The Holy Spirit is never depicted in human form in mainstream Christianity.
The Annealing Flame of Salvation
Notes on the Holy Spirit and Armstrongism
By Redermann
“… the Bible reveals that the Holy Spirit is the power and energy of the God Family, as well as the very nature, life and mind of God — not another spiritual entity!” Richard H Sedliacik (Good News, April 1985)
“God tells Christ what to do … Jesus then speaks as the workman, and the Holy Spirit is the power that responds and does what Jesus commands.” Herbert W. Armstrong (Mystery of the Ages, First Edition,
p. 44.
“The Holy Spirit from Christ is like a current of electricity flowing through a light bulb. We are that bulb.” Herman Hoeh, (Plain Truth Magazine, June 1956)
“Man is put here on earth to learn to develop tools for limited creative work — to train himself for the ETERNAL GOAL — becoming part of the God-family, which means control of the creative Spirit of God.” Herman Hoeh (Plain Truth Magazine, June 1956)
The nature of the Holy Spirit is a topic that has been fraught with controversy for centuries. The Bible describes the Holy Spirit with much different analogies than what are used for the Father and the Son. But, in general, the Christian church has come to understand the Holy Spirit to a sufficient degree to form a reasonable and scriptural doctrine. An exception to this mainstream doctrine is the view that is found in Armstrongism and other similar denominations originating in the Restoration Movement. The quotations above briefly illustrate the inclination of the Armstrongist view. That view is that the Holy Spirit is an energy or force used by God to project his power. The Holy Spirit is not a person and, therefore, it is an impersonal force. This essay addresses the deficiency of that view. I will not use the traditional approach to supporting the mainstream doctrine of the Holy Spirit which involves careful exegesis but rather some non-traditional arguments. Theology gains clarity by going first to the Doctrine of God and I will begin at that point.
God is absolute. He created everything and sustains everything. Deism is false. Yet, there are Deistic tendencies in many denominational theologies. Deism is the idea that God has created the Cosmos as an external object, like a great machine, and the machine can run without divine intervention. It is as if you made a lawn mower in your garage and then gave it to someone else so you really no longer have anything to do with it. In contrast, the NT says this about all created things:
“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” (Hebrews 1:3)
Jesus not only created all things (in the Cosmos and in the transcendent realm), but he sustains these things across time – moment to moment. So far, I think we can all agree with these statements. Now I am going to write something that will require some careful, non-dogmatic thought. God does not need an energy or force to carry out the action of his will. God is absolute and controls all things at the most fundamental level of reality. There may be a division of responsibility among the Divine Persons but God does not need an impersonal force to project his power. He is sovereign over everything by profound creational intimacy.
The idea that the Holy Spirit is an energy that God uses to project his will is derived from the anthropomorphic language of the Bible. Anthropomorphism is analogical language that illuminates events where principle rather than the details of the ontology of God are the focus. This language is based on ideas with which we are familiar in our human realm. Men use energy to accomplish work whether it be human strength or electricity or fire or the tapping of the nucleus of an atom. This human model is then used by the Bible authors to depict God. And it has a vividness that other depictions that truly reflect God’s ontology might not have for some minds. But the model is from physics – created physics. But if God is absolute, and he is, the physics model is not fully apt. It is just literature but literature to good purpose.
Armstrongists depict the Holy Spirit as an attribute of God. It is true that God says “my Spirit,” as if the Spirit were an attribute but he also says “my Son.” This language does not relegate both the Spirit and the Son to attributes. Christians depict the Holy Spirit as a divine person that is both separate and in unity with God. Throughout the OT there are references to the Spirit. An example is, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Sprit saith the Lord.” The question is why is the Spirit given a separate and significant presence, frequently incorporated in the statements of God, when the Spirit is just an attribute of God as Armstrongists believe? If the Spirit is just an attribute of God could it not be easily left out of the picture – just assumed? Couldn’t God just simply say, “I did this,” instead of “the Spirit did this” when the Spirit as an attribute simply refers to God. If the Spirit is only an attribute, it is like you and I always saying “my hand took the pencil” instead of just saying “I took the pencil.” The fact is in OT syntax the Spirit is accorded a separate status. When the Spirit is mentioned, the language refers to the action and participation of the Holy Spirit as a separate divine person.
There is a bit of sleight of hand in the Armstrongist beliefs about the Holy Spirit. This is illustrated in the quotation from Richard H. Sedliacik at the beginning of this essay. Sedliacik maintains that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal energy or power but it bears with it somehow God’s nature, life and mind. The idea that the Holy Spirit bears God’s mind stands on the brink of admitting that the Holy Spirit is a separate being. But maybe Armstrongists believe that the “mind of God” in this case is just a kind of information package carried by the Holy Spirit but not really an active mind. In this way the Holy Spirit can bear the mind of God but still be an impersonal non-being energy. This sleight of hand is really present so all the scriptures that indicate that the Holy Spirit is a being can be accommodated within the theory of an impersonal energy (Romans 8:27). That does not really work. From the context of Romans 8:27, we know that the usage of the term “mind” is not metaphor or symbol or literary personification but actual. We have the Holy Spirit in that same verse making intercession for the saints. Making intercession requires mind, free will, independent action, awareness, communication, the ability to analyze empirical data and so on.
Some of the arguments against the idea of the Holy Spirit being a divine person are curious. One argument is that by some unusual mathematics, three is a closed number and two is an open number. And the false “Trinity teaching,” so claimed, limits God to three persons. This is coupled with the unsupportable idea that man will become “God as God is God” so there will need to be many more places at the God table. No doubt people who believe in the Trinity do not believe the radically liberal idea that more full status Gods will be added to the God category. But that limitation is not derived from the inherent nature of the number three. The idea that the integer three is closed is facetious. Another argument against the Holy Spirit as a Person was made by Garner Ted Armstrong (GTA). At one time I was quite impressed with this sophomoric argument. GTA asserted that if Jesus was conceived by the action of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is a being, then God was not the Father of Jesus but maybe an uncle or some other relation. GTA’s solution to this problem was to assert that the Holy Spirit is not a being but an energy. The problem with this is that it is a violation of Occam’s Razor – that the simplest answer is the best answer and the only supportable answer. GTA radically redefined the ontology of the Holy Spirit when the only immediate conclusion you can draw from this data is simply that God and the Holy Spirit are the same – which then leads to the Trinity. The second quotation at the top, from Herbert W. Armstrong (HWA), is also informative. HWA saw God as a hierarchy. He did not see the co-equal relationship that John referred to (John 5:18) or is evinced by the Three-fold Formula. Unsurprisingly, the model of a single leader ruling over a hierarchy seemed to dominate HWA's thinking and was the backbone of church government and an Ambassador College education. This has an Arianist flavor which was held by some in the Church of God Seventh Day.
Speaking of metaphor, there is a way the Bible uses metaphor that bears on this topic. Most metaphors in the Bible are “downward metaphors.” I am coining that term. This refers to comparing a higher being or object to a lesser being or object. We might find a scripture that states that the Holy Spirit was “poured out.” If the Holy Spirit is really a person, this is a downward metaphor. It makes an intelligent being seem like liquid in order to vividly emphasize a trait – in this case scope or availability. This is found often in the Bible. “Upward metaphors” are seldom found in the Bible, if at all. (Let me know if you find one.) This is comparing a lesser being or object to a higher being or object. This is like saying, “the ocean decided to fight against us.” My guess is that this is seldom used because it has pagan implications. Pagans may see various forces, energies, flora and fauna in nature as animistic beings. This leads to a probabilistic rather than categorical conclusion. It is very unlikely that an upward metaphor that attributes mind to an impersonal energy would be used by an NT writer. It is more likely that when Paul in Romans 8:27 refers to the “mind of the spirit” he means just that. The Holy Spirit is a divine person with a mind.
Finally, the most appalling idea that devolves from the belief that the Holy Spirit is an energy is expressed in Herman Hoeh’s statement in the final quotation in the list of quotations at the top. This is the idea that when Armstronngists become “God as God is God” they will have dominion over the Holy Spirit. While this view is held out of misunderstanding, it is nevertheless explosively shocking to someone who understands that the Holy Spirit is a divine person in the Trinity. One mentally recoils and hopes that such believers in this idea will come to enlightenment and not be consigned to perdition.
In the debate over the Holy Spirit, those who favor the Spirit as energy will claim that the scriptures that make the Spirit sound like a being are metaphorical. And it is the reverse for those who believe the Holy Spirit is a divine person. So, we have a kind of deadlock. Although the debate is lopsided in terms of the number of supporters and type of supporters. The Holy Spirit as energy is supported by few who are cultic and believe many off-the-wall ideas. The believers in the Holy Spirit as a divine person are many and are orthodox. Perhaps, some of the non-traditional arguments I have made in this essay will break the deadlock for a few.
