May the Spirit be with You

Coming soon to a flower bed near you!

Along with others, I imagine, I’ve wondered about the nature of the third member of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost. Reading on the subject exposes two distinct views: the spirit is like a person or is better described as an influence. If the former, we’d be led to believe that the Holy Spirit acts somewhat like a person, that is, moving about at will, thinking about things and making decisions, knocking on doors and being admitted—or not—and hearing and speaking to us as friends do.

Rev. William Evans understands the Holy Spirit to have personality as opposed to being only what he calls, “an influence.” He argues, “No one but a person can take the place of a person; certainly no mere influence could take the place of Jesus Christ, the greatest personality that ever lived. Again, Christ, in speaking of the Spirit as the Comforter, uses the masculine definite article, and thus, by His choice of gender, teaches the personality of the Holy Spirit. There can be no parity between a person and an influence.”

Commenting on John 3:8, Richard Ritenbaugh has written: "Like the wind, spirit is invisible. A person cannot see it move or work. However, one can see the effect of what the Spirit does. One can see how it acts on things—like the wind going through a tree full of leaves. One cannot see the wind, but everyone has seen how it makes the tree's leaves and the branches sway. Some have perhaps witnessed a strong wind knock a nest out of a tree or rip leaves or branches off a tree, but not the wind itself. It is the same with the Spirit. The Spirit moves, and we then can see people react. The people do things. A work gets done. What we see is not the Spirit itself, but the Spirit's fruit."

Both understandings can be supported scripturally.

Rittenbaugh’s take on the Spirit as an influence that we cannot see, but whose effects are visible, seems to be supported in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: (5:22-3) “ . . . the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” In other words, where these fruits are present, they are signs of the spirit’s influence, like leaves blowing past our window tell us there’s a wind. (It’s noteworthy that missing in Paul’s list are speaking in tongues, ecstatic emotional states, falling down on stage with video cameras present.)

I’ve said before that we anthropomorphise God and the Spirit (we conceptualize them as persons). Perhaps that’s the only way our imaginations can deal with the spiritual side of our reality. But this also introduces a problem, namely the temptation to say things like “the Spirit was here in the room” in a similar way to “Uncle Jake was here in the room.” If Uncle Jake was in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning, it’s assumed he wasn’t somewhere else. Applying the same logic to the Holy Spirit implies that we know where the Spirit is present and where it’s not. Evangelical Pentecostalism has effectively fallen prey to a heresy and in so doing, has helped to confuse much of the Christian world on an extremely important theological concept.

Not that speaking in tongues or experiencing emotional ecstasy are anti-Spirit. That we should feel joyous and celebratory in the presence of a people who have caught the spirit of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” should surely be expected. ("Are joy and self-control at odds,” one might wonder, particularly if one is a Mennonite?) The mistake would be to say such feelings prove that the Spirit was present. Well of course it was! But if the people were not led to grow the fruit promised by Paul, one has to wonder if the feelings weren’t raised by something else.

The Spirit most assuredly and simultaneously is always here . . . and under an umbrella on a beach in Bocas del Toro.

Unless, of course, there’s never any wind there.