The nature of the Holy Spirit is a topic where there's a marked difference between standard Christian theology and the New Christian perspective. The "official" dogma of most Christian teaching is that the Holy Spirit is one of the three persons that make up one God, in the role of reaching out to people with the power of God to bring them into a desire for righteousness. He is perceived to be proceeding from the other two: God the Father and Jesus the Son.

That old formulation was the result of three centuries of debate among early Christians, as they tried to understand the nature of God. At that time, there was a sizeable minority that rejected the God-in-three-persons view, but -- the majority won out, at the Council of Nicea, in 325 AD.

The New Christian teaching is more akin to some of the old minority viewpoints. It regards the Holy Spirit as a force, or activity, coming from God -- not a separate being. This aligns with our everyday understanding of "spirit" as the projection of someone's personality. It also accounts for the fact that the term "the Holy Spirit" does not occur in Old Testament, which instead uses phrases such "the spirit of God," "the spirit of Jehovah" and "the spirit of the Lord," where the idea of spirit connected closely with the person of God.

The Writings describe the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three attributes of one person: the soul, body and spirit of the one God. They also say that the term "Holy Spirit" emerges in the New Testament because it is connected with the Lord's advent in the physical body of Jesus, and because of the way that advent changed the way we can learn the Lord's truth and become good people.

According to the Writings, the churches that came before the advent were "representative." The people in them (in the best of those churches, anyway) knew that the Lord had created the world, and that the world was thus an image of the Lord, and they had the ability to look at that created world and understand its spiritual messages; they could look at the world and understand the Lord. And they did it without trying and with great depth, much the way we can read a book when what we're actually seeing is a bunch of black squiggles on a white sheet of paper.

That ability was eventually twisted into idol-worship and magic, however, as people slid into evil. The Lord used the Children of Israel to preserve symbolic forms of worship, but even they didn't know the deeper meaning of the rituals they followed. With the world thus bereft of real understanding, the Lord took on a human body so He could offer people new ideas directly. That's why the Writings say that He represents divine truth ("the Word became flesh," as it is put in John 1:14).

The Holy Spirit at heart also represents divine truth, the truth offered by the Lord through his ministry in the world and its record in the New Testament. The term "the Holy Spirit" is also used in a more general sense to mean the divine activity and the divine effect, which work through true teachings to have an impact on our lives.

Such a direct connection between the Lord and us was not something that could come through representatives; it had to come from the Lord as a man walking the earth during His physical life or - in modern times - through the image we have of Him as a man in His physical life. That's why people did not receive the Holy Spirit before the Lord's advent.

What we have now, though, is a full-blown idea of the Lord, with God the Father representing His soul, the Son representing his body, and the Holy Spirit representing His actions and His impact on people.

(Референце: The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Lord 58; True Christian Religion 138, 139, 140, 142, 153, 158, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172)

59. This deals with what this doctrinal statement has to say about the trinity and unity of God. There then follow points about the Lord’s taking on of a human nature in the world, which is called incarnation. These too are true in every way, provided we clearly differentiate between the human nature from the mother that the Lord was conscious of when he was in states of being brought low or being emptied out and suffered trials and the cross, and the human nature from the Father that he was conscious of when he was in states of being glorified or united [to the divine nature]. That is, in the world the Lord took on a human nature that was conceived by Jehovah, who is the Lord from eternity, and was born from the Virgin Mary. This means he had a divine nature and a human nature-the divine from his own divine nature from eternity, and the human from his mother Mary in time. He put off this latter nature, though, and put on the divine human nature. It is this human nature that is called “the divine human nature” and in the Word is meant by “the Son of God.” So when the points that come next in the statement about the incarnation are understood to refer to the maternal human nature that he was conscious of in his states of being brought low, and the statements that follow those [are understood to be] about the divine human nature that he was conscious of in his states of being glorified, then everything fits together.

The following things that come next in the statement are accurate in regard to the maternal human nature he was conscious of in his states of being brought low.

Jesus Christ is God and a human being, God from the substance of the Father, and human from the substance of his mother, born in the world; perfect God and perfect human being, consisting of a rational soul and a human body; equal to the Father with respect to his divinity, and less than the Father with respect to his humanity.

And this,

That human nature was not converted into a divine nature or mixed with it but was put off, and a divine human nature was put on in its place.

The things that follow those in the statement are accurate in regard to the human-divine nature that he was conscious of in his states of being glorified and in which he is now and will be to eternity.

Although our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and a human being, yet he is not two, but one Christ. He is one altogether, because he is one person. Therefore as the soul and the body make one human being, so God and a human being is one Christ.