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The New Temple and the Divinity of the Holy Spirit
Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash
If you’re interested in theology, you’re probably aware that certain pseudo-Christian groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses deny the divinity of Jesus. They believe he’s just a created being, and they twist the Scriptures to try to prove it. However, what you might not know is that there are also groups that deny the divinity of the Holy Spirit. They’re not quite as common, but they do exist, so if we want to know how to defend the faith well, we have to know how to refute this brand of pseudo-Christianity as well.
Admittedly, there aren’t any Scripture passages that explicitly say “The Holy Spirit is God,” so our task here isn’t quite as easy as we might like it to be. But don’t worry, it won’t be too hard. While we’re going to have to do some digging, the argument is actually pretty straightforward. Once we see the passages, everything will pretty much fall into place on its own, so we won’t need to follow complicated trains of thought that feel like more trouble than they’re worth.
The Holy Spirit Within Us
To begin, let’s take a look at this super important text from one of St. Paul’s letters:
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? (1 Corinthians 6:19)
What is a temple? For us 21st-century Christians, that can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. We have churches, not temples, so while we know these buildings serve some sort of religious function, most of us don’t really know what that is. But luckily for us, the answer isn’t hard to find. In the ancient Near East, temples were places where gods dwelled with their people. For example, when Solomon, the third king of Israel, built the temple in Jerusalem, he called it a “house” for God “to dwell in forever” (1 Kings 8:13).
When we take this knowledge back to Paul’s teaching that Christians’ bodies are “temple[s] of the Holy Spirit,” his meaning becomes perfectly clear. He means that the Holy Spirit dwells in us, thereby making us temples.
And that also tells us that the Holy Spirit is God. See, if the temple was the place where God dwelled, then for us to be temples, God must dwell in us now. But curiously, that’s not what Paul says. He says that the Holy Spirit is the one who dwells in us and makes us temples, so we can only draw one conclusion: the Spirit must in fact be God.
The New Covenant and the New Temple
That’s pretty simple, but we can go even deeper. In the Old Testament, the prophets said that the New Covenant would bring with it a new temple. For example, take a look at these words from Ezekiel:
I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will bless them and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore. My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Ezekiel 37:26-27)
The “covenant of peace” Ezekiel mentions here is the New Covenant, and the “sanctuary” is the temple, so it’s clear that the New Covenant would bring a new temple. On top of that, he also says that this new temple would be God’s “dwelling place” among his people, and that seals the deal for us.
Pretty much the whole point of Christianity is that it’s the fulfillment of the Old Testament, so Paul wouldn’t take an important prophecy like this and twist it around by saying that the New Covenant has other little temples that are dwelling places of non-divine beings (that wouldn’t even make sense!). No, when he talks about Christians being temples, he means that we’re the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy. He means that we’re the new temple foretold in the Old Testament, so God must be the one dwelling within us and making us temples.
And once again, if that’s the case, then the Holy Spirit has to be God. Otherwise, Paul would be playing fast and loose with the Old Testament, almost making a mockery of one of its most important prophecies, but he wouldn’t do that. He held the Old Testament in the highest regard, and he was very concerned about how Jesus and the Church fulfilled it. So once again, when he says that we’re temples of the Holy Spirit, that we’re the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy, he can only mean that the Holy Spirit is in fact God.
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About the Author
JP Nunez has been a theology nerd since high school. He has master's degrees in both theology and philosophy (with a concentration in bioethics) from Franciscan University of Steubenville, and he spent three years in Catholic University of America's doctoral program in biblical studies before realizing that academia isn't where he wants to be. During his time in Steubenville, he worked for two years as an intern at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, where his responsibilities included answering theological questions and helping to format and edit their Journey Through Scripture Bible studies. He blogs at JP Nunez: Understanding the Faith Through Scripture.
