Jesus comments on the Holy Spirit in the book of John in the midst of alluding to his impending death, resurrection, and ascension, and not only are these comments still generally vague like practically all other statements about the Holy Spirit in the rest of the Bible, but they are not particularly long and idea of a Holy Spirit is not presented as an excuse to believe, say, or do whatever one feels like. They nonetheless constitute the most direct words Jesus ever utters in the Bible on the matter. The brevity of these words matches the wholly non-primary philosophical nature of pneumatology within Christian theology as a whole, a sub-doctrine that is in turn met with a backwards, extremely disproportionate obsession by the typical evangelical.
In John 14:16-17, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit, which he here calls "the Spirit of Truth," would be sent as an advocate for Yahweh. In 14:25-26, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit would help reveal unfamiliar truths that even Jesus did not necessarily address in his words. In John 15:26-27, Jesus states that this coming advocate will testify favorably about Christ, and again in John 16:12-15 that the Holy Spirit would guide Christians into truths and glorify Christ. Nowhere in these verses does Jesus even pretend like an ordinary human could possibly be free of the epistemological limitations that would prevent him or her from recognizing the presence of the Holy Spirit to begin with.
Even if Christianity is true, after all, it is still true that no one can know if the Holy Spirit is bringing something to their attention or helping prompt a discovery, as a person could only know they are having an emotional or general psychological experience that seems like it involves the Holy Spirit. The very teachings of the Bible itself on the Holy Spirit do not contradict this! Yes, an alleged revelation about metaphysics from Jesus cannot be verified by claims of the Bible or by the psychological experiences of Christians, just as its nonexistence would not be proven by the lack of these experiences in others, but unknowability does not prove or disprove veracity.
The necessary, demonstrable existence of an uncaused cause aside, the issue of whether the Holy Spirit could be known to be present if it exists has nothing to do with whether such a spirit actually exists. Not knowing if alien life exists does not mean it does not exist, and not knowing if someone loves you, which all beings with my limitations are restricted to, does not mean that they must not love you; the existence, presence, or nonexistence of the Holy Spirit does not logically follow from my objective inability to know this. If there is an additional spirit functioning at the will of the uncaused cause, it would exist even if the Bible misrepresented it or if the Bible had never been written.
If Jesus himself is not anything other than especially ambiguous about the nature of the Holy Spirit, and this is one of the subjects he is the most vague about out of all that he is recorded as speaking on, then, in addition to it being objectively true that one is unable yo logically prove that one is having an experience with the Holy Spirit, the teachings of Jesus do not shed a particularly large amount of light on what the Holy Spirit is according to Christian theology. Numerous people would prefer to all insist that they know that which they cannot philosophically establish, pretend like the Bible makes the Holy Spirit out to be a far more central part of its theology than is really the case, and pretend that the Holy Spirit "convicted" them into holding unbiblical ideas such as God having a specific marriage partner intended for them. The Bible they might imagine they stand on does not teach any of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment