"God's mercies dwell first in God, not in our hearts.  They reside first on Calvary, in Joseph of Aramathea's garden, and not in our consciences.  But they change place . . . The word 'spirit,' in Greek pneuma, means:  breath, wind, spirit.  Wind is a movement of air from one place to another.  It was here, and now is there.  This is both the image and reality of man's regeneration by the Holy Spirit:  God's Spirit was with God and now is with man.  The Holy Spirit is then God's going from one place to another, from his place to our place, from the height of his majesty to the baseness of our sin, from the holiness of his glory to the misery of our weakness.  The Holy Spirit is God giving us the freedom we were seeking in vain within ourselves."
                           Karl Barth, The Faith of the Church

Chapter Nine:

“I believe in the Holy Spirit;”

“Credo in Spiritum Sanctum;”

         "God gives us his Spirit so that we may have fellowship with Him and look into his heart.  In that way we are rescued from the awful enchantment of our egos and are no longer imprisoned by the airy specters of our wishful thinking."
                                             Helmut Thielicke, I Believe

         "If you then, imperfect as you are, know how to give your children gifts that are good for them, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!"

                                             Luke 11: 13 (Weymouth)
        

         If Emmanuel was God with us, the Holy Spirit is God in us.  In the Person of the Holy Spirit, God not only dwells in our midst, He dwells in our very hearts.  He is so close to us that we often fail to distinguish his thoughts from ours.  This confusion arises in part from what one theologian labeled the Holy Spirit's divine tact.  He prefers to remain hidden, to work unobtrusively behind the scenes, blending his work with ours so that his thoughts and actions appear to be our own.  That grand intimacy, though precious, yields a double peril:  We lose sight of the Holy Spirit and we too lightly assume that whoever disagrees with us disagrees with God.  That is, the Holy Spirit is so near to us that we sometimes overlook Him, on the one hand, and we too easily and too often saddle Him with our own silly notions, on the other.   
         To help us avoid that double peril, we must repeatedly call to mind that the Holy Spirit distinguishes Himself by his work, which is to bring glory and honor to Christ.  The Spirit testifies about what the Son has done, not to what He Himself has done, honorable and glorious though it is.  This happens because the Spirit is sent to us by the Son.  It comes from Him and leads to Him (John 14: 25; 15: 26; 16: 13-15).  The Spirit's task is to point us back along the path to Christ by which the Spirit Himself came.  Just as the Son was sent in the Father's name, so the Spirit is sent in the name of the Son.  He witnesses to the glory and honor of the Son, whose majesty He is commissioned to reveal.  Thus the apostle Paul writes that no one can truly confess Christ as Lord apart from the ministrations of the Holy Spirit.  Indeed, only under His influence can we think or speak worthily at all.
         One of the ways the Spirit glorifies the Son is by making people over again in the Son's image and character.  That is, the same Spirit that physically conceived Jesus within Mary re-conceives Him, so to speak, within us.  Just as Jesus Christ grew physically within that ancient Jewish peasant girl, He grows spiritually within us, in a second nativity, a second Christmas, as it were.  In other words, the birth and growth of Christ's character within us, like his birth from the virgin Mary, is also a conception by the Holy Spirit and is no less a miracle, no less a supernatural work of God, than was the incarnation.  The Holy Spirit is the maker and giver of life.  He was the source of life when Christ was born, just He was the source of life when we were born again.  Similarly, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead raises us to new life as well, and that regeneration is but the foretaste of our resurrection to eternal life, which is to come (Rom. 8: 11).  The Holy Spirit consecrates our bodies to be God's own temples, which, though they perish and die, shall be raised again in Christ.
         Put differently, the same Spirit who conceived Jesus is also the Spirit we receive from Jesus.  The fullness of the Holy Spirit's presence and gifts were given to Christ without limit.  Insofar as we are led and filled by that same Spirit, we come to resemble the Son whom the Spirit glorifies, and nothing so glorifies the Son as committed followers and imitators, people who exhibit in all its richness the fruit of the Holy Spirit:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5: 22).  That is why to be in the Spirit and to be in Christ are the same.  When you see Christ trusted, loved and imitated, you see the Holy Spirit at work.  The Spirit will continue to work within us to reproduce the mind and character of Christ until we all come to the fullness of the stature of Christ (Eph. 4: 14).  But until that happens, "one cannot believe in the Holy Spirit and rest satisfied with everything as it is.  The Spirit of God is now, as of old, a pillar; but not a pillar of stone set up to mark a boundary, but a pillar of cloud and fire, moving on, so that we must break camp every day and march forward, if we would keep up with him" (Merrill, The Common Creed of Christians 87).  Or, in the words of R. G. Parsons, "the religion of the Spirit can never stand still; like the Spirit Himself it must ever be going forth, expanding, progressing.  Wherever we find stagnation and reaction, there the Spirit of Life is being quenched; in the life both of the individual and of the Church utter selfishness and self-satisfaction may shut out the Wind of Heaven" (Bell, The Meaning of the Creed 160).
         Even though the Holy Spirit's relationship with us is intimate and enduring, He remains a mystery.  In every age, one of the Church's most pressing needs seems to be a more profound understanding of the Holy Spirit.  The Church has never seen a really great book about Him.  Perhaps it never shall.  Even now, after centuries of the Spirit's working within the Church, we seem very much like the early Christians in Ephesus, who had not so much as heard that there is a Holy Spirit (Acts 19: 2).  We sometimes seem as if we know Him not at all.  Perhaps that embarrassing appearance is more than appearance; perhaps we really do not understand of Whom we speak.  The Holy Spirt is too often considered a mere impersonal force, a catalyst of operation, a divine energy.  People too often view Him as simply a divine virtue, characteristic or power.  He is not.  He is no abstract aspect or dimension of divinity, no mere emanation from God.  He is a divine Person; He is God Himself, and no less so than either Father or Son, of whom we have already spoken.
         While some of our confusion about the Holy Spirit stems from his mission to testify about the Son and from his willingness to exert Himself through human effort, perhaps even more arises from the varied images Scripture employs to describe Him.  Some of those images are attractive and winsome while others are overwhelming and unapproachable:  The Holy Spirit is as beautiful and gentle as a dove, as revealing and warm as a light, as awesome and overpowering as a storm, as energizing and stirring as a wind, as intense and all-consuming as a fire, and as soft and quiet as a breath or a kiss.  These images are graphic and compelling; they are also hard to hold together all at once.  To understand these images aright, I am convinced, we must remember that they describe a living Person, One who is full-orbed and complete, One whose existence and character resist schematization because they are divinely rich and multifaceted.  The Holy Spirit can never be reduced to mere outline form for our understanding, or to one, two, or even three dimensions without great loss.  He is a divine Person, and as it does both Father and Son, the Scripture identifies the Spirit as a He, and often employs the Greek emphatic personal pronoun when it refers to Him.  He is a self, a genuine personality.  He teaches, grieves, reproves, guides, speaks, testifies, and comforts, which are the actions not of an abstract force but of a Person.  Blasphemy against Him is considered the one sin unpardonable.  Along with the Father and Son, the Holy Spirit is worshiped and glorified, given all homage and honor.  He is the Creator of the universe, not a creature.  He first appears in Scripture hovering over the primordial waters, enlivening them with life from God (Gen, 1: 2).  Not only does He create, He re-creates:  Just as He gave life to the lifeless matter He had made, He gives life to those who are spiritually dead.  As He did in the beginning, He does even now, bringing life out of non-life and order out of chaos.  He is the Author both of physical and spiritual existence.  He enlivens both body and soul.  He inspires us with new life and new desires.  He renews us to repentance (Heb. 6: 6).  He is the great Sanctifier; He makes us fit for God.   
         The Apostles' Creed, in other words, is trinitarian.  Having articulated belief in both Father and Son, it rounds off its declaration about God by professing belief in the Holy Spirit, who (like them) is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.  In so doing, however, the creed remains resolutely monotheistic.  Christians believe in one God, not three.  He is God in three Persons, or Personalities.  That is, God, the source of our personhood, is personal Himself.  But He is not less personal, or even merely as personal, as his creatures.  He is more personal.  He is multi-personal or supra-personal.  Whereas each human being comprises but one person, God comprises three -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Each is equally and fully divine, though none exists apart from the others.  We must remember that the Spirit is completely, absolutely, God.  The Holy Spirit is not a lesser or a third echelon God.  He is not Someone essentially less than or below the Father and Son.  Thus, while Christianity is monotheistic, it is not flatly or schematically so.  It rejects the ancient modalistic heresy of Sabellius, who taught that God is but one person who functions in three successive modes, or who wears three successive masks -- first the mode or mask of Father, second of Son, third of Spirit.  Nor is Christianity polytheistic.  Unlike the pagans, the Church does not profess belief in multiple Gods.  Rather, it professes belief in one God who eternally exists in three Persons or Personalities, a God who is even more personal than the creatures He has made.  The Holy Spirit is a distinct, divine Person.  He is distinct from both Father and Son, but He is not divided from them.  He is fully God; He is a self.  Though it is perhaps too simple, theologians sometimes explain the three Persons of the Trinity by emphasizing their varied and multifaceted relationship to us:  The Father is God over us; the Son is God beside us; and the Spirit is God within us.  All are God, all are active, all are distinct.  Christianity, in other words, is monotheistic but not unipersonal. 
         Because He is God, the Holy Spirit is omnipresent.  But though He is present everywhere in the world He made and which He continually renews, He is present most specifically and especially in the Church.  He is, so to speak, the soul of the Church.  Unlike some Christians, the Holy Spirit seems to have no distaste for institutional religion, though He is by no means confined to it or pleased by all it entails.  The Church of Christ is a fellowship of the Spirit.  Within that Church, the Holy Spirit is active primarily in the hearts and minds of believers.  This He does by means of the preaching of the Word, the administration of the sacraments, the beauty, truth and symbolism of the visual and aural arts, and the worshipful recitation of both the creed and the liturgy of which it is a part.  In other words, not only does the Holy Spirit bind us to Christ in character and in purpose, He binds us to Christ in fact.  He joins us to Christ and makes us members of his body, which we call the Church (1 Cor. 12: 12, 13). When it functions as it ought, the Church of Christ is led by the Spirit of Christ, even as it was in its earliest days (Acts 15: 28).  From the beginning, the Holy Spirit has been essential to the proper functioning of the Church.  As William Barclay once explained,

                  It was the Spirit who moved Philip to go and to speak to the Ethiopian eunuch, and thus to make the first missionary advance of the Church (Acts 8: 39).  It was the Spirit who moved Peter, an orthodox Jew, to take the extraordinary step of welcoming Cornelius who was a Gentile (10: 19-20; 11: 12) It was the Spirit who was the prime mover in the despatch of Paul and Barnabas from Antioch on the first missionary journey, which was the first step towards a world for Christ (13: 2, 4).  It was the Spirit who guided the Council of Jerusalem to put no obstacles in the way of the entry of the Gentiles into the Church (15: 28).  It was the Spirit who guided Paul's actions -- almost step by step -- in the events which ended by bringing the gospel out of Asia Minor into Europe, the events which brought the gospel to Macedonia, to Greece, and finally to Rome itself (16: 6-7).  In other words, it is directly through the guidance and influence of the Holy Spirit that we are Christians today.  (Barclay, The Apostles' Creed for Everyman 250-251).

Just as the Holy Spirit brings Christ to us, He makes it possible for us to bring Christ to others.  Without the Spirit, the Church is confounded and impotent. 
         Furthermore, He is an orderly Spirit.  As He did at the world's birth, He brings order out of chaos.  God is not a God of confusion, even though many who claim to be working directly under his influence give precisely the opposite impression  When the Holy Spirit (allegedly) guides some Christians and churches, chaos is enlarged, not diminished.  But we know from Scripture and from history that the Spirit works to advance the name of Christ and to push back the boundaries of sin and evil.  He leads the Church into wisdom, purity and sanity, not madness.       
         Simply by considering the activity of the Holy Spirit in the Church, we see that the creed has not moved us away even a little from the historical inflection that so predominated its affirmations about Jesus Christ.  Quite the opposite; in the Person and work of the Holy Spirit the special presence and activity of God are now rendered even more widely diffused in space and time.  Whereas once God walked among us as a man in a specific time and place, He now walks among us in the hearts and minds of all believers everywhere and always, which is why in The Descent of the Dove, Charles Williams identified the history of the Church as the history of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit's actions in history are many and varied, and to some of them we shall direct our attention in the remainder of this chapter.   
         First, just as the Holy Spirit binds together both Father and Son in a love that knows no limits or defects, He unites us to them and to one another.  He does so because He is the Spirit of Love.  The Spirit that makes us sons of God also makes us brothers.  Whoever is led by the Spirit of God recognizes that he must always consider others and their needs.  Whoever loves God also loves God's world and God's people.  But the unity that the Spirit engenders is not one that obliterates the differences between us.  Rather, it transcends them.  In drawing near to God and to one another, you do not become less yourself, but more.  Christian unity is not uniformity but harmony.  Because it is, your individuality in Christ is underscored, not undermined.  The Holy Spirit works to make you something and someone in Christ.  In Christ your true identity is discovered, not erased.  By becoming all you can be in Christ, you become what no one else in all the universe could ever become -- you.  If you fail to become that person, the world loses what cannot be replaced.  Human beings are not interchangeable cogs in an impersonal machine, and the Spirit of Love does not treat you as if you were.  If you do not play your part in the drama of love and redemption, it never gets played.  
         Put differently, not only does the Holy Spirit shed light abroad in our minds, He teaches our hearts to love.  But He teaches us to love aright, to love the right things in the right way.  To love is not unnatural for the human heart.  Across the length and breadth of a lifetime, most of us find ourselves loving many people and many things.  But our loves are often harmful to us because we love either the wrong things or the right things in the wrong way.  We tend to make unprofitable and destructive attachments that hurt both us and the things we love.  Such loves the Holy Spirit works to restrain or redirect.  He does this by teaching us the truth, which protects us from emotional waywardness and precipitous, injurious affection.  The Holy Spirit bestows the healing and therapeutic gifts of mind and insight.  He is the source of spiritual enlightenment.  Wisdom, knowledge, conviction and understanding:  These are the endowments of the Holy Spirit.  These are the means by which He would teach us to love wisely and by which He would lead us into truth, especially truth about Jesus Christ.      
         Second, the Holy Spirit teaches us when and how to pray.  Done properly, Christian prayer is prayer to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.  That is, we address ourselves to the Father by means of the channel or access opened up for us by Jesus Christ on the cross, and we do so under the guidance and invigoration of the Holy Spirit, who teaches us how to pray.  Indeed, the Spirit Himself prays in us with words and expressions beyond our unaided utterance.  In that light, prayer is something like a divine monologue -- God talks with God.  But when He does, He graciously includes us.  As C. S. Lewis once explained, God is a sharing God.  He rarely does all on his own things the doing of which He can share with his creatures.  Talk among Trinity is one of those things.  To enter into that divine conversation, we need the inestimable aid of the Holy Spirit, who searches everything, even the deepest things of God and of our own hearts, and brings them to life in our prayer.  In our mouths and minds, these Spirit-generated utterances sometimes surface only as inarticulate groanings, as sighs and longings, things real but beyond our articulation.  The Spirit gives life and vent to feelings and needs beyond our ability to understand or to speak.  Thus, though our own words might fail, his do not.  But that is not all:  Not only does the Spirit pray in us, He prays for us.  His is a ministry of intercession, not merely of inclusion and instruction.  He is not only the Spirit of divine love and union, but of prayer, both through us and for us.
         Third, the Holy Spirit is also charged with convicting the world of its sin and coming judgement (John 16: 8), which is part of his function as the Spirit of Holiness (Rom 1: 4).  He is "the educator of conscience" (Malden, Christian Belief 46).  The word "conscience," we should recall, comes from a Latin root that means "knowing with."  The One with Whom we know right and wrong when our consciences function as they ought is the Holy Spirit.  Furthermore, given our preoccupation with things sensual and indulgent, were it not for the Holy Spirit, we would have little, if any, taste for things holy.  Gratification, not purity, seems our strongest natural desire.  But though that carnal condition is where the Spirit finds us, that is not where He leaves us.  He brings our sins to mind so that we can confront them and conquer them by grace and repentance.  He is, in fact, the Spirit of Purity and Perfection.  He urges us onward to spiritual maturity.  He draws us to believe in Christ and to imitate Him.  The Spirit inspires within us a desire for God and for eternity.  We hunger for God and for godliness, when we do, only because the Holy Spirit has made us hungry.  If not for Him, other appetites inevitably prevail.  The craving we have in our hearts for purity and for intimacy with God is both aroused and satisfied by the Spirit who binds us to Christ.  But this growth into purity, though it begins in and proceeds according to God's grace, is never successful without us.  Though He is persuasive and powerful, the Holy Spirit does not control us against our will.  Those who fail to repent and believe, those who fall short of Christlikeness, do so because of their own shortcomings, not God's.
         Fourth, the Holy Spirit inspired Scripture and guided the prophets and apostles who wrote it (2 Pet. 1: 21), enabling them to deliver their divine message with power and effect.  That is, the biblical writers labored and wrote under his divine impetus, or afflatus.  As the directing and motive force behind the Bible, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth (John 14: 7).  His inspiration of the Bible is precisely what sets it apart from all other books, however good and beneficial they might be.  Because the Bible has its roots in God Himself, it bears his imprimatur.  It conveys his message, which is the gospel of Christ.  To the Holy Spirit we owe the Bible itself, because all Scripture is given under his guidance and authority.  By this I do not mean that God dictated each word of the Bible to passive scribes who merely wrote down whatever He spoke.  I mean that while writing in their own voice, so to speak, they articulated the truth of God.  The Bible is the word of God in the words of men. 
         Fifth, not only does the Spirit inspire the writers of Scripture, He gives the graces and endowments necessary for every calling, even those we mistakenly think of as secular.  Because Christ is Lord of the universe and all that is within it, nothing is properly secular.  There is no God-free zone of life or effort.  Therefore, as the One commissioned to bring glory to the world's great Lord, the Holy Spirit endows people in every arena of life to serve Christ with skill, compassion and effect.  For example, even though some people foolishly try to divorce their politics from their theology, the Holy Spirit works to raise up competent statesmen committed to Christ, people trained and equipped to serve God in the public square.  As He was in Old Testament times, the Holy Spirit is the source of political leadership, at least to those who desire his blessing and aid.  He works to glorify Christ in every form of human endeavor:  He anoints kings, animates poets, guides generals, trains parents, and instructs teachers.  Indeed He aids all who serve Christ in any arena of life whatever.  Wherever God has sent a call to service, the Spirit has endowed those who are called with the graces and abilities necessary for the honorable fulfillment of that call.
         Finally, the Holy Spirit is also the "Spirit of adoption."  He teaches us that we are the children of God.  The Spirit Himself bears witness to us that we are God's adopted sons and daughters.  The Holy Spirit Himself is the seal, or pledge, or down payment of our salvation.  He is the One who brings the sacrifice of Christ to us, or us to it, thus making us what we were meant to be all along -- the children of God.  Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, the atonement wrought by Christ would remain wholly and finally ineffectual.  Apart from the Holy Spirit, we are God's enemies, not God's family.  If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him (Rom 8: 11). 
         As the Spirit of Holiness, Adoption, Scripture, and Love, the Holy Spirit is not done with us or with our planet.  There is a new world coming, and He will bring it.  We await a second Pentecost, as it were, when the Spirit that gave birth to Christ, to the Church and to us gives birth to the new heavens and new earth.  Until then, the Power of the Future is the Power of the Present.  We are his and He is ours.

        "If Christians of a period that is poor in or void of miracles have less palpable evidence of the power of the Holy Ghost ruling in the Church than the Christians of the time of St. Paul, they have all the more need to meditate on faith in the Holy Ghost."
                                             Theodor Zahn, The Apostles' Creed

date modified:
5 July 2006