Chapter 6Spirit

Alister E. McGrathTheology:The Basics

I believe in the Holy Spirit…

Biblical models of the Holy Spirit

RuachSpirit as wind◦ Judgment◦Refreshment

Spirit as breath◦Genesis 2:7◦Ezekiel 37

Spirit as charismPaul◦Children of God◦Spiritual gifts

The debate over the divinity of the Holy Spirit

Council of Nicea (325)◦ [I believe] in the Holy Spirit.

Council of Constantinople (381)◦ [I believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father, and is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and Son, who spoke by the prophets.

Establishing divinity◦Scripture applies the titles of God to the Spirit◦The Spirit’s functions◦Baptism “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy

Spirit”

The filioque debate

Proceeding from the Father and the Son (filioque)

Eastern (Greek) patristic writers◦Father as supreme and sole source of being

Western (Latin) patristic writers◦ John 20:22◦Augustine

The Spirit as a bond of love

The functions of the Spirit

“Wash what is dirty;refresh what is dry;

heal what is wounded;bend what is stubborn;

melt what is frozen;direct what is wandering.”

~Veni Sancte Spiritus (Come Holy Spirit)

The functions of the Spirit

The revelation of God to humanity◦The inspiration of Scripture

The appropriation of salvation◦Sanctification◦Deification

The energization of the Christian life◦ Individual ◦Corporate◦Mission

Engaging with a text

“What is being described in Paul is one experience of an activity of prayer that is nonetheless ineluctably, though obscurely, triadic. It is one experience of God, but God as simultaneously (i) doing the praying in me, (ii) receiving that prayer, and (iii) in that exchange, consented to in me, inviting me into the Christian life of redeemed sonship. Or to put it another way: the ‘Father’ (so-called here) is both source and ultimate object of divine longing in us; the ‘Spirit’ is that irreducibly – though obscurely – distinct enabler and incorporator of that longing in creation – that which makes the creation divine; and the ‘Son’ is that divine and perfected creation, into whose life I, as pray-er, am caught up . . .

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Sarah Coakley, article (1998)

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“… As John of the Cross puts it in a lovely passage in The Spiritual Canticle (39.3.4), not coincidentally quoting Romans 8: ‘the Holy Spirit raises the soul most sublimely with that His divine breath . . . that she may breathe in God the same breath of love that the Father breathes in the Son and the Son in the Father.’

“The Spirit, on this view, note, is no redundant third, no hypostasized afterthought, no cooing ‘feminine’ adjunct to an established male household. Rather, experientially speaking, the Spirit is primary, just as Pentecost is primary for the church; and leaving noncluttered space for the Spirit is the absolute precondition for the unimpeded flowing of this divine exchange in us, the ‘breathing of the divine breath,’ as John of the Cross puts it.”