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From holy spirit to Holy Ghost The Personhood of the Holy Spirit Who is the Shepherd in Acts: The Holy Spirit or Messiah Yeshua?
Religion of the Last Days?
Chapel Hill Harvester Church (Decatur, Georgia, USA) |
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The Bible forewarns that in opposition to the holy Spirit of God there is "an unclean Spirit" (Zech 13:2), a "Spirit of harlotry" (Hosea 5:4), "a different Spirit" "who is now working" (2 Cor 11:4; Eph 2:2) in humanity to mislead, distract, seduce.
Behind a veil of sacredness and miraculous power, this Other Spirit [Greek, pneuma heteron] promotes himself so much so that God the Father and Jesus are all but eclipsed. Untold numbers of people are so enamored with this mysterious Spirit that their religion could be called Spiritanity. The roots of this religion are ancient. Actually pre-Christian. They're Edenic. For in Eden we first hear that Other Voice, beckoning humans to depart God's explicit word (Gen 3). Soon after the era of Jesus and the Jewish apostles, Christianity moved away from its Hebraic biblical roots. The religion began to evolve doctrinal innovations not found in the New Testament. One could say, this Spirit quietly introduced them—just as one tweaks the rudder of a giant ship to eventually, over time, turn it off course. Deception begins as light, not as deception.
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The earliest creeds of the post-NT Christian Church do not call the Holy Spirit "God," nor do they require worship of the Spirit. This changed with the Nicean/Constantinopolitan Creed adopted in AD 381. It introduced these phrases: "The Holy Spirit, the Lord and Life-giver…[who] with Father and Son is worshiped together and glorified together."
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As Christian dogma (after the era of the Jewish apostles) developed, theologians created a dilemma for themselves that impacted how they translated and eventually printed the Bible. Their doctrinal assumptions about the Spirit forced them to distinguish between: (1) the Spirit of God (or, of the Lord) and (2) the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. The first term was used to described God himself in his invisible activity, communicating breath, or inner nature. The second term designated the Third Person of the Triune Godhead: God the Spirit. In effect, theologians taught there were two Holy Spirits. English-speaking Christian leaders coined special vocabulary to differentiate the two Spirits. For the Spirit as God himself, they consistently used "Spirit." For the Third Person of the Trinity they coined the term Holy Ghost, even though the original Bible languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) make no such distinction.
This distinction first appears in English Bibles with the publication of John Wiclife's (Wycliffe) translation in 1380-82. After that, every major English Bible followed suit for over three centuries: William Tyndale (1534), Myles Coverdale (1535), the Great Bible (=Thomas Cranmer's, 1539), the Geneva Bible (1557), and the Rheims version (a Catholic counter-Reformation work, 1582). The two-Spirit model achieved wide-spread exposure with the Authorized or King James Version of 1611—a version that is still in use today among many English-speaking Christians. [See the fuller study: From holy spirit to Holy Ghost.] Data source: The English Hexapla [translations of Wiclif, Tyndale, Cranmer, Genevan, Anglo-Rheims, A.V.] (London: Samuel Bagster & Sons, 1840)
[Top] The distinction between "(Holy) Spirit" and "Holy Ghost" severs the New Testament from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), because the term "Holy Ghost" intentionally never appears in the OT, only in the NT. This reflects the Catholic belief (quoted above) that OT Jews were unaware of the later doctrine of the Trinity and the separate personhood of the Holy Ghost. Therefore, the translators/printers believed, it would be misleading to suggest in an OT version that the Jews were doctrinally informed about Christian doctrines before they were revealed to the Church. [See these fuller study: The Personhood of the Holy Spirit.] This severing of Scripture in two by Christian theologians undermined the authority of the Hebrew Bible: the Bible of Yeshua and his apostles. And that opened the door to expanded sources of revelation of truth—revelations that Another Spirit, cut loose from scriptural limitations, exploited. [Top]
As the Roman Catholic authority M. F. Laughlin stated above, "Among the elite...devotion to the Holy Spirit...existed from early times." That is, it existed only in the inner leadership circles of the Catholic Church—those who instituted doctrinal and dogmatic innovations. It was not a phenomenon among the laity. That parochialism of the Holy Spirit would change. A democratization occurred. 1) For example, in the late 1800s, when Protestantism was in decline after the American Civil War, Catholic leaders looked for ways to build and spread their faith. Several campaigned for increased devotion to the Sacred Heart (of Christ). However, some Catholics felt the word "heart" carried too many connotations of warm, tender affections or "interiority and spirituality." And that was definitely not a potent spiritual force in a modern society. They needed another compelling image. Many theologians realized that the Third Person of the Trinity had been the "neglected" presence in Catholic teaching. They also realized that the Holy Ghost was really at the heart of "the Church's infallibility," since it was the Spirit who regularly guided the Roman Papacy in formulating its dogmas. To increase the Church's authority—as the only repository of divine truth—several men strove to revive ancient Catholic devotion to the Third Person. These leaders formed the "Confraternity of the Servants of the Holy Ghost" in 1879. Among them was John Joseph Keane, Bishop of Richmond, Virginia. So convinced was he of the power of this movement that he predicted that devotion to the Spirit "would naturally be the dominant devotion of the future church." He wrote this in 1883. [Consider the book review: The Female Spirit Within Christianity & Judaism.] Source: Joseph P. Chinnici, OFM, Devotion to the Holy Spirit in American Catholicism (Mahwah, N.J.: Seabury Press, 1985), pages 35-41.
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2) In the twentieth century, Cardinal Leon Joseph Suenens (1904-1996), Roman Catholic primate of Belgium, was a major figure in the reforms of Vatican II. He was also key promoter of charismatic renewal within the Catholic Church in the 1960s and 70s. Some of his translated books include Come, Holy Spirit (1976), Ecumenism and Charismatic Renewal (1978) and A Controversial Phenomenon: Resting in the Spirit (1989). In his A New Pentecost? (1975), Suenens wrote: "The power of the Spirit is at work deep within the heart of the Church, breathing into it a fresh youthfulness. Everything points to the fact that we are living at a turning point in the history of the Church [emphasis added]." This turning point includes the regathering of Protestants back to the Mother Church via the Holy Spirit Renewals. These renewals, significantly, do not hinge on a person's theological base. One can remain devoted to or converted to Roman Catholic ideology, including adoration of Mary and belief in her intercessory work and those of the departed saints. A person can be "baptized in the Spirit" yet not abandon any unbiblical innovations. Access to the Holy Ghost was being democratized. Anyone—not merely the Catholic elite—could "get" the Spirit, as long as they were open to His purposes and didn't question the underlying theology or passive, demeaning experiences accompanying His reception. Source: Personal communications with the late Biblical Aramaic scholar Asher O. Jarck of Karslruhe, Germany.
The Holy Spirit Church. Heidelberg, Germany [Top]
21st Century Apostle of the Third Person
Benny Hinn is an American Pentecostal evangelist who heads a multi-million dollar ministry and hosts a daily TV program called "This is Your Day!" broadcast throughout the world. He promotes his ministry through his web presence BennyHinn.org. He is a persuasive spokesman for the idea of "a turning point" in Church history and for convincing Christians to worship the Holy Spirit. A Greek Orthodox Armenian who was born and raised in Jaffa, Israel, Hinn was spiritually nurtured in a Catholic school. "I considered myself to be a Catholic... Was I a Catholic? Absolutely. Catholicism was my prayer life." As he grew up he came to adore the Pentecostal evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman (1907-1976), and wanted to be like her. In time, Hinn says, the Holy Spirit appeared to him in a vision which led to his worship of the Third Person. In his book Good Morning, Holy Spirit (1990), Hinn attempts to overcome Christian resistance to worshiping the Holy Ghost. Time and again, he strokes his readers: Does He deserve our praise and adoration? Christians have a major problem when it comes to the topic of worshipping the Spirit. It's a subject they would rather not discuss…. [But] if He is all the things we've been discussing—equal with the Father and the Son, then He is to be worshiped. (pages 89, 90, emphasis added) [Top] For Hinn, the Spirit has taken Jesus's place. In fact, the Spirit is the actual father of Jesus: "Jesus Christ is a child of the Spirit" (page 133). With this remark, Hinn rightly anticipates his reader's reaction: "Before you say, 'Now hold it there…I thought God the Father was the Father of Jesus.' Well, you're right, but you're also wrong" (132-133). In Hinn's view the Spirit has taken over God's Fatherhood. Hinn masks his Holy Ghost replacement theology by appealing to a traditional tactic used by many Christian leaders: the mystery of the Trinity. Don't read me wrong! I am in no way saying that Christ was in a lesser position than the Spirit. Not at all. Jesus is not lower than the Holy Ghost, nor is the Holy Ghost lower than Jesus. There is absolute equality in the Trinity. (136-137)With this, Hinn attempts to quell all objections. Since we cannot grasp the mysterious workings of the Three Persons, we must keep quiet and trust those to whom the mysteries are revealed. That includes Hinn. Hinn's purpose is to maneuver the reader/seeker into adopting his unbiblical agenda. Often someone asks, "Benny, who should I pray to?" My answer is, "Please don't confuse the issue. You pray to the Father." "Well, then," the seeker says, "you told us we are to talk to the Spirit." "I have to tell them, 'There is an enormous difference between talking and praying. I've never yet prayed to the Holy Ghost.' " (142) [Top] This last comment is untrue, for a few pages later Benny Hinn tells readers: Your daily prayer should be: "Blessed Spirit of God, please help me today not to grieve you…. Holy Spirit, I'm sorry for the anguish I've caused you. But please, please, stay by my side." (157) After all Hinn's efforts to aggrandize the neglected Holy Ghost, he has the temerity to tell his readers: "The Holy Ghost will never promote Himself; He'll promote Jesus" (166). But this is not a book about Jesus. Hinn proves that with the last sentence of the book: "When the sun comes up tomorrow, He will be longing to hear you say, 'Good morning, Holy Spirit' " (177). Since this book was published in 1990, Benny Hinn's ministry has expanded into a vast empire. He regularly wears a clerical collar, implying he is an ordained priest, and he puts on an air of sober papal authority. One should remember he described his early Christian identity as one of being "a Catholic." In the Third World and even in Israel, Hinn has aggressively promoted his Pentecostal Holy Ghost message of divine healing and renewal: his version of Spiritanity.
The Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic-raised devotee of the Holy Spirit, Benny Hinn fulfills the 1883 prophecy of Catholic Bishop Keane that devotion to the Spirit "would naturally be the dominant devotion of the future church." [Top]
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From holy spirit to Holy Ghost The Personhood of the Holy Spirit
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