The Holy Ghost

Theologians through the ages have bent their brains on the nature and function of God the Father and God the Son. But the third person of the Christian Trinity has received relatively scant theological consideration. "With a few inconsequential exceptions," writes President Henry P. Van Dusen of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, "there has been hardly a period in the church's history, hardly a school of Christian theology, hardly an individual theologian who has given to the Holy Spirit the attention . . . merited."

Published last week was a new book on the Holy Ghost that will interest many a man in the pew as well as in the pulpit. In The Holy Spirit and Modern Thought (Harper; $4.50), Anglican Canon Lindsay Dewar, a Fellow of King's College, London, concisely surveys the history of thought about the Holy Ghost from the Old Testament concept of ruach, the "breath" or spirit of God, to his own arresting hypothesis that the Holy Spirit works through the unconscious with extrasensory perception.

Irrational Individualism. The commonest mistake about the Holy Ghost, writes Canon Dewar, is to say "it" instead of "He." The gift of the Holy Spirit is "not the bestowal of a thing but the action of a person." The classic description of the Holy Spirit appears in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is quoted as promising to send the disciples "the Paraclete"--a Greek word variously translated as "comforter," "advocate," or "counselor"--to remind them of Jesus' teaching and to guide them to truth. At Pentecost, the 50th day after the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples in tongues of flame and set them all to speaking in other tongues so vociferously that Peter had to explain to the crowd in Jerusalem that they were not drunk, "seeing it is but the third hour of the day [i.e., 9 a.m.]."

Thereafter, the "gift of the Holy Ghost" came to be associated with glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, (TIME, Aug. 15) and was sometimes thought to be conferred by baptism or the laying on of hands. St. Augustine of Hippo (354/430) taught that the gift of the Holy Spirit could only be present in the unity of the church, that outsiders could not receive Him. But Martin Luther (1483-1546) took no account at all of the "fellowship of the Spirit." The Holy Ghost, he thought, descended upon one man and not another with no rational explanation ("Faith killeth reason"), and to individuals rather than to groups.

Fellowship of the Spirit. The Christians who have set greatest store by the Holy Spirit have been the post-Reformation sects, such as the Baptists, Quakers, Mennonites and Moravians. Anglican Dewar is too much of a high churchman to approve of them. As a prime example, he cites Britain's George Fox (1624-1691), founder of the Society of Friends, and takes him to task for not appreciating the personality of the Holy Spirit ("he constantly refers to Him as 'it' "), and for having no "doctrine of the Church."

Canon Dewar's own original interpretation of the working of the Holy Spirit is that His field of operation is the unconscious, where He can make Himself felt in terms of what the parapsychologists call "psi phenomena"--clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, etc.--as well as in everyday life, the source of what the Christian calls his "conscience." Nor, in Canon Dewar's thinking, is the Holy Spirit limited to Christians.

"He also works at the natural level, as our Lord clearly saw, overruling and guiding even the minds of non-Christian men and women. There is, in the words of the collect, a 'never-failing Providence which ordereth all things both in heaven .and earth.' Such then, according to the New Testament, is the koinonia [fellowship] of the Spirit."

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