SCORING THE BURKE – BOWMAN DEBATE – ROUND 4 PART 3 – BURKE

In round 4, Burke urges that his views about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit provide a simpler explanation of the texts. Whereas trinitarians must argue from implications of the text,

By contrast, I argue that the Bible provides us with explicit doctrines about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which… I have shown to be firmly rooted in OT theology.

Burke has a point here, although it can be overstated. Burke’s theology allows him to stick more closely to the words of the NT and the message as preached, e.g. in Acts. Surely, considered by itself this is an advantage. Trinitarians will argue that it is outweighed by the fact that the unitarian message leaves out other essentials, if somewhat implicit ones. Burke complains that Bowman hasn’t defined “implicit“, but this is a general philosophical issue outside the realm of the debate. Burke emphasizes that his approach is “Hebraic” whereas Bowman’s is “Hellenic”. In some sense this may be true, but I don’t think it advances the debate. It is surely possible that God providentially used Greek philosophy to help uncover the true implications of the NT. Further, both debaters are to some extent using Greek-philosophy-originated concepts and logic. Another place in which they’re talking past one another is this issue of the importance of what is and is not explicit in the NT, and specifically in the preaching of the apostles. Bowman is surely right that, e.g. Peter need not assert every element of the apostolic teaching in one sermon, and that Luke’s summary of that sermon surely wouldn’t include all of it. But Burke is right that if it is an essential part of the faith, and necessary to believe for salvation, that e.g. the Holy Spirit is a fully divine person in God distinct from the Father and Son, then we would expect this to be explicitly taught by the apostles, up front, prior to baptism. And we do not find this. But I don’t believe that Bowman has said that one must believe this to be saved. But if he affirms it, and holds that the apostles teach it, then Burke has a strong argument against him. This is surely a pressing, practical question that should be raised.

It is striking that Acts 2 does not contain what are often nowadays held up as core, essential doctrines of the Good News. As Burke says,

In Acts 2 alone, thousands of people were baptised on the basis of the preaching they heard at Pentecost. That preaching is described in considerable detail, and the Holy Spirit is referred to prominently, but I find no reference to the Trinity or the deity of Christ, let alone the Holy Spirit as God. I have previously asked Rob to teach me the Trinity (or at least the deity of Jesus), in the way the apostles taught those they baptised.

This fact has impressed most unitarians, as well as trinitarians who believe that “the” doctrine truly developed later than the NT, and is not logically implied by it.

Concerning the Holy Spirit, Burke starts with the OT. Although it is arguably in a few places personified,

Throughout the OT, God’s Holy Spirit is described as something that belongs to Him, like a property or a power… This is amplified by the many passages in which the Holy Spirit is presented as something that can be bestowed upon others, for various purposes and with varying effects…

Burke concedes that in a few places this Spirit is spoken of in personal terms, i.e. as if it were a self. Might it not be a self? Burke makes an interesting move here, citing examples of “wisdom” being personified in passages in eight books of the Bible:

Judged purely on the basis of accumulated proof texts, it could be claimed that we have a stronger prima facie case for the literal personality and deity of wisdom than we do for the Holy Spirit. But is this a legitimate proposal?

Now the payoff:

Despite a number of theological developments between the OT and NT eras (including the expansion of wisdom language in apocryphal literature), Jewish pneumatology remained static. Those Jews who still retained a belief in the Holy Spirit, saw no reason to deviate from the original OT conception.

I have a concern here. Philo of Alexandria (rough contemporary of Jesus) the Hellenistic Jewish theologian / OT interpreter cannot be overlooked. Clearly, he was massively influential on 2nd century catholic biblical interpretation and theology, and he so enthusiastically personifies the Holy Spirit, inspired by the creation myth of Plato’s Timaeus, that it is unclear whether he only means to be personifying. We know that the Hellenizing of Jewish thought outside of Palestine goes back to the 200’s BCE; it is possible that some Jews, at least in Alexandria, had a view of the Holy Spirit as a being long ago derived from God, a helper in creation, so that God can as it were keep his hands clean of the material world. BUT, arguably there is little trace of deep Platonistic influence anywhere in the NT. So maybe the NT can be read whilst largely ignoring Greek philosophical theology.

Following a 1996 monograph by Max Turner, Burke neatly summarizes all the ways in which the Holy Spirit is spoken of in personal terms in Acts. But piling up a big list of these shows nothing; what matters is how the language is functioning. Is it mere personification or not? Burke points out that a number of these examples involve speaking; he then lists 10 references in which Scripture is said to speak.

How many Christians would claim that Scripture is a person? None that I know of; they would tell me that this is just a form of poetic license. Yet when faced with verses in which the Holy Spirit “speaks”, they insist that it must be a literal person. But why differentiate in this way? Which interpretation is more likely: that the same use of language implies a completely different conclusion in two identical cases, or that the same use of language implies the same conclusion for both? (emphasis added)

But is the language use here really “the same” in the two cases? Certainly, the Spirit is spoken of more often, and more pointedly, in personal terms. Again, as I mentioned last time, and as is argued in a Biblical Unitarian article which Burke links, many unitarians urge that there is a dual usage of “the Holy Spirit” in the NT – it can be a title or name referring to God (in which case what it refers to is literally a self) or it can be used to refer to an impersonal thing, God’s power. In the first usage, to say that “The Holy Spirit told us to go to Macedonia” would mean that God told them to do that, it being understood that this was through some “gift of the Holy Spirit” – impression, prophecy, dream, etc. If this is right, then it won’t do to accuse trinitarians of failing to treat like cases alike, for they are not (enough) alike.

This may also explain why Bowman thinks unitarians are weaselly about this topic – they have a thesis about two uses of the phrase “the Holy Spirit” (etc.), and he conflates this with their making two incompatible claims about one thing. Burke is clear about that one thing – he holds God to be a self, and not in any sense a complex of three selves. But he’s needlessly inflexible about NT language. He wants to hold the like that all Spirit-talk is personification. But this is a needless over-reaction to the trinitarian tradition.

And the end of his case, Burke concludes with a few comment on Revelation 4-5. There, the Father is presented as God, and as creator, and Jesus is represented as a Lamb – a separate being from God. And the Holy Spirit is arguably not portrayed there at all, at least not as any sort of self or agent. People may be tempted to deride this is an “argument from silence”. But it is no fallacy, for it is plausible that if the Holy Spirit was “together with the Father and the Son [to be] adored and glorified”, then he’d make an appearance here, as an object of worship. It doesn’t follow that the Holy Spirit isn’t a divine person (that’d be a fallacy); rather, this passage is evidence against the view that the Holy Spirit is a divine person – fallible, overridable evidence, but significant evidence nonetheless. Other such negative evidence is there too – see the article Burke links for some examples.

This raises the issue: isn’t Jesus worshiped here, with “religious worship” no less? And can’t only God himself be worshiped? (Or does Rev 4-5 refute that claim?) But more on this later; Burke says some things about this in a long comment on a previous round.

Though there may be important rebuttals and back and forth coming, for now I have to award this round to Burke. He shows that given the OT background of the NT, the burden is on someone who thinks that Jewish thinking about the Spirit of God radically changed during the ministry of Jesus. Bowman essentially bets it all on John 14-6 plus Acts, arguing, not too convincingly, that he can deduce the true personhood of the Spirit from these. But he does very little to show this is a person other than the Father, alongside and equal to the Father, which is what he needs to show. Although Burke’s case is needlessly over strong (about the usage of “the Holy Spirit”) and marred by some ineffective charges (“Hellenism”), he builds on a solid OT foundation, and makes a plausible case that this pattern of thinking continues in the NT, e.g. in Luke 1:35. He focuses on (what he takes to be) personifications of the Spirit in the NT. He might have said more about NT spirit-talk which doesn’t involve that – are there other usages which sort of balance out the personifying?

Score:
Bowman: 0
Burke: 2
draw: 2