The Holy Spirit is thought
of as one person of the Trinity. The word person is used in recognition of the
identity of an individual sentient being. With God though whom is the
transcending omnipotent, omniscient being the differentiation from monism to
pluralism is challenging to understand. One wonders what could differentiates
or forms boundaries within the being of God such that differences could exist
yet equally as well one might wonder how God could not have primary
differentiation in order to achieve better intellect or capacity such as one
finds in moving from monocular to binocular vision. The Holy Spirit is God, yet
so are the Father and the Son.
It is a little difficult to
describe the Holy Spirit without describing the Father and the Son for each
cohere within God and comprise the essential nature of God as a triune being
from whom all good things are made to exist (though one might have an opinion
that all things always exist in some nook within the infinite spatio-temporal,
non-spatio-atemporal- memory as reality -knowledge of God). The Holy Spirit is
held to have always existed as have the Father and Son.
Obviously scientists would
want find in that an interest in deconstructing a synthesis as they might find
a synthesis in the history of human R.N.A. and mitochondrial D.N.A. or the
evolution of a given government bureaucracy such as Homeland Security from
prior bureaucracies. The trinity though is something more than what a Nobel
Prize winning physicist wrote about phase changes generating new wholes
that are greater than the sum of the parts in a book called ‘Reinventing
Physics from the Bottom Up’. Existence and creation may be enabled because of
the complexity possible with the Trinity.
Albert Einstein had a friend
and fellow physicist (Paul Ehrenfrest) who discovered the principle that three
dimensions of space and one of time seems to be the ideal configuration for the
existence of atoms. With fewer dimensions of space atoms either could not exist
as complex structures and with more dimensions the formation of atoms would be
too difficult and simple motions would not be possible. Nuclear valence shells
would be obstructed by complexity; electrons could not orbit a nucleus and so
forth.
If atoms exist in three
dimensions of space it is possible that they are made up of one or two
dimensional strings at a very fundamental level. At a larger level membrane of
space-time may collide to generate energy or membranes of spatial dimensions
may intersect and move along creating an appearance of the passage of time for
humans or other sentient beings existing within the intersecting ‘branes’. In that context space ‘branes’ would have
field energy that generates complexity after collisions. That complexity seem
like a big bang and a Universe of particles could appear as detritus. That has
been compared to a collision in a particle accelerator. This is all natural
philosophy view by humanity within some existing realm willed by God to exist.
Various fields and branes, if they exist, would be pluralistic creations will
by God to exist. In the infinite power of God all things are possible including
an infinite generation of spatial membranes.
The Holy Spirit as one of
the trinity has a special role enabling communication with humanity and
providing grace unto humanity though the world is itself complex and
challenging to exist within. The Holy Spirit has more power than even gravity
to transcend the criterion of mass, for gravity acts without differentiation
upon all mass with only massless particles being uninfluenced by it, while the
Holy Spirit can act specifically upon individuals as the will of God deems. The
Trinity may be the way God interacts with all created things while for-himself
He just is.
God exists in a heterodox
fashion with things existing eternally one might guess as an essential
attribute. The Holy Spirit is God as are the Father and Son, yet one might also
regard the Holy Spirit from the perspective of existential relations of being-for-others.
In that sense one finds the Holy Spirit to be
little different-a Person of Holiness and excellence drawing human
beings toward the perfect and good, the true and righteous, to a directions
leading to fulfillment of the purposes of God. Through revelation human beings
learn of the Holy Spirit. It is only as created beings that humanity can regard
the Holy Spirit. What or how the Holy Spirit is for-himself or more accurately
what God is like for-himself human beings simply cannot know. The most close we
can get to that is through Jesus Christ, as Jesus informed us in his special
prayer of renormalization unto one-ness.
In order to provide a
measure of comparison of what I have written here to the historical context of
what has been written about the Holy Spirit I will provide a substantial quote
from a Christian historian on the Holy Spirit. It is interesting to see how a
writer’s knowledge-base affects his approaches for writing about a topic that
has existed for writers as a topic for millennia. It occurs to me for example,
that the problem of free will and determinism can be approached differently
today with string and atomic theory cosmology than during the early Christian
era, of course it wasn’t necessary to develop apologetics or replies to quantum
physics or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, General Relativity or quantum
teleportation in the first century A.D. With all of that it is illuminating to
consider that the Holy Spirit would seem to implicitly have an advantage in
acting within and through deterministic sectors of space-time mass and/or
energy configured as human life and human affairs. One also might wonder how
God can effect deterministic space-time mass or energy once it is set in
motion. Though brane theory can negate the need for local brane motion when the
appearance of motion can arise through intersecting, traveling branes, some
motion does seem to exist at at least one meta-level of brane existence or in a
variegated field of branes. With the uncertainty principle perhaps arising
because of the difference in space-mass-energy configurations on intersecting
branes yet at any rate required for freedom-of-movement within an overall
deterministic field, the Holy Spirit can act directly beyond and through any
given configuration of branes, entangled mass energy, fields, strings or other
atomic structure…helpful indeed for the fallen and lost human race.
Holy Spirit (page 503) and
the Trinity (page 507) in volume 2 of Schaff’s History of the Christian Church; (in the public domain).
Quote-“The doctrine of the Holy Spirit was far less developed, and until the
middle of the fourth century was never a subject of special controversy. So in
the Apostles’ Creed, only one article is devoted to the third person of the
holy Trinity, while the confession of the Son of God, in six or seven articles,
forms the body of the symbol. Even the original Nicene Creed breaks off
abruptly with the words: "And in the Holy Spirit;" the other clauses
being later additions. Logical knowledge appears to be here still further
removed than in Christology from the living substance of faith. This period was
still in immediate contact with the fresh spiritual life of the apostolic,
still witnessed the lingering operations of the extraordinary gifts, and experienced
in full measure the regenerating, sanctifying, and comforting influences of the
divine Spirit in life, suffering, and death; but, as to the theological
definition of the nature and work of the Spirit, it remained in many respects
confused and wavering down to the Nicene age.
Yet rationalistic historians go quite
too far when, among other accusations, they
charge the early church with making the
Holy Spirit identical with the Logos. To confound the functions, as in
attributing the inspiration of the prophets, for example, now to the Holy
Spirit, now to the Logos, is by no means to confound the persons. On the
contrary, the thorough investigations of recent times show plainly that the
ante-Nicene fathers, with the exception of the Monarchians and perhaps
Lactantius, agreed in the two fundamental points, that the Holy Spirit, the
sole agent in the application of redemption, is a supernatural divine being,
and that he is an independent person; thus closely allied to the Father and the
Son yet hypostatically different from them both. This was the practical
conception, as demanded even by the formula of baptism. But instead of making
the Holy Spirit strictly coordinate with the other divine persons, as the
Nicene doctrine does, it commonly left him subordinate to the Father and the
Son.
So in Justin, the pioneer of scientific
discovery in Pneumatology as well as in Christology. He refutes the heathen
charge of atheism with the explanation, that the Christians worship the Creator
of the universe, in the second place the Son, in the third
the prophetic Spirit; placing the three
divine hypostases in a descending gradation
as objects of worship. In another
passage, quite similar, he interposes the host of good
angels between the Son and the Spirit,
and thus favors the inference that he regarded the Holy Ghost himself as akin
to the angels and therefore a created being. But aside from the obscurity and
ambiguity of the words relating to the angelic host, the coordination of the
Holy Ghost with the angels is utterly precluded by many other expressions of
Justin, in which he exalts the Spirit far above the sphere of all created
being, and challenges for the members of the divine trinity a worship forbidden
to angels. The leading function of the Holy Spirit, with him, as with other
apologists, is the inspiration of the Old Testament prophets. In general the
Spirit conducted the Jewish theocracy, and qualified the theocratic officers.
All his gifts concentrated themselves finally in Christ; and thence they pass
to the faithful in the church. It is a striking fact, however, that Justin in
only two passages refers the new moral life of the Christian to the Spirit, he
commonly represents the Logos as its fountain. He lacks all insight into the
distinction of the Old Testament Spirit and the New, and urges their identity
in opposition to the Gnostics.
In Clement of Alexandria we find very
little progress beyond this point. Yet he calls
the Holy Spirit the third member of the
sacred triad, and requires thanksgiving to be addressed to him as to the Son
and the Father.
Origen vacillates in his Pneumatology
still more than in his Christology between
orthodox and heterodox views. He
ascribes to the Holy Spirit eternal existence, exalts him, as he does the Son,
far above all creatures and considers him the source of all charisms,
especially as the principle of all the illumination and holiness of believers
under the Old Covenant and the New. But he places the Spirit in essence,
dignity, and efficiency below the Son, as far as he places the Son below the
Father; and though he grants in one passage that the Bible nowhere calls the
Holy Spirit a creature, yet, according to another somewhat obscure sentence, he
himself inclines towards the view, which, however he does not avow that the Holy
Spirit had a beginning (though, according to his system, not in time but from
eternity), and is the first and most excellent of all the beings produced by
the Logos.
In the same connection he adduces three
opinions concerning the Holy Spirit; one regarding him as not having an origin;
another, ascribing to him no separate personality; and a third, making him a
being originated by the Logos. The first of these opinions he rejects because
the Father alone is without origin (ἀγέννητος); the second he rejects because in Matt. 12:32 the Spirit is plainly distinguished from the Father
and the Son; the third he takes for the true and scriptural view, because
everything was made by the Logos. Indeed, according to Matt. 12:32, the Holy Spirit would seem to stand
above the Son; but the sin against the Holy Ghost is more heinous than that
against the Son of Man, only because he who has received the Holy Spirit stands
higher than he who has merely the reason from the Logos.
Here again Irenaeus comes nearer than
the Alexandrians to the dogma of the perfect
substantial identity of the Spirit with
the Father and the Son; though his repeated figurative (but for this reason not
so definite) designation of the Son and Spirit as the "hands" of the
Father, by which he made all things, implies a certain subordination. He
differs from most of the Fathers in referring the Wisdom of the book of
Proverbs not to the Logos but to the Spirit; and hence must regard him as
eternal. Yet he was far from conceiving the Spirit a mere power or attribute;
he considered him an independent personality, like the Logos. "With
God" says he, "are ever the Word and the Wisdom, the Son and the
Spirit, through whom and in whom he freely made all things, to whom he said, ’Let
us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ "But he speaks more of the
operations than of the nature of the Holy Ghost. The Spirit predicted in the
prophets the coming of Christ; has been near to man in all divine ordinances;
communicates the knowledge of the Father and the Son; gives believers the
consciousness of sonship; is fellowship with Christ, the pledge of imperishable
life, and the ladder on which we ascend to God.
In the Montanistic system the Paraclete
occupies a peculiarly important place. He
appears there as the principle of the
highest stage of revelation, or of the church of the
consummation. Tertullian made the Holy
Spirit the proper essence of the church, but subordinated him to the Son, as he
did the Son to the Father, though elsewhere he asserts the "unitas
substantiae." In his view the Spirit proceeds "a Patre per
Filium," as the fruit from the root through the stem. The view of the
Trinity presented by Sabellius contributed to the suppression of these subordinatian
ideas.
§ 149. The Holy Trinity.
Comp. the works quoted in §144,
especially Petravius, Bull, Baur, and Dorner.
Here now we have the elements of the
dogma of the Trinity, that is, the doctrine of the
living, only true God, Father, Son, and
Spirit, of whom, through whom, and to whom are
all things. This dogma has a peculiar,
comprehensive, and definitive import in the Christian system, as a brief
summary of all the truths and blessings of revealed religion. Hence the
baptismal formula (Matt.
28:19), which forms the
basis of all the ancient creeds, is trinitarian; as is the apostolic
benediction also (2
Cor. 13:14). This doctrine meets us in the Scriptures,
however, not so much in direct statements and single expressions, of which the
two just mentioned are the clearest, as in great living facts; in the history
of a threefold revelation of the living God in the creation and government, the
reconciliation and redemption, and the sanctification and consummation of the
world—a history continued in the experience of Christendom. In the article of
the Trinity the Christian conception of God completely defines itself, in
distinction alike from the abstract monotheism of the Jewish religion, and from
the polytheism and dualism of the heathen. It has accordingly been looked upon
in all ages as the sacred symbol and the fundamental doctrine of the Christian
church, with the denial of which the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit,
and the divine character of the work of redemption and sanctification, fall to
the ground.
On this scriptural basis and the
Christian consciousness of a threefold relation we
sustain to God as our Maker, Redeemer,
and Sanctifier, the church dogma of the Trinity
arose; and it directly or indirectly
ruled even the ante-Nicene theology though it did not
attain its fixed definition till in the
Nicene age. It is primarily of a practical religious nature,
and speculative only in a secondary
sense. It arose not from the field of metaphysics, but from that of experience
and worship; and not as an abstract, isolated dogma, but in inseparable
connection with the study of Christ and of the Holy Spirit; especially in
connection with Christology, since all theology proceeds from "God in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself." Under the condition of
monotheism, this doctrine followed of necessity from the doctrine of the
divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. The unity of God was already
immovably fixed by the Old Testament as a fundamental article of revealed
religion in opposition to all forms of idolatry. But the New Testament and the
Christian consciousness as firmly demanded faith in the divinity of the Son,
who effected redemption, and of the Holy Spirit, who founded the church and
dwells in believers; and these apparently contradictory interests could be reconciled
only in the form of the Trinity; that is, by distinguishing in the one and
indivisible essence of God three hypostases or persons; at the same time
allowing for the insufficiency of all human conceptions and words to describe
such an unfathomable mystery.
The Socinian and rationalistic opinion,
that the church doctrine of the Trinity
sprang from Platonism and Neo-Platonism
is therefore radically false. The
Indian Trimurti, altogether pantheistic
in spirit, is still further from the Christian Trinity.
Only thus much is true, that the
Hellenic philosophy operated from without, as a stimulating force, upon the
form of the whole patristic theology, the doctrines of the Logos and the
Trinity among the rest; and that the deeper minds of heathen antiquity showed a
presentiment of a threefold distinction in the divine essence: but only a
remote and vague presentiment which, like all the deeper instincts of the
heathen mind, serves to strengthen the Christian truth. Far clearer and more
fruitful suggestions presented themselves in the Old Testament, particularly in
the doctrines of the Messiah, of the Spirit, of the Word, and of the Wisdom of
God, and even in the system of symbolical numbers, which rests on the
sacredness of the numbers three (God), four (the world), seven and twelve (the
union of God and the world, hence the covenant numbers. But the mystery of the
Trinity could be fully revealed only in the New Testament after the completion
of the work of redemption and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The historical
manifestation of the Trinity is the condition of the knowledge of the
Trinity.”-endquote
