Thoughts on......

THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE TRINITY

The identity of the Holy Spirit as Person and His role in the Trinity can be understood only when we consider and answer the following four questions:

1. Is the Spirit of God a Person in contrast to being just divine energy or power?
2. Is He a fully Divine Person or is He inferior to the Other Persons, Father and Son?
3. What is the role of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity?
4. What are the implications of the Trinitarian role of the Holy Spirit for us as members of the body of Christ?

These are huge issues and can be dealt with only cursorily in this essay – the reader should not be tempted to think that this article is exhaustive!

Question 1: The Old Testament (OT) abounds with references to the Holy Spirit, the first reference being the very second verse of the Bible (Gen.1:2). Admittedly, before the advent of Jesus Christ and His explicit teaching on the Spirit, the Personality of the Spirit could not be conclusively established. Having said that, I shall surely argue that the OT references do not encourage the conclusion that the Spirit is some kind of divine energy or force. For example, in II Samuel 23:2, Ezekiel 11:5 and Joel 2:28, the capacity to speak is attributed to the Holy Spirit – it should be noted that speaking is the quality of a Person, not that of a thing. Jesus would echo the same aspect of the Personality of the Spirit when He attributes David’s statement in Psalm 110:1 to the Holy Spirit (Matt.22:43). Micah 2:7 and Eph.4:30 imply that the Spirit can be angered or grieved – both personal qualities. Of all Biblical writers, John the evangelist is clearest in his comments on the Spirit. In John 15:26; 16:8,13,14, he uses the masculine pronoun He for the Holy Spirit although, according to Greek grammar, he should have used the neuter pronoun It, because the Greek word for Spirit (to pneuma) is neuter in gender. John commits this deliberate grammatical mistake only to affirm the Personality of the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit is a PERSON.

Question 2: From both Testaments, we see that the role of the Holy Spirit is to fully represent God. For example, Gen.6:3 – “My Spirit will not contend with man forever” - implies that God will not keep striving with the human race; there is complete identification of the status of God with that of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, Peter rightly accuses Sapphira, Ananias’ wife of ‘testing the Spirit of the Lord’ – Acts 5:9 – meaning that the couple had jointly plotted on lying to God Himself. John has more to say on the standing of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity; Jesus says that it is for the good of the Church that He has to go away to the Father so that He can send the Holy Spirit upon her - John 16:7. This obviously means that the presence of the Holy Spirit will be identical to that of Jesus, except that while Jesus, as a physical human being was limited to one place at a time, the Spirit will be available to all believers in every place all the time! In a similar passage – John14:23 – Jesus says that Father and Himself will come to make their home in a believer. But how can this come about? Only because the Holy Spirit Who indwells the believer can fully represent the Father and the Son to him (her)! The Essence of the Holy Spirit is the same as that of the Father and the Son – the Spirit is EQUALLY GOD.

Question 3: To answer this and the next question, we have to look at Scriptures reflectively – no proof-texts will do. In John 17:20-23, we hear Jesus praying for unity (oneness) among the believers that will reflect the Oneness of the Father and the Son (John 10:30). The word One in these verses is in the neuter gender in the Greek – this means that John is not referring to the oneness (or sameness) of persons but rather the oneness of being (or essence). In other words, these verses rule out the Unitarian suggestion that Father and Son are actually one Person playing two roles. Those cults who call themselves Christians but deny the Trinity claim that the Father and the Son are the same Person playing two roles – like a man (one person) is both husband (to his wife) and father (to his children). Thus it is clear that the Father and the Son are two distinct Persons who share in the same Divine Essence.

We should now proceed to ask the question, “How are the Father and the Son One in their Divine Essence?” The answer: Through the Holy Spirit’. How do we know this? Jesus is praying that the Oneness of God should be reflected in the unity of the Church. How can the Church, which comprises many members, be one entity? The answer: Only through the Holy Spirit.

But there are various aspects of this Unity in Diversity that the Scripture encourages us to explore. Firstly, the agency of God the Holy Spirit in effecting oneness in the Church is only because He is the One through Whom the love of God (the Father) is poured out on us (Rom.5:5). This, we can safely conclude, is a reflection of the role of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity – Jesus tells the Father about the eternal love in the Trinity even before the creation of the world (John 17:24). We can therefore understand that the Divine Agent of communication of this love in the Trinity is God the Holy Spirit through whom the Father and the Son are constituted One God.

Secondly, we see that the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of knowledge and communication; in fact, love cannot be love in the absence of a relational knowledge and its attendant communication. Paul makes it clear that it only through the Holy Spirit, we can know anything that it is of God (I Cor.2:10b,11). This, again, is a reflection of the role of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity – of forging the amazing knowledge-relationship between the Father and the Son. The medium of communication – for example, a language – is useful only when it is understood both by the speaker and the listener. We reverently conclude that the Divine Personal Medium of communication of knowledge in the Trinity is God, the Holy Spirit. This is possible only because the Spirit suffuses and therefore connects the Father and the Son – that is why the Holy Spirit is referred to in the New Testament (NT) as both the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus; both uses can be seen in Romans 8:9.

Thirdly, it is through the Spirit that true freedom and identity are possible. Love liberates and does not enslave. The Spirit of love and communication is also the Spirit that provides the freedom to be oneself. In this context, it is important for us to note that freedom is a relational quality – it is not a stand-alone entity. At the present stage of our culture, we have become thoroughly individualised – for us freedom actually has come to mean, “I can do what I want!” But is it really so? While playing football, are we free to shift the goal posts? The rules of the game help us to relate to each other and provide us the freedom to play the game. The same is the case with our identity. Our names give us an identity only because they tell us the identity of the family we belong to. In the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the One through whom the Father and the Son are One – but by the same token, it is through the Spirit, the Father is free to be the Father and the Son is free to be the Son because where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (II Cor.3:17). The Spirit of God provides that free relationship in the Oneness of the Trinity that the identities of the Father and the Son are not erased but enhanced. It is in this amazing function that the Spirit operates only to bring glory to Jesus (John 16:14) and through Him, glory to the God the Father (Phi.2:11)!

Question 4: We can briefly make three corresponding applications to the centrality of the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church:

Firstly, the Church reflects the Trinity through the love that is shown towards the members of the body of Christ (John 17:20-23). The Bible, in the OT and the NT, makes it abundantly clear that our inward love for God is empty sham if it is not expressed in outward love towards our brothers and sisters. The Holy Spirit who bonds the unity of the Trinity is the One through whom the fruit of the Spirit has to be shown in the life of the body of Christ (Gal.5:22,23).

Secondly, we recognise that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are meant to communicate the truth of God by word and deed. Paul has 3 passages on the gifts in the NT (Rom.12:3-9; I Cor.12,14; Eph.4:7-13) but Peter summarises them in one short verse – I Peter 4:11. Without neglecting the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit, we need to emphasise the centrality of the fruit of the Spirit. A very gifted Church as the one in Corinth seemed to lack the fruit of the Spirit so that Paul had to sandwich a Spirit’s fruit chapter (I Cor.13) between two gift chapters.

Thirdly, the unity of the Body of Christ does not remove the beauty of the diversities that make up the Church. We are differently called and differently gifted and yet we are gloriously one in Christ. We are drawn from every nation, tribe, people and language (Rev.7:9) and our identities are not erased but enhanced by the Holy Spirit in a marvellously redemptive way. It also shows us that unity is not to be confused with uniformity or unanimity. While we are agreed on all the fundamentals of the Christian faith, we are, by the Spirit, enabled to be creatively different. We recognise God is not a cloner and He has made us differently from one another so that together, we could express the unity of the Triune God in the multi-dimensioned mosaic of the Church!