Holy Ghost

The Holy Ghost is the third member of the Godhead, the Spirit of God who bears witness of the Father and the Son, teaches, comforts, and sanctifies. “The Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us” (D&C 130:22). Since spirit, as Joseph Smith also taught, is refined matter, the Holy Ghost is at once a person and a presence able to influence embodied persons.

Wind, Breath, and Advocate

The Savior played on both senses of pneuma when he told Nicodemus that “the wind bloweth where it listeth,” likening it to “every one that is born of the Spirit.” After the Resurrection the image became an act, when the risen Lord “breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:22). Emphysaō, the verb used there, occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, but the Greek translators of Genesis chose it for the Lord God breathing life into Adam. John thus presents the bestowal of the Holy Ghost as a second creation, performed by a resurrected body upon mortal ones.

In his farewell discourse, the Savior named the Holy Ghost the Comforter, promising that “he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26). The Greek paraklētos designates one summoned to another’s side, especially an advocate who pleads a cause before a judge. The promise is personal throughout: “another Comforter,” who “dwelleth with you, and shall be in you,” given so that the disciples would not be left “comfortless.”

The Power and the Gift

Hedcut illustration of In Acts 10:44-47, the Holy Ghost comes to those who hear Peter’s word, and Peter links that reception to water baptism. — In Acts 10:44-47, the Holy Ghost comes to those who hear Peter’s word, and Peter links that reception to baptism by immersion.

While Peter was still preaching in the house of the centurion Cornelius, “the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word,” and Peter asked, “Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?” (Acts 10:44-47). Joseph Smith drew a lasting distinction from the episode: “There is a difference between the Holy Ghost and the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Cornelius, he taught in 1842, received the Holy Ghost as “the convincing power of God,” and had he refused baptism, that power “would have left him.”

A revelation of 1843 likewise allows that the Holy Ghost “may descend upon him and not tarry with him.” The gift, by contrast, is a constant companionship conferred by authorized servants, as when Peter and John came to Philip’s converts in Samaria: “Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost.” The same Spirit ratifies covenants, which have no force after the Resurrection unless “sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise.”

A Still Small Voice

Elijah stood upon Horeb as “a great and strong wind rent the mountains,” yet “the Lord was not in the wind,” nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, “and after the fire a still small voice.” The wind is ruach, and Hebrew hearers may have noticed that the Lord withheld himself from the phenomenon that shares his Spirit’s name. Lexicons render the voice’s demamah as “whisper” or “stillness.” At Bountiful the pattern recurred: the Nephites heard a voice that was “not a harsh voice, neither was it a loud voice,” yet it pierced them “to the very soul” (1 Kings 19:11-12; 3 Nephi 11:3).

In 1839, Joseph Smith taught that a person may profit by noticing “the first intimation of the Spirit of Revelation,” for “when you feel pure intelligence flowing unto you it may give you sudden strokes of ideas,” which may be “fulfilled the same day or soon.” An earlier revelation located that speech “in your mind and in your heart,” and Moroni promised that “by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.”

Quickened Faculties And Enhancement

Parley P. Pratt, writing in 1855, described the gift of the Holy Ghost in terms a Mormon transhumanist might recognize as enhancement. The gift, he wrote, “quickens all the intellectual faculties, increases, enlarges, expands, and purifies all the natural passions and affections,” and “tends to health, vigor, animation, and social feeling.” Pratt’s Spirit works through the organs of an embodied person and improves them. Lincoln Cannon, extending that materialist strand, has anticipated a time when “spiritual experiences become easily reproducible and malleable,” so that teachers “shift focus from general encouragement to careful discernment between helpful and harmful esthetics.”