Anti-Trinitarians often argue that the Holy Spirit is “missing” in many biblical passages where one might expect him to be mentioned, if the doctrine of the Trinity is true. For example, they notice that Paul’s salutations usually mention both the Father and the Son but never mention the Holy Spirit (e.g., “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” Rom. 1:7). Jesus once said, “No one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27). Why didn’t Jesus mention that the Holy Spirit knew the Father and the Son? When Jesus said, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:32), why didn’t Jesus say “but only the Father and the Holy Spirit”? New Testament visions of heaven often include visions of the Father and the Son, but not of the Holy Spirit (for example, Acts 7:55-56). Examples of arguments of this type could easily be multiplied; virtually any text in the Bible that mentions the Father and the Son but not the Holy Spirit could potentially be viewed as grist for this mill.

I addressed this question in a debate with Oneness Pentecostal pastor Robert Sabin back in the early 1990s (see video below). In the rest of this post, I will go into further detail dealing with the specific biblical passages cited by anti-Trinitarians.

The basic problem, from a logical perspective, with this type of argument is that it commits the informal fallacy known as the argument from silence (or argumentum ex silentio, for those of you into Latin). An argument from silence fallaciously reasons that if a particular speaker or writer did not mention something it must be because he was ignorant of it (or even that he would have denied it, given the chance). Such arguments are notoriously unreliable because speakers and authors rarely tell us everything they know. The “silence” may be the result of the specific context, or due to some circumstance or intention on the part of the speaker or author, or reflect his assuming something that from his perspective did not need to be stated, or in general be indicative of a different way of thinking about the topic.

Such arguments crop up in biblical studies and theology surprisingly often. Paul does not mention the Virgin Birth, we are told, and therefore did not believe it. Only Matthew mentions the guard at the tomb, so it must be a late apologetic fiction. The Gospels do not report Jesus ever saying anything about homosexual behavior, so evidently he didn’t have a problem with it. Josephus never mentioned Nazareth in his writings, so apparently Nazareth did not exist in his day. All of these arguments are flawed. Paul may simply not have had occasion, in his letters to various churches, to discuss the Virgin Birth. None of the Gospels claims to give exhaustive information about what happened after Jesus’ burial. If the Gospels report no saying from Jesus about same-sex relations, it is more likely to be because Jesus agreed with the prevailing Jewish view of such behavior than that he disagreed with it. Josephus made no pretense of cataloguing all of the tiny villages in Galilee.

It is true that there are many passages in the New Testament that mention the Father and the Son but not the Holy Spirit. This is true of all of Paul’s salutations, for example. However, the Holy Spirit is mentioned in one of Peter’s salutations: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who reside as aliens, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His blood: May grace and peace be yours in the fullest measure” (1 Pet. 1:1-2). Here “the Spirit” is mentioned alongside God the Father and Jesus Christ in the salutation. So, it is not true that the Holy Spirit is mentioned in none of the salutations. But why is he not mentioned in most of them? Any number of reasons can be suggested, all of which are to some degree speculative (because they are attempts to explain what is not said). Perhaps Paul did not mention the Holy Spirit in his salutations because he thought of the Father and the Son as acting in their roles as sending the Holy Spirit to instill these blessings within us. Perhaps he did not refer to the Holy Spirit in these texts because referring to the Father and the Son was sufficient to establish the context of his epistles as representing a Christian perspective. Perhaps Paul was going for a rhetorical effect in which the two blessings of grace and peace were attributed to the two divine persons of the Father and the Son. Who knows? In any case, the salutations do not deny the existence of the Holy Spirit as a divine person distinct from the Father and the Son. It’s not an issue in these verses.

There is a kind of unreality in the claim of anti-Trinitarians that Jesus should have mentioned the Holy Spirit every time he made a statement about himself and the Father. Two points need to be made here.

1. For one thing, it would seem that Jesus did not expect his followers to understand that the Holy Spirit was a distinct divine person until he came into their lives in a transforming way after Jesus’ resurrection (at Pentecost). The Gospels report Jesus saying very little about the Holy Spirit until the night before he was killed, and then Jesus speaks at length about the Holy Spirit (in John 14-16). In this same context, Jesus makes it clear that he does not expect his disciples to grasp fully what he is saying until the Holy Spirit comes to be their new Advocate (John 14:25-26; 16:13-14). Therefore, it is rather unrealistic to demand that Jesus make specific and distinct reference to the Holy Spirit prior to his unveiling this truth in the sustained way we find in John 14-16. When Jesus said that only the Father knew the Son and vice versa (Matt. 11:27), it is rather silly to argue that Jesus should have said “and the Holy Spirit” in this context. The same is true for Jesus’ statement that only the Father knew the day and hour (Mark 13:32). Introducing the Holy Spirit at these junctures would only have confused his hearers, who did not yet know anything about the Holy Spirit as a distinct divine person.

2. No reference to the Holy Spirit in these contexts is really necessary, because, assuming the existence of the Holy Spirit, his knowing about these things might be legitimately taken for granted. Let me give an illustration. Suppose Mr. Smith, the head of a company, tells his vice-president that he will be stepping down as president of the company in six weeks, and then adds, “Please don’t tell this to anyone; you are the only person who knows about this.” It would obviously be unwise to infer from this statement that Mr. Smith had not yet told his wife about his plans to step down. In context, Mr. Smith probably means only that no one else at the company, or in the business world, knew about his plans. Thus, even in the case of statements using exclusionary language like “only so-and-so knows,” there may be legitimate exceptions that are not specified because they are irrelevant to the context. This is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the lack of any reference to the Holy Spirit in such texts as Matthew 11:27 and Mark 13:32.

New Testament visions of God or Christ or both are too infrequent to justify any sort of generalization that depends on an argument from silence. In the Book of Revelation, John’s first vision is of Jesus Christ alone (Rev. 1:13-18). The anti-Trinitarian claim that such visions never include the Holy Spirit is, however, mistaken. In the Book of Revelation, the visions of the heavenly throne room are highly symbolic. In John’s later visions, Jesus Christ is represented by the image of a Lamb (Rev. 5:6). God is described as simply someone “sitting on the throne” (Rev. 4:2, 9, 10; etc.). In some of these same visions, the Holy Spirit is depicted symbolically as “the seven Spirits that are before the throne” (Rev. 1:4) or “the seven spirits of God” (Rev. 3:1; 4:5; 5:6). The idea that these are seven literal spirits of some kind is just as big a mistake as supposing that the Lamb is a literal woolen four-footed animal. Rather, it is a symbolic picture of the Holy Spirit in Isaiah’s sevenfold description of the Spirit’s ministry through the coming Messiah, who of course is Jesus (see Is. 11:2). No biblical writer ever offers a literal description of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is incorporeal and does his most important work in the hidden recesses of the heart; the lack of any description of the Holy Spirit’s appearance, then, is consistent with the way he actually works. Once again, the argument from silence makes assumptions that are not warranted.

Our doctrine of the Holy Spirit must rest on what Scripture says, not on what it does not say. Once we get such arguments from silence out of the way, we can see that there is much positive evidence for the distinct person of the Holy Spirit.

Tags: argument from silence, Holy Spirit, Trinity