Sunday, June 6, 2021

William Lane Craig on the Role of the Holy Spirit

  

. . . the witness of the Holy Spirit [is] self-authenticating, and by that notion I mean (1) that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for the one who has it and attends to it; (2) that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God: (3) that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; (4) that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth; (5) that such an experience provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and (6) that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for the one who attends fully to it . . . As I read the New Testament, it seems to me that for both Paul and John the fundamental way in which a believer knows the truth of the Christian faith is by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. When I say “the Christian faith,” I do not mean fine points of doctrine such as infralapsarianism or amillennialism, but rather the belief that one has been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, or some rough equivalent. Thus, Paul tells us that every Christian believer is an adopted son of God and is indwelt with the Holy Spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9; Gal. 4:6). It is the witness of God’s Spirit with our spirit that gives us the assurance that we are God’s children: “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of Sonship. And by him we cry ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Rom. 8:15-16). Paul does not hesitate to use the term plÄ“rophoria (“complete confidence, full assurance”) to indicate the surety that the believer possesses as a result of the Spirit’s work (Col. 2:2; 1 Thess. 1:5; cf. Rom. 4:21; 14:5). (William Lane Craig, “Classical Apologetics,” in Stanley N. Gundry and Steven B. Cowan, eds., Five Views on Apologetics [Counterpoints: Bible and Theology; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2000], 29-30)