Who or What Is the Holy Spirit?

Among the more debated issues relating to the Trinity—one God in three persons—is the nature of the Holy Spirit. Or, in the older terminology, the Holy Ghost.

Some readers of the Bible have interpreted God’s Spirit to mean the divine power, force, or impact of God in, and on, the world, especially in relation to individuals and human history. In Judaism, there is little or no suggestion that the Holy Spirit is a distinct person. In the Old Testament, the Spirit moves, from time to time, to take possession of an individual, whose acts, statements, or writings reflect or embody God’s nature, desires, and commands.

In the New Testament, the Spirit operates in a similar way but is also described as a person. God’s Spirit is understood to live in the hearts of all true Christians, and to motivate them, in the words of the Apostle Paul (Romans 8:29), to conform to the image (nature) of Christ.

Through the ages, Christians have sometimes made one of two mistakes. The first is the conclusion that God routinely gives supernatural gifts to all those “living in the Spirit.” One such gift is to speak in foreign languages, which others Christians may or may not be able to translate or interpret. Another is to heal people afflicted with diseases. Still another is to discern the true nature of something, although it is not always clear what is supposed to be discerned.

The principal difficulty with such a belief is that it can be easy for the believing individual to end up functioning as a kind of magician whose requests God automatically grants. This can come dangerously close to dethroning God, rather than trying to figure out what God desires and then to do it. God becomes a silent if not junior partner who brings about whatever such a charismatically inclined believer has determined should happen.

Many Christians believe God continues, on occasion, to perform miracles, such as enabling a person for whom others pray to recover from an illness that medical science has determined is imminently and inescapably fatal. It is impossible to know for sure if such an event was a genuine miracle, although at times this appears to have been the case. Humility before God always makes sense, and rigid pronouncements of certainty about what God has done run the risk of displacing the need for faith, which by nature operates in the presence of ambiguity. Those who speak and act as Christian magicians, even if sincere in their belief that God can and still performs miracles sometimes act as if God is constrained to obey them, rather than the other way around.

The second mistake, at the other end of the spectrum of understanding the Holy Spirit is for Christians to pay lip service to the Spirit, whom they fail to regard as a living presence in their lives and who can influence their minds and hearts. Such Christians run the risk of quenching (I Thessalonians 5:19) or grieving (Ephesians 4:30) the Spirit. Grieve clearly implies the Holy Spirit is personal, an understanding that differs from that of those theologians who view the Spirit as only a sort of vague awareness of God or as Christ consciousness.

Many Christians, even those who view the resurrection of Christ as an actual historical event, give short shrift to the Spirit. This can be because they believe miraculous acts of God ended after the first century, or because they worry that focusing on the work of the Spirit could encourage “emotionalism,” with which they are uncomfortable, or end up splitting their congregation into factions—which has happened more than a few times.

Minimizing, underestimating, or ignoring the work of the Spirit can, however, deprive Christians of the spiritual vitality that comes only when they acknowledge and embrace the Spirit as a living presence. This requires listening to God with spiritual ears.