I submit that the data shows that the event that happened on Pentecost was the voluntary fusion of Deus with Homo to form a new, symbiotically based, human being. The characteristic that the human in the union suffers if it is broken ("grieving the Holy Spirit") supports the idea that the union is strongly obligate. The language used by Jesus and the Apostles that describe the Holy Spirit as internally resident in Homo ("abides in you", "...shall be in you", etc.) indicates that it is endosymbiotic. The union is permanent ("...with you for ever") to the point of total ownership ("given us the earnest of the Spirit"), further confirming the identification. This is an event worthy of celebration, it being a sovereign act of God that significantly benefits us.
The metaphor of "Tomboy Princess kid sister" is thus inadequate, as are most metaphors: the imagery of the metaphor is one of two individuals side by side engaging in a cooperative activity that can be superficially compared to a business venture. The kind of symbiosis here is mutualistic, and is easily mistaken for a form of cooperation. The metaphor is inadequate because it understates the level of involvement, interdependence, and commitment in the true relationship. The imagery suggests that either can walk away with only hurt feelings being the consequence. That imagery is false. It is mutualistic, but the connectivity is at a very deep level.
The use of metaphors, in which we attempt to understand an object or idea by comparing it to another object or idea, is shaky because it fails when it comes to thinking about this kind of symbiosis, mainly due to having very few examples of this kind of symbiosis that we easily recognize today, and which was doubtless impossible to recognize in the first century AD. The concept has been explored in science fiction, and it has been only since the invention of the microscope, that lichen was recognized as a symbiotic entity. There is some debate in taxonomic circles whether lichen are a separate species, but it appears that the current compromise is to consider lichen as a species separate from its component species because not every species of algae and fungus can symbiotically combine into a lichen, and some algae species cannot survive at all apart from its fungal host. Also, every fungus that can join with algae to form lichen has distinct and different non-lichen and lichen forms that facilitate taxonomic classification.
I mentioned the impossiblity of detecting symbiosis in the first century AD. Although they lacked the mental concept of symbiosis, it is interesting to note how the Holy Spirit, in accordance to Jesus' promise of teaching them all things after he came, tried to get the idea across. In Second Corinthians 5:17, Paul states:
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
And in Galatians 6:15, Paul writes:
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.
The word "species" did exist in Greek, but as a philosophical cateogory, not as a distinct classification level of living organisms. The greek word for "creature" is "ktisis", referring to a living organism that appears equivalent to the term "animal". The greek word for "new" is "kainos", and can be used to describe something that is novel, uncommon, and of a new kind. Thus, the case can be made that Paul, if living today and familiar with scientific terminology, might have elected to use "new species" in these passages in place of "new creature". In the taxonomic debate, he'd probably would have argued for lichens to be classified as distinct species.
Now that we have a collection of scriptural texts and an interpretation, we need to readdress a problem posed earlier in this essay.
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