Theopedia

Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit

Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is the sin Jesus names as the one exception to God’s forgiveness: “whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come” (Matthew 12:32). It is not ordinary unbelief or doubt but a deliberate, knowing rejection of the Spirit’s own testimony to Christ, of the kind committed when the Pharisees attributed Jesus’s exorcisms to Satan (Matthew 12:24).1 It is the one sin Scripture marks as different in kind from every other sin, which otherwise remains forgivable to those who repent.1

Confessional Definition

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to this sin. It appears once, in passing, in the chapter on worship: prayer is not to be made “for those of whom it may be known that they have sinned the sin unto death,”2 a phrase drawn from 1 John 5:16. The confession’s fuller bearing on the doctrine comes indirectly, through its chapter on the perseverance of the saints, which holds that those God has effectually called and sanctified “can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace.”3 That claim does not name blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, but it is the confessional ground on which Reformed theologians have answered whether a true believer could ever commit it.

Biblical Basis

The sin is named directly in the Synoptic Gospels. In Matthew’s account, Jesus responds to the Pharisees’ charge that he casts out demons “by Beelzebul, the prince of demons” (Matthew 12:24) by declaring that “whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come” (Matthew 12:32). Mark records Jesus calling it “an eternal sin” (Mark 3:29), committed by those who said “he has an unclean spirit” (Mark 3:30); Luke preserves the same saying in a different setting (Luke 12:10).

Hebrews warns that it is impossible to restore to repentance those “who have once been enlightened… and then have fallen away” (Hebrews 6:4-6), and warns again of “no longer any sacrifice for sins” for those who “go on sinning deliberately” after receiving the knowledge of the truth (Hebrews 10:26-29). Neither passage names blasphemy against the Spirit, but Bavinck reads both as describing, in substance, the same hardened and unpardonable state.1 John writes of “sin that leads to death,” for which he does not instruct believers to pray (1 John 5:16), the phrase the confession borrows in naming “the sin unto death.”2

Historical Development

The church has read these texts differently at different points, largely over how far the “impossible to restore” language of Hebrews extends.

An early rigorist reading, which Calvin attributes to “the Novatians of old,” took Hebrews 6 and 10 to mean that any serious sin committed after baptism was permanently unpardonable, not only the specific blasphemy Jesus names.4 Calvin rejects this on the ground that it would set the author of Hebrews against his own master’s teaching, since Christ names only one unforgivable sin, not a general class of post- baptismal sins.4

Augustine offered a narrower definition still current in the medieval church: the sin is “obstinate perverseness, with distrust of pardon, continued till death.” Calvin found this definition wanting too, since it would make Jesus’s statement that the sin is not forgiven “in this world” pointless: on Augustine’s reading, the sin by definition could not be identified, let alone forgiven or refused forgiveness, until the sinner was already dead.4

Calvin’s own treatment in the Institutes locates the sin not in ignorance or ordinary unbelief but in deliberate resistance to a truth the sinner’s own conscience cannot deny, resisted for no other reason than to resist it. He contrasts Paul, who persecuted the church “ignorantly, in unbelief” and so obtained mercy (1 Timothy 1:13), with the Jews who resisted the Spirit speaking through Stephen despite being unable to answer him (Acts 6:10), and with the Pharisees who, to discredit a power they could not deny, called it the work of Beelzebub.4

Later Reformed theology treated the sin less as a single act to be defined than as a state approached gradually. Petrus van Mastricht, writing in the generation after the confession, described a six-step progression of sins against the Spirit (neglecting, resisting, grieving, provoking, and lying to the Spirit), each of which lays the groundwork for the next, with blasphemy against the Spirit as the final, catastrophic step “toward this sin the other preceding sins lay steps.”5 Thomas Ridgley, lecturing on the Larger Catechism a generation later still, took up a question the earlier tradition had not needed to answer: whether the sin could still be committed once the apostolic “dispensation of miracles” had ceased. He judged that the specific circumstance in Matthew 12, witnessing Christ’s own miracles and attributing them to Satan, belonged to that period, but that the substance of the sin, a total and final apostasy from a once-professed and inwardly convicted faith, attended by malice toward the truth, was not so limited.6

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic moral theology classifies sins as either mortal (forfeiting sanctifying grace, remediable through the sacrament of penance) or venial. Reformed theology rejects that distinction as a category. Bavinck states the Reformed position: every sin, without exception, is by nature deserving of death, and the Reformers used the words “mortal” and “venial” only to mean that all sins except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit are actually forgiven to believers. Blasphemy against the Spirit is, on this view, not the worst of many mortal sins but the sole sin of a different kind altogether.1

Objections and Responses

This sin required witnessing Christ’s own miracles firsthand, so it cannot be committed today. Ridgley reports an objection raised in his own day: since the Pharisees’ blasphemy consisted specifically in attributing miracles they had personally witnessed to Satan, and the apostolic “dispensation of miracles” had ceased, the sin belonged to that period alone. He answers that this proves too much: it would mean Christians today have weaker grounds for believing the gospel than the Pharisees had for disbelieving it, which is not so, since the church’s evidence for the truth of Christianity does not depend on personally witnessing a miracle. What cannot recur is the exact historical circumstance; what can recur, in substance, is a total and final apostasy from a once-professed and inwardly convicted faith, carried out with malice toward the truth once held.6

Can a true believer commit this sin, or fear they already have? Reformed theology answers no, on both scriptural and confessional grounds. Jesus says of his sheep that “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish” (John 10:28), and Paul that anyone in Christ “is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17); the confession grounds the same conclusion in the doctrine that the elect “can neither totally nor finally fall from the state of grace.”3 Ridgley, writing pastorally to troubled consciences, gives criteria by which a believer can know the sin has not been committed: those under genuine conviction of sin, who feel sorrow and shame for it, and who desire to keep waiting on God rather than abandoning the means of grace, have not committed it; the very fear of having committed it, taken seriously rather than dismissed, is itself evidence against having done so, since blasphemy against the Spirit leaves its subject without any such conviction or fear at all.6

Related Doctrines

  • Holy Spirit: the person against whom this sin is specifically directed; A.A. Hodge cites the distinction between blasphemy against the Son and blasphemy against the Spirit as evidence for the Spirit’s distinct personhood.7
  • Perseverance of the Saints: the confessional doctrine bearing on whether a true believer could commit this sin.
  • Repentance
  • Apostasy

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 13, “Sin and Its Consequences.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), 22.4. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), 17.1. ↩ ↩2

  4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 3, secs. 21-23. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  5. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 27, “God the Holy Spirit,” 632-633. ↩

  6. Thomas Ridgley, A Body of Divinity, vol. 4, ed. James P. Wilson (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1814), 319-321. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 176. ↩