I finished Robert Grant's Gods and the One God. In this post, I'll use as my starting-point something that Grant says on page 149 regarding the Holy Spirit:
"Some
of the biblical texts treat 'spirit' not as personal but as a force, or
even an experience, not clearly definable...The category of personal
divine being shared by the Father and the Son is not quite the same as
that shared with the Spirit, and this is one reason why Eastern theology
speaks of the Spirit as 'proceeding from the Father' and in the West we
hear of 'proceeding from the Father and the Son'... [But] we should not
try to reduce doctrines to their presumed origins and assume that the
nature of the Spirit must be limited to force or experience."
For better or for worse, Armstrongism
has had an impact on how I study religion. It's not that I assume that
Armstrongism is the end-all-be-all of what the Bible means----far from
it, for I neither associate with that movement anymore, nor do I follow
many of its beliefs and practices. But my background in Armstrongism
does account for some of the questions that I ask, or some of the things
that I notice when I am reading a scholarly book on religion. Such
questions include: "What did early Christianity believe was the proper
relationship between Gentiles and the Torah?", and "Did the Hebrew Bible
regard the Holy Spirit to be a person or an impersonal force----as in
God's power."
On the latter question, Armstrongism maintained that
the Holy Spirit was God's power, not a person. What that means is that
Armstrongism does not believe in the Trinity, and that is a big reason
that it has been treated as an unorthodox cult by many conservative
Christians. Many may ask why it even matters----why should
Armstrongites be so insistent that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal
force rather than a person, and why should the "orthodox" boldly contend
that the Holy Spirit is a person and not an impersonal force? I mean,
how many poor people does this debate feed? Personally, I can
understand why a person could look at this debate and consider it to be a
non-issue. I think that many of the doctrinal hang-ups of Armstrongism
were rooted in a desire among people to feel as if they had more
insight than others. I myself tend to harp on these issues for a
variety of reasons----my rebellion against what I was told was the only
legitimate way to see things, or my curiosity about the extent to which
Armstrongism is right or wrong. For me personally, though, the debate
does not matter a great deal, but I do find it interesting----and one of
my goals as a budding scholar of religion is to find something
interesting about which I can write.
So what is my stance about
whether or not the Holy Spirit is a person? I think that, from the
outset, it's important for me to clarify something: I do not believe
that the entire Bible is a thoroughly consistent document that teaches
one position on certain doctrinal issues. Rather, my impression is that
the Bible is a diverse document and contains a variety of
perspectives. You can do with that what you wish. Personally, I've not
found a way to uphold the Bible as divinely-inspired while maintaining
that view, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a way. But I'm saying
this because it's what sets me apart from Armstrongites and many of
their conservative Christian detractors: both sides assume that the
Bible is one consistent document from beginning to end, and I don't
think that's necessarily the case.
So what about the Holy Spirit?
I'll just lay out what I currently think, but I will not rigorously
defend it, at least not in this post. I believe that, within the Hebrew
Bible, the Holy Spirit is God's power. That view could have carried
over into Jesus' perspective during his ministry, since Jesus calls the
Holy Spirit the finger of God (Luke 11:20). But, at some point within
the New Testament, the Holy Spirit was held to be a person. When Jesus
in Matthew 28 talks about being baptized in the name of the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Spirit, that sounds rather Trinitarian to me. And
when Paul says in Romans 8 that the Spirit intercedes for believers who
pray, he seems to be doing more than personifying an impersonal force:
rather, he appears to be describing a person who intercedes. James Dunn
argues that Proverbs 8 personifies wisdom, which was deemed to be
impersonal, and Dunn says this because (according to him) the Hebrew
Bible was rather monotheistic; but elements of the New Testament go a
step further and say that wisdom was a personal being, Jesus Christ. I
think that something similar is going on with the Holy Spirit----what
was once considered to be an impersonal force becomes a person.