- ETC Intro
Trinitarian Pneumatology for the Formation of Holy Community
Question
Manuscript
Message
Trinitarian Pneumatology for the Formation of Holy Community
<Diverse Misunderstandings of the Work of the Holy Spirit>
Changwon Kim (UBF Gwanak I staff)
Recently, there was an incident in Germany. On December 8, 2015, German local mass media announced, “On December 5th, in a guest room of Ammein Intercontinental Hotel, Frankfurt, a 41-year-old Korean woman was found dead due to severe blows.” According to police investigation, this woman was tied to the bed, with a towel in her mouth for several hours and was severely beaten in her torso and this resulted in her death due to strangulation. The police arrested 5 people who were involved in the murder on the spot.
Surprisingly, they were known to be members of the same church in Korea. Under the leadership of a 44-year-old woman who claims that she received the power of the Holy Spirit to cast out demons, they performed so called “touching or beating prayer” to drive out demons. As a result, they brought about the tragic death of the woman.
There was a student. She asked a woman deacon who claims that she received the gift of prophesy about what department she should choose in order to pass the University Entrance Exam. The woman deacon answered, “If you choose Mathematics, you will get in the University.” The student chose Mathematics and amazingly she got accepted to that department at a university. However, she did not have any interest in the program throughout her university life. She barely graduated from the Mathematics department but after her graduation, she couldn’t get a job. She fell into deep depression and stayed at home alone. She couldn’t go out.
There is such a thing as “impartation.” It is that those who have the power of the Holy Spirit can give the power to speak in different tongues and heal the sick by laying their hands on them. It is the idea that the one who has the power of the Holy Spirit can impart (pass or give) the power to others. When they lay their hands or stretch out their hands toward people, they fall to the ground, roll around, or laugh with high emotion; “Caal Caal!!”Even amalgam-filled teeth turn to golden teeth or gold powder is sprayed all over the face.
The ones who perform these miracles equate the Holy Spirit with “force,” “strength,” or “mysterious power.” And they think that they can give such supernatural power to people anytime they want. The word that they always shout is “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
However, these kinds of miracles are not unique to Christianity. Evil spirits can also perform miracles. A Muslim prophet performed a miracle of turning a coconut to gold. There is a story of an American Christian woman whose legs had a 5 cm difference in length. One day she visited a miracle-performing sorceress and amazingly she experienced a miracle that the length of her legs became the same. But after the experience, she fell into heavy depression and anxiety. She couldn’t bear the stress and she went to her church pastor to consult with him about her problem. Through counselling from her pastor, she realized that she committed a great sin against God and should repent her sin deeply. After sincere repentance, her heavy depression and anxiety disappeared and her legs were also restored to the state of 5 cm difference as before.
Some have a pragmatic understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit. Those who have such a view utilize the Holy Spirit only for pragmatic purposes. They try to escape from their daily boring, routine life through mysterious experiences of the Holy Spirit. They seek relief from the weariness of daily life through transcendent experience, ecstasy, speaking in different kinds of tongues, or seeing a vision. Also through such experiences, they want to demonstrate that they are superior to others.
Many ministers or workers of God may, from time to time, feel that serving God’s ministry is hard and fruitless. Drinking coffee or an energy drink on a tired and weary afternoon gives a boost in energy; in the same way, some think that if they experience a special work of the Holy Spirit, they would have a surprising change in their life of faith. So they seek a supernatural experience through the Holy Spirit.
A pitfall of a pragmatic understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit is to try to utilize the Holy Spirit as the means of one’s own work. As a result, the Holy Spirit is understood only as a tool of achieving the ministers’ own glory and success. Here, the Holy Spirit is considered an assistant to satisfy the ministers’ own desire for the growth of their ministry.
The above are just a few examples of misunderstandings about the work of the Holy Spirit. There are far more diverse misunderstandings about the work of the Holy Spirit. This leads to several questions. “What does it mean to experience the Holy Spirit? What work does the Holy Spirit want to do? What work is he doing in the present? Who is the Holy Spirit?”
In order to answer to these questions, we should go back to the Bible. How does the Bible answer those questions?
1. The Holy Spirit is God: a Person of the Trinity
The account of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is based on “Creation-Fall-Redemption-Perfection.” Throughout the Bible, God is revealed as God who is alive and at work. Creation, preservation, and governance are the works of God.
But God’s works did not begin just from the time of his creation of the universe because his work is from eternity to eternity. Working is integral to “His being.” Jesus said in John 5:17, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.”
Here, we can divide the works of God into two; one is the works of God inward(ad intra) and the other is the works of God outward(ad extra).
The Bible teaches us that God’s personal attributes are His immanent and eternal works. His personal attributes are the attributes of each person in the Triune God; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The personal attribute of the Father God is “fatherhood” or “non-begottenness.” The personal attribute of the Son is “filiation.” The personal attribute of the Holy Spirit is “procession” or “spiration.” These attributes are God’s immanent work. The Father God eternally works as “the God who begets.” The Son God eternally works as “the God who is begotten” and the Holy Spirit eternally works as “the God who processes.”
The Father God eternally gives life in him to the Son so that his life may dwell in the Son and also with the Son he gives his life to the Holy Spirit so that his life may dwell in the Holy Spirit(John 5:26). The Father God knows and loves the Son God eternally even from before setting the foundation of the universe (Matt 11:27; John 17:24). The Holy Spirit searches the deep things of the Father God (1 Cor 2:10). Therefore, the community of being that exists among the three persons is a life of absolute activity.
All these works of God bear no relation to anything that exists or will exist outside of God, but occur within the divine being and they concern the relations existing among the three persons. These are usually designated as ‘decrees.’
What can we conclude here? The Holy Spirit is a person in the Triune God. As the Father God is God, so the Son God is God. As the Father God and the Son God is God, so the Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit is God. Therefore, the Holy Spirit is not an impersonal ‘force,’ or ‘energy’ or ‘power,’ but a personal Being; the God who has personality.
Of course, the Bible describes the Holy Spirit with the image of water, fire, wind, or dove. It is because God can manifest himself to man only through the expression of anthropomorphism. Through the window of such objects, we should try to understand that the Holy Spirit is God, but, if we are interested only in the realm of our experience, we cannot but have misunderstandings about the Holy Spirit. In fact, in church history, there have been so many examples of ignoring the Holy Spirit’s personality by clinging only to the utility of the Holy Spirit, which emphasizes only the functional aspect and the gift aspect of the Holy Spirit. The tragedy of diluting the personality of the Holy Spirit and his divine nature is being repeated in the church today.
1 Cor. 2:10, 11 teach us that the One who searches and knows the deep things, inner thoughts of God (the Father God) is the Holy Spirit. “But God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”
Then, who is the Holy Spirit who searches even the deep things of God and knows the thoughts of God? He is also God. It is because God is comprehended completely by only God.
The incident recorded in Acts 5 also testifies that the Holy Spirit is God. Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? (Acts 5:3)” In the next verse, he said clearly, “You have not lied to men but to God.” To Peter, ‘lie to the Holy Spirit’ and ‘lie to God’ seem to be interchangeable expressions. Through this, we can come to a conclusion that Peter emphasized that the Holy Spirit to whom Ananias lied was God.
Historically, the church had included the fact that the Holy Spirit is God in the confessions of faith. In A.D 325, at the Nicaea Council, in A.D. 381, at the Constantinople Council, and in the Protestant Reformers’ confession of faith, that the Holy Spirit is God had consistently been confessed. Westminster Confession of Faith adopted in July, A.D. 1643, also included the divine nature of the Holy Spirit as follows: “In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost: the Father is of none, neither begotten, not proceeding: the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.”
It is self-evident truth that the Holy Spirit is God in the Triune God but we neglect this fact too frequently. The fact that the Holy Spirit is God teaches us that He is worthy of receiving our worship and praise. He is not the One whom we can utilize as we want but whom we ought to obey and follow.
2. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Creation
The works of the Triune God ad intra is inseparable from ad extra, but there is a distinction between them. The works of the Triune God ad extra in the will of God are revealed in ‘creation, preservation, and governance.' God’s outward work (ad extra) in his will is included within his eternal counsel. The realization of the counsel of God begins with creation. God created the universe by his Word and Spirit (Gen 1:2-3; Psalm 33:6; 104:29; 148:5; Job 26:13, 33:4; Isa 40:13; Zec 12:1; John 1;3; Col 1:16; Heb 1:2). As God the Father is Creator, so the Word, the Son, Jesus, who came to this earth as a man is Creator, and not only so, the Holy Spirit is Creator.
The first mention of the Holy Spirit in the Bible in relation to Creation is Genesis 1:2. “and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters(~yIM'h; ynEP.-l[; tp,x,r:m. ~yhil{a/ x:Wrw>))))" Here, ‘hover’(lahap) in Hebrew, means “tremble, palpitate.”This interpretation is based on Jer 23:9, “all my bones tremble” and Isa 63:7-14 which clearly describes that the Holy Spirit was the leader and deliverer of the Exodus, and Deut 32:10-11 which describes the deliverer of the Exodus as “shielding, caring, guarding his people like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young…in a desert land.”
This description points to the