Holy “Spirit”? Wrong. That’s Not His Name.

[Radagast]

Because you say so?

Because all Christians say so.

I never suggested otherwise. Relevance?

You were basing your argument on the same word "wind" being used. In fact, the Greek uses two distinct words, as I showed.

What is it you doubt? You doubt the historical fact of Tertullian's position?

Would you care to back up your claim with an actual citation?

 

[Knee V]

Again, referring to God as a Spirit perpetuates an immaterial doctrine CAUSING Christians to feel content/complacent with a 'purely spiritual' relationship with God. My thesis is that this is a grave mistake. This leads to errors such as, "I don't need to feel God. Faith isn't a feeling, it's a conviction based on the truth of God's word." And the church remains in perpetual immaturity due to a Platonic view of God.

So you are saying that God, eternally, is physical, even apart from the Incarnation?

 

[JAL]

Because all Christians say so.

You hold to an 'infallible church' doctrine, then, a magesterium? Prior to modern science, all Christians regarded earth as the center of the universe (the geocentric model). And they thought it was the clear teaching of Scripture. They were wrong.

You were basing your argument on the same word "wind" being used. In fact, the Greek uses two distinct words, as I showed.

Nope. My argument was based on the fact that the context is wind.

The argument reads like this. God knew that the reader would be faced with two possible translations of the term 'pneuma':
(1)God is an immaterial spirit
(2) God is a physical breath/wind.
Now let's consider your theory that #1 is the correct translation. God is the author of Scripture. Assuming His goal isn't that of being the most misleading writer (and worst instructor) of all time, then He must make it a point or at least a goal - to prevent hopelessly confusing us - to ABSTAIN from even HINTING at breath/wind in the immediate context, because any INKLING of breath/wind would foster translation #2.

The FACT that He STRESSES 'wind' in the Pentecost context, therefore, completely overthrows your position (regardless of whether He used one Greek word or two different ones).

And not only does He do this once, He does it REPEATEDLY. I could give many examples. Here's just one more. "Jesus breathed on them, and said, 'Receive the Holy Breath' (John 20:22). The CONTEXT is wind/breath. This shows that the proper translation is Holy Wind/Breath - either that or God is the most misleading writer - and worst instructor - of human history. THAT'S the argument.

 

[JAL]

So you are saying that God, eternally, is physical, even apart from the Incarnation?

That's precisely my position.

 

[SolomonVII]

Re Post 43

Isn't He?

Doesn't resurrection of the body imply that it is our world that is redeemed, even eternally?

Platonism, which lauds the Ideal world of non-existence, and considers this world of touch and taste and smell as a shadowy and degraded caricature of that world of Pure Idea at best, is fundamentally at odds with the idea that the world of the Resurrection of the Body is a good thing.

 

[Radagast]

We seem to have multiple posters arguing that God is physical, and hence that matter is eternal. This is so far outside Christian orthodoxy that I think continued debate is pointless.

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

“Holy Spirit” is a mistranslation of the Greek phrase in question. The first word “Holy” is correct. The second word “Spirit” is obviously incorrect. Here’s a simple way to demonstrate the point.


Suppose I were describing to you a particular family consisting of husband, wife, and child. But instead of using the terms ‘husband, wife, and child’ – or even father, son, and mother – I used the following terms: “The father, the son, and the HUMAN BEING.”


This kind of language DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE. Neither you nor anyone else would ever make such a ridiculous statement - ridiculous because ALL THREE OF THEM are human beings. To refer to ONE of the three members as ‘the human being’ would - if anything at all – cast doubt as to whether the first two are human. Secondly, one of the main functions of a title is to provide some kind of conceptual distinction between various members. If the Bible’s language fails to provide distinctions between the three members, it thereby undermines the biblical basis for Trinitarianism. I'm a Trinitarian myself.


So here’s the problem. Mainstream Christianity regards ALL THREE members as ‘spirit’ (and holy). Thus the term ‘Holy Spirit’ applies to all three of them. Hence the phrase Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is just as ridiculous as saying of a human family, “The Father, the Son, and the Human Being.” The only way to solve this is to acknowledge that "Spirit" is a mistranslation of the Third Person's title.




The Greek term (pneuma) - traditionally mistranslated ‘Spirit’ - has one other possible meaning – breath/wind. (The Greeks conflated breath/wind into one word ‘pneuma’ even though they are two separate words in English). No theologian would deny that the Greek OT uses that term at least 100 times to denote breath/wind, and ditto of ‘ruach’ (the Hebrew version of the Greek term pneuma).

The PROPER translation of the relevant passages, then, is Father, Son, and the Holy Breath/Wind. You can picture the Trinity as three physical Persons – the Father seated on a throne, the Son seated at His right hand, and the Holy Wind/Breath continually exuding as smoke, wind, and Fire from their nostrils and mouth toward the earth as portrayed clearly in Psalm 18 (traditionally known as the PROCESSION of the Third Person from the Father and the Son to the earth). “And they saw what seemed like tongues of fire descending from heaven…”

Several biblical contexts CLEARLY AND BLATANTLY confirm the translation Holy Wind. Let’s consider just one example for now. “On the Day of Pentecost…they heard the sound of a mighty rushing wind. And they were all filled with the Holy Wind.” Here the CONTEXT confirms what we already should have known - we should have known it from the father-son-wife analogy I gave you above - that Holy ‘Spirit’ is an obviously, blatantly incorrect translation of this passage.

Significant because the whole case for the claim that God is a nonphysical substance called spirit rests about 99% on the (mis)translation ‘Holy Spirit’. When we translate the term properly as the Holy Breath/Wind, it becomes apparent that 99% of the biblical data refers to God using physical language.



I’ll end with this. As early as 200 A.D. the church father Tertullian – the man credited with inventing the word Trinity – insisted that God is a physical being biblically entitled the Holy Wind/Breath – and he insisted that the term ‘Spirit’ was born of Plato’s philosophy, not of Scripture. Cheers.

So you think, what, that you literally experience God's divinity when you get hit with a gust of wind? When someone breathes on you?

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

We seem to have multiple posters arguing that God is physical, and hence that matter is eternal. This is so far outside Christian orthodoxy that I think continued debate is pointless.

I know, right?!

 

[James Is Back]

Those two words in MODERN ENGLISH are not interchangeable (regardless of whether they stem from the same ancient etymological roots). Take for instance pneumatic tools. These are physically powered air-driven tools. No one regards them as tools powered by an immaterial ghost/spirit.

Again, referring to God as a Spirit perpetuates an immaterial doctrine CAUSING Christians to feel content/complacent with a 'purely spiritual' relationship with God. My thesis is that this is a grave mistake. This leads to errors such as, "I don't need to feel God. Faith isn't a feeling, it's a conviction based on the truth of God's word." And the church remains in perpetual immaturity due to a Platonic view of God.

Oh boy what's next. You're going to tell us we're going to hell if we keep saying The Holy Spirit?

 

[rockytopva]

Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. - 1 Corinthians 12:3

 

[Targaryen]

We seem to have multiple posters arguing that God is physical, and hence that matter is eternal. This is so far outside Christian orthodoxy that I think continued debate is pointless.

I agree as well, if this "debate" is to continue move it to the unorthodox forum where it belongs.

 

[ChristsSoldier115]

The notion that God is a nonphysical being leads to a blind complacency, viz. "I have a good relationship with God, it's all spiritual though". The result is spiritual mediocrity because Christians tend to presume they are in a good place, a place of maturity.

The CORRECT description of a good relationship with God is the physical description given in Numbers where God says, "I speak physically face to face with Moses because he is mature."

Claiming to have a "spiritual" relationship with God is a falsehood born and perpetuated of 2000 years of spirit-doctrine. It reduces to nonsense as I will likely demonstrate at some point in this discussion.

A physical God? Um.. This is the most bizarre heresy I have ever read in my life. This is like a reverse of the heresy of the super transcendent indifferent God.

 

[Citizen of the Kingdom]

We seem to have multiple posters arguing that God is physical, and hence that matter is eternal. This is so far outside Christian orthodoxy that I think continued debate is pointless.

It's not as unorthodox as one would think
"he barriers of time and space no longer apply to him. The Lord appears and disappears with shocking suddenness. He continually demonstrates his physical reality. The Apostles and the disciples see him, hear him, and eat with him. Thomas is told to touch his wounds. The stone rolled away from the entrance, and the carefully folded burial cloths direct our gaze to the physical. He has truly risen.

The disbelief and uncertainty evidenced by those who saw him testify to an apparent strangeness in the appearance of the newly risen Christ. Slowly they came to recognize him, but they still struggled with doubt. We are accustomed to an annual celebration of Easter. However, for the first disciples of Jesus, resurrection was totally new. Let us remember, that the son of the widow of Nain, Jairus' daughter, and Lazarus were all brought back to life by Jesus, but not one of them continued their lives with a glorified body. "

I don't think eternity was mentioned.

 

[Radagast]

The Apostles and the disciples see him, hear him, and eat with him. Thomas is told to touch his wounds.

You're talking about the Incarnation. The O.P. is claiming that God is inherently physical.

When John says "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), that means that the Word was not flesh before the Incarnation. Also, the Incarnation applies only to the Word, not to the Father or the Holy Spirit.

 

[Citizen of the Kingdom]

You're talking about the Incarnation. The O.P. is claiming that God is inherently physical.

When John says "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), that means that the Word was not flesh before the Incarnation. Also, the Incarnation applies only to the Word, not to the Father or the Holy Spirit.

The son is physically resurrected , the Spirit is physical as the mighty wind and the OP said he had more to say on why the belief of merely spirit alone is harmful in some way. I think that the onus is on him to prove the point. Two outa three aint bad so far.

 

[James Is Back]

If God is physically here,point me to Him so I can talk to him!!!

 

[Radagast]

the Spirit is physical as the mighty wind

No, the Holy Spirit is not, in His nature, a physical wind. If the winds on earth stopped blowing, would the Holy Spirit cease to exist?

And when John says "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), that means that the Word was not flesh before the Incarnation. Also, the Incarnation applies only to the Word, not to the Father or the Holy Spirit.

 

[JAL]

Would you care to back up your claim with an actual citation?

I don't have any sources handy (I haven't installed any Bible software on my machine for several years), but here's what one scholar said of Tertullian, "His assumption was that something wasn't real unless it had some (material) substance."
Classical Trinitarian Theology: A Textbook - Tarmo Toom - Google Books

That's a fairly straightforward contention. To rephrase the point, Tertullian realized that immaterialism leads to the incoherent notion of a substance without substance. In Tertullian's own words, "‘Everything which exists is a bodily existence sui generis. Nothing lacks bodily existence but that which is non-existent.’ 32

Wikipedia states, " "Tertullian, the prince of realists and practical theologian carried his realism to the verge of materialism. This is evident from his ascription to God of corporeity and his acceptance of the traducian theory of the origin of the soul."


Modern writers tend to be emabarrassed by Tertullian's materialism and hence try to read immaterialism into his position. Consider for example this citation from the Catholic Encyclopedia, "His notion that all things, pure spirits and even God, must be bodies, is accounted for by his ignorance of philosophical terminology". This comment is rather patronizing and biased - it is ludicrous to suggest that Tertullian was too philosophically uneducated to distinguish, whether conceptually or in writing, the distinction between a physical body and an immaterial soul. It completely ignores the fact that Tertullian extensively defended his theory that the human soul is a physical substance. "Tertullian argues that the soul is even nourished by corporeal substances. It is refreshed by food, and when deprived of all food it removes from the body. 35 He seizes upon the fact that the Stoics teach that the arts are corporeal, since that strengthens his view of the corporeity of the soul, which is commonly supposed to be nourished by the arts. 36 Though the origin of this theory is Stoic the support of the Gospels is claimed for it."
R.E. Roberts, The Theology of Tertullian (1924), Chapter 8 (pp.149-165)

 

[JAL]

Look folks, use a little common sense here before jumping to silly interpretations of my position. What I mean is, you have to do a little thinking and reading between the lines because it's impossible for me to CLEARLY explain all aspects of my position in a few short posts (I can't revise 2000 years of bad theology in a couple of short posts). Case in point:

No, the Holy Spirit is not, in His nature, a physical wind. If the winds on earth stopped blowing, would the Holy Spirit cease to exist?

This is too shallow a reading of me. When I say that God is physical, I merely mean that He is tangible. I'm not saying that He is identical to ordinary wind or subject to all the same limitations. For instance His particles don't likely take the shape of electrons orbiting around a nucleus. Or consider the burning bush where the divine Fire didn't consume it. That Fire CAN consume (the OT bears that out repeatedly) but it doesn't always do so. Thus there are significant differences between divine Fire and Wind versus earthly fire and wind. To begin with, the one is an animate conscious Person, the other inanimate and unconscious.

And when John says "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), that means that the Word was not flesh before the Incarnation. Also, the Incarnation applies only to the Word, not to the Father or the Holy Spirit.

Actually this passage supports my position, not yours. Let's make some distinctions here. God can assume any physical shape He wants - not only Fire and Wind but liquids, metals, and solids (viz. the Eucharist). Human protoplasm called "flesh" is one of those modalities.

Any physical substance can become flesh. Take for instance a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, your metabolism turns into skin cells. An immaterial spirit, by definition, can NOT become flesh.

Thus the verse you cited, "The Word became flesh" is ABSOLUTE PROOF that the divine Word is a physical substance.

 

[JAL]

If God is physically here,point me to Him so I can talk to him!!!

Unfortunately God usually hides Himself from we who are spiritually immature.

Generally speaking, the prophets (such as Abraham) were NOT immature. They saw God. Consider for example Genesis 18 where God came over to Abraham's house for supper. Abraham could have pointed God out to you, as you asked, and you would have seen God chewing some food and guzzling down some kind of beverage. I regret that I can't do for you what Abraham could have done. Perhaps some day that will change, if I mature sufficiently.

Or perhaps you'll recall when God wrestled with Jacob all night long. Most fathers enjoy play-wrestling with their children. Our heavenly Father is no different, so let us press on to know Him as well as these men did.