Holy (26)
the Holy Spirit, who gave the Scriptures, is Himself the perpetual author (auctor perpetuus) of all appropriations of their contents by and of all application to the individual. It is the Holy Spirit who, by illumination, enables the human consciousness to take up into itself the substance of the Scripture; in the course of ages leads our human consciousness to ever richer insights into its content
Abraham Kuyper
Principles of Sacred Theology, 4025.8K
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 works of the Holy Spirit cannot be understood unless his divine personhood is acknowledged.God Has Spoken (725)
With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, non-universal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones. Knowing God (The Love of God, 130)
The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone without the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, He will do it according to the Scriptures and never contrary to them. Answers to Prayer (11)
God gave the Spirit to the rest of the apostles, but he gave the purse to the son of perdition.
Your flesh is a square peg, and the Spirit is a round hole. The two don't go together!
If the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, why should we not believe that he proceeds from the Son? Indeed, if he did not proceed from the Son, Christ would not have breathed on his disciples after the resurrection and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." What else did such breathing mean than that the Holy Spirit also proceeds from the Son?Tractatus in Iohannis Evangelium 99.6
Can he who finds no pleasure in the company of spiritually-minded persons, or even sneers at them as saints,-can he be said to "have the Spirit"? Judge for yourself.Old Paths, Chapter X
the Holy Ghost generally works on the heart of man through the use of means. The Word of God, preached or read, is generally employed by Him as an instrument in the conversion of a soul. He applies that Word to the conscience: He brings that Word home to the mind. This is His general course of procedure.Old Paths, Chapter X
We cannot explain how and in what way the Almighty Spirit comes into man, and operates upon him; but neither also can we explain a thousand things which are continually taking place in the natural world.Old Paths, Chapter X
only by the Spirit can a person think rightly of the One to whom he prays. They then, not being able to conceive aright of God to whom they pray, of Christ through whom they pray ... how shall they be able to address themselves
to God, without the Spirit help this infirmity?
The problem we face is that the word holy is foreign to all languages. No dictionary is adequate to the task.
There is no way of deliverance from the state and condition of being in the flesh, but by the Spirit of Christ.
Put simply, in the Bible the Spirit is never the object of worship.For the Glory of God, 50
Fee rightly notes that the "demonstration of the Spirit and power" here cannot be taken as a reference to miracles since in the context of 1 Corinthians this is the very triumphalist assumption Paul is arguing against. In contrast to Jewish requests for signs and Greek desire for wisdom Paul preaches Christ crucified (cf. 1:22f). It would thus be a little odd, as Fee notes, if Paul were to appeal to powerful signs and wonders that persuaded hearers! In the context of his own personal weakness, the demonstration of the Spirit's power is seen in the Corinthians' conversion, as the Spirit applies the word of the gospel, Christ and him crucified, to their hearts: "the evidence lies with the Corinthians themselves and their own experience of the Spirit as they responded to the message of the gospel." The plural of power would have been a more unambiguous reference to miracles. Power here is about moral conviction, not miraculous display.Pillar Commentary
Instead of "enticing, clever words" (Thiselton) to win his audience, what accompanied Paul's preaching was a demonstration of the Spirit's power. "A demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (NRSV, NASB), to translate literally, has been understood by the TNIV as a hendiadys, a figure of speech in which two words connected by "and" express a single idea. An example in current English is the phrase, "nice and warm." Fee supplies the validation for taking "Spirit" and "power" together here: "for Paul the terms 'Spirit' and 'power' are at times nearly interchangeable; to speak of the Spirit is to speak of power."Pillar Commentary
The term hagios taps into an important Old Testament tradition, according to which Israel was called out from among the nations to be God's own people (see esp. Exod. 19:6; Dan. 7:18, 22, 25, 27). Some of the modern translations seek to capture this nuance by translating God's holy people (TNIV; NLT) instead of the traditional "saints." As Moule remarks, "Â 'Saint' is, to modern ears, misleading, for the Hebrew and Greek words are concerned less with any excellence of character (however much that may be implied as a result) than with the commitments and loyalties of the Church to the God who had made her his own."Moo, D. J. (2008). The letters to the Colossians and to Philemon (p. 78). Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.
When we read Scripture, the focus will be on God the Father or Jesus Christ the Son. However, it seems that the Holy Spirit is most honored when we accept his conviction of sin, his transforming and sanctifying work within us, and his guidance in life and ministry, and when in response to his leading we prostrate ourselves before Jesus... trinitarian worship need not be balanced, if by balanced we mean giving the three persons of the Godhead equal time and space. True Christian worship focuses particularly on ChristFor the Glory of God (53)
One of the persistent criticisms made by Western theologians of Eastern Orthodoxy is that it tends to put too much emphasis on the limitations of creaturely finitude as the cause of mankind's alienation from God and not enough emphasis on sin and disobedience. This kind of imbalance is not possible if the Holy Spirit is thought to proceed from the Son as well as from the Father, because then the Son's redemptive work is just as important to the Spirit's mission as the original creation is.God Has Spoken (726)
[John 15:26] Jesus says this because it accords with his general practice of referring everything he has to the one from whom he has. Compare the place where he says, "My teaching is not mine but his that sent me." If the teaching that he says was his Father's and not his own was actually his as well, how much more does the Holy Spirit proceed from him, just as he proceeds from the Father. The one from whom the Son receives his Godhead is the one from whom he can claim that the Holy Spirit proceeds.Tractatus in Iohannis Evangelium 99.7
Is receiving from the Son the same thing as proceeding from the Father? If we have to maintain that there is a difference between these two things, then at least we must admit that receiving from the Son is the same thing as receiving from the Father. The Lord declares: "He will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore... he will take what is mine and declare it to you." Whatever the Spirit receives, whether it is power, strength, or doctrine, the Son says will be taken from him. He lets it be understood that it will also be taken from the Father, because whatever the Father has is his.De Trinitate 8.20
John of Damascus still spoke of the Father as the source of the Godhead, and represents the Spirit as proceeding from the Father through the Logos. This is still a relic of Greek subordinationism. The East never adopted the 'filioque' of the Synod of Toledo. It was the rock of which the East and the West split.The History of Christian Doctrines (92)
The Cappadocians followed in the footsteps of Athanasius and vigorously maintained the homoousis of the Holy Spirit. Hilary of Poitiers in the West held that the Holy Spirit, as searching the deep things of God, could not be foreign to the divine essence.The History of Christian Doctrines (90)
As in sanctification you are made to err in this way from time to time with respect to the Holy Scripture, you may be led to doubt, and even for a while pursue wrong paths. But this will not be permanent. The work of grace is not left to yourself, but with a firm hand is guided by the Holy Spirit, who in no mechanical way, but by a richer spiritual experience, at length restores you to seeing again what is truly Divine.Sacred Theology, 559
What the Holy Spirit personally does, is to direct faith to the revealed knowledge of God, to explain and apply this revealed knowledge of God to the heart according to its particular need, and also to quicken in the soul a lively sense of truth; but along this individual way He does not impart an increase of content.Principles of Sacred Theology, 351
The presence of the Holy Spirit within us reminds us of our sonship, yes, our adult sonship. We are not infants, the very term means that we are grown sons and have reached full age. We are sons in the fullest sense and in the possession of all our faculties. The clear realization of this gets rid of the spirit of bondage again to fear.Spiritual Depression (172)
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2. J.C. Ryle (111)
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