1. Alister E. McGrath Theology: The Basics
Chapter 6 Spirit
I believe in
the Holy Spirit…
Alister E. McGrath
Theology:
The Basics

2. Biblical models of the Holy Spirit
Ruach
Spirit as wind
Judgment
Refreshment
Spirit as breath
Genesis 2:7
Ezekiel 37
Spirit as charism
Paul
Children of God
Spiritual gifts

3. The debate over the divinity of the Holy Spirit
Council of Nicea (325)
[I believe] in the Holy Spirit.
Council of Constantinople (381)
[I believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, and is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and Son, who spoke by the prophets.
Establishing divinity
Scripture applies the titles of God to the Spirit
The Spirit’s functions
Baptism “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”

4. The filioque debate Proceeding from the Father and the Son (filioque)
Eastern (Greek) patristic writers
Father as supreme and sole source of being
Western (Latin) patristic writers
John 20:22
Augustine
The Spirit as a bond of love

5. The functions of the Spirit
“Wash what is dirty; refresh what is dry; heal what is wounded; bend what is stubborn; melt what is frozen; direct what is wandering.” ~Veni Sancte Spiritus (Come Holy Spirit)

6. The functions of the Spirit
The revelation of God to humanity
The inspiration of Scripture
The appropriation of salvation
Sanctification
Deification
The energization of the Christian life
Individual
Corporate
Mission

7. Engaging with a text
Sarah Coakley, article (1998)
“What is being described in Paul is one experience of an activity of prayer that is nonetheless ineluctably, though obscurely, triadic. It is one experience of God, but God as simultaneously (i) doing the praying in me, (ii) receiving that prayer, and (iii) in that exchange, consented to in me, inviting me into the Christian life of redeemed sonship. Or to put it another way: the ‘Father’ (so-called here) is both source and ultimate object of divine longing in us; the ‘Spirit’ is that irreducibly – though obscurely – distinct enabler and incorporator of that longing in creation – that which makes the creation divine; and the ‘Son’ is that divine and perfected creation, into whose life I, as pray-er, am caught up . . .
[continued]

8. [continued]
“… As John of the Cross puts it in a lovely passage in The Spiritual Canticle (39.3.4), not coincidentally quoting Romans 8: ‘the Holy Spirit raises the soul most sublimely with that His divine breath that she may breathe in God the same breath of love that the Father breathes in the Son and the Son in the Father.’
“The Spirit, on this view, note, is no redundant third, no hypostasized afterthought, no cooing ‘feminine’ adjunct to an established male household. Rather, experientially speaking, the Spirit is primary, just as Pentecost is primary for the church; and leaving noncluttered space for the Spirit is the absolute precondition for the unimpeded flowing of this divine exchange in us, the ‘breathing of the divine breath,’ as John of the Cross puts it.”