Sins Against The Holy Spirit -- By: Graham A. Cole

Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 16:4 (Winter 2012)
Article: Sins Against The Holy Spirit
Author: Graham A. Cole


Sins Against The Holy Spirit

Graham A. Cole

Graham A. Cole serves as Anglican Professor of Divinity and Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama.

Prior to this, Dr. Cole served on the faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, served as an administrator in the New South Wales Department of Education, as a lecturer at Moore Theological College and at the University of Sydney, and from 1992 to 2001 he was the Principal of Ridley College, University of Melbourne. In addition, he is the author of He Who Gives Life: The Doctrine Of The Holy Spirit (Crossway, 2007); Engaging With the Holy Spirit: Real Questions, Practical Answers (Crossway, 2008); and God the Peacemaker: How Atonement Brings Shalom (InterVarsity, 2009).

Introduction

As I write there is ongoing war in Afghanistan, a bloody civil war in Syria, bombings in Iraq and mass shootings in the United States in a theater and a Sikh temple. Christians are saddened but unsurprised. Paradise has been lost. Sin is at work in the good world that God made. Indeed sin is the great spoiler as Genesis 3 shows. Sin spoils our relation to our creator. Fellowship gives way to flight and our relation to one another (blame shifting), to our very selves (shame) and to our environment (to the dust we return). And sin is the great disrupter. It fractures relationships: upward towards God, outward to the human other, inwards within ourselves, and downwards to the natural order.

We have become paradoxical beings capable of great compassion and great cruelty. Pascal of the seventeenth century summed up the paradox in these startling words: “What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!”1 Pascal further contended in another of his pensées that “Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.”2 The doctrine of humanity as imago dei (theological anthropology) captures the glory. The doctrine of sin (hamartiology) captures the refuse side. Pascal also argued that a believable religion “must also account for such amazing contradictions.”3

In this study we explore a subset of the doctrine of sin. Our focus is on sins against the Holy Spirit of God.4 Two categor...

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