Ok, sit back, ‘cause this one’s a biggie!
Article 8:
Current Text:
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.
Beginning Advent 2011:
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.
So here we go with the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit. We call the Holy Spirit “the Lord” because the Holy Spirit is just as much “the Lord” as God the Father and God the Son (Jesus), the other two persons of the Holy Trinity. We call the Holy Spirit “the giver of life” because throughout the Bible, the life-giving actions of the Lord are attributed to the “spirit” of God, i.e. the Holy Spirit. Take Genesis 2:7, for example: “the LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.” The word being here is literally translated “soul.” So God breathes the “breath of life” into man, which is essentially his spirit (the Holy Spirit), and so we are given life by God. St. Paul also directly mentions that the Spirit gives life in verses 5-6 of his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians: “Not that of ourselves we are qualified to take credit for anything as coming from us; rather, our qualification comes from God, who has indeed qualified us as ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter brings death, but the Spirit gives life.”
So we know that the Bible teaches that the Holy Spirit gives life. Now we get into the more philosophical concept of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. This is the very thing that causes migraines all over the globe on Trinity Sunday: how do you explain the unexplainable mystery of the Holy Trinity to the general congregation? I’ve come to the realization over the years that I’ll never fully understand the Holy Trinity, just like I’ll never understand the concept of God not being bound by time. I might be able to explain it to a certain point, but in the end, that explanation will be lacking some crucial, fundamental point, because God is just too big for the human mind to comprehend, and while some people say, “That’s dumb! Why would God create us and have our minds fall short of understanding him?”, I say, “That’s exactly right. God is infinite, and our finite minds, just can NOT comprehend something infinite.” All the same, I’d like to share with you the most sensible explanation I’ve learned about how the Holy Trinity exists in one being. First, we’ll have to have a little philosophy lesson:
Let’s take you, the person lucky enough to be reading this blog (yes, I AM quite full of myself most of the time). I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you have friends, or at least have interacted with at least one individual at some point in your life. Might be a pretty big assumption, but I’m just going with it for now. So take this other person you know. How do you know they exist? If we look back at the French philosopher Rene Descartes, we see that first thing we have to be sure of when contemplating existence is our own existence. You have thoughts, and those thoughts have to come from SOMEWHERE, so you decide that they are coming from yourself, some kind of being. So if you’re real enough to create thoughts, we can safely say that you exist. This is where the phrase “I think, therefore I am” comes from. So now that we’ve established that you exist, how do you know that other things that you encounter exist—whether those things be friends, bar stools, three-toed sloths, or even blog authors? Well, you first have to figure out where all these things come from. Well, let’s figure out where YOU came from, first. We know that you exist, but WHY do you exist? How did you get here? Who created you?
If you choose (and forgive me philosophy students, but I AM moving incredibly quickly through these concepts) to believe in a supreme being, we can, for argument’s sake, call this supreme being “God” and say that God is the one who has created you. But how do we know that God did not create ONLY you, and that everything you THINK you are experiencing every day is not just a figment of your imagination? How do we know that God is not an “evil genius” (as Descartes speculates) who is determined to fool you into thinking that the world you experience is real? Pretty Matrix-y, don’t you think?
Well, Descartes tackles the idea of God this way (sorry if this gets too philosophical, but it IS, philosophy, after all):
First of all, we have to understand that something cannot come from nothing. Everything in this world was created by something that was created by something that was created by something, and so on. Next, we see that the cause (or creator) of some “thing” must have at least as much formal reality as that “thing” has objective reality. So Descartes realizes that he has in himself an idea of God. Since we view God as creator as being infinite, Descartes says that the idea of God has infinite objective reality. We also see that man cannot be the cause of the idea of God, since man is not an infinite and perfect being. We, being imperfect, cannot create the concept of perfection and infinity…we don’t enough formal reality to be that cause. Only an infinite being, or a perfect being could cause an infinite or perfect idea such as an infinite and perfect God. Therefore an infinite and perfect God MUST exist.
Now that we know God exists, we go back to the question of whether God created you, then made you believe that you were part of this big world, when really it’s all just a figment of your imagination. Well, Descartes says that if God is a perfect being, he would have to be a good and benevolent being. Since we’ve already seen that God is a perfect being, we conclude that he IS a good and benevolent being. Since a good and benevolent being would not deceive a person in that way, we conclude that the things we experience are NOT figments of our imaginations.
So now that we KNOW that the things around us are real, we can get back to talking about how we experience them. This brings us to the subject of relationships. Now I’m not talking about relationships in the sense of not knowing who’s “hooking up” with who on Jersey Shore. I’m talking about how we interact with other things in the world. For the sake of forcing you to separate the idea of “relationship” from the way you’re USED to using it—in the sense of a “romantic” relationship—I’ll continue my explanation using you and a table. How do you know that the table exists? You can’t talk to it. It can’t talk back to you. So you can’t make that kind of connection. You can, however, try to walk through it, but in the end, you’ll probably end up with a sharp pain in your thigh, depending on how tall you are in relation to the table—it could be a pain in your rib cage, or in your shin if it’s one of those little Japanese tables. So we can interact with the table in such a way that we can “experience” it and the fact that it’s there. For the sake of our discussion, we’ll call that interaction your “relationship” with the table. Now don’t run off and start making out with random tables…remember, we’re not talking about relationships in the commonly-used “romantic” sense, but in the philosophical sense. So you have a relationship with the table. Let’s dissect that relationship, shall we? There are three components to that relationship: (1) you, (2) the table, (3) the relationship that exists between you. Let’s shift this over to personal interaction. Let’s say you’re married, the relationship that exists between you and your spouse has three components, as well: (1) you, (2) your spouse, (3) the relationship that exists between you. Now, at its most basic form, the relationship between you and the table is essentially the same as the relationship between you and your spouse. Realistically, however, we see an obvious distinction between those two relationships. Again, I hope you don’t play spin the bottle with your coffee table on lonely Saturday nights. If so, seek help immediately.
Let’s just go for it now and apply this to God. If you haven’t picked up on it already, the Holy Trinity is (are?) the three parts of a relationship. (DISCLAIMER: Again, this is my attempt at explaining something that my incredibly limited mind probably has NO business trying to comprehend.) As we’ve just seen, the three parts of a relationship are: (1) the first entity in the relationship, (2) the second entity in the relationship, and (3) the relationship that exists between them. Applying that to the Holy Trinity, we’ll say that the first entity in the relationship is God the Father. We’ll say that the second entity in the relationship is God the Son. Now for the mind-blower…the THIRD part of the relationship, which is the relationship that exists between the two entities, in the case of the Holy Trinity is (drum roll………..) THE HOLY SPIRIT. Yep, the infinitely perfect bond that exists between God the Father and God the Son is such a powerful relationship that it is, itself, an entirely other “person” of the Holy Trinity. This relationship, which is a relationship of perfect love, is the way we experience God. As the title of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical as pope clearly spells out, “God is love.” We experience God, because we experience his infinite, perfect love. This is where we get our existence. This is where we get our forgiveness. This is where we get our grace.
Getting back to the Creed, we say, “who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” It’s important to remember that God had no beginning, and will have no end. So it’s not like God the Father was existing, and God the Son was existing, and one day they met each other at work and God the Father was like, “Hi, I’m God the Father,” and God the Son was like, “Hey God the Father, I’m God the Son…want to establish an eternal relationship of infinitely perfect love from which we can pour that relationship of love onto a universe of our own creative design?” The relationship of the Holy Trinity has always existed. It never BEGAN…it just always is. So it’s important to understand that the word proceeds is not used here to mean that the Holy Spirit comes AFTER the Father and the Son, but rather that the Holy Spirit exists because the Father and the Son exist. However, it’s important to realize that without the relationship between them, the Father and the Son wouldn’t exist, so it’s not like the Father and Son are more important than the Spirit and that the Spirit is just a by-product of the Father and the Son. They are all equally important components of a bond of existence that we’ll never understand (until possibly after we die). This is why we say that the Spirit “…with the Father and Son is adored and glorified.” The Holy Spirit is just as much “GOD” as the Father and the Son.
Finally (thank the Lord), we believe that the Spirit “has spoken through the prophets.” If you remember, this line was not in the original 325 AD version of the Nicene Creed. It was added later, as we came to a fuller understanding of the importance of the Holy Spirit in the workings of the world. Since my brain nearly exploded earlier in this post, I’m going to be lazy here and defer to the 2nd Letter of Peter, Chapter 1, Verses 20-21: “Know this first of all, that there is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation, for no prophecy ever came through human will; but rather human beings moved by the holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God.” Right there in plain black & white in the Bible. The Holy Spirit is believed to be the guiding force behind the prophetic works in the Bible. The writers of the books of the Bible wrote the words with their own hands, but we believe that the thoughts and prophecies they wrote were not of their own minds, but rather it was the Holy Spirit of God that touched the hearts and minds of those writers to have God’s message sent though them to the people of the world. A message we are still unpacking today.
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