After reading of this blog post, about how the Holy Spirit seems to be persona non grata in most theological conversations, I was put in mind of something I read on the website of an Episcopal Church just yesterday.
Second paragraph, second sentence: “allow The Spirit its due.” Its? Slip of the keyboard? I think not.
The early Church struggled with the personhood of the Holy Spirit. Binary and subordinationist conceptions of the Godhead mutated finally into the Macedonian heresy, a form of Arianism that explicitly denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which was formally condemned by the First Council of Constantinople. And it was that council that formulated the Nicene Creed and its affirmation “I believe in the Holy Ghost . . . ”
It is still too easy for Christians to view the Spirit as some sort of impersonal “power” that imbues the believer with special, politically correct insight, as if it were one of those magnifying thingees you buy in the drugstore to help you read the small print of newspaper editorials. The rise of New Age self-actualization dribble, with its ideas about the tapping into and the passing along of “energies,” has filtered through the walls of the Church into the thinking of too many Christians about the Third Person of the Trinity—which is why it is so important to recite at least one of the creeds every Sunday.
The Father and the Son send the Spirit to be an abiding personal presence within the regenerate believer and the Church—but the Holy Spirit cannot contradict what Christ himself has revealed. (That is why it is possible to “grieve” the Spirit [Eph. 4:30].) The way the Episcopal priest (and much of the mainline) interprets the Spirit’s role is almost that of a usurper—some thing that acts as an addendum to revelation, allowing the savvy progressive Christian to be up on current events in a way a first-century itinerant preacher could not be, and therefore better suited to answering those tough moral questions that tend to crop up between the dinner and an 8 o’clock curtain . . .
