Knowing Scripture is true - Wirness of the Holy Spirit
May I suggest that, fundamentally, the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit? Now what do I mean by that?
I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premiss in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am condemned by God,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth; that such an experience provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it. It seems to me that the NT teaches such a view with respect to both the believer and unbeliever alike.
The Believer
First, let’s look at the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. When a person becomes a Christian, he automatically becomes an adopted son of God and is indwelt with the Holy Spirit: “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. … And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ ” (Gal 3: 26; 4: 6). Paul emphasizes the point in Romans 8.
Here he explains that it is the witness of the Holy Spirit with our spirit that allows us to know that we are God’s children: “for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8: 15–16). Paul uses the term plerophoria (complete confidence, full assurance) to indicate that the believer has knowledge of the truth as a result of the Spirit’s work (Col 2: 2; 1 Thess 1: 5; cf. Rom 4: 21; 14: 5; Col 4: 12).
Sometimes this is called “assurance of salvation” by Christians today; now assurance of salvation entails certain truths of Christianity, such as “God forgives my sin,” “Christ has reconciled me to God,” and so on, so that in having assurance of salvation one has assurance of these truths.
The apostle John also makes quite clear that it is the Holy Spirit within us that gives believers conviction of the truth of Christianity. “But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all know … the anointing which you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that any one should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie, just as it has taught you, abide in him” (1 John 2: 20, 27).
Here John explains that it is the Holy Spirit himself who teaches the believer the truth of divine things. John is clearly echoing the teaching of Jesus himself, when he says, “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14: 26). Now the truth that the Holy Spirit teaches us is not, I’m convinced, the subtleties of Christian doctrine. There are too many Spirit-filled Christians who differ doctrinally for that to be the case. What John is talking about is the inner assurance the Holy Spirit gives of the basic truths of the Christian faith. This assurance does not come from human arguments but directly from the Holy Spirit himself.
Now someone might point to 1 John 4: 1–3 as evidence that the testimony of the Holy Spirit is not self-authenticating, but needs to be tested:
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist …
But such an understanding would be a misinterpretation of the passage. John is not talking about testing the witness of the Spirit in our own hearts; rather he’s talking about testing people who come to you claiming to be speaking by the Holy Spirit. He referred to the same people earlier: “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour.
They went out from us, but they were not of us …” (1 John 2: 18–19). John never encourages the believer to doubt the witness of the Spirit in his own heart; rather he says that if someone else comes claiming to speak by the Holy Spirit, then, since the situation is external to oneself and involves additional truth claims not immediately apprehended, we must test that person in order to determine if his claim is true. But in our own lives, the inner witness of God’s Spirit is sufficient to assure us of the truths to which he testifies.
John also underlines other teachings of Jesus on the work of the Holy Spirit. For example, according to Jesus it is the indwelling Holy Spirit that gives the believer certainty of knowing that Jesus lives in him and that he is in Jesus, in the sense of being united with him.
And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. … In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you (John 14: 16–17, 20).
John teaches the same thing: “And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit which he has given us. … By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his own Spirit” (l John 3: 24; 4: 13). John uses his characteristic phrase “by this we know” to emphasize that as Christians we have a confident knowledge that our faith is true, that we really do abide in God, and God really does live in us. In fact John goes so far as to contrast the confidence which the Spirit’s testimony brings to that brought by human evidence:
This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth. There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree. If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has borne witness to his Son. He who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. He who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne to his Son (1 John 5: 6–10).
The “water” here probably refers to Jesus’ baptism, and the “blood” to His crucifixion, those being the two events which marked the beginning and end of his earthly ministry. “The testimony of men” is therefore nothing less than the apostolic testimony to the events of Jesus’ life and ministry. Though John had laid such great weight on precisely that apostolic testimony in his gospel (John 20: 31; 21: 24), here he declares that even though we quite rightly receive this testimony, still the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit is even greater! As Christians we have the testimony of God living within us, the Holy Spirit who bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.
Thus, although arguments and evidence may be used to support the believer’s faith, they are never properly the basis of that faith. For the believer, God is not the conclusion of a syllogism; he is the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob dwelling within us. How then does the believer know that Christianity is true? He knows because of the self-authenticating witness of God’s Spirit who lives within him.
Craig, W. L. (1994). Reasonable faith : Christian truth and apologetics (Rev. ed., pp. 31–34). Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books.
