https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMeNSG9dSjs
I've heard it said that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit was only possible when Jesus was on Earth, which is what the context is meant to suggest. Accusing Jesus of demonic activity is unforgivable, because what kind of a person could be within the very presence of Jesus, and witness works of God, and in full knowledge of the holiness of these things tell a bald-faced lie and call Jesus evil, when they know full well that this isn't true?
But this doesn't make sense. That sounds like blasphemy against the Son, not of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself says that the reason he must ascend is so that the Holy Spirit can come to Earth, suggesting the Holy Spirit was not already on Earth when Jesus was there. (Why couldn't Jesus stay and the Holy Spirit come, I have no idea.)
And if God is three in one, then why isn't blasphemy against one as bad as against the other?
Moreover, the Holy Spirit is meant to be a person separate from the Son, per the doctrine of the Trinity. So for someone to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit per se, they couldn't be blaspheming Jesus. They would have to single out the Holy Spirit somehow. How would they do this, unless they believed the Holy Spirit to be a real, separate person in the first place? A non-believer wouldn't believe this. Only someone who had experienced the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit" would be in a position, it would seem, to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. But there are cases where people think God is speaking to them, or they think that the Holy Spirit is moving within them, but this turns out to not be the case. So how is someone supposed to tell whether this "inner witness" is legitimate or just a product of their imagination?
What must this blasphemy amount to? Could it be something as innocuous as reinterpreting a previous experience of the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit" as nothing more than one's imagination? Or does it require something more dramatic?
If God is perfectly forgiving, then how could there be any unforgivable sin?
For there to be an unforgivable sin, that's some serious stuff. So serious in fact, it would be a profound failure of love for God to give us just enough knowledge of the unforgivable sin to cause us great spiritual anxiety, but not enough knowledge to even know what it is. What kind of God would communicate such an important idea so poorly?
Then there's the obvious ethical problem. Genocide? Perfectly forgivable. Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, whatever that even means? Unforgivable. This makes no sense!
And if blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is a "lifetime thing" as they suggest in the video, then why doesn't the text say that?
And if the unforgivable sin is not forgivable because forgiveness always requires repentance, and the person who blasphemes the Holy Spirit is necessarily unrepentant, then that means blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is unforgivable in a trivial sense. By that definition of forgiveness, then anyone who is unrepentant is unforgivable, which means there is nothing special about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. But again, why wouldn't the text say this if this were the case? Instead, the text suggests that there is something special, not trivial, about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit that makes it a uniquely unforgivable offense. Put another way, the text suggests that someone who commits blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is directly unforgivable, while the above suggests that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit makes someone indirectly unforgivable.
But even if it were true that there is this kind of 'indirectly unforgivable' status, it's totally misleading to call such a person unforgivable. Instead, you should call the person unrepentant. It would be misleading to say "A lack of repentance is an unforgivable sin" when the truth is "Forgiveness requires repentance." One has to do with the quality of the sin itself and the other has to do with the meaning of 'forgiveness.'
If Jesus wanted to make things clear, he could simply say: "Those who do not repent cannot be forgiven" and leave it at that. But instead Jesus singles out a specific kind of evil that he labels "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" and says this sin, and only this sin, will not be forgiven. That's very different from saying "Forgiveness requires repentance and those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit are unrepentant."
And yet, even if Jesus said this, it would still be confusing. Is a 'blasphemer of the Holy Spirit' just another term for an unrepentant person? Or is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit a specific kind of sin that only an unrepentant person would commit?
If the latter, then even that makes no sense, because what determines whether a person is unrepentant is their attitude and behavior after they have committed a sin, not the sin itself. Case in point, Jesus says blasphemy against the Son or the Father will be forgiven, but not the Holy Spirit. So even the sin of blaspheming the Father or the Son needn't come from someone who is permanently unrepentant. Committing that sin doesn't tell us that this person is necessarily unrepentant. But why would blasphemy against the Holy Spirit have this quality when other sins do not?
Again, this suggests that the only kind of person capable of blaspheming the Holy Spirit would be someone who has direct contact with the Holy Spirit in an unmistakable kind of way. But no one has that contact, because there is always the possibility that what you perceive to be the Holy Spirit could be your imagination or something else. Putting all your faith in what you perceive to be the Holy Spirit speaking to you leads to what I call epistemic hypocrisy. Imagine a Muslim says to the Christian, "Allah has told me that Jesus did not die on the cross." The Muslim has a deep gut feeling that this is true. The Christian has a deep gut feeling (that they attribute to the Holy Spirit) that Jesus did die on the cross. So we have clashing certainties, and the Christian has to say that the Muslim can be wrong in their certainty, but hypocritically does not apply this same risk to their own certainty.
"My certainty is better than yours because it's mine," the Christian has to say. Or, "Someone (the Muslim) can have religious certainty and yet be wrong."
But the Christian either applies this to himself or not. If he does, then his certainty is destroyed, as he admits it's possible that his certainty is wrong. If he does not, then he's committing special pleading, making his own certainty an exception to the rule when there is no principled reason for doing so.
For all the Christian knows, the phenomenology of Muslim certainty is identical to the phenomenology of Christian certainty, and that there is a secular explanation that uniformly explains the misplaced Muslim certainty and the misplaced Christian certainty (only a naturalist gets to take advantage of this beautifully uniform explanation).
If your epistemology leads to epistemic hypocrisy, then your epistemology is bad.
But again, this is a moot point, because it assumes an 'indirectly unforgivable' status of the unforgivable sin that the text strongly suggests against.
At some point I will look into biblical commentaries and bring receipts to these questions.
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