The next Sunday, I told a friend at church about Dr. Ervin’s red door. He smiled a little wistfully. “Well, when you meet the Holy Spirit,” he said, “please introduce me. I’ve never had a very clear idea about Him.”
He wasn’t the only one. I remember one Sunday when I was a small boy growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, hearing a sermon on the Holy Ghost. It was the one and only time I heard Him mentioned more than in passing from our pulpit, and all that I recall of the occasion is that my sister and I drew spook forms down the side of the bulletin and were darkly frowned upon by an usher.
But was I really any better informed now? Wasn’t the Holy Ghost still a shadow? An aspect of God, the third member of the Trinity, a concept you acknowledged every Sunday in the Creed, but a ghost just the same, as if He were the featureless remnant of someone who at one time in the Church’s life had been very real indeed but now was little more than a memory.
I knew that the personal pronoun was correct in referring to Him; the right word was He, not It. But I didn’t act as though I believed this. Near the hospital in our neighboring town of Mount Kisco there is a traffic light. If I needed to cross that street and get to the hospital in a hurry, I could appeal fervently to the traffic light, but I couldn’t change its pattern by a single second. I’d get across, all right; but only when the machinery inside had completed an automatic cycle. Occasionally, however, a policeman will turn off the mechanical light and direct traffic himself at that corner. If he were there when I made my urgent appeal, I would doubtless see the normal course of traffic interrupted, the pattern broken, an exception made. In my prayers, when the name of the Holy Spirit was invoked at all, I noted that He filled more the function of the traffic light than that of the traffic officer.
Dr. Ervin had suggested that I step through the red door and meet the Holy Spirit. Before I could consider doing this, I wanted to get some more information about this entity I was being invited to meet. So, once again armed with concordance and Bible, I set out to find it.
Some years ago I had an interview with Robert Frost. The poet drew an image that stood out with particular vividness in my mind as I set out on my search.
“If you would have out the way a man feels about God,” he said, “don’t ask him for a credo, but instead watch his life. It’s as though a coin were hidden under a piece of paper. You can’t see it directly, but you can discover the denomination by rubbing a pencil over the paper. From all the individual rises and valleys, your answer will come out.”
I hoped to use this technique with the Holy Spirit. I wanted to find out who He was not by reading various credos, but by watching Him in action in the Bible. Perhaps by examining the rises and valleys I would get a portrait of Him.
I thought that references to the Spirit would be all in the New Testament, but to my surprise I found that they were not. It is true that the precise words “Holy Spirit” appear only three times in the Old Testament, but the evolving concept of the Spirit is there way back in Genesis.
One of the first things I noticed was that the confusion as to whether the Spirit was more like an inanimate force or more like a person dates right back to the beginning of biblical thought on the subject. The root word for “spirit” in Hebrew is ruäh, and this word has two distinct meanings. One is “wind.” And the other is “breath.” One is an impersonal force; the other is much more intimate, assuming consciousness and awareness, for you cannot have breath without having someone who breathes.
The basic quality of both, however, was movement. Ruäh was always in action. It was moving. It was going to affect whatever it came in contact with.
Another concept inherent in the ancient use of the word was creativity. Ruäh was intimately associated with birth. It was the Spirit of God that moved upon the face of the water at creation. It was the breath of life breathed into the nostrils that made man a living soul.
In later books of the Old Testament, the Spirit is depicted as playing a special role in the lives of certain individuals. The coming of the Spirit to a human being is usually accompanied by an abrupt change in personality. Samuel told Saul that the Spirit of Jehovah would come mightily upon him, and that afterward he would be so changed as to be like another man. And indeed young Saul of “the humblest of all the families from the least of the tribes of Israel” was transformed into one of the Old Testament’s great leaders.
The Spirit habitually made heroes of ordinary men. It was the Spirit of Jehovah that gave Samson his strength. The Spirit of God came upon Joshua just before he blew the trumpet that signaled the fall of Jericho. David considered that it was God’s Spirit that spoke through him. The list of men who were touched by the Spirit is the Old Testament’s roster of giants:
Joseph
Moses
Joshua
Jephthah
Nathan
Gad
Ezekiel
Daniel
Joel
Hosea
Amos
Obadiah
Jonah
Micah
Nahum
Habakkuk
Haggai
Malachi
But there was another aspect to God’s Spirit coming upon a man. In the 51st and 139th psalms the Spirit visits the poet not as a source of strength for mighty acts, but as an intimate Presence, subtle by comparison, a guide not of armies, but of one man’s soul:
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.
Psalm 51:10–11, ASV
O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.
Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
Psalm 139:1, 5, 7, ASV
In these lines there is a sense of God’s immanence quite different from the fear-filled worship of distant and unapproachable Jehovah.
The parallel to Christian thought is inescapable, and this, in fact, was the next observation I made. In those Old Testament passages that Christians believe foreshadow Christ, the Spirit figures prominently. The most striking of these prophecies come in Isaiah:
And there shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots shall bear fruit: and the Spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon him.
Isaiah 11:1–2, ASV
Behold, my servant, whom I uphold; my chosen, in whom my soul delighteth: I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the Gentiles.
Isaiah 42:1, ASV
If this were true, I should expect to find a flurry of references to the Spirit at the time of Jesus’ birth. And there they were. Jesus, Himself, was conceived by the Holy Ghost. Simeon was promised by the Spirit that he would see the Messiah before he died. John the Baptist, the principal actor in the drama of recognition that attended Christ’s coming, was associated with the Holy Spirit from the beginning. John’s mother was filled with the Spirit upon being greeted by Mary. His father received the Spirit on the day the child was named. John himself was filled with the Holy Spirit from the moment of his birth. In addition, there was to be a specific sign by which John was to know the Christ when he saw Him: upon whomever he saw the Spirit descending, that person was the Son of God.
Christ’s earthly ministry did not start until after the Spirit was given to Him at His baptism. It was through the Spirit’s power that Jesus worked His miracles, through this power also that people were to enter the Kingdom that He preached. “Except one be born of water and the Spirit,” Christ said, “he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5, ASV).
As His death approached, Jesus began to prepare the disciples for the coming of this power—telling them that it was expedient for them that He should go away, for if He did not, the Spirit would not come. But when He, the Spirit, did come, He would stay with them forever. He would guide and teach and strengthen them, and in His power they would do greater works even than Christ had done.
After His death, Jesus reminded the disciples of this promise and commanded them to remain in Jerusalem until the Spirit came upon them. I paused at this point in my reading and tried to summarize what I had discovered about this Spirit who was coming:
This, then, was the portrait that emerged from following the hills and valleys of the Holy Spirit’s activity. The disciples waited now in Jerusalem for the arrival of this Spirit. And when, at Pentecost, He came, He transformed the timid band of disciples (literally, “learners”) into apostles (“ones who are sent”). The men and women who waited in the Upper Room embarked immediately on an amazing series of power-filled acts. That very day, Peter—the same Peter who had fled for his life on the night of Jesus’ arrest a few short weeks before—stood boldly up in the full hearing of the authorities and preached a sermon so eloquent and convincing that three thousand people were converted on the spot. This from a fisherman, and one from the little-regarded hinterland of Galilee at that! It was not surprising that after this the apostles insisted that their new converts receive this power too. It was the necessary tool without which they could not carry out the tremendous task that Christ had given them.
What did it feel like to receive the Holy Spirit? There are no full descriptions in the Bible, but from what is said we can fill in the picture.
In the first place, if the Holy Spirit is God in His dynamic aspect, knowing Him would necessarily have to be an experience. It would be the experience, furthermore, of a Personality, and one who deeply cared. It would be the experience of friendship. A creative, transforming friendship, in some instances fragile as a dove, in others searing as fire, like all good friendships, elusive and mysterious.
“Baptism” is just one of the words used in the Bible to describe the moment when a person comes into full contact with this friendship. The other terms, too, bolster the idea that the Holy Spirit is God in action. Sometimes, I read, the Spirit “fell” on people. Sometimes they were “filled” with the Spirit. At others they “received” the Spirit. The Spirit is said to “proceed from” God.
There was a quality about the experience that produced two responses. In the first place there were tongues. And then, at Pentecost, anyway, they got a little rowdy, enough so that the people watching wondered if they were drunk. It struck me as a curious contrast with the sobersided pulpits of today that the first Christian sermon should begin with a stout denial by the preacher that he and his friends were drunk. Why, he said, it’s only nine in the morning, how could anyone be drunk?
And how, in New Testament times, did people enter into this experience? There seemed to be several ways. At Pentecost the disciples simply assembled together and waited expectantly. But Cornelius and his friends and relatives, listening to Peter preach about Christ, were expecting nothing when the Spirit fell upon them. In other cases a Spirit-filled Christian passed Him to others by laying hands upon them.
I closed the Bible, feeling that what I’d been reading had a strangely contemporary feel. I knew where the feeling came from. The letters in my file, the interviews with Spirit-filled people, all showed that little had changed in this area of the Spirit since the New Testament was written. Even the manner in which He descended on those first-century Christians had parallels today.
I remembered one recent instance where a group of people, listening to God’s Word as Cornelius’s household was, and no more expecting the Holy Spirit than they had, were suddenly overwhelmed the same way. In 1954 a Mennonite preacher, Gerald Derstine, was conducting a weeklong Bible study seminar in northern Minnesota. One day, without warning, a young man in the class suddenly knelt down and began to cry.
This kind of emotion was very unusual in the Mennonite church, [says Derstine] and at first we tried to put a stop to it. But before we could, another student was crying. And then another. We tried to pull the weeping students out of the classroom, but as soon as we took one out, two or three others began to cry.
And then we noticed an amazing thing: strange sounds were coming from the mouths of some of these young people. Were these the “stammering lips” we had read about in the Bible?
Never before, to my knowledge, had such a thing happened in our church. The Mennonites do not teach that these manifestations are for today: as far as we were concerned, they belonged back nineteen hundred years ago. And yet, there before our eyes, our students were suddenly speaking in tongues, just as at Pentecost.
A friend of ours, Lila Ginter, was filled with the Spirit as a child, without even knowing that such a religious experience existed. Lila was standing in her father’s apple orchard in Ohio one day, looking up through clouds of white blossoms to the blue sky overhead, when she suddenly had an overwhelming sense of the presence of God. She opened her mouth to talk to Him in the unself-conscious way of children, but the sounds that came out of her mouth were not English, and though she prattled on fluently for a long while, her lips would form no sensible words at all.
“I never told this experience to anyone,” Lila told me. “I thought I was the only human being who had ever had such a thing happen. It was forty years before I discovered that there were whole groups of people to whom this phenomenon was normal.”
More common, today, is for the experience to come because someone is consciously, actively seeking it. But there is as much variety in ways of seeking as there was in the Bible. Some take their cue from Christ’s injunction to the disciples, “And behold I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high” (Luke 24:49, ASV). The word they stress is “tarry.” They feel that they must wait, sometimes for days, praying and praising God until the baptism comes. Others feel that there is no need to tarry. They point to other occasions in the New Testament when the Spirit was given as soon as the believer asked for Him.
Some feel that the candidate must be in a stage of deep prayer before he can receive this baptism. But others take just the opposite view: they feel that the baptism is not a kind of Christian spectacular but an ordinary, almost routine step in the life of a believer.
How about emotion going along with it? Some say that together with tongues should come an “interior witness”: a “sense” that one’s own spirit and the Holy Spirit are in communion. Others believe that the baptism occurs on a level entirely separate from that of emotion and is more dependable when unaccompanied by the least trace of feeling.
Absolute criteria seem to be about the only things absent from the experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit. “And I’d worry about it if it were any other way,” Tib said one night as we were discussing this. “If the Spirit is like the wind, blowing where it wants to, fixed rules would be suspicious. It’d be like coming in out of a tornado and switching on an electric fan.”
But although this wind of the Spirit “bloweth where it listeth” (John 3:8) it is also undeniable that certain individuals, today as in apostolic times, have a special ministry for passing it along. In the earlier days of the Pentecostal revival, the late J. E. Stiles used to travel around the world meeting with small groups of Christians, praying for them to receive the Spirit. Literally thousands came into the experience at these meetings. David du Plessis has this special ministry. So does the Reverend Richard Winkler, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Wheaton, Illinois.
One of the most active people we know in this ministry is a woman. Jean Stone is a housewife and mother in suburban Van Nuys, California. She was a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys at the time of the uproar over Dennis Bennett’s sermon. Jean felt that the misunderstanding never would have occurred if people had been better informed about the modern-day working of the Spirit. One evening she announced to her husband that she had decided to start a magazine that would fill this function in other parishes.
“I just smiled knowingly,” said Jean’s husband, Donald. “Jean didn’t have the business sense to subscribe to a magazine, much less start one.” Donald Stone and I were talking in a New York hotel room where he had come on a business trip.
“She was completely impractical,” he went on. “She had some idea for a slick-paper, sophisticated quarterly which would be aimed at highbrows. She was going to call it Trinity.” Donald laughed a little ruefully as he drew from his suitcase a slick-paper, sophisticated quarterly, aimed at highbrows and called Trinity.
In addition to publishing the magazine, Jean travels all around the country lecturing on the baptism in the Holy Spirit and, when requested, praying with those who wish to receive it. She has a special way with the people for whom her magazine is edited: the well-educated, conservative suburbanite from the denominational church.
“These people do not approach the other areas of their lives excitably and demonstratively,” she says, “and I don’t see why the Holy Spirit should be presented to them under this guise.”
We have heard her address groups, and her presentation is very sane and quiet. “The apostles just assumed that Christians would receive the baptism,” she tells her listeners. “‘Have you received the Holy Spirit now that you have become believers?’ they asked new converts. And if the answer was no, they entreated God to give Him to them at once, confident that God would not withhold this necessary power from any believer.”
“I like being in this particular ministry,” she often says. “It’s the only one where you should expect one hundred percent success. The baptism is for the whole church. For every Christian.”
Nor does she expect a great seizure of emotion at the moment of baptism. “The new tongue is usually quiet and lovely,” she says, “joyous but not frenzied.” To Jean Stone, receiving the baptism is more like getting a kit of tools with which to do a job than an emotional experience. “It’s a transaction between the Architect and His workmen. ‘Will you work on this building of Mine? Here’s the equipment you’ll need.’ And He provides us with healing, prophecy, wisdom, tongues, whatever we can use for our particular part in the construction.”
But the baptism is by no means always so tranquil. Dr. John F. Barton, a dentist in West Hartford, Connecticut, told me that his baptism felt like receiving a massive jolt of electricity, painless but stimulating. Sometimes these jolts of power produce physical manifestations. A person’s muscles may react, flexing and relaxing until he or she begins to shake all over. Or one may start to cry, or sing. Or one may literally be prostrated: the Holy Rollers, who are for the most part African-American Pentecostals, get their name from this unusual manifestation.
Physical reactions have defenders in unexpected quarters. I was surprised to read this in John Wesley’s Journal:
The danger [wrote Wesley, talking of outcries, convulsions, dancing, visions, trances and the like], was to regard them too little; to condemn them altogether; to imagine they had nothing of God in them, and were a hindrance to His work. Whereas the truth is:
(1) God suddenly and strongly convinced many that they were lost sinners, the natural consequences whereof were sudden outcries and strong bodily convulsions;
(2) to strengthen and encourage them that believe, and to make His work more apparent, He favored several of them with divine dreams, others with trances and visions;
(3) in some of these instances, after a time, nature mixed with grace;
(4) Satan likewise mimicked this work of God in order to discredit the whole work; and yet it is not wise to give up this part any more than to give up the whole. At first it was, doubtless, wholly from God. It is partly so at this day; and He will enable us to discern how far, in every case, the work is pure, and where it mixes or degenerates. The shadow is no disparagement of the substance, nor the counterfeit of the real diamond.
Physical manifestations are not the only possible response to the baptism. There are also strong emotional reactions. In my correspondence there were constant references to a sense of well-being. Here are examples:
Quite often, along with this sense of well-being goes some form of healing. One of the people we met at the “Saturday Group” in the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia was the wife of a Baptist minister who had an amazing story to tell. This lady had been born with one leg a full two inches shorter than the other and all her life had worn a built-up shoe on that foot. On the night she received her baptism, she felt a burning sensation in this leg but paid no attention in the intense joy of the moment. Joy was her overriding reaction to the baptism; she sat for hours on a sofa, tears of happiness streaming down her cheeks. But when at last she stood up to go home, she stumbled. The next step was the same. After she had tripped and hobbled the length of the room she realized what had happened. Her short leg had grown two inches: the built-up shoe was making her legs unequal. The healing, she added that Saturday, looking down at two shapely shoes, was permanent.
The Reverend David C. Wilcox of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had been advised by his doctor to take an ounce of brandy in hot water three times a day to relieve nervous tension. Six years later Mr. Wilcox was drinking a quart of vodka a day, swallowing box after box of lozenges in an effort to keep his alcoholism secret. He tried prayer, psychiatry, hypnotherapy, Alcoholics Anonymous—nothing helped him. Then one night he fell asleep on his knees after a long and intense prayer. When he awoke he knew that something immensely important was happening. He felt that the Holy Spirit was filling him with power. Specifically, he knew that as of that instant he had completely overcome his problem with alcohol.
“God marvelously and miraculously delivered me from the demon of alcoholism,” says Wilcox today, five years after his baptism. “This deliverance came as quietly as the dew of the morning, and yet with such thunderous impact that it completely changed my life.”
Another kind of healing frequently reported is a healing of the spirit. Marianne Brown of Parkesburg, Pennsylvania, is today a truly joyous person. She has a wonderful, infectious smile; but the lines around her eyes are not smile lines: they come rather from the years Marianne spent as a chronic worrier.
Marianne lived in an eleven-room manse built back in the days when help was inexpensive and available. It was neither when the Browns moved into the house beside the old Presbyterian church. Marianne was constantly behind in her schedule: either she took care of the house and her five children and her minister-husband and neglected the needs of the parish, or else she helped with the parish work and the house suffered. Always late, always running, always under pressure, Marianne grew steadily more desperate. Her solution was simple: when things got too bad she took to her bed.
“Those illnesses,” Marianne told me one day when Tib and I were visiting her in Parkesburg, “brought a double reward: I got lots of sympathy and I was free from responsibility. Still, I knew this was no way to live. I knew that God had not intended for me to be a semi-invalid, but I was powerless to do anything about it.”
And then Marianne received the baptism in the Spirit. “The new tongue I was given,” she said, “was intermingled with waves of mirth in which every fear I had just seemed to roll away. It was a tongue of laughter. And when I had finished laughing I felt that I would never again have to spend another day in bed because of worry.” For eight years this prediction has proved true. “He lavished strength and joy on me, so that I was able to do in hours what before had taken days to accomplish.”
Of all the variety of experience with the Holy Spirit, one thing held true in every case. Whether the baptism came quietly or with a bang, unexpectedly or after long seeking, the ultimate result was to draw the individual closer to Christ. Jesus was no longer a figure on the pages of a history book. Nor, even, a memory from some personal mountaintop experience. His Spirit was with the baptized believer in a present-time, minute-by-minute way, showing the believer at every turn the nature and personality of Christ.
And suddenly I realized that I had come full cycle.
This whole search had begun in the vacuum that had followed my own mountaintop experience in the hospital. I was following—perhaps all Christians follow—the path the disciples took: First, there was a direct, personal encounter with Christ. Then, He appears to go away. There is a longing for His return, and a helplessness, because nothing we do seems to bring that return.
Wasn’t the lesson I had learned from the Bible, and from the people who had had the experience today, that in order to see Him again we need the mediation of the Holy Spirit? “But when your Advocate has come, whom I will send you from the Father—the Spirit of truth that issues from the Father—he will bear witness to me” (John 15:26, NEB).