The nature of the Holy Spirit is a topic where there's a marked difference between standard Christian theology and the New Christian perspective. The "official" dogma of most Christian teaching is that the Holy Spirit is one of the three persons that make up one God, in the role of reaching out to people with the power of God to bring them into a desire for righteousness. He is perceived to be proceeding from the other two: God the Father and Jesus the Son.

That old formulation was the result of three centuries of debate among early Christians, as they tried to understand the nature of God. At that time, there was a sizeable minority that rejected the God-in-three-persons view, but -- the majority won out, at the Council of Nicea, in 325 AD.

The New Christian teaching is more akin to some of the old minority viewpoints. It regards the Holy Spirit as a force, or activity, coming from God -- not a separate being. This aligns with our everyday understanding of "spirit" as the projection of someone's personality. It also accounts for the fact that the term "the Holy Spirit" does not occur in Old Testament, which instead uses phrases such "the spirit of God," "the spirit of Jehovah" and "the spirit of the Lord," where the idea of spirit connected closely with the person of God.

The Writings describe the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three attributes of one person: the soul, body and spirit of the one God. They also say that the term "Holy Spirit" emerges in the New Testament because it is connected with the Lord's advent in the physical body of Jesus, and because of the way that advent changed the way we can learn the Lord's truth and become good people.

According to the Writings, the churches that came before the advent were "representative." The people in them (in the best of those churches, anyway) knew that the Lord had created the world, and that the world was thus an image of the Lord, and they had the ability to look at that created world and understand its spiritual messages; they could look at the world and understand the Lord. And they did it without trying and with great depth, much the way we can read a book when what we're actually seeing is a bunch of black squiggles on a white sheet of paper.

That ability was eventually twisted into idol-worship and magic, however, as people slid into evil. The Lord used the Children of Israel to preserve symbolic forms of worship, but even they didn't know the deeper meaning of the rituals they followed. With the world thus bereft of real understanding, the Lord took on a human body so He could offer people new ideas directly. That's why the Writings say that He represents divine truth ("the Word became flesh," as it is put in John 1:14).

The Holy Spirit at heart also represents divine truth, the truth offered by the Lord through his ministry in the world and its record in the New Testament. The term "the Holy Spirit" is also used in a more general sense to mean the divine activity and the divine effect, which work through true teachings to have an impact on our lives.

Such a direct connection between the Lord and us was not something that could come through representatives; it had to come from the Lord as a man walking the earth during His physical life or - in modern times - through the image we have of Him as a man in His physical life. That's why people did not receive the Holy Spirit before the Lord's advent.

What we have now, though, is a full-blown idea of the Lord, with God the Father representing His soul, the Son representing his body, and the Holy Spirit representing His actions and His impact on people.

(References: The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Lord 58; True Christian Religion 138, 139, 140, 142, 153, 158, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172)

167. Everyone acknowledges that those three essentials, namely, soul, body and activity, were and are in the Lord God the Saviour. No one but Antichrist can deny that His soul was from Jehovah His Father; for in the Word, in both testaments, He is called the Son of Jehovah, the Son of the Most High God, the Only-begotten. So the Father's Divine is His first essential, as the soul is in man. It follows from this that the Son born to Mary is the body of that Divine soul, for what grows in the mother's womb is simply the body conceived and derived from the soul. So this is the second essential. Activities make up the third essential, since they are produced by the soul and the body working together; and anything so produced is of the same essence as the productive agents. The three essentials, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, make one in the Lord, as the soul, body and activity do in man. This is plainly demonstrated by the Lord's saying that the Father and He are one, and that the Father is in Him and He is in the Father; likewise that He and the Holy Spirit are one, since the Holy Spirit is the Divine which proceeds out of the Lord from the Father, as was fully proved from the Word above (153-154). To prove it again, therefore, would be filling one's stomach ¹ to overflowing, and like loading the table with food when one has eaten one's fill.

Footnotes:

165. If the reason is left to itself, there is no way it can see how these statements are to be understood; it could be that there are three Gods, who are one in essence and therefore in name; it could be that they are three aspects of a single subject, so that it is merely qualities or attributes of one God which bear these names; or other solutions may be possible. What then are we to do? The only way is to approach the Lord God the Saviour, and read the Word under His guidance, since He is the God of the Word; we shall then be enlightened and see the truths, which the reason too will acknowledge. But if you do not approach the Lord, though you should read the Word a thousand times and see in it the Divine Trinity as well as the oneness of God, still you will never be able to grasp anything but the doctrine of three Divine persons, each of which taken singly is God; and this means three Gods. However, since this is repugnant to the general perception shared by all people throughout the world, to avoid criticism they invented the doctrine that although in truth there are three Gods, faith none the less demands that we should not speak of three Gods, but one. Moreover, to avoid having insults heaped on them, in this respect especially the understanding has to be imprisoned and kept chained under the control of faith; and this is henceforward to be prescribed by the ordained ministry of the Christian church.

[2] That is the kind of paralysed offspring which is produced by not reading the Word under the Lord's guidance. Everyone who does not read the Word under His guidance must do so under the guidance of his own intelligence; and this is as blind as an owl in matters illuminated by spiritual light, as are all the essential doctrines of the church. When such a person reads about the Trinity in the Word and is led by this to think that although there are three Gods they are none the less one, he finds this as enigmatic as a reply from the Delphic oracle ¹ . Since he does not understand it, he rolls it round his teeth, for if he put it before his eyes, it would be a riddle, which becomes the more obscure the more he strives to solve it, until finally he begins to think about it without using his understanding, which is like seeing without using one's eyes. In brief, reading the Word under the guidance of one's own intelligence, as all do who fail to acknowledge the Lord as the God of heaven and earth and do not approach Him and worship Him alone, can be compared to children who in play tie a bandage over their eyes, and then try to walk in a straight line; they even think they are walking straight when step by step they turn to one side and end up walking in the opposite direction, so that they trip over a stone and fall down.

[3] They are also like ships' captains who sail without a compass, run their ship on rocks, and so are drowned. Or they are like a man who walking through a broad plain in a thick fog sees a scorpion and thinks it is a bird; he goes to grasp it and pick it up, and then gets a fatal sting. He is also like a sea-bird or a kite, which spots a small patch on the back of a large fish breaking the surface of the water, dives on it and jabs its beak into it, but is pulled under by the fish and drowns. He is also like a man who goes into a maze without a guide or a thread to pay out, and the farther he goes in, the more he loses track of the way out. A person who reads the Word under the guidance of his own intelligence instead of the Lord's thinks he is gifted with the vision of Lynceus ² , and has more eyes than Argus ³ when in fact he cannot inwardly discern the smallest truth, but only falsity. But having persuaded himself that this is the truth, he shapes the course of all his thinking by reference to this apparent cynosure. Yet then he is as blind to truth as a mole, and what he does see, he bends to suit his fancy, so perverting and falsifying the holiness of the Word.

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