What We Believe About The Holy Spirit

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made: Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man; And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate and suffered and was buried; And the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures; And ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father; And He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the prophets; And I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

In this confession of faith in the God who has revealed Himself to us, not as a single person but as a communion of three persons who share the same Divine being or essence (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), God’s self revelation of Himself to us is complete. With the revealing of the person of the Holy Spirit we would say, in the Church, that God has shown Himself to us as completely as we are able to grasp Him.

Both the Son and the Holy Spirit have their origin in the Father. The Father is the source of their being. It is the Father’s "Godness" from which they come forth. We speak of the Son of God as being the only begotten of the Father, as being the perfect image of the Father, coming forth from the heart of the Father outside all time. Likewise, when we speak of the Holy Spirit, the word that is used to describe His coming forth from the Father is the word "proceed." The Son is begotten (eternally) and the Spirit proceeds (eternally).

The persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit are unique, distinct persons. Their relationship, each one of them, to the Father in this perfect communion of life that the three Divine persons share is a unique relationship.

In the Old Testament the Hebrew word that is used for "spirit" is one of those words that sounds like what it means. The word is "ruah," which sounds like a breath, and that is what the word means (breath or air). This word is first encountered at the very beginning of Genesis.

Ruah was translated into the Greek word, "pneuma," which likewise has the same connotation of breath. In English it forms the root of such words as pneumonia, pneumatic, etc. From Greek to Latin, pneuma became "spiritus." The root meaning is the same and we have in English such words as respiration, the breathing. The Spirit as He is described in the Old Testament is, we could say, the presence of God, the person of God who gives life, who makes life to be. As the Scripture so beautifully says,

One of the great teachers of the early Church was St. Ireneaus of Lyons (130-202 AD). He can be described as "a third generation Christian." He was a disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of St. John the Apostle (here we have a very concrete example of the passing on of the tradition of the Church’s faith). Using a physical analogy, St. Ireneaus speaks of the Son and the Spirit as the two arms of God. Just as the arms of a human being are the physical means through which we work, so likewise the Son of God and the Spirit of God are the persons though which the Father is revealed. We know the one, true and only God because He reveals Himself though His Son and through His Holy Spirit.

The communal life of the persons of the Godhead is foreshadowed in several other places in the Old Testament.

In all of this expression of the plural the Church sees a foreshadowing of the Father whose Son and Spirit are the means through which all the Father’s plan for the salvation of the human race is accomplished. This word "ruah" (air, breath, or wind) is an expression of the mysteriousness of God’s acting. You cannot see the wind but you know that it is moving.

The Holy Spirit is confessed in the creed as being the Lord. The Holy Spirit is God in the same sense that the Son is God from all eternity. The origin of His being is in the Father. It is the Holy Spirit of God within God’s plan of salvation that makes everything that is accomplishes through the Son work.

In Genesis God breathes into man the breath of life.

Jesus breathes this same breath, the Holy Spirit, upon the disciples and gives them that same breath to be given to the Church. The Holy Spirit is the giver of both the physical life and the spiritual life. It is through the Holy Spirit that the Lord transforms inanimate matter into living beings. He calls all things from nothingness into being by His Word, by His Son, and He breathes the life through His Spirit. Likewise, the life of the new creation, the eternal life, the life of the kingdom of God is through the breathing of the Holy Spirit.

As we have seen in the Gospel of John, on the day of the resurrection Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. But they were not finished with receiving the Holy Spirit. Forty days latter, on the day of His ascension, Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to His disciples.

On the one hand, they received the Holy Spirit from Jesus breathing upon them on the day of the resurrection, but there’s a further receiving of the Holy Spirit for them – the great receiving of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. We are to learn from that that

the receiving of the Holy Spirit cannot be narrowed down to one particular event, just as it was not for the Apostles.

The miracle of Pentecost is that the Apostles speak in one language and are heard in many. The languages that are being spoken on the day of Pentecost are human languages. What’s going on here is the reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel. At Babel human beings tried independently to become God and the result was that they lost the means of common communication, their languages were confused. On the day of Pentecost, the gift God, the Holy Spirit, descends upon the Apostles in the form of divided tongues as of fire and brings the languages back together so that all the world can hear proclaimed that salvation is given, that the new life that has been made possible through the resurrection of Christ has been made available for all.

But it is only through the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles that this is possible. Even though the Apostles have been with Jesus, even though they have heard His teaching, even though they have witnessed Him resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven, they are still, of themselves, unable to be the means through which this good news of salvation is revealed to the world. Something else had to happen to them and that something else was the coming of the third person of the Holy Trinity – the coming of the Holy Spirit who teaches all truth. The Holy Spirit is the giver of life (physically and spiritually) and the person through whom it becomes possible for human beings to know God. So, the Holy Spirit is the giver of life and the Spirit of Truth - the Spirit of true wisdom who enables God to be known.

Likewise the Holy Spirit descends upon Christ Himself at His baptism in the Jordan.

This is the first full revelation of the three persons of the one God. The Spirit accomplished this critical turning point in the human life of Christ. For the first thirty years of His life, Jesus, as far as the eyes of men are concerned, is hidden. But when He is baptized and the Holy Spirit descends upon Him, His public ministry begins. It is the Spirit descending upon the Son of God incarnate in the flesh who reveals Him to be the Messiah.

It is the Spirit descending upon the Virgin Mary that accomplishes the incarnation.

Furthermore, the Holy Spirit is instrumental in Christ’s resurrection.

The Holy Spirit is the one through whom all of the Father’s will is made to work. The Holy Spirit is Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.

The original text of the Nicene Creed confesses the Spirit who proceeds from the Father. The Latin church added, "and from the son " (Latin – Filioque). The Orthodox Church rejects this addition to the creed.

The original confession comes directly from Jesus’ words in Scripture.

Why did the Western church add the Filioque expression? It’s for two reasons. The first is theological and is related to St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD). Even being a saint of the Church does not necessarily mean that you don’t have some opinions that are erroneous. That’s why, in Orthodox tradition, we never take any of the Fathers of the Church and say that in this person’s writings everything is expressed perfectly. Rather, the Orthodox tradition is to look through everything in its completeness and see how faithful the writings and teachings of any one person are in reference to the whole.

St. Augustine developed an explanation of the Holy Trinity that won a great deal of acceptance in the Latin church. He said that between the Father and the Son there is this great and eternal Divine love. St. Augustine spoke of the mutual love of the Father and the Son as the person of the Holy Spirit. That seemed to many people to be one of the easiest to understand explanations of the Holy Trinity that had come along.

The problem with this explanation in the light of the tradition of the Church is that it can make it sound as if the Holy Spirit is being depersonalized. The traditional way of speaking of the Trinity is the monarchy of the Father who begets the Son while the Spirit proceeds from the Father. Both the Son and the Spirit have their origin in the Father. But Augustine’s model seems to confuse the uniqueness of the origin of both persons in the Father.

The second explanation is historical – the Arian controversy (the denial of the divinity of Christ). In the Greek (Eastern) Church, Arianism was able to be overcome rather quickly. Within a century it had pretty much disappeared. In the West it was an influence much longer. This was not due to any disagreement within the Church over the issue. A major factor was the fact that the tribes (Goths, Visigoths, etc.) which eventually overthrew Rome, to the extent that they were Christianized, tended to be Arians. It certainly served their political purposes to have a church separated from the see of Rome. The pressure was greatest in the Western half of the Roman Empire. It took several centuries for these tribes to be converted to the Orthodox catholic faith.

The place hit the hardest by it was Spain, which was overrun by a solidly Arian tribe, the Visigoths. The Arians persecuted the real Church for nearly a century before they were finally converted. To fight the Arians the Church developed the natural tendency to emphasize the divinity of Christ in as many ways as possible. Under St. Augustine’s influence, the Bishops of the Spanish Church (Council of Toledo, 589 AD) added the phrase, "and from the Son" to the Nicene Creed to emphasize the divinity of Christ (relying on such Scriptures as Jesus saying, "But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth.." John 15:26a).

They modified the creed without the agreement of the universal church. This was resisted by the rest of the Western church for quite some time. The creed, without the Filioque, was inscribed on the walls of St. Peter’s in Rome as a repudiation of the Filioque. But as time went on the Latin church insisted on the Filioque and by the ninth century Rome began to insist that the entire Church should accept this unauthorized innovation in the creed.

The Orthodox Church rejected the Filioque as an error that results in something that is theologically and spiritually false and unbalanced. In the Orthodox understanding, the Filioque subordinates the person of the Holy Spirit. It speaks of the person of the Holy Spirit as being, in a sense, lesser than the Father and the Son because He is deprived of the unique source of His being in the Father alone. In the Orthodox understanding the result of this is an unbalanced experience of who God is. The Son is understood in a sense as greater than the Spirit and the Holy Spirit’s life in the Church takes a second place to that of the Son.

As the result of the Filioque, it seems to the Orthodox that the western Church has developed a practical "Christomonism" (Christ alone). That is, for all practical extents and purposes, God is related to as Jesus only. When Orthodox look at the strain in so much of contemporary Protestantism, for example, which focuses on this private relationship of me alone with Jesus alone, we say that in Orthodox experience no such relationship exists at all. The Christian, alone, has no relationship with Jesus, alone in the Orthodox Church. Such a thing doesn’t even exist. We don’t have any kind of a private relationship with a private God. God is not known privately. God is known in the communion of the persons of the Holy Trinity within the communion of the Church. It’s not to say that it’s an impersonal knowledge – we know God as persons but we do not know Him as isolated individuals. The God we know is not a Jesus isolated from the Father and the Spirit. Orthodox worship is the worship of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Always the life of the communion of the Holy Trinity is experienced on every level in the Church (whether it’s in personal prayer, liturgical prayer, or in the highest theological contemplation). It’s always this Trinitarian experience of God, which is not the product of the imagination or the intellect of man, but is the way God has revealed Himself to us.

The Holy Spirit is to be given the same worship as the Father and the Son because, already, when the creed was being formulated, there was this tendency of some to speak of Him in a lesser way. Compared to Christ, with all that is written about Him in the Scriptures, the person of the Holy Spirit is, we would say on the human level, much more mysterious. As Jesus, Himself, says in the Gospel……

In the Lord’s own words in the New Testament the Spirit is referred to as the "Living Water" that He gives that will be the fountain gushing up in the heart of the every one of the believers unto life eternal.

In this plan of God for the salvation of the world there is an order to how it proceeds. First the Son is glorified by His voluntary crucifixion and resurrection. Then it is possible for the Spirit to be poured out on all flesh.

All the prophets of the Old Testament and those who exercised the prophetic gift in the New Testament (those who speak the Word of truth to the Church) were inspired by the Holy Spirit . Everything that is recorded in the prophetic writings in the Old Testament and everything that is said within the communion of the Church that bears testimony to the truth of the God who reveals Himself to us comes through the Person of the Holy Spirit.