That one verse does not prove that the Comforter is the Holy Spirit but I have argued this to death with a Christian for six years so I am not going to argue about it again.
Strictly speaking, that verse directly identifies the Comforter as the Holy Spirit.
John 14:26 "But the Comforter,
which is the Holy Ghost," There really isn't an argument here, unless you want to try to say that Holy Spirit is man. But yes, that one verse directly states it is the Holy Spirit. There is no putting puzzle pieces together with that one. So I'm not sure why you say it doesn't say that?
He had to believe that the Comforter was the Holy Spirit that came at Pentecost in order to reject Baha’u’llah as the Comforter and thereby maintain his Christian beliefs, which were that the same Jesus ascended and will return in the same body.
I wouldn't say that Christians "have to believe" that the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost to the disciples as the promise of Jesus about the Comforter he would send, is because they do so because they want to reject Baha'u'llah. Christians have believed that for over 1800 years before that person was born.
And furthermore, most Christians in the world have never even heard of him, and yet all believe that verse is about the Holy Spirit, and not some promised future prophet. It has nothing to do with wanting to reject the Baha'i, whom most have never even heard of.
Using one verse in the Bible which can be interpreted in more than one way to try to prove something and ignoring all the other verses is illogical.
But it's not one Bible verse, but many verses. And even so, that one verse directly identifies the Comforter as the Holy Spirit.
I believe that the Comforter is the Holy Spirit that was sent to Jesus and to Baha’u’llah and they brought the Holy Spirit to humanity. Baha’is believe that the Holy Spirit is the Bounty of God.
I have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit can "come to", or rather inspire many human beings, including your prophet, as well as all others who are aligned with the will of God. It clearly teaches this in scripture, where the Spirit "comes" to the disciples and fills all believers hearts, if they allow it.
John 14:26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.
That Jesus was a Comforter is backed up by this verse and I am sure I could find more verses:
John 14:18 I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.
Welcome to the doctrine of the Trinity.
Yes, the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, are all one and the same Divine Reality. "To see me, is to see the Father", said Jesus.
I do not care what Christians believe.
If you're going to use their scriptures and ignore thousands of years of teachings, just because, that's not really all that wise or prudent.
That said however, regarding the Christian faith, how Christians view their scriptures and the meaning of the faith is not a univocal, monolithic thing by any means. Rather, think of it like Light hitting the prism of people's consciousness. How that Light refracts into different colors, is a matter of multiple factors that create that lens for that individual.
Some see Spirit through a purple colored refraction of Light, others a red color, others orange colored, others green colored, others yellow, others tiel, others indigo. While your experiences with red Christianity may be one thing, others with green Christianity may understand it quite differently, or teal or indigo Christianity differently than red and green Christianity. And so forth.
To understand more about how you believe, it's good to understand how others think about God. Not all Christians believe the same ways. See Romans 14 full chapter which goes into some depth about this.
Christ does not live inside of the human body and neither does the Holy Spirit of God, as I just explained to 1213: “I do not believe that God or the Holy Spirit literally lived inside the bodies of the disciples. Entrance and exit, descent and ascent, are characteristics of bodies and not of spirits. Intellectual subtleties and mental realities such as the Holy Spirit do not enter, nor come forth, nor descend into the body, but rather they have direct connection to the body through the soul, and they are reflected in the soul.
This is something a lot of people struggle with to apprehend. How we conceptualize God, and what God is, are two very different things. When we speak of God as being outside of ourselves, that is a matter of us expressing
how it is perceived by our thinking minds, not how our heart or our souls perceive it however. For instance, David cries in lament "take not your Spirit from me", yet another time he says "Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there." ~Ps. 139:7,8
You can see that he knows it is not possible for God's Spirit to be taken away from him, because God's Spirit is everywhere at all times, impossible to be outside of or escape from. Yet, he uses that language in his lament that worries that God will be taken from his life - as if God is even capable of that. But to his ego-self, laden with guilt and shame, hiding its face from the Divine, his cry to God to not take his Spirit from him, is really a cry from within David, "I don't want to lose my sense of connection with the Presence of the Divine, because of my sins."
This is the use of dualistic languages, to express something of how it 'feels' to the separated egoic self, the small "I", or "me" that we see ourselves as, outside of God. It is NOT however, Reality. The reality is God is not, not cannot be separated from Creation itself, as God is Infinite. If God is Infinite, that means He is everywhere, including every cell and atom of your body, within every breath we take, within every thought that arises, even when we are not consciously aware of it. You cannot have holes or gaps where the Divine does not exist, like a block of Swiss cheese.
No doubt, I'll come back to this. By virtue of the fact we are speaking of the Absolute or the Infinite, language will by default fall apart into paradoxes. Language, words, definitions, etc., are ill suited to a true Knowledge of the Divine, like trying to eat a steak, with your ear.
Thus I believe that the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles means they were affected by the Christ Spirit. Through the spirit of the love of God they gained a new life, and they were like mirrors facing the sun and some of the light of the Holy Spirit became manifest in them.”
Like the poetry in David's psalms, the use of "descended", and "ascended" are metaphors, not facts. These are ways to express the ways in which things
appear or are
experienced by us. They are "as if" statements, not technical details of altitudes and rates of descent from arial positions towards ground targets.
Maybe we should take a poll.
That is what all the Christians I have ever known believe. They believe that the resurrected Jesus, the same man Jesus, will return.
It is also possible that you may not understand the ways in which they understand what those things mean when they use the Biblical language. Do all Christians believe Jesus' literal corpse literally rose from the grave, and will literally come back to earth from it's interstellar location after it's liftoff from earth 2000 years ago? I'm sure some literally think that way. But I'm also pretty a huge number also do not.
You may ask a Christian for instance if they believe Jesus literally walked on water. Some will insist we should read the texts literally, and others will conclude they are symbolic stories meant to convey higher truths about overcoming the impossible through faith in God. I'd venture if pressed, the majority think the latter, even if they can't articulate it to themselves as I have here, or are willing to express their real doubts in the literalist interpretation of scripture, but unable to articulate why or how, as I just have.
That is why they rejected Baha’u’llah but they would reject anyone who came and claimed to be the return of Christ unless He was the same man Jesus. They have made that perfectly clear to me, it cannot be another man, it has to be Jesus.
Obviously, there is failing in their thinking here, as there is no way they could know whoever that was they found was the original Jesus or not. I prefer to understand the 2nd coming as a metaphor for mass spiritual awakening. And a spiritual awakening, does not need flesh and bone bodies in order to see the Divine in the world. They just need to open their eyes. True for anyone, at anytime in history.
