Dwelling of the Holy Spirit
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2: 19-22)
On the Trinity
Kallistos Ware, in Reclaiming the Great Tradition, has stated that the Trinity is the “heart of our life.” I am posting more quotes by him from that book, showing how the Holy Spirit relates to the triune God:
God is a triunity of persons loving each other, and in that shared love the persons are totally “oned” without thereby losing their personal individuality. In the phrase of St. John of Damascus, . . . the Three are “united yet not confused, distinct yet not divided.” . . . The Father is the “fountainhead” within the Trinity, so that the Son and the Spirit find their unity in him and are defined by their relationship to him: the Son is begotten,” the Spirit “proceeds.” . . . In the case of the Trinity . . . every divine operation is one and undivided, and the Trinity has but one will and not three. In this manner the three persons of the Trinity are one in a way that three human persons can never be.
Supernatural - natural interaction
I am sharing a selection taken from C. S. Lewis’ book, Miracles: How God Intervenes in Nature and human Affairs. It gives substantiation to interaction between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit, soul and body/brain. Though Lewis died before the most current findings of neuroscience that I cite in my two books and in many blogs, his comments are prescient for what we are now beginning to understand about this interaction.
. . . we do not know in advance that God might not bring two Natures into partial contact at some particular point: that is, He might allow selected events in the one to produce results in the other. There would thus be, at certain points, a partial interlocking; but this would not turn the two Natures into one, for the total reciprocity which makes a Nature would still be lacking, and the anomalous interlockings would arise not from what either system was in itself but from the Divine act which was bringing them together.
The supernatural human mind
Human minds, then, are not the only supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature; each has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being, whom we call God. Each is an offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles)
God the Son, the Word
This quote from C. S. Lewis’ book, Miracles, speaks to the unity of Jesus Christ, the Son, the Word, to the Father God:
The title “Son” may sound “primitive” or “naif.” But already in the New Testament this “Son” is identified with the Discourse or Reasons or Word which was eternally “with God” and yet also was God. (John 1:1) He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion or cohesion whereby the universe holds together. (Col 1:17) All things, and specifically LIfe, arose within Him, (John 1:4) and within Him all things will reach their conclusion - the final statement of what they have been trying to express. (Eph 1:10)
Uncreated, unconditioned supernatural reality
In this quote C. S. Lewis speaks to the reality of the supernatural:
For me the Christian doctrines which are “metaphorical” - or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought - mean something which is just as “supernatural” or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before. They mean that in addition to the physical or psycho-physical universe known to the sciences, there exists an uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be; that this reality has a positive structure or constitution which is usefully, though doubtless not completely, described in the doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce; and that this has brought about a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality.
The resurrected Jesus Christ sent as He promised the Holy Spirit to indwell believers in repentance, bringing “a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality,” to the Holy Spirit, to God the Father, by His grace through Jesus Christ.
God, a concrete fact
But if God is the ultimate source of all concrete, individual things and events, then God Himself must be concrete, and individual in the highest degree. Unless the origin of all other things were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality. . . . If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an “ideal” or a “value,” but an utterly concrete fact. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles)
God, the Absolute Being
I continue with a quote taken from Miracles by C. S. Lewis:
Let us dare to say that God is a particular Thing. Once He was the only Thing: but He is creative, He made other things to be, He is not those other things. He is not “universal being”: if He were there would be no creatures, for a generality can make nothing. He is “absolute being” - or rather the Absolute Being - in the sense that He alone exists in HIs own right. But there are things which God is not. In that sense He has a determinate character. Thus He is righteous, not a-moral; creative, not inert. The Hebrew writings here observe an admirable balance. Once God says simply I AM, proclaiming the mystery of self-existence. But times without number He says, “I am the Lord - I, the ultimate Fact, have this determinate character, and not that. And men are exhorted to know the Lord,” to discover and experience this particular character.
By the restoration of direct communion between the Holy Spirit and the spirit and soul of repentant mankind through the sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ on behalf of fallen mankind we can come to a personal, intimate knowledge of God the Father.
God becoming man
C. S. Lewis discussed in depth God’s becoming man in Miracles. I am sharing a series of comments from his book that speak to this reality. I refer the reader to his chapter entitled, “The Grand Miracle”:
What can be meant by “God becoming man?” In what sense is it conceivable that eternal self-existent Spirit, basic Fact-hood, should be so combined with a natural human organism as to make one person? And this would be a fatal stumbling-block if we had not already discovered that in every human being a more than natural activity (the act of reasoning) and therefore presumably a more than natural agent is thus united with a part of Nature: so united that the composite creature calls itself “I” and “Me.” . . . In other men a supernatural creature thus becomes, in union with the natural creature, one human being. In Jesus, it is held, the Supernatural Creator Himself did so. . . . We cannot conceive how the Divine Spirit dwelled within the created and human spirit of Jesus: but neither can we conceive how His human spirit, or that of any man, dwells within his natural organism. What we can understand, if the Christian doctrine is true, is that our own composite existence is not the sheer anomaly it might seem to be, but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation itself - the same theme in a very minor key. . . . We catch sight of a new key principle - the power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less.
I address extensively in my books, especially in The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story, the “how” of this “composite existence,” drawing upon current findings of neuroscience and information theory to obtain at least a partial understanding. Most of all we now have the ability to understand that the “coming down” of the Holy Spirit to indwell the human spirit to give Counsel to the human soul is a reality in which we can have evidential faith in our time.
C. S. Lewis on dualist interactionism
In my books I consider in detail the concept, and I believe the reality, of what is called dualist interactionism, a concept that materialism and naturalism do not accept. What is it? Simply put, it is the interaction between what is immaterial and what is material, or physical. That which is immaterial can exert causal effects on that which is physical, and the dualist relationship I address through over 20 years of apologetics research is that between the Mind of God and the mind of Man, the human spirit and soul, through God’s created neural synaptic networks and their linguistic neural codes. Let us read selected comments by C. S. Lewis from Miracles that address this interactionism. My blog posts collectively address this concept, expanding on the points made in my books.
In the Walking on the Water we see the relations of spirit and Nature so altered that Nature can be made to do whatever spirit pleases. This new obedience of Nature is, of course, not to be separated even in thought from spirit’s own obedience to the Father of Spirits. . . . One thing at least we must observe. If we are in fact spirits, not Nature’s offspring, then there must be some point (probably the brain) at which created spirit even now can produce effects on matter not by manipulation or technics but simply by the wish to do so.
Causality of dualism
It is useful to remember that even now senses responsive to different vibrations would admit us to quite new worlds of experience: that a multi-dimensional space would be different, almost beyond recognition, from the space we are now aware of, yet not discontinuous from it: that time may not always be for us, as it now is, unilinear and irreversible: that other parts of Nature might some day obey us as our cortex now does. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles)
i refer you to my earlier blog posts entitled, “Waves in Our Brains, Parts I and II,” that extend the findings shared in my books from the neurosciences to those acquired by my continued research that relate to Lewis’ “senses responsive to different vibrations.”
Life in the Sonship of Christ
Most certainly, beyond all worlds, unconditioned and unimaginable, transcending discursive thought, there yawns for ever the ultimate Fact, the fountain of all other facthood, the burning and undimensioned depth of the Divine Life. Most certainly also, to be united with that Life in the eternal Sonship of Christ is, strictly speaking, the only thing worth a moment’s consideration. . . . I allow and insist that the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, can never be, nor have been, confined to any place at all: it is rather in Him that all places exist. But the records say that the glorified, but still in some sense corporeal, Christ withdrew into some different mode of being about six weeks after the Crucifixion: and that He is “preparing a place" for us. (C. S. Lewis, Miracles)
As I state in my books, by God’s grace in our repentance we have had the direct, personal communion with the Holy Spirit restored by the sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In this sense we “already” have a real glimpse of the eternal Life to come in the Sonship of Christ, but it is “not yet” fulfilled in our present space-time. It is our eternal Hope.
Man, the supernatural and the natural
What follows is a series of posts of what C. S. Lewis said about the duality of Man in Miracles:
When we are considering Man as evidence for the fact that this spatio-temporal Nature is not the only thing in existence, the important distinction is between that part of Man which belongs to this spatio-temporal Nature and that part which does not: or, if you prefer, between those phenomena of humanity which are rigidly interlocked with all other events in this space and time and those which have a certain independence. These two parts of a man may rightly be called Natural and Supernatural: in calling the second “Supernatural” we mean that it is something which invades, or is added to it, the great interlocked event in space and time, instead of merely arising from it [the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as Counselor sent to believers in repentance by the resurrected Jesus Christ - added by the blog author]. On the other hand this “Supernatural” part is itself a created being - a thing called into existence by the Absolute Being and given by Him a certain character or “nature.” . . . There is, however, a sense in which the life of this part can become absolutely Supernatural, i.e. not beyond this Nature but beyond any and every Nature, in the sense that it can achieve a kind of life which could never have been given to any created being in its mere creation. . . . The rational part of every man is supernatural in the relative sense - the same sense in which both angels and devils are supernatural. But if it is, as the theologians say, “born again,” if it surrenders itself back to God in Christ, it will then have a life which is absolutely Supernatural, which is not created at all but begotten, for the creature is then sharing the begotten life of the Second Person of the Deity. . . . Finally, Christian writers use “spirit” and “spiritual” to mean the life which arises in such rational beings when they voluntarily surrender to Divine grace and become sons of the Heavenly Father in Christ. . . . the regenerate man will find his soul eventually harmonized with his spirit by the life of Christ that is in him.
This series of quotations concludes the posts taken from C. S. Lewis’ book, Miracles, that strongly support the concept of dualist interactionism between the immaterial Mind of God and mind of Man through God’s created neural synaptic networks of the brain.