when we relate to the Spirit, we do so as one mind with another, not as a mind interacting with an impersonal object or force that can be manipulated according to the dictates of our will.  While this may appear to be a largely theoretical distinction with little meaning on the practical level, as we shall see, one’s understanding of the Spirit exercises a controlling influence over one’s understanding of the gifts of the Spirit. 

One sometimes hears that a program of prayer, Bible study, and personal holiness is the infallible path to seeing the gifts of the Spirit manifest in one’s life.  If the Spirit is indeed an impersonal force, then this kind of thinking makes perfect sense.  As a substance without a will, the Holy Spirit becomes something akin to a divine vending machine: you drop the appropriate tender in the slot and receive your miraculous gift in the bin below.  But if, as the Bible teaches, the Spirit is a personal being, a being with a will and mind, then His generosity concerning so-called “sign gifts” may be far less mechanical that the above formula implies.

Just as Mrs. Zebedee learned when she made a request of Jesus, God may have a certain opinion on a matter which we cannot change no matter how importunate we are (Matthew 20:20-23).  God has a will and while He may honor our will expressed in prayer, He may not; it’s up to Him.  As such, there is no fool-proof system of action that inevitably leads to spectacular manifestations of the Spirit in our lives. One may pray, study and model virtue, producing the so-called fruit of the Spirit in one’s life—things such as patience and joy and so on—and still not be able to raise the dead or walk through a bonfire at the end of the day.  If study plus prayer plus virtue forced the Holy Spirit to work miracles through an individual, one would expect that every church with more than 100 members would likely have at least one person giving literal sight to the physically blind.  But they don’t.  Instead, just as in the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit does what He wants, when He wants, when He feels it is appropriate and useful.  Peter spoke and the Spirit struck Ananias and Sapphira dead; it seems the Spirit was unwilling to repeat this trick upon Peter’s would-be executioners when he was crucified in Rome.

When we have a healthy sense of the Biblical personhood of the Spirit, when we understand that He is a will-ful being, then the absence of certain spiritual phenomena in our lives, so concerning to some, becomes far less troubling.  Granted, we may not speak in tongues, we may not raise the dead, we may not do a dozen things the great saints of Christendom have done, but that does not mean that we simply have not hit upon the right magic words to bend the Spirit to our will.  It merely means that God, in His greater wisdom, just doesn’t think it is necessary here and now.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.