A New Look at Holy Spirit
What, in the World, is Holy Spirit?
Part Two
In the recent Coronation of King Charles, the Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of "the anointing of the spirit." I wondered what came to mind in the millions of people listening in. Did it mean Charles was not just a religious man but also a "spiritual" one? And then, what is a "spiritual" person? It must have something to do with "spirit!" So, back to what spirit means in progressive, evolving, integral Christianity.
A major part of my understanding of Christianity is a radically new idea: A Christian, biblical, mystical understanding of spirit that also embraces many other traditions is best found in the one word "consciousness."
The Church took a conceptual path with doctrines on holy spirit
From the Bible, let's move to the Church's official take on holy spirit. We see this in the Creeds, which are about what major parts of the global church has believed. These are mental concepts that adherents subscribed to. The earliest creed was "Jesus is Lord," which framed Jesus in opposition to the Roman "Caesar is Lord." Eventually church leaders formulated three much more elaborate creeds, which, sixteen centuries later, are still widely used today in many churches except Evangelical/Pentecostal churches. They all speak of spirit.
(Click here for more about the creeds and their problems and how we can reconstruct our toxic beliefs to transforming ones)
Catholic Christians are familiar with two creeds – the Nicene Creed, typically recited at Sunday Mass, and the Apostle's Creed, the first prayer of the Rosary.
The Apostles' Creed is the earliest (fourth-century) creed still used today. About spirit, it simply says, "I believe in the Holy Spirit."
The Nicene Creed of 325 was reformulated in the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 381. It says, "And [we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. In one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church."
The Athanasian Creed has been widely used since the sixth century. Significantly, it begins with an "anathema" — a formal curse by a pope or an ecclesiastical council, excommunicating a person or denouncing a doctrine. Here it is from the beginning of this creed: "Anyone who does not keep it [this creed] whole and unbroken will doubtless perish eternally." They didn't play nice back then — or today since this creed still stands for Roman Catholics and others.
The section on the "Holy Ghost" reads: "The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts. And in this Trinity none is before, or after another; none is greater, or less than another."
This lesson in religious math was accompanied by serious infighting and debate by the church authorities.
In my previous article, I began exploring the ten arrows or discoveries it took for me to move from a traditional theological understanding of spirit as "the third person of the Trinity" to spirit as the life force and energy of divine consciousness present in and as the consciousness of finite humankind.
Now, I continue to detail how I came to this:
Arrow #6: Why the biblical writers say did not say "consciousness" instead of spirit
The Stanford Encyclopedia states that consciousness, as we know it today, is a relatively recent historical development. According to this view, earlier humans such as those who fought the Trojan War, did not experience themselves as unified internal subjects of their thoughts and actions, at least not in the ways we do today. Therefore it has been claimed that there was no word in ancient Greek that corresponds to consciousness.
Though the ancients had much to say about mental matters, it is less clear whether they had any specific concepts or concerns for what we now think of as consciousness. The earliest English language uses of "conscious" and "consciousness" date back to the 1500s.
There is nothing closer to us than consciousness. At the same time, there is nothing harder to explain. Consciousness, like quantum physics, is one of the few incredibly important things about life and reality that we have only begun exploring.
I arrived at seeing spirit as consciousness by two pathways. First, I approached this phenomenologically by looking at the many biblical accounts of the activity of spirit in human life. I decided to take these biblical accounts seriously when describing the effects of "spirit" in today's language. Last week we journeyed through the Bible to better grasp spirit— so spirit could get a better grasp on us (for more extensive accounts, see my book, Is Your God Big Enough? Close Enough? You Enough?).
The New Testament uses phrases like "filled with," "poured out," "come upon," "flowed from," "descended upon," "baptized with," "received," and "given." In these cases, people are given "more" life, spirit– breath, or consciousness in order to carry out certain tasks. My friend Jack Levison, Chair of Old Testament Interpretation and Biblical Hebrew at Perkins School of Theology, calls what I identify as awakened spirit-breath-consciousness a "special endowment."
We see this in the New Testament after Pentecost as intensified spirit-breath fills new followers of Jesus, such as Paul, and believers at Samaria and Ephesus. This is in the form of "more" spirit or "expanded" spirit. I concluded that God's spirit in the Old Testament is our normal, everyday life force or spirit, with a few exceptions of awakened spirit. In the New Testament, God's spirit almost always refers to awakened or intensified spirit. It is sometimes seen causing trances or visions.
When Peter addressed the crowd at Pentecost, he explained what was happening. He quoted the prophet, Joel, saying, "I will pour out my divine consciousness on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall speak messages from God, your elders shall dream dreams, and your young people shall see visions. (Acts 2:17, my translation).
That divine spirit-consciousness was not the ordinary, everyday awareness that all humans possess. Instead, he was talking about awakened, elevated consciousness. Notice the mystical phenomena that characterized this kind of expanded awareness was speaking forth messages from God (prophecy), sacred dreams, and visions.
Have you ever had meaningful words come to you while in a sacred space that has great meaning for someone else? Ever had a dream full of meaning? While in deep meditation or prayer, have you ever seen images, heard words, or felt sensations on the inside that did not seem to come from you? Over 2500 years ago, the Israelite prophet Joel said you would!
Arrow #7: Jesus on spirit, breath, wind, consciousness
I noticed that Jesus did not say God is a spirit but "God is spirit" (John 4:24). The I AM face of God, what I call the Infinite Face of God Beyond Us, is not a divine being but is more expansively thought about as Being itself. Likewise, the Infinite Face of God is not a spirit. This dimension of God can be more helpfully thought about as Consciousness Itself. The Psalmist asks, "Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?" (Psalm 139:7). In Jeremiah 23:24, God declares, "Do I not fill heaven and earth?"
The infinite Spirit of God is everywhere and is associated with God's conscious presence. In all ventures of life, "even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me" (Psalm 23:4). Since we are talking about "everywhere," it appears that spirit itself is big — infinitely big. So let's identify this divine "everywhere" spirit that Jesus spoke of as Infinite Spirit-Breath-Consciousness.
Arrow #8: Spirit is both divine and human
Next, I decided to go back to the Bible's story of the beginning of everything. In dramatic story-telling, "the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while spirit (rûach) of God swept over the face of the waters" (Gen 1:2). One of our problems with understanding spirit in the Bible is that we must use translations from the Hebrew and Greek. No translation can catch the rich and nuanced mixtures of meanings of the word translated as "spirit" in Hebrew.
In my Hebrew studies in seminary, I found that the word "spirit," rûach in Hebrew, amazingly means not only "spirit" but "breath," "wind," and even, at times, "mind," "ecstatic state," and "symbol of life." Translators must choose whether to use spirit, breath, wind, or other meanings based on the context and their interpretation of the most likely meaning. For instance, in Ezekiel 37, we see all three different translations of the same word: "I will put my spirit (rûach) within you, and you shall live. . . Come from the four winds (rûach). . . and breath (rûach) came into them" (Ezekiel 37:6, 9, 10). We see how mysteriously nuanced the one word rûach is as our spirit, life force, wind, and breath.
As they saw it, the translators also had to decide whether someone was filled with the life force of awakened human awarenes (spirit) or the divine spirit of God (Spirit in their spelling). In most places, the translators seem to believe they had to determine whether to call this God's spirit or human spirit because their theological view was that it could not be both. The ordinary reader doesn't realize all the theologizing going on behind the translation of "spirit" that reflects the translator's beliefs.
A progressive, evolving integral view sees spirit as both divine and human to avoid a false dichotomy between human and divine spirit.
In classical Greek classes at my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, and in my biblical Greek studies later at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, I learned that pneuma (πνεῦμα) is the Greek word for spirit and corresponds to the Hebrew rûach in the Old Testament. It is found 362 times in the New Testament. Amazingly, like rûach, pneuma can also mean life-giving spirit, breath, wind, and the vital principle by which the body is animated. Stoicism, a school of philosophy from ancient Greece and Rome in early 3rd century BC, enriched Christianity by emphasizing pneuma as life force, vital fire, and beneficent warmth.
I found out that there is even more mixing and blending because rûach and pneuma can also mean both divine and human spirit or breath. In Genesis, God created the first human being by starting with dust, dirt, or clay from the ground formed into a body or "earth creature," as the Inclusive Bible translates it. "So YHWH fashioned an earth creature from the clay of the earth." But that earth creature was not yet a living person. God then "blew into its nostrils the breath (niš·maṯ) of life. And the earth creature became a living being" (Gen. 2:7 IB). Niš·maṯ is another Hebrew word that can also mean divine or human breath, a living person, and spirit. Human life is created when spirit is breathed or imparted!
Next, I moved to the dramatic scene of Noah and the flood. As the flood continued, "All that had the breath (niš·maṯ) of the spirit (rûach) of life that were on dry land died" (Gen. 7:22). This word "breath" is also "spirit (rûach) of life." In Hebrew, spirit is both the inner nature of God and the principle which gives life to the human body. All of this continues the great mixing of divine and human spirit, life, and breath in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Job says, "As long as my breath (niš·maṯ) is in me and the spirit (rûach) of God is in my nostrils" (Job 27:3). And again, "The spirit (rûach) of God has made me and the breath [from niš·maṯ] of the Almighty gives me life" (Job 33:4). Levison writes, "The rûach, the spirit-breath, is an amazing amalgamation of human breath and divine spirit— all of this a gift of God."
We can readily make the connection between the divine spirit and our very life in other passages, such as Ezekiel 36:7. God says, "I will put my spirit (rûach) within you, and you shall live." This rich and nuanced connection of divine and human spirit with divine and human breath in the one word "rûach" is so lost in the usual translation that Levison renders rûach as "spirit-breath" (as I do also) to signify the mingling of divine, human, spirit, and breath, all in this one word.
The divine spirit-consciousness became the human spirit-consciousness even while remaining the divine spirit-breath. You and I are individualized expressions of this single, indivisible, infinite, universal divine spirit. The human spirit is a holy spirit!
Arrow # 9: In the Bible, Spirit is Consciousness
I asked myself what the was the difference between the "earth creature" of Genesis and the "living being" that it became when God-She breathed spirit into it. The difference between an earth body created from the clay of the earth and a living human being is the life-force and energy of consciousness. Dust, dirt, and rocks are not conscious, at least in the way people are.
What was the difference between basic spirit-breath and what Levison calls a "special endowment"? I call this intensified or more awakened spirit. When people moved from basic consciousness or awareness to a higher degree of awareness, they suddenly became more conscious of an intensified life force and, in Joel's words, of "prophecy, dreams, and visions." We will see that the phenomena Joel predicted of channeling words from God, information from dreams, and seeing sacred visions were all a vital part of the New Testament church's experience of spirit-breath. These are all experiences of non-ordinary or awakened mystical awareness. When I saw this, I came to the only conclusion that seemed to fit: These ancient biblical metaphors and descriptions of spirit are today contained in our word "consciousness."
Knowing "spirit" as waking up shifts us from a set of beliefs to a transformed life.
Confirmation and ordination are traditional rituals that mimic the transmission rituals of Acts but seldom carry that same transformative power.
For some, this exploration may, understandably, be too technical with all the Hebrew and Greek references. I also want to point out that even though I am making a strongly held case for my viewpoint here, you must decide how much of this is true and meaningful for you. It is certainly still, in my mind, appropriate to use the word "spirit" as the Bible does.
I find myself using the word spirit much less and consciousness more because it is significant to me. Take whatever is helpful to you.
