HOME | contents | introduction | OT | godhead | personality | procession | appendix
LISTEN
to the choir of New College sing "Come Holy Ghost." CD details HERE.
The Ascension of our Lord was followed by
the descent of God the Holy Ghost.
St. Luke connects the Ascension with what followed
it rather than with what went before it.
It is not so much the end of the Gospel
as the beginning of the history of the Church.
The doctrine of the Person of the Holy Ghost, which is part of the doctrine
of God,
is the subject of this chapter.
The doctrine of the work of the Holy Ghost in this world will be found in
Chapter 37.
God the Holy Ghost is the Third Person (hypostasis) of the Holy Trinity.
(The Prayer Book and the Authorized Version of the Bible use the old English
expression "Holy Ghost".
The modern fashion of always using the alternative "Holy Spirit" is
an impoverishment of the English language.
One of the rules of good style is to use, where possible, words of English
derivation in preference to those of Latin derivation.)
The "Persons" of the Holy Trinity are not persons in the modern
sense,
or individuals.
There is only one God.
The Three Persons are one in essence.
But they are not mere aspects of God.
They are distinct enough to love one another.
Though the doctrine of God the Holy Ghost is taught by St. Paul, St. Luke,
and St. John, it was not clearly understood for some time.
(The author of Revelation speaks of "the seven spirits" where we
should expect a reference to the Holy Ghost (Rev.1.4);
and the second-century writer Hermas, author of the "Shepherd",
does not appear to be fully informed about it.)
There are two subjects to be discussed,
the Godhead of the Holy Ghost,
and His distinct Personality.
page^
The older theologians found in the Old Testament many references both to
the Godhead and to the Personality of the Holy Ghost.
But the doctrine of the Holy Trinity had not yet been revealed.
In the Old Testament
the Spirit of God is a power or influence not yet known to be personal.
We are justified in treating passages in the Old Testament
as carrying for us the Christian meaning of the Holy Ghost,
so long as we do not suppose that they had this meaning for their authors;
as we refer Isa.53 and Ps.110.1 to our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we do not suppose that this was what the authors intended.
The first reference is Gen.1.3:
The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Tertullian (about AD 200) in his work on Baptism says that the Spirit consecrated
the element of water,
and that it was set apart to be "the carriage
of the Holy Ghost" at baptism.
Other references are Num.27.18, Neh.9.20, Ps.51.11, Isa.42.1, 61.1, Hag.2.5,
etc.
In the later books of the Old Testament
"the Spirit of God" means God in His relation to men.
The later Jews did not like to think of God as acting directly on men
and therefore preferred to say "the angel of God",
"the spirit of God",
"the wisdom of God".
The use of the words
the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee (Luke 1.35),
spoken by the Angel Gabriel to Blessed Mary,
was probably understood by her in the Old Testament sense,
for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was not yet revealed.
But we cannot doubt that this expression is used
because it was the Third Person of the Trinity who gave to Blessed Mary the
power to become the mother of the Messiah though a virgin.
He was conceived through the Holy Ghost.
St Paul says (I Cor.3.16):
Know ye not that ye are a temple of God,
and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?
In St. Mark. 2.29 our Lord warns His hearers against blasphemy against the
Holy Ghost as worse than attacks on Himself.
In II Thess. 3.5
May the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God
and into the patience of Christ,
St. Basil (On the Holy Spirit, 52) says that as "the Lord" cannot
refer to the Father or to the Son, it must refer to the Holy Ghost;
cf. also I Thess.3.12-13.
In II Cor.3.15-18, St. Paul identifies the Spirit with the Lord
that is, with the God of Israel;
and in Acts 5.3-4, to lie to the Holy Ghost is to lie to God.
In Luke 11.20 our Lord speaks of "the finger of God",
whereas in the parallel passage in Matt.12.28 He uses the words "the
Spirit of God".
It is for this reason that the famous hymn, the "Veni
Creator",
calls the Holy Ghost "Digitus dextrae Dei",
Finger of the right hand of God.
Arius who taught that both the Son and the Holy Ghost were created beings
denied the Godhead of the Holy Ghost.
Macedonius, Bishop of Constantinople, a member of the party that was on its
way back from Arianism to orthodoxy, accepted the Godhead of the Son but
denied that of the Holy Ghost (AD 360).
The First Council of Constantinople condemned his teaching in 381.
It is clear from all the passages in the New Testament, which refer to the
Holy Ghost, that He is God and not a created being.
In II Cor.13.14, Phil.2.1, Matt.28.19, besides the passages already mentioned,
He is placed on a level with our Lord Jesus Christ.
page^
The separate personality of the Holy Ghost is a more disputed question.
It cannot be proved from the Old Testament,
but the evidence of the New Testament is quite clear.
The two chief passages are Rom.13 and the last discourses in the Fourth Gospel.
In the former passage St. Paul plainly speaks of the Holy Spirit as a Person,
not a mere impersonal influence.
The Spirit helpeth our infirmity,
the Spirit Himself (not "itself" as in the AV)
maketh intercession for us,
the mind of the Spirit.
In I Cor.12.11 we find
all these worketh in one Spirit dividing to each man severally as He will,
and in Eph.4.11 the apostle forbids his readers to grieve the Spirit of
God.
In Matt.12.31 the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is contrasted with blasphemy
against the Son of Man, which implies that the Holy Ghost is personal like
the Son of Man and equal to Him.
But it is in John 14-16 that the Paraclete (ὁ Παράκλητος,
masculine) is promised, and that His Godhead, His personality, and His functions
are most clearly revealed: see 14.16, 26; 15.26; 16.7-14.
[A
Divine helper called in as a witness, adviser, or advocate (J. H. Bernard, ad
loc.). In I John 2.1 the word is applied to our Lord and means
Advocate.]
The words for "Spirit" in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, differ in
gender.
In Hebrew the word in ruach, which is feminine as also in other Semitic
languages.
In Greek the word is pneuma (πνευμα),
which is neuter.
This is why τὸ πνεῦμα
αὐτό (Rom.8.16, 26) must be translated "the
Spirit Himself", for the pronoun in Greek follows the gender of the
substantive, whereas in English, which has no proper genders, it follows
the sense.
In Latin the word is Spiritus, which is masculine as is also the German Geist.
It is possible that the feminine gender of the word in Semitic languages
led to the strange notion held by Muhammad that the Trinity of the Christians
was Father, Mother, and Son!
page^
One more subject in connection with God the Holy Ghost remains to be discussed, the doctrine of the Procession.
The relation of the Holy Ghost to the Father is called "procession" (εκπόρευσις).
St. John 15 .26 tells us that He proceeds
from the Father
( παρὰ τοῦ
Πατρὸς εκπορεύεται).
The Council of Chalcedon therefore had Scriptural warrant
for the words in the Creed, "Who proceedeth from the Father".
Our Lord said, according to St. John,
If I depart, I will send the Paraclete unto you (16.7).
The words "unto you" imply a sending in time, which is
not disputed.
The question is whether this Procession in time represents a relation between
the Son and the Holy Ghost in eternity.
There must be some eternal relation between the Son and the Holy Ghost,
and it is not the same as the relation between the Father and the Holy Ghost.
The Father is the only Source (ἀρχή)
of the Godhead.
Origen taught that the Holy Ghost is subordinate to the Son, as the Son to
the Father.
Later and more exact thinkers saw that this "subordination" was
a dangerous theory, and so taught that the Three Persons are absolutely equal
(see the Athanasian Creed) with this exception, that the Father is the Source
of Godhead.
[G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, p.249.]
From St. Cyril of Alexandria onwards the Holy Ghost is said to be "from
the Father through the Son", but the phrase
"from the Father and the Son" is also used.
St. Augustine taught that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the
Son, but by "one Spiration", not two, for there is but one
source of Godhead.
Some later Latin writers were not so careful.
There is a large literature on this very difficult question, and it cannot
be discussed at length here.
Greek is a more subtle language than Latin,
and the Greeks distinguish between παρά and ἐκ τοῦ Υἱοῦ,
a distinction that cannot be translated into Latin or English.
The Holy Ghost is παρὰ τοῦ
Υἱοῦ, but not ἐκ τοῦ
Υἱοῦ.
The subject became highly controversial when the word Filioque (and the
Son) was added to the clause "Who proceedeth from the Father" by
some Latin churches.
This addition appears to have been first made by the Council of Toledo in
447.
Charles the Great enforced it throughout his empire (800),
but Pope Leo III refused to accept it
and went so far as to set up two golden shields
on which the Creed without the addition was written in Greek and Latin.
The date at which Rome at last accepted the Filioque clause is not known,
but it was probably 1014.
The Greeks still reject it.
The schism between the Latins and the Greeks, which became final in 1054,
was not due to the insertion of the Filioque by the Latins;
but the inserted clause became the symbol of the division.
Greek theologians claim that all the later developments of what they call
the Latin heresy are due to the insertion of the Filioque, and since the
schism both sides have become much sharper in their opposition.
The Anglican Communion has inherited the Filioque clause.
Probably the Creed has never been recited here without it.
In 1689 a proposal to omit it was part of the abortive Prayer Book put forward
as part of the Revolution Settlement.
In 1875 after Delinger and the Old Catholics had been excommunicated by
the Pope because they refused to accept the decrees of the Vatican Council
of 1870, a conference of Old Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran
divines was held at Bonn, and the Filioque clause was the chief subject of
discussion.
The theologians present (who were not sent by their churches but came by
Delinger's invitation) produced a written agreement (see Appendix to this
chapter).
Since then Anglican theologians have again and again assured
the Orthodox churches that Anglican teaching does not differ from Orthodox
teaching on this subject.
The Old Catholic churches, which are now
in full communion with the Church of England, have long since dropped the
Filioque clause, which in their books is printed in brackets.
The opposition of Dr. Pusey defeated a proposal that the Church of England
should drop the Filioque.
The Orthodox churches, however, continue to regard this question as a serious
hindrance to reunion.
They cannot understand how churches can be in
communion with one another while they recite the Creed differently.
The
Uniat churches (Eastern churches in communion with Rome) are permitted to
recite the Creed without the Filioque.
For this reason Orthodox controversialists
accuse Rome of inconsistency.
The late Patriarch Barnabas of Yugoslavia,
in a conversation with me, raised the same objection to the union of the
Anglican and Old Catholic communions. "How can they be united," he
asked,
"when they recite different creeds?"
It seems certain that the Anglican Communion, if it is ever to return to
union with the Orthodox Eastern churches, will have to drop the Filioque,
as the Old Catholics have done.
There are two questions involved,
the doctrinal question and the canonical question.
To the first we have often replied that when we say "from the Father
and the Son" we mean what St. John of Damascus and other Greek Fathers
meant by "from the Father through the Son".
But the Filioque, with the emphatic "que", does not express this
at all well.
If we believe what they believe, we ought to use the same words.
The Orthodox view of the canonical question is that since the Creed was
imposed by an Ecumenical Council, it can be altered only by an Ecumenical
Council, and therefore the Latins had no right to alter it by adding the
Filioque.
It is true that Constantinople was for centuries in full communion with the
French and Spanish churches that used the Filioque, but in those days the
distances were immense.
There was little contact between the Greeks
and Latins, and the question had not become sharply controversial.
There
is only one real answer to the Orthodox case, and it is an answer that we
cannot make:
"the Pope is above an Ecumenical Council and can add to
its Creed if he wishes."
The Filioque clause is inseparably connected with the Papal Supremacy.
Dr. Liddon opposed the omission of the Filioque for two reasons:
it would place a further hindrance to reunion between Rome and Canterbury,
and it would weaken the authority of creeds in general.
The answer to the first is, that since Rome allows the Uniat churches to
recite the Creed without the Filioque, we might be allowed to do the same;
that the omission of the Filioque would do much more to promote reunion with
Constantinople than to hinder reunion with Rome;
and that the obstacles to
reunion with Rome are so vast already that the addition of this one, even
if it were a real obstacle, would make no practical difference.
The answer to Dr. Liddon,s second objection is that the omission of the Filioque,
if it led to reunion with the Orthodox churches, would enormously strengthen
the authority of the Nicene Creed and of Creeds in general.
Therefore I agree with the late Dr. Goudge that the Anglican Communion would
do well to omit the Filioque from the Creed.
The break with our tradition would be well worthwhile, for it would do more
to promote reunion than anything else we could do.
The view of some
modern Russian theologians, that the Filioque is an error against love rather
than against truth, has much in its favor (N. Zernov, Church of the Eastern
Christians, p. 96).
page^
We accept the teaching of St. John of Damascus respecting the Holy Ghost, as expressed in the following paragraphs, in the sense of the ancient undivided Church:
Τοῦτο ἡμῖν ἐστι τὸ λατρευόμενον.
Πνεῦμα ἅγιον τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ Πατρός,
ὡς ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἐκπορευόμενον,
ὅπερ τοῦ Υἱοῦ λέγεται,
ὡς δι' αὐτοῦ φανερούμενον καὶ τῇ κτίσει μεταδιδόμενον,
ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἔχον τὴν ὕπαρξιν.
This is what is worshipped by us:
the Holy Spirit of our God and Father,
as proceeding from Him,
who is also called the Spirit of the Son,
since He is manifested by Him and given to the creation,
but has not His being from Him.
These propositions, which were signed, among others, by Dr. Liddon, were
intended to convince the Orthodox that Western Christians outside the Roman
Communion did not differ from them in faith even though they recited the
Creed with the Filioque.
page^