The
Personality of the Holy Spirit
Stephen
Terry
Commentary
for the January 28, 2017 Sabbath School Lesson
“But
when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He
will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell
you what is yet to come.” John 16:13, NIV
In the 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, restrictions on corporate
donations to election campaigns were lifted under the legal argument that this
right that pertained to persons should also be rightly exercised by corporations.
It did not, as some suppose, maintain that corporations were people. The legal
concept of personhood is not a corporeal one but it maintains that personhood
exists at the point where rights normally exercised by people may also be
exercised by corporations and only at those points of intersection, nowhere
else.[i] In other words, for legal
purposes, contrary to the Cambridge Dictionary,[ii] it is possible to have
personhood without humanity. Perhaps it is this legal perspective that invites
us to attribute personhood to the Holy Spirit. Our lesson author goes to great
lengths to assert that the Holy Spirit is a person on somewhat of a reversal of
this perspective. Instead of defining this personhood based on rights imputed
to this Spirit, he makes the case for personhood based on attributes derived from
the Spirit. This latter can be more specious than the former. For instance, is
a monkey a person because it shares bipedalism, an opposable thumb and even a
love of bananas with human beings? Common sense tells us the monkey is not a
person.
That same monkey is representatively and essentially below
us as we are below the Holy Spirit. Now if the monkey had the ability and asserted
that we shared monkey-hood with him because we displayed attributes of monkeys,
we might debate the issue for we know that our stature is far above that of a
monkey. We might even question the monkey’s ability to make that determination
because of its inability to comprehend the distinct attributes that make us
human, even though some few of them are in common with the monkey. We would
feel the monkey was trying to fit us into a box where we did not belong.
Similarly, we try at times to place God in a box, wrapped in our definitions,
securely tucked away on a mental shelf. That shelf is labeled “What We Have
Figured Out.” Once the box is stored, we move on to other things, rarely giving
the contents of the box a second thought. Perhaps we didn’t notice when we
created the box, but when a day eventually comes, perhaps when someone else
asks us about God, and we pull the box down from the shelf, blowing years of
accumulated dust from its top, we open it and find – nothing. Oh, to be sure,
there are a few scraps of paper with Bible verses scrawled on them with faded
ink, but God is nowhere to be found.
Perhaps our desire to place a face of personhood on the
Holy Spirit is another attempt to place God in a box of our definition, written
solely from our perspective. In spite of the ephemeral character of the Spirit
that Jesus shared with Nicodemus,[iii] we want something we can
wrap our brains around. We are uneasy with spirits. Jesus we could understand
primarily because He was incarnated. He looked and acted like us. We overlook
the fact that perhaps that was the purpose of the incarnation, and we try to
incarnate by definition God the Father (a nice anthropomorphic word, by the way
– “Father”) and the Holy Spirit. With the Heavenly Father, we have managed to
create a mental image of a benevolent bearded, perhaps really powerful, person
who is indistinguishable from a human and bears a striking resemblance to Santa
Claus in a robe.[iv]
Such a God is more akin to Jupiter or Zeus, who were happy throwing a
thunderbolt every now and again, than to the omnipresent, omniscient, all
powerful God that created our infinite universe. Nonetheless, we clad Him in
what He was not and were comfortable in our knowledge of our carefully wrought
out theology. We did not deem such knowledge unattainable by definition, but believed
that since even the stars submitted to our inquiries, God would necessarily do
so as well. Sure we could not even draw a picture of infinity, but we could
figure out God and the idea of a bearded old gent called the Father suited our
liking, and it made pleasant bedtime stories for the wee folk. Jesus could be the
gentle Shepherd and God the Father the blessing giving Santa.
But what do we do about the Holy Spirit? How do you put
a face to something you cannot draw? Well let’s see. He speaks. (Oh, wait a
minute. Is it a He? The English says “He.” The Greek, εκεινος, can be he, she or it,
but the word it refers to, πνευμα
or Spirit, is neuter not masculine or feminine.[v]) He teaches. He guides.[vi] Those all sound very
human like. But then He dwells inside us?[vii] That is definitely not a
human attribute. He also apparently travels about as wind, fire,[viii] and even doves.[ix] Those are also definitely
not human abilities. While gender can also define personhood, the Holy Spirit
even avoids that attribute, being neutral as I have shared. Faced then with
such an amorphous being, why do we so insist on nailing it down as a person?
Are we that uncomfortable with the ephemeral? Perhaps it has to do with our
desire for God in all His forms to be beautiful. Beauty is often defined as
symmetry, and it is hard to find symmetry in a being without form.
How did we become so anthropocentric? Perhaps it is a
leftover vestige from the time when we believed the Earth to be the center of
the universe and the stars were lights in a dark blanket suspended above us. We
were full of our own sense of destiny and God was a being who catered to our
every whim, if we were obedient enough. Everything was about us. We are still plagued
with those who stress obedience in order to placate a judgmental god who is
watching and waiting for us to slip up, so perhaps it makes sense that some of
us would still see ourselves as the defining center of everything, even God.
One might be tempted to consider this a harmless conceit, but when God is so
narrowly defined, what happens if someone challenges that definition? Words like
“heretic” and “apostate” begin to fly back and forth. Eventually hundreds of
thousands, who feel God will fall if not defended by
His faithful, march off to battle and the Earth drinks the blood of the sacrifice
made in His name. All of this because of insisting my “God in a box” is the
real God and someone else’s is not. What a sad picture we paint of a vengeful
God who delights in the deaths of sinners. The Revelation talks of a final Battle
of Armageddon with death, blood, and carnage aplenty. But why are we not
content to wait for that day? Do we feel that since it is going to happen
anyway, we may as well hurry it along?
I have a better idea. How about if we let God be who He is, whether Father,
Son, or Holy Spirit, and rather than establish precise definitions of who and
what He is, we allow some fuzziness around the edges. Some ambiguity might be
good for us. The humility of admitting we do not have all of the answers is
certainly a lot less confrontational than, “This is our dogma. Accept it or be
considered a heretic and subject to anathema.” God must surely weep when He
sees people presume to speak for Him in such a manner. If events around the
world at present are any indication, the chaos and divisiveness tell us that we
may be on the brink of the Parousia. When we read the predictions of Matthew,
chapter 24,[x]
we can see those events being fulfilled around us. Paul’s second letter to Timothy
also speaks to what we are experiencing.[xi] We may find that abiding
faith in a God we cannot define beyond “love,”[xii] itself an amorphous
term, is more important than having a concrete definition of His personhood.
Let the theologians quibble about such things; it is faith, not knowledge,
which God will seek when Jesus returns.[xiii] Will He find it?
Perhaps only if we can manage to accept Him as Something beyond our personhood,
transcendent beyond all definition, yet present in every moment of our lives.
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