The person of the Holy Spirit

One of the great mysteries that makes Christianity seem hard to believe is the doctrine of the Trinity.  Somehow God exists as three persons and yet is only one God. 

This mysterious and strange set of affairs is perhaps most clearly set out in the 'Athanasian Creed' - the one that you have probably never heard of.  Most Western Christians accept this 'third' creed as an accurate statement of their beliefs, even if they do not use it regularly in worship, preferring the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed.  If you go to the Wikipedia page and read it you will probably understand why.  In its repetitive and multiply-redundant phraseology it tells us about the three persons of God - and if we have been brought up in a Christian culture it is very likely that we won't give much thought to the following question.

Who is 'the person' of the Holy Spirit?

Obviously we can understand the concept of Jesus as a person, even if we happen to have a view that he might have been a mythical person.  God, the father, is a little harder to envisage as the second person, in that he has no earthly form, except in a few Old Testament stories.

But the person of the Holy Spirit is something that is so familiar that we never question it - and yet so alien that we can't imagine it either.

Do you find that as paradoxical as me?

God so loved the world . . .

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." John 3:16 (NIV)

Anyone who has grown up in a christian tradition can't help recognising those few words.  Our reaction to the words is a bit less predictable.  For me they used to have the comforting feeling of familiarity.  After that I started to wonder what they really meant.  Nowadays I find them quite risible - even pathetic.

Let's set aside the problem of the lack of evidence for an historical Jesus outside the (hardly un-biased) bible itself.  Don't even consider whether God exists, or which particular version of the Christian God he might be.  It doesn't matter.

What matters is the claim itself.  Omniscient God had made a mistake at the very beginning of the Old Testament, and through some totally inexplicable mechanism had contaminated humanity with something mysterious called 'Original Sin'.  Omnipotent God (the same person - although there are three of them in the one person of course) couldn't think of any way to fix this mistake other than to send his son (one of the three parts of himself) to Earth to be tortured and killed in some kind of scapegoat ritual.  He loved the world so much that he gave up his own son (one third of himself) for this reason.

But he didn't, did he?

If you think about it for a few moments, the very most charitable version of the story is that he lent his son (or part of himself) to the world for a few decades, then let him be killed for reasons that hardly make any sense and let him remain dead for a few days.  During that time he might have visited hell, but it is hardly likely that the devil was totally in control of that little interlude.  Then he resurrected him(self) and in due course whisked him(self) safely back up to heaven.

Being omniscient he knew all along that things were going to pan out this way.

So how much did God really love the world? 

Not as much as you would think!

Converted by C.S. Lewis . . . and a waterfall

Francis Collins (of Human Genome Project fame) wasn't always a committed Christian, but in his later years he was converted. What could have caused such an event?

First he had read C.S. Lewis.  Personally I never liked the material that Lewis wrote specifically for children, but the stuff that he wrote for 'adults' is quite astounding.  I have quoted him sometimes before, e.g. here and here, and found some of his writing entirely risible and facile.

The particular passage that precipitated the conversion of chemist Francis Collins appears to have been this one:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—- on a level with the man who says He is a poached egg—- or else He would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

I do agree with Lewis in one way.  I also believe that he was not a great human teacher . . . but for the reason that I doubt that he ever lived as described in the New Testament.

However, what was the context where this had such an effect?  It was the sight of a frozen waterfall.

"Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. "

How surprising that a a rational scientist turned his view of life over for a reason such as this!  Why did a waterfall lead him to this specific God when there were so many others to choose from?

Christ myth: some inconsistencies

"Truth is not hard to kill but a lie well told is immortal" - - Mark Twain

I know that it might be hard to accept that the stories of the life of Jesus are merely myths, but many people claim exactly that.  One of their starting points is the inconsistencies in the bible's own accounts of the life of Jesus.  Another is the suggestion that the bible was written so long after the time of the supposed events that it can't possibly be accurate - which after all is consistent with what we actually see.

First century Judea was a strategically important region from the Roman point of view and it is particularly well documented by plenty of writers.  The surprising thing is that the writers of the bible got things so wrong.  Here are a few of the inconsistencies that make the Jesus myth so difficult to believe:

• Caesar did not tax the world in the time of Quirinius.  The first such tax was imposed in 74CE.
• Quirinius and Herod did not overlap.
• There is no archaeological evidence that Nazareth existed at the beginning of the first century, but did it did exist by the end (when the gospels were written).  
• The term Nazarene did not imply coming from Nazereth, so if he actually existed the mythical Jesus might have been a 'Nazarene'.
• It is very unlikely that the slaughter of the innocents occurred.  Herod made a lot of enemies who then catalogued his misdeeds in every detail but they never mentioned this slaughter.  Anyway this story is only found in one of the gospels, Matthew, and is a clear redaction of the Moses story anyway.
• The ministry of Jesus is not found described in any documents other than the bible for about a century - which is much too late to count as contemporaneous evidence.
• The triumphant entry into Jerusalem is described differently in each of the gospels, but nobody else records it, including those who were known to have been there at the time.
• The accounts of the trials of Jesus are different in all the gospels and they were not recorded elsewhere.
• The various versions of the crucifixion in the gospels are incompatible in almost every detail.  The synoptic gospels have it starting at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of Passover, but John has it on the day before.  All four say it was Friday.
• The crucifixion darkness was not recorded by anyone else, and neither were the ripping of the temple veil nor the earthquakes.  The mass resurrection in Jerusalem also appears to have gone unnoticed.
• The resurrection was originally only mentioned in Luke and Acts.  The account in Mark was probably added later and John doesn't bother with this trivial detail.

Given this amount of inconsistency in the story, how can anyone actually believe it.

On a charge of perjury, doesn't the bible indict itself?

Remarkable faith claims - culpable nonsense!

Someone calling themselves T-Herbert kindly left a comment on my post How to beat William Lane Craig!  I always welcome comments, even if they are culpable and incomprehensible nonsense like this one.  It went like this.

What Hilary is trying to present is if one refutes God's goodness and grace one would have to look at Jesus which is God 'manifested in the flesh' - Paul. To truly label God (an infinite and non-natural being) with natural qualities one needs to look more at his natural manifestation and not what he did in the old testament. I think a very good argument for how compassionate God is towards us is the fact he loved the world so much he allowed the execution of his son so that we might be able to go to Heaven-John 3:16. In laymen's terms, God essentially wrapped himself in dirt, then fellowshipped with dirt, in order that dirt might be able to spend eternity with him. That, to me is remarkable, and I think that any non-incredulous person can not refute this as evidence of how compassionate God is.

Remarkable, I agree, but to me it is most remarkable that an obviously intelligent and literate individual thinks so completely differently to me.  How can any of this be considered as evidence in any way at all? 

Remember how philosopher Peter Boghossian defines faith?  He says "Faith is pretending to know things that you don't know".  Having said that I will unpick the arguments from the comment above.  It is an interesting variant on the usual themes that we hear from the faithful.

First of all, the only evidence presented for this point of view is either biblical or faith based (or both).  Since I can't accept the bible as more than fable, and faith is nicely defined as it was above I can't see any value in the comment at all.

Second - I don't think that is what Hilary was talking about anyway, even though she and T-Herbert are clearly on the same side of the fence.  So the argument about how much God loved the world is worthless.  It is a claim about something that you just can't know.

Then moving onto the nice explanation of the comment for us laymen, this is a typical Christian point of view.  God wrapped himself in dirt??  Humanity is dirty and sinful, not intelligent and respectable.  From a humanist point of view this (and indeed reducing it to a layman's explanation) is simply offensive. 

That doesn't mean that you can't say it, but it does mean that it isn't likely to convince anyone to change their point of view and suddenly accept Jesus into their hearts (or indeed to stop thinking of William Lane Craig as an intellectual criminal, as Boghossian also said).