Hello, Internet; I am Pastor Recoil, and welcome to my parish. Today we’re talking about another of the big questions in Christianity: Who is the Holy Spirit?
Introduction
We’re on the third video of this series, having already talked about God in Trinity, as well as two of the persons of the Trinity, the Parent and the Son. Today we’re talking about the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the hardest person of the Trinity to talk about, in large part because one of the main purposes of the Spirit is to point people to either God the Son or God the Parent, so this probably won’t be as long of a video as the one about the Son, but the Holy Spirit is still part of the Trinity, and does a lot more than a lot of Christians seem to think!
God the Holy Spirit
First off, who is the Holy Spirit? When talking about God in Trinity, I used the metaphor of a speaker: the Parent, speaking a Word, the Son, and the Spirit is the breath on which the Word is carried. It’s not a perfect metaphor for the Trinity, just like any metaphor for the Trinity will inevitably fail, but this does get at one of the main ways the Spirit is thought of: as the conveyor of God’s action in the world.
The Spirit’s Pronouns
Before I get there though, I want to talk a little bit about how I am going to refer to the Spirit. God the Parent, whom I treated as non-binary and used “They” pronouns for, and God the Son, who in the person of Jesus is canonically male and gets “He” pronouns, are somewhat straightforward, but the Spirit is a bit more complex. The Holy Spirit is, as evidenced by the name “spirit,” a spiritual being, like the Parent, and is not nearly as humanized as the other two persons of the Trinity, even though the Spirit is a person of the Trinity along with the other two.
Some folk, seeing this problem, refer to the Holy Spirit as “It;” that makes me uncomfortable. I’m too used to “It” being used in a derogatory sense— to remove someone’s personhood—to be comfortable applying it to any of the persons of the Trinity. Other folk draw a connection between Wisdom, presented in the book of Proverbs as feminine, and, in making this connection, refer to the Spirit as “Her.”
I’m going to follow those folk’s lead and use feminine pronouns for the Spirit, though not for those reasons. Though I think Wisdom is certainly a part of the Holy Spirit’s aspect, referring to Her simply as wisdom leaves out a lot of what the Spirit does. Instead, I’m using “Her” for two main reasons, one out of linguistic pedantry and the other out of a sense of balance.
In Hebrew, a gendered language, the word ruach, which means “breath” or “wind” or “spirit”, carries the feminine gender. While the gender of a word doesn’t really reflect any characteristics of the thing the word represents, it does provide a reference for how to refer to the thing. (As an aside, there are interesting studies about the gender of a word affecting human perceptions of the thing, such as a table seeming more “manly” in German than French because of their grammatical genders, but that’s not really what I’m getting at here.) Meanwhile, pneuma, the corresponding Greek word, is of the neuter gender and has nothing to add to this conversation. So one reason for using “Her” to refer to the Spirit is that it reflects the Hebrew word’s feminine grammatical gender.
My other reason for using “Her” as the Spirit’s pronoun is that it adds a little bit of balance to the Trinity. God the Parent is nonbinary, encompassing the whole of both human genders, and the Son is male, so including the Spirit with feminine pronouns keeps our perception of God from skewing overly masculine, which, historically, has been a problem.
It is important to remember here that the Spirit is not really gendered, just as a pen in a gendered language doesn’t have any inherent qualities of gender either. The Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, it’s just much more convenient to be able to refer to the Spirit as “Her” rather than trying to clumsily avoid using pronouns at all, especially when I’m already doing that with regard to the whole of God in Trinity.
The Spirit as the Force of God
So, all of that out of the way, let’s get back to this way of thinking of the Holy Spirit as the thing that does God’s action in the world. This is the earliest understanding of the Holy Spirit, and is the one that is most prevalent in the Hebrew Scriptures.
We can read this idea of the Spirit from the first creation account, where God’s Spirit — God’s creative force, if you will — is brooding or blowing over the waters of chaos. God’s Spirit is what carries the words that God speaks to the prophets whom God calls, and empowers them to do the miracles they did. Even Jesus, the Son, during His incarnation is said to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
German theologian Michael Welker calls the Holy Spirit God’s “force field,” alluding to ideas in the study of electromagnetics, which certainly appeal to me, though I think it’s fair to say Welker wouldn’t go as far with this analogy as I do. Much like the multi-dimensional way of viewing God, much of my perception of the Holy Spirit is informed by my undergraduate work in Electrical Engineering, and Welker gave me the words to tie the two together.
I think of God’s spirit as a field which interacts with all of creation in various ways, often depending on how “in phase” things are with creation. In electromagnetics, and even in really any studies of waves, there are different ways that those waves interact with one another. If two waves are “in phase”, meaning the peaks of those waves line up, there is constructive interference, when the overall amplitude — how big the wave is — combines. If the peak of a wave lines up with a valley, though, there is destructive interference, and instead of combining to increase amplitude, the overall amplitude decreases. If you’ve ever accidentally wired up a set of speakers backwards and they sound very thin, or you go to a concert and stand in just the wrong spot and there seems to be no bass, you’ve experienced this before.
I may well be taking the metaphor way too far here, but I think that we regularly encounter a similar phenomenon, or at least we can use this language to understand it, with God’s Spirit as well. There are times when we are in phase with God’s “force field,” and other times when we are not — which one might call times of consolation or desolation, to use theological language for times when we feel particularly close to God or far away from God. God’s Spirit is always present, but we don’t always experience Her.
There’s another word for this that is often used called shekhinah, which kind of means “presence” or “indwelling”. Different theologians use this word in different ways, but it comes out of Jewish reflections on the presence of God through God’s holy spirit — which, please note that the Jewish conception of God’s spirit do not include the Trinitarian ideas found in Christianity, but rather are more focused on God’s spirit as the action or presence of God. Also please be aware that I am not a scholar of Judaism, and I apologize in advance for anything that I got wrong regarding Jewish theology.
This, however, is the point at which Christian and Jewish understandings of the Holy Spirit diverge significantly. While we will agree that God’s spirit is the action of God in the world, the Christian view of the Holy Spirit gives that power agency. God’s Spirit is a person just like the Parent and the Son, and She is just as involved in the life of the Trinity as the Trinity’s more prominent members.
Characteristics of the Holy Spirit
Procession from the Parent
So in talking about the Spirit, how does She relate to the other members of the Trinity, if She is going to be equal to the others yet Her own person? As I mentioned last time in the video about the Son, God the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Parent through the Son, though I need to admit that is a position that doesn’t fit necessarily with any of the major theological strands of Western Christianity. It all started, again and this is going to be a bit of a recap from what I mentioned in the last video, with the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Parent, and a later addition of one word, filioque, which caused a whole heap of trouble.
Filioque
In 325 CE, a group of Christian bishops met together in Nicaea in modern Türkiye to deal with the teachings of a bishop named Arius, whose teachings were incredibly popular but didn’t fit with the larger understanding of Christian theology at the time. This produced a statement called the “Nicene Creed,” which was amended about 60 years later at another council, called the Council of Constantinople.
At the Council of Constantinople, the gathered bishops expanded on a lot of the language within the Nicene Creed to its mostly current form, and its official name became the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. That’s a mouthful, so I’ll mostly just refer to this as the Nicene Creed, because that’s what we call it when we say it in church, just know that when I say Nicene Creed, I actually mean the amended one from 381 CE.
Part of the expanded language in this creed was about the Holy Spirit, asserting several ways She interacts with humanity and talking about where She comes from, namely stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Parent. (They, of course used the word “Father” but I’m using “Parent” for all the reasons I stated in the first video of this series.) The Spirit also is glorified alongside the Parent and Son, equally, as a full member of the Trinity.
For about 250 years everything was fine, until some of the churches under Rome’s authority started to add another word to the creed, filioque, asserting that the Spirit proceeds from the Parent and the Son, not just the Parent. Over time, this usage grew in the Western church until by the early 11th Century CE it was officially included in the liturgies of the church of Rome.
Meanwhile, the Eastern church, those who followed Constantinople, rejected this change, insisting on keeping to the creed established by the councils of the church. This led to some pretty significant disagreements between the Rome and Constantinople, contributing to the split between East and West in 1054 which continues through today.
I draw from both traditions to hopefully find a balance which better reflects my understanding of the unknowable mystery of the Trinity. If the Parent is the source of divinity, then the procession of the Holy Spirit is from the Parent. And yet, the Holy Spirit comes to us through the Son, as Jesus says on earth that He will send the Spirit. So there is definitely a connection between the procession from the Parent as well as the sending by the Son, so I use language which reflects that: the Spirit comes from the Parent through the Son, involving the whole of the Trinity yet also respecting the Parent’s role as source of divinity.
Coequality with the Parent and Son
This, then leads into the next characteristic of the Spirit that I’m going to talk about, that She is coequal with the Parent and the Son. This is not going to be unlike the discussion with the Son’s coequality, but it’s an important distinction for a Trinitarian understanding of God.
In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, this plays out in saying that the Holy Spirit is worshiped and glorified alongside the Parent and the Son, which isn’t the most helpful way of saying it, but it’s also meant to just be a reminder of a situation that really doesn’t make a lot of sense, and is only a projection we can kind of understand of the reality which we cannot understand because the Trinity is outside of our whole understanding.
The important part is that even though the Spirit comes from the Parent, and even though the Spirit comes to us through the Son, that procession is not a statement about any perceived inequality. The Parent is not superior to the Spirit, nor is the Spirit inferior to the Son. As the Parent and Son are equal, so also the Spirit is equal.
I’m talking about this a bit more with regard to the Spirit than I did with the Son, because it is one of the distinctives of Christianity. Where in the Jewish understanding of God’s spirit, She is the action of God in the world, and thus in no way equal to God; in Christian thinking the Holy Spirit gained personhood and, in doing so, equality with the Parent and the Son in the Trinity.
Now I am certain that this is not all there is to say about this equality. It is confusing because it is a framework to understand a deity that is ‘other’ to our human selves, so we only see finite projections of an infinite being in the world. The framework of the Trinity does an alright job of this, but certainly not a perfect one, so we can understand some of the interaction between the Parent, Son, and Spirit, but never the whole.
Attributes of the Holy Spirit
What we can understand, or at least we can understand it better than these Trinitarian relationships, is some of the ways the Holy Spirit presents Herself to humans and the world.
Wisdom
The first of these aspects is as the personification of Wisdom. Now I don’t just mean wisdom in the sense of having a lot of information or being able to see connections between things better than someone else. It’s not about even having a good deal of life experience to draw on. The wisdom this is referring to is having a rightly ordered life, which in a Christian context means having a life that is oriented towards love of God and of one’s neighbor rather than towards selfishness or violence.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, and similar ancient literature, there is an entire genre relating to wisdom, with books such as Proverbs or Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Scripture being two of the more prominent examples. They’re meant to provide advice — generally, things to emulate for Proverbs and things to avoid for Ecclesiasties — on what a life oriented to God looks like. The Holy Spirit, as the one who leads a person into wisdom, is then also treated like the personification of that wisdom, both as the one who is with the wise but also the giver of wisdom.
Guidance
This actually leads into the next attribute of the Holy Spirit, which is the provision of guidance. Now, this plays out in a lot of different ways in Scripture. One of the earliest ways this is recorded in Scripture is in reference to the main craftsman in charge of building the tent, or tabernacle, that would hold God’s presence in the story of the Exodus and the subsequent wandering in the wilderness. This craftsman, Bezalel, is filled with God’s divine spirit to give him the skill necessary to do or oversee everything needed for the building of the tabernacle: metalworking, stone-cutting, woodcarving, and so on. He, and those who worked with him, were all empowered to do this work by the Holy Spirit.
With regard to Scripture, there’s an understanding that the Spirit was also working in those who wrote Scripture to accomplish God’s purposes in the midst of this writing. I’ll talk about this more in the Scripture episode, about what it means for Scripture to be “God-breathed”, which often gets translated as inspired, but for now, I think it’s enough to focus on the guidance of the Spirit to those who wrote Scripture, that She was somehow involved in its writing, guiding the authors with Her own wisdom.
The final aspect of the Spirit’s guidance I want to mention is the everyday work of the Spirit which helps a Christian to live a more Christian life, seeking out the “good” that comes from God the Parent and living into the example of Jesus as the one who embodied the kingdom of God and the new creation which God intends for all humans. I’ll talk about this more in a bit when we get the work of the Spirit, so for now let’s talk about the next aspect of the Holy Spirit: as the presence of God in the world
Presence
I admit, this is quite similar to the Spirit as God’s action in the world, but I think there is enough of a difference to be able to talk about these two aspects separately. I mentioned earlier the concept of shekhinah, the presence of God in the world. Theologian Jürgen Moltmann explains shekhinah as the thing that makes the unknowable God knowable, connecting God’s transcendence — that far away, unknowable otherness of God — to God’s immanence — God’s closeness to humanity. It’s involved with God’s self-limitation that I talked about in the first video, as God limits Godself in order that God may have an interaction with humanity that humanity will be able handle.
It’s the Holy Spirit which affects this presence, through its role in creation, life-giving, working out the kingdom of God in the world — that alternative community embodied in the incarnate Son. During the time of Jesus’ incarnation, that presence of God was contained in the Son; but since Jesus’ ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit into the world by the Parent through the Son, the Holy Spirit which is the presence of God to the world, working out God’s purposes as She blows through all of creation and humanity carrying God’s action with Her.
Action
And it’s precisely God’s action that is the last attribute of the Spirit that I’m going to talk about. Because the Spirit doesn’t just bring God’s presence, but She is the one who works out God’s actions in the world. Sometimes this is in singular events, such as the conception of Jesus or the work of creation itself, but it’s also the continual action of the Parent’s sustaining work of creation, or the result of the Son’s purifying work on behalf of humanity. When God acts, the Spirit carries that action into the world.
This is generalizing somewhat, and this idea of the Holy Spirit as God’s action isn’t necessarily a perfect description of what is happening with regard to the Trinity, but it does get part of the way to understanding how the Spirit fits into the whole of God’s Triune nature.
Work of the Holy Spirit
So having gone through these attributes of the Holy Spirit, now I’ll shift to talking about some of the work the Spirit does that flows out of Her characteristics and attributes, and the ways She interacts with creation and humanity to accomplish the Trinity’s purposes.
Breath of Creation
One of the first places we see the Spirit’s work, both in Scripture and in the overall story presented in Scripture, is in the work of Creation. When we remember that included in the meaning of the Hebrew word we translate Spirit is also Breath, it brings sense that, when God the Parent spoke in the Biblical account of creation, with the Son of God being the spoken word, the Spirit carries the Word from the Parent in the breathing that is part of speaking.
The Spirit is also described as one who is “brooding” over the waters, like a mother bird would brood over her nest while incubating her soon-to-be-born offspring. It adds an element to the understanding of Spirit in the feminine, as She incubates the nascent creation before the Parent speaks it into being.
Breath of Life
But that’s the Holy Spirit as described in the first creation account at the beginning of Scripture; in the second, God breathes God’s own breath into the first human, bringing to life that which began as a rather odd dirt-sculpture. God’s Breath, which in this case it is a different word than than the one used of the Spirit who brooded over the unformed creation, still has a connection to spirit — and later interpreters, when translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, connect breath and spirit when choosing similar words for each. So there is a sense in which the giver of life, even the mechanism through which God sustains life, connects with God’s Spirit.
Speaker to Humanity
Shifting a bit, there’s a sense that, because God in Trinity is outside our perception, God the Parent is a spiritual being whom we cannot perceive, and God the Son only inhabited among humans for a relatively brief time, that the Spirit is the primary way God interacts with humanity.
This plays out in a number of ways. For one, as Christians, we claim that the Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets we read about in Scripture; the words of God they shared with God’s people in their time were transmitted to them somehow, though the exact mechanism of if they received literal words from God that they re-spoke directly or if they were inspired in a more general sense and spoke words that fit with the concept that they had received from God is less clear.
As an aside, even the word “inspiration” comes from a root which implies the work of a spirit, in particular a divine spirit which “breathes through” a human, bringing some manner of knowledge that the human would not otherwise know or be aware of.
This also applies when we come to Scripture, which Christians say was inspired by God the Spirit, though there is a lot of debate also about what exactly that means. Much like the prophets, we wonder; did She provide literal words to the writers of Scripture? Did She provide a general concept and they put their own spin on it? I tend to lean towards the latter interpretation in both cases, though I’ll discuss that more when I get to talking about Scripture in its video.
I do want to briefly discuss some more general ways that the Spirit speaks to humanity, but only briefly. I’m generally skeptical when folk claim that God is speaking to them, though I leave myself open enough to times in which God does in fact say something to someone now through the Holy Spirit. It’s important to check on any claims that God the Holy Spirit is directly speaking to a person on the basis of the broader actions of their life, and if those things reflect the alternative community of God presented in and through Jesus or if their actions are unjust, oppressive, or otherwise unloving.
Jesus and Mary
The next work of the Holy Spirit is very much a one-time work, but it’s also important to consider: the Holy Spirit was somehow involved in the conception of Jesus in Mary. Now I’ve certainly heard some folk take this in some rather uncomfortable directions. There’s no sense that this action followed the pattern of Greco-Roman gods, for instance, that God had sexual relations with Mary to produce Jesus. Jesus’ conception, as it’s presented in Scripture, is meant to serve more as a miraculous indicator of his “special” status, and as a symbol of his importance. The Spirit’s work in Jesus’ conception is that bring God’s action into being– specifically the action of the Son’s setting aside all the authority of divinity for a time to enter the world.
Sanctifier
Now the next several examples of the Spirit’s work are all very related, and I thought about lumping them together into one category, but I realized that, in order to do that, I would have to use a specifically theological word and I’m not necessarily ready to introduce that yet, at least not until I get to the video about sin and salvation. So while I’ll mention that all of these things fall under the umbrella term of “sanctification,” I’ll flesh that out more in that video, and for now just describe a few aspects of that larger term in using language that is much less theological.
Revelation of the Son
The first “sub-aspect” of this work is that the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to humanity. We are living a couple of millenia removed from Jesus of Nazareth’s life in Judea, and so for us to encounter the now-ascended Jesus, there needs to be an intermediary to reveal Jesus to humanity. This is one of the big roles of the Holy Spirit, revealing Jesus to all humanity, and in more specific ways to those who participate in the community that Jesus gathers, which I’ll talk about shortly.
There’s a few ways this happens. The Holy Spirit empowers Christians, through Her gathering work and through forming Christians to be more like Jesus, to be better witnesses to the alternative community begun at the resurrection. The Holy Spirit also points out the ways that humans are not living into that alternative community, which we call with fancy language “convicting of sin.” I think it’s important to note that while sometimes She may use humans to address times when sin happens, that usually happens in times where they are in an active community with one another. It is so rarely a good idea to go up to a stranger or an acquaintance claiming that the Holy Spirit told them of some sin they have that I would very strongly suggest never actually doing that.
The Holy Spirit also nudges us to the ways that God is already active in the world, specifically those places where Jesus might be “found” among those humans who are suffering, inviting us to live into our calling as followers of Jesus, who took the time to care for the sick and suffering, who proclaimed the good news of God’s kingdom to the poor, and suffered alongside all humanity on the cross.
Gathering God’s People
In addition to guiding us toward Jesus, the Holy Spirit, along with the Son, gathers those people who have encountered him into what we call the church, the getting-together of those who are connected to Jesus’ death and resurrection, who bear witness to the beginning of God’s kingdom in the same resurrection, and who proclaim that there is a way to be human, shown in Jesus’ teaching and action, which counters the narrative of totalism I described in the video about Jesus and invites us into the alternative community of God’s kingdom, in which there is love and justice and peace.
Giver of Gifts
So to accomplish this, the Holy Spirit works in humans and gives them gifts, which we have rather uncreatively named “spiritual gifts.” There’s a lot of understanding of spiritual gifts that I’m not really going to get into, so I’ll just share mine. Any way that we are strengthened by the Spirit to do something for the kingdom of God, that alternative community I keep mentioning, counts as a spiritual gift. Sometimes we get explicit lists of these things in Scripture, but the general understanding is that these gifts fit in categories around wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and the fear of God. I don’t want to go into exactly what all those mean, because I don’t want to give the impression that these are the only ways to receive spiritual gifts.
The idea here is that the Spirit gives humans certain gifts that are meant to both build up the church as well as to further God’s actions in the world, in line with the values of God’s kingdom. Sometimes those gifts fall into neat categories, and other times they don’t, and yet the Spirit is in them all, as part of the invitation to participate in and bear witness to God’s kingdom.
Actor in Divinization
And this leads to the final bit of the Spirit’s work that I’ll talk about: that She works in and for us to make us more Christ-like. As part of being the action of God in the world, the Spirit participated in Jesus’ resurrection, doing much of the “heavy lifting” within that particular mystery. But because Jesus is the first of a resurrection promised to humanity, the Holy Spirit also works in humans to make us more like Jesus, in both His example as the perfect human but also in His resurrection.
Part of this work is in this world, before the resurrection of the dead, but part of it happens in the midst of our own resurrection when all are raised like Christ. The part in this world is in growing us, as we follow Jesus, into better witnesses of God’s kingdom. Through the rituals of the church, as well as in more personal ways, the Holy Spirit acts in us to turn us away from sin, selfishness, and violence and toward loving God and our neighbor. This work will culminate in our own resurrection, when, in the power of the Spirit, we will participate with God in the Trinity and live a complete life in eternity, sharing the same glorified, resurrection body that Jesus of Nazareth currently has.
Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit
That pretty much covers the Holy Spirit, but there is one last thing I want to talk about: the sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. This is one of those things that is used in some of the more toxic expressions of Christianity to both terrify Christians as well as to accuse non-Christians of doing, because there are a couple lines in the gospels which talk about this particular sin as being “unforgivable.”
Because of this, a lot of work has gone into figuring out exactly what that means, which is kind of ironic, because its complete lack of additional explanation probably means that those reading the texts where it’s mentioned knew exactly what it would mean, and it was so obvious that we’ve since forgotten.
The most obvious possibility from the gospels is that blaspheming the Holy Spirit is attributing to evil something that God is doing, because the immediate context is people claiming that Jesus is using the power of Satan to cast out demons. Since that doesn’t cover near enough possibilities, it was originally broadened out to mean apostasy, knowing the “truth of the gospel” and then leaving it behind; but the church pretty quickly realized that, as persecution ramped up, there was room for forgiveness of those who denied Christianity out of fear of persecution.
I think that by far the most popular view is that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit means not acknowledging that forgiveness is possible, and therefore that’s why it is unforgivable — basically just a fancy way of saying that unless you do xyz and become a Christian you can’t be saved, with different traditions having different steps to perform to become a Christian.
I’m not really satisfied by any of those interpretations. There’s definitely a sense that it is super bad to actively accuse something that God is doing of being from not-God, but at the same time, there is a whole lot of wiggle room there. There’s plenty of Scripture to tell us to test what someone may or may not be prophesying, so for God to say to do that on one hand but not do that on another means we have a contradiction we need to resolve somehow.
This highlights a bigger problem with interpreting Scripture that I’ll try and talk about in two months in the Scripture video, but the way I deal with this idea of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is that I mostly don’t think about it. It seems like a rhetorical flourish meant to make clear that a certain group of people was not seeing the work of God happening among them, and in doing so sets up the inclusion of a different group of people in later works, something that was definitely a teaching of the early Church and something that we need to be incredibly careful in our interpretation of today, due to the significant situational differences between now and then.
God even seems to be in the habit of even forgiving folk who do exactly this thing, like Paul — who started off as a “blasphemer of the Holy Spirit” himself, even persecuting the church and arresting those who followed Jesus, before becoming one of the more prolific writers of the Christian Scriptures. So I just trust in that forgiveness, of even what seems unforgivable, because that is the God whom I see revealed in Scripture.
Summary
So, with that out of the way, I’ll see you again next month as we look at Creation, and what the idea of Creation tells us and doesn’t tell us.