Part 7 of a Study in the Nicene Creed

“And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; 

who proceeds from the Father and the Son; 

who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; 

who spoke by the prophets.”

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

John 16:13-14

This is one of the clearest passages for showing that the Holy Spirit is not a mere impersonal force emanating from God. On the other hand, neither is the Spirit a Person separable from the Godhead. He proceeds within the Trinity and within the economy of God’s works. The order will matter here just as in the case of the Father and the Son. The mission of the Spirit (how he is sent in the divine works ad extra) will be a kind of revelation of the procession (how he eternally subsists).

The specific work of the Spirit that Jesus focused on in John 16:14 is the truth that the Spirit communicates and the glory that he shines upon the Son.  Not to reduce this study to a polemic against Pentecostal-Charismatic notions, but the whole paradigm our generation has received about the Holy Spirit would be corrected precisely by the emphasis of the Spirit’s work of illuminating Jesus Christ in the form of the truth that is in the Word.  

1. The Procession of the Holy Spirit as God

2. The Mission of the Holy Spirit in Life and Truth

The Procession of the Holy Spirit as God

1. We have to keep in mind the historical context of the fourth century. At Nicaea, the orthodox doctrine of the Son was clarified. But there emerged a few decades afterwards a group known as the Pneumatimakians, literally, the “Spirit-fighters.” They denied this same divine status to the Holy Spirit. So as Athanasius took on the Arians of his day, so the three great theologians known as the Capaddocian Fathers met this new challenge. These were Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Naziansus, and Gregory of Nyssa. Basil’s work in particular, On the Holy Spirit, took aim at the heresy of Aetius, who stressed that, “things expressed in unlike terms are naturally unlike.”1 This was directed at using the various Scriptures on the diversity of the three Persons to the effect that they were differing beings. I bring this in only to show how heretics have always been pedantic shape-shifters when it comes to the natural sense of texts. Limits of our study prevents us from examining the Capaddocians argument in any detail, but they are well worth reading.  

2. Now there are six classes of texts demonstrating the deity of the Holy Spirit: 1. Where the New Testament attributes his speech to the same as the Old calls God (Acts 8:25, 26; Isa. 6:9-10); 2. Where he is called God (Acts 5:3-4); 3. Where he is depicted as dwelling in the temple as none but God does (1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19); 4. Where he is placed on par with the Father and Son (Mat. 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14; Rev. 1:4); 5. Where divine attributes are ascribed to him (Ps. 139:7-8; 1 Cor. 2:10); and 6. Where divine works are done by him (Lk. 1:35; Mat. 12:28; Acts 13:2; 20:28; 1 Cor. 12:4-6). The Spirit is also called “another Comforter” (Jn. 14:26) indicating some comparable essence with the Son. So the Spirit is he ‘who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.’

3. Having seen a little bit about what eternal generation might mean, and how it differs from earthly or carnal ideas of begottenness, we are in a better position to discern those same sorts of differences between the eternal procession of the Spirit and that “going forth” or “breathing out” that one might associate with temporal and physical realities. The Creed says that he PROCEEDS. What does this mean? You will recall the word “spiration” about the Spirit, which paralleled the word “filiation” about the Son. In his little book On the Procession of the Holy Spirit, Anselm of Canterbury said,

“We posit the title ‘Holy Spirit’ as a relational term, so that we understand the Holy Spirit as the spirit of someone. For although the Father is spirit and holy, and the Son is spirit and holy, the Father is not the spirit of anyone, nor is the Son the spirit of anyone, in the way in which the Holy Spirit is the spirit of someone, since the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of the Father and the Son. For the Greeks, although they deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, none the less do not deny that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Son.” 2

What is Anselm doing here? He is setting us up. But this brings up that line in the Creed that was so controversial.

4. There is this phrase that exists in the Western (Latin) form of the Creed that is not in the Eastern (Greek) form, and was not in fact included until a few centuries later. This is referred to as the Filioque Clause. This is named for the Latin for “and the Son.” So you will notice that line that says, ‘who proceeds from the Father and the Son.’ It was Jesus (and not some Latin church father) who said, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn. 16:7). Two chapters earlier, Jesus had used these words: “the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name” (Jn. 14:26). So the Spirit is sent by the Father in one sense, but to be sent “in my name” refers to Christ’s royal authority. And we see that connection at Pentecost, where the ascension to the throne is the event that makes the anointing of the King in heaven overflow to the empowerment of the church below. Anselm continues, 

The Greeks also believe and profess that there is God from God by generation, and that there is God from God by procession, since the Son is God from God the Father by generation, and the Holy Spirit is from God by procession … But we understand that the Son is from the Father in one way, and that the Holy Spirit is from the Father in another way.3

From here Anselm goes on to argue from the simplicity of God, and from the fact that the Son is uniquely from the Father, and the Spirit proceeding from the whole of God, that, since God does not have parts, that the Spirit essentially proceeds from all that is in God save for his personal property of the Spirit himself. 

5. Wherever one lands in that debate, this idea of PROCESSION helps us understand the Spirit’s proper name in a similar way to what we saw about the Son. Mastricht explains that this name Spirit is “not so much from the immaterial essence common to all the persons of the Trinity, or from some economic operation by which he makes men spiritual, as instead from the mode of subsisting, that he subsists through an ineffable spiration, from which he is designated ‘the Spirit of his mouth,’ ‘the Spirit of Jehovah,’ that is, of the Father, and ‘the Spirit of the Son.’”4 All of this reminds us that the Spirit, like the Son, is what he is eternally first, and in the economy of works second. So when we hear the voice of the Son, from Isaiah, “And now the Lord God has sent me, and his Spirit” (48:16), that the Spirit sends here has reference to his mission on earth: that is, the anointing of the Spirit for Christ’s ministry.

The Mission of the Holy Spirit in Life and Truth

1. He is called ‘the Lord and Giver of Life.’ “It is the Spirit who gives life” (Jn. 6:63). Such life can be an animation of the original nature, as when “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7), or even in his animating of the craftsman of his tabernacle, as he says to Moses: “​​I have filled him with the Spirit of God” (Ex. 31:3). This includes plant life: “You send forth Your Spirit, they are created; And You renew the face of the ground” (Ps. 104:30). This includes all life: By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” (Ps. 33:6). This includes human intellect: “the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding” (Job 32:8).

2. If the Spirit is to give that life that is life unto God, then he must give us holiness, “the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14). So what Mastricht said about the proper name SPIRIT having not to do with what he has in common with the Father and the Son, but by his eternal mode of subsistence, here the proper name HOLY is likewise distinguished: “not so much from holiness, the essential attribute common to all the persons, as from sanctifying, insofar as that work has been committed as it were by the other persons to the third person as his economic office.”5

3. Why this addition at the end of the section—who spoke by the prophets. Right after Jesus had said, “It is the Spirit who gives life,” he followed that with, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life”(Jn. 6:63). Here is the connection: the Spirit gives life by the Word, through the words not only of Jesus in particular, but through all of the words of Scripture. By PROPHETS here the Creed draws attention to that, “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16). So Peter uses the word, 

And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed … For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:19, 21).

4. These two — the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit who gives life — come together in the vision of Ezekiel in Chapter 37 of the prophetic book. What we find is that the Spirit alone gives life and he does that through the Word. It is not simply that the Spirit will make these bones live, but through the imperative, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them” (37:4). So the Spirit enlivens through what he illuminates. The verse from John 6 before isn’t just that the Spirit gives life, but through what? “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (Jn. 6:63).

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1. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, II.4.

2. Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 390-91.

3. Anselm, The Major Works, 391

4. Mastricht, TPT, II:568.

5. Mastricht, TPT, II:568.