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Is the Spirit of God a Dove? | The Trinity – Part 2


To continue with thinking about the Holy Spirit, I wanted to look at some passages from the Bible, and to look at some of the verses that people sometimes use to explain why there are three persons in the Trinity.

 

John 1:1-2

 

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

 

Romans 8:27

 

And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.

John 14:26

 

(Jesus said) But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

 

These verses seem to be pointing to the idea of a Trinity, but it’s easier to see that if you’re already holding the idea in your mind. The concept of a Trinity provides these verses with a certain understanding which seems to have depth, so it has to be correct, even if it is complicated. Without the Trinity they just don’t make sense, right? I would say that it’s almost impossible not to look at these verses and see the Trinity, although I would put that down to theological conditioning, rather than an instinctive way of understanding God.

 

The most popular verses that point to the Trinity are found in the story of Jesus’s baptism.

 

Matthew 3:16-17

 

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment Heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from Heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

 

Again, this seems to indicate a Trinity of three persons. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all there, all existing independently as three individual entities, whilst simultaneously being one. We can see explicit Trinitarian theology here, but if we actually think about this account, couldn’t it be a human rationalisation of something inexplicable and supernatural? Should the report provided be taken as a literal occurrence of what happened? Do we think that following his baptism, the Holy Spirit turned into a dove, then flew down from Heaven, past all the harp playing angels sat on clouds, and rested on Jesus’s shoulder, making him look like a weird pirate?

 

If that is literally what happened, then why?

 

Also, if a literal dove did land on Jesus after his baptism, then how did people know it was the Holy Spirit? It could have just been a passing dove that was flying by and fancied a rest, and decided to perch on Jesus, hoping that John the Baptist would feed it a delicious locust, which doves definitely eat. The accounts of Jesus’s baptism don’t report the that a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased, and by the way, this dove is the Holy Spirit, and it's the third person in the Trinity”.

 

The original text says that the Spirit “was like a dove”, the Greek word in the text is ‘hōsei’, meaning ‘like’, ‘as it were’, and ‘as’. It’s the same word that is used when Jesus had compassion on the crowds who were following him, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, seen in Matthew 9:36. The people weren’t actually sheep, they were ‘like’ sheep. In the same way, contrary to the thousands of Christian greetings cards, church logos, and paintings, that exist, of haloed doves soaring in azure blue skies, the Holy Spirit isn't an actual dove, flapping around all over the place, it’s a metaphor. Metaphors are used all over the Bible, but we don’t take them all literally and build doctrines around them. For instance, Jesus said that he was the bread of life, but we don’t hang pictures of sourdough up in our churches. The baptism of Jesus is also told in Luke 3, where in fairness, it does say that the Holy Spirit descended in a “bodily form like a dove”, which implies a physical entity, but I still don’t think that means it was a dove, or that it even looked like a person or was a recognisable being in any way.

 

God is obviously trying to tell us something by presenting as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and so I wanted to see if I could unpick it by looking at the Bible in a wider sense, rather than focusing just on single events and verses from the New Testament.

 

If we look at the opening lines of the Bible, in Genesis 1 we see the following text.

 

In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

 

Maybe the Spirit of God is a dove, dove can hover right?

 

So, in the beginning there is God and there is the Spirit of God. God is creator, and the Spirit of God hovers over the water. They are both there at the dawn of creation, and as we continue through the Old Testament, we continue to see God present, and we continue to see the Spirit of God also present. However, the Spirit of God is never treated as a separate person, it’s just God, it’s the essence of God, the presence of God, or if we really want to get into the Hebrew, it is the ‘ruach’ of God, which means ‘breath’ or ‘wind’.

 

If we look at the Old Testament then we also discover that people understood that God was their father. This relational aspect of God as a father wasn’t a new idea that Jesus invented, he was merely reminding the people of what they already knew.

 

Isaiah 63:16

 

But you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.

 

So, the Jews saw God as a father, and they also believed in and encountered the Spirit of God, but they didn’t see God as a Duality, that there were two persons in one Godhead.

 

If we look again at the opening verses of John’s Gospel, the text doesn’t say that Jesus was there at the beginning, with the father and the Spirit, and that they were all distinct persons, who were also God. It says that the word was God. God was seen as a father before Jesus arrived on earth, but the Father wasn’t seen as a person of God, neither was the Spirit seen as a person of God. God was God and Jesus was a further extension of that idea, not the breath or wind of God, but the word and enfleshment of God, the incarnation of God. We understand that Jesus was a person who had a personality, feelings and emotions, and maybe that complicates things, but Jesus as the incarnation of God, is just an extension of God, showing humans by example, how they could relate to God.

 

Maybe John puts the idea in the simplest way in this passage, when he says that Jesus is the word of God. If we add to what the Jews and early Christians already knew, then we have God, the creator and father, the Spirit of God, which is the breath and presence of God moving among people, and then we have the word of God, Jesus, God in the flesh, in human form, speaking to people in the world they inhabited, and in a way that actually meant something to them.

 

I know that Jesus talks about the Father and Spirit as if they are different people, but isn’t this just God explaining and demonstrating the tangible reality of him as a father, and of God’s Spirit being among people in a way that is real and knowable? Jesus could’ve just been saying that we can know God as a Father, and the Spirit of God as a comforter and advocate, but not that the Father is a distinct person who is within God, and that the Spirit is another distinct person who within God, and that Jesus himself is yet another distinct person who is within God. Even if he did say that, directly or by implication, Jesus isn’t always literal in what he says in the Bible, and he isn’t always clear in the teachings he presents. Just think about the story in John 6 when Jesus tells people that they have to drink his blood and eat his flesh.

 

The problem with the doctrine of the Trinity seems to be the ‘personhood’ of each essence of God, and I don’t know why Christians are so hung up on that idea. I don’t know why we are so eager to leap from the idea that it might be a metaphor, to the certainty of it being a literal truth that needs to be fully believed in order for your faith to be authentic. I don't think first century followers of Jesus would have thought of God as being three distinct people in one essence. I think that the doctrine of Trinity is an attempt to make sense of God, but it’s also an over reading of how Jesus talks about God. The way I have presented it, admittedly has its own problems, and I don’t think it even comes close to defining God, but it makes more sense to me than the Trinitarian theology that I’m supposed to believe if I want to be a proper Christian, which raises more questions and problems. I don’t think any theory about God’s nature and essence can be undeniably true, and while proponents of Trinitarian doctrine can claim it to be irrefutable, the reality is that it reduces God to a fallible human theory, and equates God to a series of confusing triangulated diagrams.

 

I think ideas around the Trinity have also caused confusion and division, for one, it has been a real problem in Judaism in Islam, because it seems to detract from the shared belief we have, that there is only one God. Christians can argue that we also believe this, but when we start talking about the three distinct persons of God, it does sound like you are talking about three God’s, no matter how you try and spin it. Not only is it confusing for other people, it’s confusing to us, if we’re really being honest.

 

Trinitarianism, modalism, and any other ideas we might have about God, are always going to be a human attempt to define the ineffable. They are all inadequate human theories about something we will never fully understand. If Trinitarian theology helps someone to make sense of God, and Modalism helps another person make sense of God, then why can’t we just be OK with that? Why does one theory have to be more correct than the other? God is mystery, and is completely outside of our human understanding. No human mind can understand God. We can create theories that help us to some extent, but they are all ultimately deficient.

 

If you’re a smart arse and believe that a complicated arrangement of God being three and one, is the most useful way for you to understand God, then that’s fine, good luck to you. If an egg helps you best understand God, then go for it. If you find that water helps make sense of the mystery of the Divine, then that’s great. Just bear in mind, whatever theory you have, you are also likely to be wrong about.

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music

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