When I started this blog at the beginning of Lent, I had a declared intention of posting one article a week. As you have probably already realised, this did not happen. Articles on the war in Ukraine, the Atonement, why the Resurrection is important and not mere “proclamation” of a victory “won” at the Crucifixion, and so on, never got written.
However, for Pentecost I’d like to share something a bit less polemical than most of the articles I had planned.
Talking about the Spirit
Cally Hammond, in this week’s Church Times, says that the Spirit is the easiest Person of the Godhead to experience. I am not convinced, because our experiences of the Spirit are intensely personal. It is hard, if not impossible, to know what someone else’s experience of the Spirit is like; when I hear people’s descriptions, it might sound like a spiritual experience beyond anything I have ever felt; more often it comes across more like a physiological response to a heightened emotional state. In neither case, however, can I really compare such descriptions with what I feel, or even with each other. Perhaps this is what Philip Yancey meant when he said “Mention of the Holy Spirit summons up much confusion.”
This is reflected to some extent in the vocabulary we use to talk about the spirit. Here the problem is compounded: not only are we using words in an attempt to communicate something that is beyond words, but the words themselves change in meaning.
Spirit
In biblical languages, the word for “spirit” also means “breath”. This is true of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic; it is discernible in Latin and English, where we can see a connection between “spirit” and “respiration”. In Genesis 1:2, where the Spirit is intimately involved in creation, one could argue that a better translation might be the breath of God. Likewise in John 3:8, where Jesus tries to describe the effect of the Spirit, “The wind blows where it wishes …” he seems to be deliberately punning in his choice of words for “wind” and “Spirit”.
It is worth mentioning that the Old Testament use of “breath” for “life-force” was consciously metaphorical. In Genesis 2:7 God breathes life into Adam, and in Ezekiel 37:9–10 the army of corpses is animated by breath. This breath/spirit is a metaphor for what distinguished a sentient being: God is not seen breathing life into any other creature, but we cannot infer that the ancient writers were unaware that other animals breathed.
Holy Ghost
It is unfortunate that “Ghost”, with connotations today only of spooks and spectres, survived long enough to stand for the Spirit in the Book of Common Prayer. This does refer to the “Holy Spirit” – notably in the prayer that opens the Eucharist – but most of the book refers obdurately to the “Holy Ghost”.
More worrying is the use of “Ghost” in languages that lack this confusion. In German, for example, the word for spirit is Geist, which means mind rather than spook; and yet in Germany I once saw a display of Sunday School interpretations of “Holy Spirit” based around children’s colouring in of a conventional spook image – the spectre in a sheet – and entitled “Wie ein Gespenst”: “Like a ghost”.
Paraclete
To most people, who only ever encounter it as a title for the Spirit, this word conveys no information. In Greek it seems to have meant a legal representative; “solicitor” might be a modern equivalent. It is sometimes translated “comforter”, but this hardly helps, with connotations more of a child’s security blanket than of the etymological “giver of strength”.
Tongues
One could (and I once did as part of my degree) write a whole essay on this one subject. There is probably more than one phenomenon described by this word. At Pentecost, the apostles spoke; everyone, even those from places so obscure that Luke couldn’t even find Greek names for them, heard their own language. In 1 Corinthians 14:28, Paul warns against speaking in tongues unless there is someone to interpret – hardly an issue if everyone is hearing their own language!
There are two problems here. One is that the word, and even the phenomenon, can be misused and made into something quite unspiritual. The second is that, possibly because speaking in tongues is so often described in Acts as symbolic of a range of manifestations, it can seem as if tongues are diagnostic: without them, the Spirit is absent. Applied to a church, this is bad; applied to an individual, this goes directly against Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 12:29, as backed up by 1 Cor. 12:11.
(At the risk of getting polemical again, 1 Cor. 12:29 is usually translated “Do all speak with tongues?” etc., but this is misleading: more literal would be “Of course not all speak with tongues.”)
Person, Substance, Being
Finally, we come to the notion of the Trinity, and the words used to describe the relationship between Trinity and Unity. This is difficult in any language, and words that we expect to mean the same are found in contrast to one another. Three Substances, one Essence? Three Persons, one Being? Rather than insist on a particular model, I prefer to accept that God cannot be fully known in this life, and therefore cannot be adequately described in Human language.
Images of the Spirit
A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, but this seems to be an average exchange rate. Some pictures add little to the text; others are worth far more than a thousand words, and can often convey things that words cannot.
At Pentecost, we tend to concentrate on images of wind and flame, which obscure an important point: that the Spirit is a Person, not just a thing.
However, to counterbalance my example of the Gespenst image of the Spirit, from the church I attended during my 2004 visit to Germany, I should like to offer you an image from the Thomaskirche (St Thomas’s Church) in Hohenbostel, which I attended in 2011-12, when working in Hanover. Here the artist has abandoned wind and flame, and returned to the gospel imagery of a dove – with a difference. (And provided a helpful caption in the local Low German dialect.)
