Pentecost, Holy Spirit, and Zeitgeist
Shavuot (“Weeks”) is the second of three Jewish Pilgrim Festivals, occurring fifty days after the first day of Passover and marking the end of the wheat harvest in Israel. In the earliest Christian documents, there are also two holidays counted as being fifty days apart: If Easter counts as Day1, then Pentecost (“fiftieth,” in Greek) counts as Day 50. Today, we would be more inclined to say that the latter is 49 days after the former. Pentecost marks the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the presence of God, among believers who subsequently came to be called Christians in Acts 11:26. It is desired in this essay to distinguish the Holy Spirit from what is known in philosophy as the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age.
At Pentecost, the apostle Peter addressed the crowd as recorded in a Biblical passage [Acts 2:14 – 41 (typically estimated as occurring circa 30 A.D.)]. Peter used a quotation from the prophet Joel that links the pouring out of the Spirit of God with the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord, when all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Speaking to that day’s relatively large pilgrim crowd, Peter said that you (crowd members), with the help of wicked men, put him (Jesus) to death, despite his being accredited to you by God via miracles, wonders, and signs. Upon hearing Peter’s address, the people (crowd members) were cut to the heart and asked one another “Brothers, what shall we do [in view of this despicable crime]?”
The formulation and clarification of existential questions such as “What shall we do?” can be described (e.g., by Hegel) as the work of the Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age.” The Zeitgeist catalogues the historical stages in the unfolding of reason into theses and antitheses, the resolving of apparent contradictions, the synthesis of higher modes of thought, and the approach towards Absolute Knowing. Many contemporaneous finite spirits (human beings) contribute to the overall spirit of an age: For example, the spirit of Voltaire and the spirits of his contemporaries led to the Zeitgeist of the Enlightenment. In other words, it is the work of the Zeitgeist to create a “rational buzz” among the opinion leaders of a society. This “buzz” allows existential questions, ultimate concerns, and proposed answers to become widely known. Over time, the import of the existential question “What shall we do?” became known to an increasingly large subpopulation of the Roman world in the Near East and beyond. Some fraction of that subpopulation became Christian believers.
In Acts 2:38, Peter responded to the “What shall we do?” question, saying “Repent and be baptized … for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.” One observes that the Zeitgeist played its role by creating a “buzz” (existential question), while the Holy Spirit played its role by inspiring Peter to state the correct answer. Hence, anyone living in the ancient society generating this “buzz” could take a position on the existential question, whether or not he or she was aware of the explicit concepts of Zeitgeist or Holy Spirit.
After Pentecost, Peter spoke to onlookers at the temple in Acts 3:11-26, again criticizing the people for handing over Jesus of Nazareth for execution and calling on them to “Repent and be converted so that sins may be washed away and that times of refreshment may ensue.” This second response of Peter, occurring in Acts 3:19, was a reformulation of his initial response (Acts 2:38), as appropriate for that day’s communication in the temple.
Perhaps 20 years later, during Paul’s second missionary journey (typically estimated as occurring during a three-year subset of the interval from 49 to 55 A.D.), Paul and Silas were imprisoned at Philippi, as recounted in Acts 16:16-40. A prison-destroying earthquake ensued, placing the jailer’s life in jeopardy because of the apparent escape of the incarcerated due to the failure of the infrastructure. The jailer asked Paul and Silas “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” In Acts 16:31 Paul and Silas gave a third response to the existential question first posed at Pentecost: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved - - you and your household.” [The speed with which the jailer’s household converted might be taken as evidence of a Zeitgeist already at work in Philippi even before the earthquake (see Acts 16:11-15).]
In summary, the three “existential responses” presented above are (#1) Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit, (#2) Repent and be converted (turn again) so that sins may be washed away and that times of refreshment may ensue, and (#3) Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you and your household will be saved.
Relying on the Greek-language resources embedded in the biblehub.com website, we see that each of the three existential responses begins with either (a) repent (metanoesate) or (b) believe on (pisteuson epi) the Lord Jesus. (The second response, today, would be idiomatically rendered as believing in, or on the basis of, the Lord Jesus.) Metanoesate means next to or beyond what is thought, implying a thinking differently. Pisteuson epi implies mentally endorsing the truth of some proposition on some adequate basis. After or beyond this rearrangement of thinking on the basis of perceived reality (against subjective natural inclinations), the benefits mentioned in responses #1 - #3 ensue.
In responses #1 - #3 there seems to be a presupposition that thinking and acting against natural inclinations and in favor of Christian doctrines and precepts will lead the spiritually engaged person to ingrafting into the body of Christ, to forgiveness, to the gift of the Holy Spirit, and to salvation. Inclinations that are founded merely on the Zeitgeist and that contradict Biblical exegesis are referred to as heretical or immoral inclinations. Over the course of millennia many varieties of heresies, immoralities, and perversions have been identified.
The Philippian jailer’s question “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” can be recast as “Against what natural inclinations must I think and act?” The answer must surely include opposing heretical thoughts and repudiating immoral actions, thereby avoiding any acquiescence in thoughts and actions proceeding from a defective Zeitgeist.
The distinction between the Holy Spirit, proceeding from God (or from the Father and the Son), and the Zeitgeist, proceeding from the best current efforts of rational thought among finite spirits, seems to be reasonably clear. But yet some individuals in some churches on some occasions today are revealing a deep-seated confusion between the Holy Spirit and the Zeitgeist: Bold proclamations are heard from some individuals who are pleased to announce that they are “proud to be who they are,” i.e., agents who do not think and act against natural inclination, at least on the really big issues. But if, say, 5% of a population engages in perversion X, while 0.5% partakes of perversion Y, etc.; then one is left wondering why the vast majority of that population should be compelled to listen to recitations of alleged “existential authenticity” by those afflicted with X or Y. Is therapeutic utility the decisive factor justifying these public proclamations? If so, does therapeutic utility entail toleration, normalization, or encouragement of similar behavior?
The author notes in passing that the concept of “therapeutic utility,” popularized in the 1960’s by Philip Rieff, characterizes a transition phase between the Mainline Protestantism of the mid-twentieth century and [what Ross Douthat has recently called (in First Things, June-July 2022)] the Post-Protestant Gnosticism of the twenty-first century.
Perhaps therapeutic utility ought not to be a foundational religious principle: On December 14, 2021 the Pew Research Center released a social-survey report stating that self-identified Christians made up 63% of the U.S. population in 2021, down from 78% in 2007. One might interpret this data by saying that identity politics, therapeutic utility, etc. are increasingly seen by the U.S. population as tangential to true religion. One thinks also of the Indulgence Crisis of 1517: At some point the people rejected such advertising jingles as “when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul up from purgatory springs” and ceased buying indulgences. As another example of moral intuitionism, consider the rebelling cowboys confronting the arbitrary disciplinary actions ordered, under duress, by the cattle baron Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) in the 1948 movie Red River: The rebels exclaimed “You were just wrong, Tom!” before hijaaking the cattle drive from Missouri to Kansas. In summary, the moral intuitionism of the people cannot be ignored forever, despite the allure of therapeutic utility.
The modern, therapeutic question for the Philippian jailer to have posed might have been: “Sirs, what must I do to receive an imperial pardon and a check for infrastructure repair?” But in the event, the Philippian jailer, and the Zeitgeist of the Greco-Roman-Jewish-Christian world in the mid-first century A.D., got the existential question right by asking: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Today, it would seem that rational agents have plenty of work to do in repairing the Zeitgeist before it can ever possibly converge upon Absolute Knowing.