Master Mentor #27

Chapter 26 (Book 4, Chapter 5)
CS turns to the very complicated subject of the Trinity in this chapter. His argument is somewhat difficult to grasp… as most explanations of the Trinity tend to be.

Recently I asked a group of our high school students this question, “What do you believe about the Holy Spirit?” The question was asked in an open-discussion forum in our student ministry. Part of the purpose of the time is to talk about some of those complicated questions of the Christian faith without much of an agenda in an effort to allow students to have the opportunity to defend what they believe in a public setting. The answers were interesting. They ranged somewhere on the scale between “Casper the Friendly Ghost” and a mysterious form of God. But they really weren’t sure how to describe Him or what exactly what His function. It would seem that they were reading CS Lewis in this chapter. In describing the Holy Spirit, CS says, that “this third Person is called, in technical language, the Holy Ghost or the ‘spirit’ of God. Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two” (page 153).

And CS is correct. Most Christians would have a hard time explaining the nature of the Holy Spirit. And probably for good reason. We don’t talk or teach much about the Holy Spirit, what He is and how He functions. But we should. It’s just such a hard subject to bring up. Mostly, it would seem to me, because it brings up this whole “Trinity” issue that we have and since no one knows how to explain that, we skip the time with the Holy Spirit. Which is tragic.

Jim