23 Jun '13 23:58>
Originally posted by e4chrisGood points.
The Father and the Son are quite easy to explain. But the Holy Spirit I know puzzles people who have been in the church a while.
I believe in it, and that it has a purpose for us. I used to work as a data analyst and people are so predictable, shop spending for example happens in very predictable waves, if you plot it on a graph it looks like a heartbeat ...[text shortened]... an form complex patterns. Its there. I wonder if it refers to the Bible too, as a product of it?
Please excuse the pasting, I'm a very slow typist but see if this helps:
God’s Active Force; Holy Spirit. By far the majority of occurrences of ru′ach and pneu′ma relate to God’s spirit, his active force, his holy spirit.
Not a person.
Not until the fourth century C.E. did the teaching that the holy spirit was a person and part of the “Godhead” become official church dogma. Early church “fathers” did not so teach; Justin Martyr of the second century C.E. taught that the holy spirit was an ‘influence or mode of operation of the Deity’; Hippolytus likewise ascribed no personality to the holy spirit. The Scriptures themselves unite to show that God’s holy spirit is not a person but is God’s active force by which he accomplishes his purpose and executes his will.
It may first be noted that the words “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (KJ) found in older translations at 1 John 5:7 are actually spurious additions to the original text. A footnote in The Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation, says that these words are “not in any of the early Greek MSS [manuscripts], or any of the early translations, or in the best MSS of the Vulg[ate] itself.”
A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, by Bruce Metzger (1975, pp. 716-718), traces in detail the history of the spurious passage. It states that the passage is first found in a treatise entitled Liber Apologeticus, of the fourth century, and that it appears in Old Latin and Vulgate manuscripts of the Scriptures, beginning in the sixth century. Modern translations as a whole, both Catholic and Protestant, do not include them in the main body of the text, because of recognizing their spurious nature.—RS, NE, NAB.