Self-Authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit

Published by 1c15 on 24th February 202024th February 2020

So far we’ve talked about what properly basic beliefs are and that we are going to infer that the Holy Spirits witness to us is one of these properly basic beliefs. the Holy spirit is fundamentally how we know Christianity is true, but what do we mean by that? what does it do?

1. The experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable for someone who has it

If you are a person genuinely experiencing the inner witness of the Holy Spirit you can’t mistake it for something else and think that its just another God or some sort of fraudulent feeling. It’s a veridical (verifying), genuine authenticating experience of God himself to you. 

This doesn’t mean that it’s irresistible or indubitable (impossible to doubt; unquestionable). It’s unmistakable and veridical for the person who has it, but through sin we can quench the Holy Spirit in our lives, we can resist the Holy Spirit. You can know an act you’re doing is wrong, but you really want to do it and when you wrestle inside of yourself like this, you are quite possibly resisting the spirit in your life.

2. A person who enjoys the witness of the Holy Spirit doesn’t need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God

A person who has the witness of the Holy Spirit doesn’t need to have arguments and evidence in order to know that God’s spirit is witnessing to him the truth in Christianity.

I struggled with particular sins when I became a Christian and I felt moved to change, and I knew God with giving me some subtle "divine nudge" as I called it. But before I knew the New Testament innermost Christian beliefs, I was being convicted of sin by the Holy spirit before I knew certain acts were sin! Often scripture will come to mind but for those who don't have a strong enough familiarity, there's no reason the spirit can't work in this way.

3. Such an experience doesn’t function as a premise in an argument from religious experience to God, it is just the immediate experience of God himself

It’s not an argument for Christianity from religious experience. Just as you have an experience of the external world, or the reality of the past, so you experience the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.

4. In certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion 

For example

1. For a Believer: God exists
2. For a Believer: I am reconciled to God — when someone has been born again
3. For a Believer: Christ lives in me
4. An unbeliever: I am condemned by God when under conviction of sin

We'll get more into what the Holy Spirit does in an unbelievers life later

5. Such an experience provides you not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth but with objective knowledge of that truth

This isn’t a touchy feely assurance that Christianity is true. Through the witness of the Holy Spirit you come to develop and objective knowledge that God exists, that you are reconciled to God through Christ and so forth.

6. Arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends to it

You may hear arguments and evidence against Christianity which you cannot respond to. You may not be in a position to respond to such arguments at that time in your life. Fortunately, for someone who fully attends to the witness of the Holy Spirit, who doesn’t quench the spirit, who doesn’t live in sin (one who attempts to resist a sinful lifestyle), the witness of God’s spirit will provide such warrant for the truth of Christianity that it will overwhelm the arguments and evidence brought against it.

It doesn’t answer the arguments and evidence it just overwhelms them and makes the truth of the Christian faith more evident than it’s falsity. If you were confronted by a Buddhist who was offering arguments that the external world wasn’t real, the premises for that argument are just less obvious than your properly basic belief that there is an external world. So defeaters for such a belief are overwhelmed by the reality you experience.

Christians argue the same thing for the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.

The New Testament teaches this view

This applies for the believer and the unbeliever. It may feel like circular reasoning to use scripture proof texts to prove the witness of the Holy Spirit (We believe in the witness of the Holy Spirit because scripture says so and helps us define what it is so we recognise it’s call in our lives).

Since we accept the authenticity and authority of scripture it is not circular, it is a trustworthy source of information (See articles and training tab on the reliability of the New Testament).

So to the non-believer we could tell them we have a witness of the Holy Spirit with us without having to get into a 6 hour discussion on the authenticity and authority of scripture. Trust me, its a minimum of 20+ seperate discussions if you fancy defending scripture from the many angles required of some people.