This week I was sent a question by a church member regarding a particular article that she found online entitled What Is The Baptism Of The Holy Spirit by a Michael Bradley. This article is found on the website bibleknowledge.com and it claims, as the title shows, to be an explanation of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It is followed by a series of articles which explain how one may receive this baptism, what the evidence is that one has received it, and what are its benefits. I do not plan to deal with those articles at this point, but I thought, after reading the introductory one, a response was in order. To be clear, I am not intending to engage in a back-and-forth with the author but simply to use his article as a teaching tool for the benefit of the members of EBC and any who would come across our site in search of information about this subject.
With that said, let me begin by summarizing his primary points as I understand them. He begins by discussing the failure of some who “have tried to receive this gift at an altar call at their local churches, but they have failed to receive it.” He contends that this happens in large part because people are not prepared to receive the gift of Holy Spirit baptism. He then says that in order to receive it one must know what you are receiving and properly prepare yourself to receive it. When these are done, he says, it is quite easy to receive the gift as you “ask and press for it.” He maintains that this is a gift which God desires all his children to have, just like eternal salvation through Christ Jesus.
Before we can get into his definition of the gift, we should make a few comments on his opening paragraphs. He assumes a great number of things to be true, namely, that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is distinct from salvation, that not all Christians experience this baptism (he may even believe that not all Christians receive eternal salvation but that is not clear from this article), and that this gift is something that should be asked for and “pressed for,” whatever that means. These assumptions serve to give his readers some clue as to where he is headed with this discussion, and demonstrate that he will not question whether his understanding of the gift is accurate, nor is he inclined to offer any alternative views on these points.
So what exactly is the baptism of the Holy Spirit?
Bradley rightly states that we must begin by defining the gift. Sadly, he neglects to mention that the Bible never actually uses the phrase “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” and he does not speak of either of the passages in Scripture which actually speak of the Spirit in connection with baptism, namely John 1:33 and 1 Corinthians 12:13. He does rightly say that the Bible teaches that every Christian receives the Spirit at the moment of salvation (see Romans 8:9 which says, “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.”). He also points out that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit when we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior (see Eph. 1:13 which reads in part “in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise.”). He then asks a key question. If we have received the gift of God’s Holy Spirit by whom we were sealed on the day we believed, “then what is this ‘second’ baptism of the Holy Spirit that the charismatics are talking about?”
Instead of defining Holy Spirit baptism according to Scripture, Bradley offers this strange explanation: the baptism of the Holy Spirit is when he “will release from your spirit to come up and enter into your soul.” This is dependent on the assumption that man is what is known as a tripartite being (he is composed of 3 parts: body, soul, and spirit), which Bradley believes the Bible teaches in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 which reads, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He further states that “The Bible refers to our human spirit as being our “innermost being” a term I could find only in Eph. 3:16 in The Passion Translation, a charismatic Bible paraphrase. And then he also claims that Jesus taught in John 7:38 that our human spirits are located in our bellies: “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)”
His theory goes that when we get saved the Holy Spirit comes into our human spirits, at which point our spirits are baptized with the Holy Spirit’s presence, and that this is what the Bible means when it says there is only one baptism. But apparently, according to the charismatics, there is a second experience where the Holy Spirit comes up out of your spirit and fills up your soul. This, he contends, is what it means to be “Spirit-filled.”
To illustrate this, Bradley uses a couple of analogies. The first is buying a house. He says that the house includes two things: the house itself, which represents your soul and the front and back yards, which represent your spirit. When you are saved, the Spirit comes into your yard (spirit), but what he really desires is to enter your house (soul), because that is where you actually dwell. Never mind the fact that this analogy has no place for the body (the 3rd part of your being in his view), or that the human spirit lies inside your soul (according to him) while the yard is most definitely outside the house. It is all quite confusing. But what is clear is that Bradley believes that Jesus is speaking of exactly this in Revelation 3:20 when he says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.” The problem for Bradley is that Rev. 3:20 is part of the letter that is written to the church at Laodicea. Jesus isn’t stuck on the front lawn hoping to be let into your soul, he’s been put out of the church and is looking for some repentant person to invite him back in!
It’s at this point that Bradley begins to turn to his second analogy, a telephone cord between us and God. He says that “the Holy Spirit is like a telephone wire that enables us to connect to and make contact with both God and Jesus in heaven” and that when the Holy Spirit comes up and enters into your soul (his description of being filled with the Spirit) “you will be able to hear God much better and much clearer because the Holy Spirit has now moved up into where you really live at – your soul.”
If at this point you are totally confused as to the source of these ideas, I am afraid I cannot help you. What is very clear here is that Mr. Bradley has used a great deal of imagination, supported by a handful of out-of-context verses of Scripture, plastered over with a layer of imprecise terminology and come up with a doctrine which is neither biblical nor historically orthodox. This is, unfortunately, what happens when someone abandons the Scriptures as the sole authority for their faith and instead follows personal ideas, impressions, feelings, and experiences as their guide. Maybe the worst part of all this is that it is hosted on a website which calls itself bibleknowledge.com.
We still are faced with the question “What is the baptism of the Holy Spirit?” I will seek to answer that next time and dive into a discussion of the ministry and work of the Spirit in the lives of believers today.
I have found the same. I agree with your article. There seems to be a twist of AoG and Pentecostal/Bapticostal type of obscure undertone probably in their background but I have found that the Bradley brothers have misdefined some Scriptures to suit their own written articles (what we call in Seminary ‘Higher Redaction Theorizing’ of doctrinal statements). The end result is skewed doctrinal statements that just plain aren’t correct (bad muddy orthodoxy).
Thank you for the author of this webpage article.
Good job teaching.
Refreshing, since some of our students are quoting the Bradley’s in their Bibliography of Seminary papers and are wrong defending faulty doctrine just because they googled a topic and the Bradley’s came up (I’m a Sr Professor, Pastor and President of a Church and Seminary).