PERSONS OF THE TRINITY: THE HOLY SPIRIT

 

References:            The Authorized Version of the Bible

                        Kelly, J.N.D.  Early Christian Doctrines

                       

  1. From the earliest beginnings of the New Testament Church it had been generally acknowledged that God was both one and many and, even more specifically within the testimonies of the apostles, that god manifested himself as having a threefold nature.  In the Old Testament itself were found evidences of such a nature manifested in three general ways:
    1. Passages that hint at both a unity as well as a plurality of persons in the deity.

                                                              i.      Deuteronomy 6:4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD

                                                            ii.      Genesis 1:26-27 Let us make man in our image

    1. Passages that refer by name to the holy spirit or to the word or the wisdom of God.

                                                              i.      Psalm 51:11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me

                                                            ii.      Ezekiel 12:1 The word of the LORD also came unto me, saying,

                                                          iii.      Proverbs 8:12, 22-24 I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions…  The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.  I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.  When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water.

    1. Passages in which God appears in physical form to the patriarchs or prophets in a theophany:

                                                              i.      Genesis 18 1 And the LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day;    2And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, 3And said, My LORD, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant…                                                                         8And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.   9And they said unto him, Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, Behold, in the tent.  10And he said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah heard it in the tent door, which was behind him.

1.      Question: What do these three men have in common?

  1. The full formulation of Trinitarian orthodoxy was developed over many years through a series of councils and synods – it being formally ratified in the formula of God existing in three co-equal Persons during the council of Constantinople in 381.  Many tentative theories were propounded from the first to the fourth centuries and these fell either to the side of overemphasizing the plurality of the godhead – thus placing in danger the monotheistic principle that had been seen as the dividing line between the Church and Paganism – or the other side of overemphasizing the unity of the godhead to the detriment of what had come to be seen by most as the specifically Trinitarian nature of the New Testament revelation.  This later kind of theory having the effect of reducing Christ to something less than fully divine.  By the time that Emperor Constantine had convened the Council of Nicea in 325 doctrinal unity regarding the divinity of the Son had been established and the Arian reduction of Christ to the status of demi-god had formally been pronounced anathema.  The status of the Holy Spirit, however, was still less than fully philosophically developed into what Trinitarian orthodoxy now requires; that is, coequal status with, and consubstantial status of, both the Father and the Son.  This is evidenced by the creed which the council had drafted:
    1. Creed of the council of Nicea (325): We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things, visible and invisible;

And in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth, Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down and became incarnate, becoming man, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended to the heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead;

And in the Holy Spirit.

But as for those who say, There was then when He was not, and, Before being born he was not, and that He came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is from a different hypostasis or substance, or is created, or is subject to alteration or change – these the Catholic Church anathematizes.

                                                              i.      The creed places strong emphasis on the consubstantiality of Father and Son (homoousios).  But what is meant by this term?  The root word ousia could signify either the kind of substance or stuff common to several individuals of a class (e.g. the gold atoms in two bars of gold), or it could connote an individual thing as such (e.g. the substance of a complaint).

1.      As in the above theophany under I.c.i – above.  Three “men” would be of one substance in the former sense - each having a human nature – but could they still be considered consubstantial in the same way that the Father and Son should be considered consubstantial: as composed of an individual thing or divine substance? 

a.      Since the divine nature is immaterial and indivisible, it follows that the Persons of the Godhead Who share it must have or, rather, be one identical substance.

    1. Constantine’s objective for the council of Nicea appears to have been a move toward unity somewhat at the expense of specificity but also toward the utter exclusion of the position of Arius.  This objective was fulfilled with the one substance position; yet the lack of elaboration left still open the Sabellian view, also called ‘modalism’, in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not distinct persons but merely different modes of God.  As Hilary Poitiers had stated, in his book De synodis (359), the one substance theory, unless safeguarded by a proper stress on the distinction of Persons of the ingenerate Father and the generate Son, lent itself to such Sabellian interpretations.

                                                              i.      The Nicene creed had pronounced the position of ‘three hypostases’ – roughly transliterated as “three separate states or underlying realities – as anathema along with the idea that there could be more than one divine substance – or essence or nature.  But this was really a conflation of the two concepts homoosios and hypostasis.  At the council of Alexandria, meeting under the chairmanship of Athanasius in 362, this formula of ‘three hypostases’ was pronounced legitimate provided that it did not carry with it the Arian connotation of ‘utterly distinct, alien hypostases, different in substance from one another’ or, in other words, any implication that were ‘three principles or three Gods’, but merely expressed the separate subsistence of the three persons in the consubstantial triad.  Here we have the essentials now of what was later to become the badge of orthodoxy: ‘one ousia, three hypostases’.

    1. The council of Alexandria repeated the old affirmation regarding the Holy Spirit that He had inspired the prophets and apostles.  It also secured acceptance of the proposition that the Spirit is not a creature but belongs to, and is inseparable from, the substance of the Father and Son.  From this point onwards the status of the Spirit becomes an urgent issue, and underlying divergences of opinion are brought to the surface.  There were two main divisions of opinion:

                                                              i.      Pneumatomachians (‘Spirit Fighters’): opponents of the full deity of the Spirit.  Many saw the Spirit occupying a middle position between creature and created.

                                                            ii.      Adherents of the full deity of the Spirit included Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa.  The later chose to emphasize the oneness of nature shared by the three Persons and quotes Psalm 33:6 By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath [‘Spirit’] of his mouth, to establish prove that the Word and the Spirit are coordinate realities.  From this (along with a since redacted version of Luke 11:2) he concludes that the activity of the Spirit was identical with that of the Father; and since the Son also was indistinguishable, there could be no difference of nature between the three persons.

1.      Gregory of Nazianzen finds support for the divinity of the Spirit in Scripture (see his references directly below) and also in the Spirit’s character as the Spirit of God and of Christ, His association with Christ in the work of redemption, and the Church’s devotional practice.  To explain the lateness of His recognition of God he produces a theory of doctrinal development that argues that just as the acknowledgement of the Father’s Godhead had to precede that of the Son’s, so the latter had to be established before the divinity of the Spirit could be admitted.

a.      John 4:24

b.      Romans 8:26

c.      1 Corinthians 14:15

d.      I would also suggest:

                                                                                                                                      i.      John 14:26

                                                                                                                                    ii.      John 15:26-27

                                                                                                                                  iii.      Acts 5:32

2.      An additional problem presented itself to this group: the contention that the consubstantiality of the Spirit with the Father and the Son would seem to imply that the Father has two sons.  So the mode of origin of each – the Spirit and the Son – needed to be differentiated.  Basil would say on the subject that the Spirit issues from God, not by way of generation, but “as the breath of his mouth”; thus His manner of coming to be remains ‘ineffable’.  Gregory of Nyssa was to provide what was to prove to be the definitive statement.  The spirit, he teaches, is out of God and is of Christ; He proceeds out of the Father and receives from the son; He cannot be separated from the Word.

a.      John 20:21-23

b.      Acts 16:18

c.      Can we think of any related verses that would help to tie these ideas together?

    1. The climax of these above developments was, again, the reaffirmation of the Nicene faith at the council of Constantinople in 381.  At that time the consubstantiality of the Spirit, as well as of the Son, with the Father was formally endorsed along with an emphasis on the separate subsistence of all three persons within that one divine substance.  The theology of the council, as exemplified by the Cappadocian fathers such as Basil, had as its heart the doctrine that the one Godhead exists simultaneously in three modes of being, or hypostases.  This is different from the Sabellian modalism of the third century (as best that I can presently surmise) in that these modes of being are not modes of action of one being but simultaneous modes of being of one essential nature, i.e. the Godhead.  To explain how the one substance can be simultaneously present in three Persons they appeal to the analogy of a universal and its particulars.  “Ousia and hypostasis”, writes Basil, are differentiated exactly as universal and particular are, e.g. animal and particular man”.  From this point of view each of the divine hypostases is the ousia or essence of the Godhead determined by its appropriate particularizing characteristic, or identifying peculiarity, just as each individual man represents the universal ‘man’ determined by certain characteristics which mark him off from other men.

                                                              i.      When speaking of particular men as opposed to manhood in general we approach a definition of personhood which, for the time and the individuals we are referencing, was not the idea of self-consciousness nowadays associated with ‘person’ and ‘personal’.  The terms prosopon and persona were used to express the independent subsistence (but not separability) of the three within the Godhead.  After originally meaning ‘face’, and so ‘expression’ and then ‘role’, the former came so signify ‘individual’, the stress usually being on the external aspect or objective presentation.  The primary sense of persona was ‘mask’ and in legal usage it could stand for the holder of the title to a property.  Tertullian used it to connote the concrete presentation of an individual as such.

                                                            ii.      For Basil these particularizing characteristics are respectively ‘paternity’, ‘sonship’, and ‘sanctification’.  Others define them more precisely as ‘ingenerateness’, ‘generateness’, and ‘procession’.  The distinction of the Persons is thus grounded in Their origin and mutual relation.  They are so many ways in which the one indivisible substance distributes and presents itself; and hence they come to be termed ‘modes of coming to be’ in the one God who is made known in three forms of presentation.  The three persons do not each stand for an essence or being (as ‘God’ does), but for a mode of existence or relation.  Individuality, then, is only the manner in which the identical substance is objectively presented in each several Person.

                                                          iii.      The Cappadocians were thus emphatic that the three hypostases share the one and the same nature.  Since in the classical tradition nature is almost identical with function or action, the theory is that the unity of the ousia, or Godhead, follows from the unity of the divine action which is disclosed in revelation.  “If we observe”, writes Gregory of Nyssa, “a single activity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in no respect different in the case of any, we are obliged to infer unity of nature from the identity of activity; for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit cooperate in sanctifying, quickening, consoling, and so on”.  Basil similarly finds proof of the deity of the Spirit in the fact that His energy is coordinate with the Father and the Son.  As Pseudo-Basil remarks, “Those whose operations are identical have a single substance.  Now there is a single operation of the Father and the Son, as is shown by ‘Let us make man in our own image’ or ‘Whatsoever the Father does, the Son does likewise’; and therefore there is a single substance of Father and Son”.  Along similar lines Gregory of Nyssa argues that, whereas men must be regarded as many because each of them acts independently, the Godhead is one because the Father never acts independently of the Son, nor the Son of the Spirit.

    1. Questions:

                                                              i.      Does the analysis lend itself to the charge of tri-theism?

                                                            ii.      Can we apply the above analysis to the theophany of Genesis 18?

                                                          iii.      What “presentations” do we find the Godhead making through the Holy Spirit?

1.       Matthew 1:20

2.       Matthew 12:32

3.       Luke 1:67

4.       Luke 3:16

5.       Luke 3:22

6.       Luke 4:1

7.       John 7:38-40

8.       John 14:26

9.       Acts 2:38

10.  Acts 7:51

11.  Acts 6:16

12.  Acts 28:25

13.  1 Corinthians 2:13

14.  Titus 3:5

15.  Hebrews 9:7-9

16.  2 Peter 1:21

17.  1 John 5:7

                                                           iv.      Is there any difference between the Spirit and the Holy Ghost?  Note: the term ‘holy ghost’ is found only in the New Testament whereas ‘holy spirit’ is found in both testaments.

1.      Luke 4:1

2.      John 1:33

3.      Acts 2:4