The Development of the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s Authority in Historical Theology
Now we shall examine the five periods of historical theology from the perspective of the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s authority.
Patristic Theology
In the Patristic period (ca. 100–450), divine authority was understood in terms of Hebrew (i.e., Old Testament) understandings. The word exousiva occurs fifty times in the LXX, with the book of Daniel providing important background material for understanding the New Testament use of the word. Daniel’s usages imply dominion or power, and often refer to the whole world. The authority of the human world-rulers always originates from the supernatural realm; it is delegated by God, the Lord of history, whose rule is eternal (4:31), who installs and removes kings (2:21), and who can remove their dominion at any time (7:12). The “Son of Man” is invested with sovereign authority to rule all nations, and his dominion will never pass away (7:14). Old Testament authority was often conceived of in terms of Word and Spirit, two closely related “authorities” (i.e., Isa 59:21). Clement of Rome refers to the role of the Spirit in the inspiration of the Old Testament, saying “Look closely into the Scriptures, which are the true utterances of the Holy Ghost.”9 Clement also reported that the Apostles appointed bishops and deacons by the leading of the Spirit to govern the Church and that the gift of apostleship was given to continue the apostolic tradition into the patristic period (i.e., through inspired writings). According to Nielsen, Clement viewed the Spirit as “a reality connected with the . . . governmental structure of the Church.”10 Nielsen adds,
It is significant, is it not, that the Holy Spirit is interested enough in the tradition of ecclesiastical succession to help guarantee it. According to Clement, one must keep contact with apostolic tradition simply because the Apostles had unique authority.11
The institutional Church eventually tried to gain political authority through symbiotic union with the Empire. Athanasius said that Constantius had attempted to make the Church a “civil senate” by “mingling Roman sovereignty with the constitution of the Church” and had led the Arians to consider “the Holy Place a house of merchandise and a house of juridical business for themselves.”12 Constantine’s Rome not only began to guard against persecution but against the Empire’s intrusion into the Church. The Church was given free reign to develop its tradition for preserving its own integrity. After Constantine, however, a “hostile separateness” between Empire and Church emerged and eventually grew so strong that the question of the day became, “What has the Emperor to do with the Church?” It was the Church’s opportunity to search the Scripture and to draft a series of doctrinal precedents, developed only through a long series of controversies, upon which she could assert her own “authority.” Imperial authority, whether paraded by Church or State, found its flourishing soil upon these semi-alienated grounds.
It is within this context that the debate over the Holy Spirit’s divinity began to erupt—the Arian perspective often collaborating with the Empire and the orthodox “Fathers” at times finding themselves on the defensive, trying to protect the early Church from heresy.
Arius
Arius was a priest over the Church of Bacucalis in Alexandria (318) who systematically taught a subordinationism that thought of the Father alone as “God” and the Son and Spirit as “creatures.”13 The Arians held that the Spirit is really an angel, created by the Son, and one of the spirits ministering to God in heaven. Arianism is well known for denying the deity of the Son and particularly the idea of the Son being homoousious (“of one essence”) with the Father. According to Arius,
The essences [ousia] of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are separate in nature. They are estranged, unconnected, alien . . . and without participation in each other. . . . They are utterly dissimilar from each other with respect to both essences and glories to infinity.14
The “Arians” increased along with the Church’s imperial authority, replacing the Scriptures with numerous creeds of their own. Athanasius referred to them as “modern Jews and disciples of Caiaphas.”15 As legalists, the Arians sought to justify their doctrines with an appeal to the authority of synods. Morrison claims that, for the Arians,
Exegesis was therefore more important than the actual text. Theology and concepts of Church cohesion had shifted from repetition of scriptural passages to the right interpretation, from the text to the gloss. True believers were no longer simply those who upheld the Scriptures as true, but those who shared a particular understanding of the Scriptures’ inner meaning or implications.16
The various “Arian Councils” were actually the first ones to attempt to draft a formal theology of the Holy Spirit for the Church at large. Before that time extensive writings on the Spirit were made by Clement of Rome and Ignatius, but their teaching “seems to be solely personal and experimental, and only indirectly doctrinal,”17 serving only to confirm the presence of the Spirit in the Body of Christ. The Arian Councils (up until 360), however, expressed their theology of the work of the Spirit “in terms which were in thorough accord with the spiritual simplicity of the Holy Scripture.”18 Lest we discount the contribution of the Arians entirely, Swete acknowledges:
The Church owes a debt, it may be freely admitted, to the Arian leaders who thus persistently called attention to the teaching and sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit, at a time when there was grave risk of Christian thought being turned too entirely to theological controversy.19
Nevertheless, Arian and semi-Arian teaching on the mission and work of the Spirit made the doctrine of the Spirit’s nature conspicuous by its absence. It was “unsatisfactory and even misleading; professing to be scriptural, it represents only one side of the teaching of Scripture.”20 As a result, new controversy regarding the deity of the Spirit arose throughout Christendom. While the “trinitarian” orthodoxy of the third century was both modalist and subordinationist—shaped largely by Origen, who saw the distinctions of the three Persons mainly in terms of three levels of divine outreach to the world—Arius drafted a radical metaphysical discontinuity amongst the Persons. Arius’ denial of the Spirit’s divinity emerged from his reaction to this third-century modalism.21
The council of Nicea sought to correct such heresy through an articulation of homoousios, which was employed to define the nature of the triune God. The Council constitutes a decisive step in a general movement in the fourth-century from economic to immanent trinitarianism. Many Christians, however, were horrified at the conclusions of Nicea (conclusions which were essentially unclear regarding the specific nature of homoousios), and thought that the idea of the Father and Son as one identical ousia implied modalism. Arianism took advantage of such fears, leading many believers to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit is less than divine. In reaction, the Church Fathers gave considerable attention to the nature of the Spirit (particularly in relation to the Son and to the Father) in their writings (up to and even after the Council of Constantinople in 381).22
Athanasius
