THE HOLY SPIRIT AS I, TEMITOPE UNDERSTAND IT. -Culled from ETHOS; What Africa may learn from Trinity by Tope Apoola Now we are back to a less familiar terrain. The world’s understanding of the third member of trinity is, to say the least, confused. Even people who recite the Christian creed everyday do not know what it is they profess to believe. The few who ever discussed their article of faith happen to be guilty of heresy- a charge that might have caused them a lot in medieval times! The Holy Spirit of Trinity is not just an active force of God, as it is erroneously believed in some quarters, rather, it is (as some preachers have consistently hammered) a person, a member of the Godhead. Earlier in our discussion, we had examined the logical necessity of this part (but we wish the necessity must not be mistaken as what informed the origination the doctrine. The Holy Spirit was clearly mentioned in the scriptures). Who is the Holy Spirit? The nature of the Spirit is obviously why He is the least understood among the three persons of Trinity. The same goes for the forces of nature; they were the last to be explained and up till now, the least understood. I will dilute our discourse on descent but will start with the dramatic part where the 19th Century physicists discovered what seemed to have insulted their intelligence. We may, for the purpose of this discussion see Schrödinger as a believer in the erroneous notion that the Holy Spirit is just God’s active force because of the Noble laureate’s assumption on the nature of natural forces (though he later argued that waves provides better explanation in the duality puzzle). The man, like his other colleagues, soon encountered what nullified their ‘commonsense’ assumption. In his 1952 lecture, What is matter? he expressed the paradox of the forces of nature. “The carriers of those (particles) are (particles)’, he said, ‘one gets dizzy.” We can easily imagine the scientist standing on the podium, proclaiming, “God’s active force is God.” To say that the doctrine of Trinity has no analogy in nature is to overstate the complexity of theology as physics is riddled with similar situations. The forces that energizes particles, or if the reader like, logos, are not just some wave-like nothings but they are particulate themselves. Particles energize particles and one of the most fundamental laws of nature; the law of inertia is flawed. It has been decades now since the amazing nature of matter was first discussed in a published work and today, we have a little more detailed picture of things. People are increasingly absorbing the fact of reality that there is no such thing as nothing. They have carried their new scientific faith into what would seem extreme at first sight; that even the force of gravity is quantized as what is called graviton. Deeper understanding of this part of physics, hopefully will find good analogy in the part where the scripture’s Logos said He couldn’t do anything except by the Father who sent Him. It may also help us to understand how the members of the Trinity may be logically three but still one. Again, I will leave further elucidation to people of better understanding, promising them that science offers logical relationship with many difficult theological questions. Because we do not wish to continue in the ways of ultra-modernism in our discussion, we will go back to the great philosophies of Kant, Philo, and the theology of E.B Ford. Kant, as we have mentioned before, alluded to the opinion that Christ did what He did because He was convinced about it. Now, we will substitute Kant’s idea of conviction with an earthly vocabulary. ‘Holy’ is our only word for Trinity’s conviction as there is no other expression for their decisions. Let me explain how. The reader should imagine a two-year-old living with grannies. Whatever grannies do would be, to the average child, perfect and unquestionably correct even when the grannies do not mean to. However, we should not underrate the infant’s ability to discern. The child may, on a second thought, consider granny’s spanking as corrective and not of wicked motive. The child will in no time, reach an overall opinion about the grannies. Even though grannies frown at times, even though they make the child to study in the hours of her favorite TV program, the child knows that whatever idea (or logos, reality, Christ) the grannies (God, the father) have, they must be perfect (holy). Now we cannot say that the child sees granny’s actions as all good because of his or her limited understanding. The child can tell if granny is unloving if for instance granny shows himself to be unjust through his ideas or if granny has evil conviction. We recognize there is a system of thought which holds that God is too transcendent to be described in terms such as good or even holy. We do not find for this maxim any logical backing neither do we think it able to withstand reality check. Now, Mr. Colson, author of How Now Shall We Live? had disowned the opinion on the grounds that it does not answer the deep yearning of humans. I will not pitch the tent of our discussion with humans but with reality and I want to oblige the reader to think clearly. Good and evil are not subjective feelings or something we perceive because of our social background but it is real and independent of both human psyches. Tears of joy or agony, as we might have noticed, do not always come upon inducement. Several human reactions to different emotional situations are without doubt, independent of the conscious mind. Again, we will nudge Freudian psychoanalysts with our earlier suggestion that they should carve out a certain part of the mind’s id and superego for a new psychoanalytic division of the mind, in which conscience or the God factor will be recognized as residing. Because of this and many other reasons we purport that the knowledge of good and evil is objective, hence what is good for the goose must be equally good for the gander. Attentive reader would notice a seeming contradiction here. The reader might wonder; haven’t we suggested that the dynamic attribute of Logos allows for cultural relativity? How can a member of Trinity, which is supposed to be one, now possess contrasting attributes? To the reader who thinks this way I give a puckish smile, grateful that he or she has evidently followed our discussion but not willing to explain without throwing him or her into further confusion. I will encourage readers in their doubtfulness while I suggest to them another question; why did Logos, the second member of Trinity, Christ, demur when He was called righteous, why would he rather have the Father take the honor solely? How can Logos be God if it is not perfect? Now, I will require greater attentiveness from the reader to illustrate this scenario. Let us consider a situation where a man, convinced that it is important to have a shelter now develops the idea of building a house. His idea resides in his mind, but it becomes visible when he finishes with the building project. Comparing idea with conviction, one observes that the man conceived his idea through his conviction. Idea is free to be dynamic as long as it works towards initial conviction. The man may change rooms’ sizes, he may change paints but the overall conviction that a shelter must be constructed cannot be compromised. Any divergence by construction workers can be tolerated but not a dissention in His conviction about having a roof over the head of his family. His conviction is sacrosanct, not evolving or developing. It can therefore be said to be perfect (or in scriptural terms, ‘righteous’). Logos or the idea is dynamic, subsuming, tolerant, evolving, and so may not want to be seen as perfect (or righteous) in the sense of the former. There is more to this but I will stop at this point with the hope that some readers will deep further into the subject matter. I will like to remain in context and state that any serious nation, if they must record huge success as Trinity have, must first of all things be convinced about a lot of things before they start fashioning ideas and before those ideas start to take bodily forms. Such things that nations may need to be convinced about include among others, democracy, justice, corruption and financial crimes, right to life, press freedom, children welfare, women affairs, education, science, social cohesiveness, culture, infrastructure, and so on. According to Karl Mannhein, a society in which diverse groups can no longer agree on the meaning of God, life, and man, will be equally unable to decide unanimously what is to be understood by (those things) 14. In the next chapter of this book, we will discuss how some of today’s industrialized nations have shown or seem to have shown a deep understanding of the lessons of Trinity, how they have succeeded considerably in bringing their convictions to bear and in substantiating their ideas.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:20:22 +0000
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