A Brief History of the Doctrine of the Work of the Holy Spirit

From Glory to Glory

Many people will be surprised to discover that the work of the Holy Spirit was not developed as a doctrine until after the Protestant Reformation. Of course, Jesus taught his disciples about it, the letters of the apostles were filled with it, and if Pentecost means anything, the church could not have existed without it. People experienced the Spirit in their hearts, but when they talked about theology it was usually about something else—could the God of the Old Testament be equated with the Father of Jesus Christ? Was the Creator God also the Redeemer? How can Jesus Christ be divine when there is only one God who is transcendent and completely different from anything he has made? These were the questions that were debated, and it was only late in the day that attention turned to the work of the third person of the Trinity as distinct from that of the other two.

A key difference between the Son and the Holy Spirit is that the Spirit came into the world but without becoming incarnate. He was poured out on the church at Pentecost, but he had an elusive quality that was not true of the Son. As Jesus said, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”¹ The only way anyone could know the Holy Spirit was through his work, but in the early church that knowledge was used mainly to prove that he was a divine person. We can see this in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, where he is described as “the giver of life.” On the surface, this is a description of his work, but that is not what the creed is trying to say. Its emphasis is on the equality of the Spirit with the Father and the Son, of whom Jesus said, “As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.”² In other words, to confess that the Holy Spirit is a “giver of life” is to confess that he is equal to the other persons of the Godhead; it is not intended to explain his work as something distinct from theirs.

This is not to say that the work of the Spirit was ignored, but it was discussed in other ways. Spiritual experience was always at the heart of the church’s life, but for many centuries it tended to be regarded as something extraordinary that was enjoyed by an elite minority of its members. In the early days these were the martyrs, whose sacrifice gave them an air of holiness that ordinary mortals did not possess. Later on, this aura was transferred to monks and hermits, whose daily self-sacrifice was meant to bring them closer to God and gave them the reputation of being more spiritual than others. Even within the monastic tradition there were grades of sanctity, depending on the severity of the discipline to which the monks subjected themselves, and periodic renewals of the religious life invariably aimed for greater strictness in mortifying the flesh.

Quest for Holiness

As time went on, asceticism combined with mystical experience to give an added dimension to the quest for holiness, and it was in this sphere, more than in any other, that women were to make a historic contribution to the development of Christian theology. The fathers of the early church were all men, though there were some notable female martyrs. But in the Middle Ages women like Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Lady Julian of Norwich (1342?–1416?), and Margery Kempe (1373?–1438) left a corpus of devotional writing that is universally recognized as foundational to the Western mystical tradition. Only toward the end of the medieval period was there an attempt to translate the ideals of the monastic life into the humdrum world of everyday existence, and this began, as it probably had to, as the development of a new kind of monastery. Gilbert of Sempringham (1083?–1190) had led the way with the establishment of joint male and female religious houses, but it was left to Gerhard Groote (1340–1384) to develop the family convent, where complete communities strove to practice the spiritual principles thitherto reserved for the cloistered life. Groote’s mission both reflected and encouraged a thirst among ordinary laypeople for a deeper experience of God, and this contributed in no small measure to the success of the Reformation 150 years after his time.³

The work of the Holy Spirit cannot be understood unless his divine personhood is acknowledged.

It was the Reformation that provided the impetus for the development of a spirituality for the ordinary believer. Practices like daily prayer and Bible reading, that had always been regarded as monastic activities, now became the foundation of the Christian life for everyone. The concept of a vocation, which had previously been understood to mean a call to the priesthood or to the monastic life, was now extended to cover every form of human activity. Men and women had a calling to serve God wherever they were placed and in whatever profession or activity in which they were engaged. The great divide between clergy and laity, between the religious and the secular, was broken down, partly by dismantling the features that had set the former apart (notably by the abolition of compulsory celibacy) but mostly by raising the dignity of occupations that had previously been thought of as profane and second-rate. In the Protestant kingdom of God, a carpenter or a gardener was just as holy as a priest or a monk, and more so if he was more faithful in the exercise of his calling than they were.

From there it was a short step to the view that only a Spirit-filled person could accomplish the will of God in the world, and that those who were not so blessed were not really Christians at all. The effects of that teaching were, and still are, revolutionary. For the first time, large numbers of people came to believe that academic achievement and ecclesiastical promotion meant nothing if the person so honored was not filled with the Holy Spirit—and it was obvious that many members of the church establishment were not. A poor and relatively uneducated man like John Bunyan (1628–1688) was a spiritual giant compared with the bishops who persecuted him, and the general recognition of this truth has left an indelible mark on the spirituality of the church ever since. The evangelical revival of the eighteenth century was the incarnation of that attitude, and in many ways it remains a counterculture to the institutional church(es) whose leaders understandably feel threatened by a movement that they cannot control and that tends not to accept their claims to authority. John Wesley (1703–1791) may have been one of the first to break the mold of church government by ignoring hostile bishops and ordaining his own men to the ministry, but he was certainly not the last, and the perception of what Christian service is has changed as a result. “Traditionalists” may regret this and react against it, as John Henry Newman (1801–1890) did, but they cannot put the clock back, and (as Newman discovered when he became a Roman Catholic) they are in reality as much the product of this change as those whom they oppose.

Today the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s personal divinity is seldom given much attention. Books about him tend to gloss over who he is and concentrate almost entirely on what he does. This is a pity, because the work of the Holy Spirit cannot be understood unless his divine personhood is acknowledged. If he were not a divine person, his work would be comparable to that of an angel, just as the work of the Son would be like that of a prophet. That would not make it unimportant, but it would be different and our relationship with God would not be what it is.

This article is adapted from God Has Spoken: A History of Christian Theology by Gerald Bray.

Related Articles