About This "Holy Spirit"

In our own day we generally have our greatest difficulty when we try to talk meaningfully about the Holy Spirit. If God the Father is little more than "a benevolent oblong blur," the Holy Spirit is just a blur. We are not alone in this difficulty. The same thing bothered certain early Christians.

SCENE: Ephesus. The home of some disciples. Enter Paul.

PAUL (anxious to get better acquainted): Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?

DISCIPLES (wondering what on earth Paul is talking about): No, we have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.

( Acts 19: 2)

And for us the situation is made even more confusing by the frequent ecclesiastical use of the old-fashioned word "ghost": for "Holy Spirit" read "Holy Ghost" in most hymnals, prayer books, and sermons. We think of "ghosts" in terms of the old Scottish collect:

From goblins and ghosties and long-legged beasties, And things that go BUMP in the dark, Good Lord, deliver us.

"Since we don't believe in ghosts of that sort any more, why should we believe in a Holy Ghost?" is a not unnatural rejoinder. As a matter of fact, the old Anglo-Saxon word from which this comes, gast, originally meant "breath," or "spirit," or "soul," which (as we shall see) is not far from the original Biblical meaning. How can we overcome these confusions?

Let us remember that the Holy Spirit is, in simplest definition, God in action. To be possessed by the Spirit is not simply to be "feeling inspirational" or to be imbued with "team spirit," but to be possessed by God. He was central to the experience of the early Christians, and he has been central for authentic Christian experience ever since. His reality is perhaps most clearly felt in community experience. Paul, you remember, talked about the "koinonia [community, fellowship] of the Holy Spirit" ( II Cor. 13: 14). The Church, then, is the sphere where His power is most fully operative. It is significant that almost everything that the early Christians do in the book of The Acts is attributed to the power of the Holy Spirit. "It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us . . ." (Acts 15: 28) is mature Christian conviction.

As we look at the notion of "spirit" in the Bible, certainly the dominant impression we gain is of "spirit" as a source of power. The Hebrew word used in the Old Testament, ruach, is developed from the notion of "wind," and comes to mean a manifestation of God's activity and presence. ("Take not thy holy ruach from me," Ps. 51: 11.) The new Testament word pneuma stands likewise for the dynamic activity of God at work in the lives of men. As Jesus put it, "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you" ( Acts 1: 8). The word-images that the early Christians use for the Holy Spirit also reflect this fact. He is not gentle and passive. On the contrary, "The place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit" ( Acts 4: 30). In the account of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the apostles hear "a sound from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind." When they try to picture the Holy Spirit in a visual image, he appears as "tongues of fire." (Cf. Acts 2: 1-4.)