Ghost!” a 5-year-old screeched as he stood in the pew and clutched his mother's neck. “Mama, the preacher said there's a ghost in here!”
Although most Baptists in the sanctuary laughed at the outburst, likely at least a few also wondered: Who or what is the Holy Ghost — the Holy Spirit? And what difference does the Holy Spirit make in today's world?
Baptists profess to believe God manifests attributes and character through the Trinity, three distinct persons — the Father as Creator, the Son as Savior and the Holy Spirit as Comforter.
But through history, some Baptist branches — including those of the Southern tradition — have leaned toward a form of Unitarianism, sometimes centered on the Creator and often focused on Jesus.
Doug Weaver, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in Baylor University's religion department, believes Baptist biblicism — the way Baptists understand the Bible — explains the tendency to focus on Jesus.
“Passages about God and the Holy Spirit are surely there [in the Bible], but we will quote Jesus' ‘I am the way' from John and Paul's ‘we preach Christ crucified' before we quote anything else,” Weaver explained.
The New Testament leads Baptists to a Trinitarian position, said Dallas Roark, a former professor at Wayland Baptist and Kansas State universities. For example, “John 1:1-18 [and] the words of Jesus in John 14-17 indicate the identity with the Father and the Holy Spirit,” he said.
And, Roark believes, the New Testament leads to the Savior.
“The emphasis on Jesus is so strong because he is the mystery of God now revealed in history. … The central fact of God's revelation is in Christ, not the Holy Spirit,” Roark added. “Jesus indicated that the Spirit would testify to him, not about the Spirit's self.”
Baptists focus on the person of Jesus because they recognize him as central to personal salvation and Christian experience.
“Baptists are a conversionist movement; testifying to the personal experience of salvation made possible through Christ and signified by believer's baptism has always been the basis for our concept of ‘believer's church,' ” Weaver added.
The Enlightenment — the social and cultural age that emphasized reason and intellect — also affected Baptist understanding of the Trinity, Baylor professor Rosalie Beck believes. Beck is an assistant professor at Baylor, specializing in Christian history and missions and in women's studies.
“We are heirs to the Enlightenment and accept a growing emphasis on mentally describing and understanding everything,” she said. “Other cultures have a more creative understanding of their world and explain it in terms that we have rejected because of our intellectual tradition.”
Human form lends concreteness to the person of Jesus, while the Holy Spirit remains abstract. “When one reads through the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, the personality of Jesus shines through and we are given an image of a person who is one with us,” Roark explained.
“We don't have the same details about the Holy Spirit. The embodiment of the Logos gives us concrete details that we don't have about the Holy Spirit.”
But that concreteness should not detract from the Holy Spirit's role, he added. The Spirit's presence is the constant reminder of what Jesus did for humankind. The Spirit penetrates “in a way that it is not conceivable in the seeming limited spatial body of Jesus,” Roark said.
Sometimes Baptists have shied from emphasizing the Holy Spirit to distance themselves from the practices of other groups. A few Baptists participated in the holiness movement in the late 19th century, Weaver explained. “Holiness” Baptists adopted an understanding of sanctification that paralleled the Pentecostal approach.
“More recently, Baptists, like other Protestants and Catholics, have been influenced by what I call the ‘pentecostalization of American religion,'” Weaver added.
“As the charismatic movement developed in the 1960s — and the electronic church — a few Baptists began to affirm the ‘gifts of the Spirit,' though most Baptists — especially in the South — opposed the movement,” he said.
Some Baptist groups, such as the Southern tradition, include the Spirit “through the back door, because Baptists emphasize the inspired aspect of the Bible.” said David May, professor of New Testa-ment at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kan.
But other Baptist groups express more open connection to the Holy Spirit, May pointed out, particularly in African-American Baptist traditions.
“I wonder if those who have felt marginalized have sensed the Spirit because the Spirit is kind of marginalized,” he speculated. “Mainline churches have monopolized Jesus. The Spirit doesn't have a cultural look.”