I believe in the Holy Spirit

The Text

The creed turns. The first article confessed the Father and the world he made. The second confessed the Son and the saving acts he wrought. The third opens here with the Spirit and unfolds, from this single clause, the church and the communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection and the life everlasting. Everything in the third article hangs on this opening. To confess the Holy Spirit is to confess that God has not finished. The same God who created the world, the same God who became flesh, is the same God who is, at this very moment, present in the church and in the believer, applying the work of Christ, drawing the redeemed into the life of the Father. The third person of the Trinity is the one in whom the saving work of the first two becomes ours.

Translation Notes

Credo in. The creed uses the same opening verb here that it used in the first clause, and the same Greek construction (pisteuō eis) used for trust in the Father and trust in Jesus Christ. This parallel is not incidental; it is one of the basic grammatical reasons the church has held that the Spirit is fully God. To say credo in Spiritum Sanctum in the same register one says credo in Deum Patrem is to refuse the option that the Spirit is something less than divine — a force, a mode, an influence. The act of faith offered here is the same act of faith offered to the Father and the Son.

Spiritus, pneuma, rûaḥ. The three primary biblical languages of the doctrine all use the same word for breath, wind, and spirit. Genesis 2:7 — the Lord God breathed into the human nostrils the breath of life. Ezekiel 37 — breath came into the dry bones and they lived. John 3:8 — the wind blows where it wishes. Acts 2:2 — a sound came from heaven like a mighty rushing wind. The biblical doctrine of the Spirit is constantly bound up with the physical metaphors of breath and wind and air — the invisible, present, life-giving, uncontrollable. The English word spirit (from Latin spiritus) preserves the breath metaphor; the older English ghost (Germanic geist, cognate to gust) preserved it as well, until the word ghost drifted, in the modern English imagination, toward dead souls and Halloween.

Sanctum, hagion. Holy, set apart. The adjective distinguishes the Spirit of God from every other spirit — from the human spirit, from the spirits of the dead, from the spirit of the age, from the unclean spirits of which the Gospels regularly speak. The doctrine of discernment of spirits (1 Cor. 12:10; 1 John 4:1) is built on the assumption that there are many spirits and that the Holy Spirit must be distinguished from them; the adjective in this clause is the church’s permanent test.

The Apostles’ Creed simply says Credo in Spiritum Sanctum. It does not specify the procession of the Spirit, the relation between the Spirit and the Son, or the Spirit’s eternal mode of subsistence. Those questions — and especially the filioque question (whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son) — were taken up explicitly in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and have remained the central doctrinal difference between Eastern and Western Christendom ever since. The Apostles’ Creed itself does not adjudicate. It only confesses, with the same opening verb it used for the Father.

Historical Context

The pneumatological clauses of the early creeds developed more slowly than the christological ones. The first three centuries of Christian theology spent their energy on the Son’s relation to the Father; the Holy Spirit was confessed everywhere but treated with explicit doctrinal precision relatively rarely. The Council of Nicaea (325) gave only a brief confession of the Spirit (“And in the Holy Spirit”); the fuller pneumatology was supplied by the Council of Constantinople (381), which expanded the clause to “the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.”

The reason for the expansion was a fourth-century controversy. The Pneumatomachoi (Spirit-fighters), also called Macedonians after their alleged leader Macedonius of Constantinople, taught that the Spirit was a creature — perhaps the highest of the angels, perhaps a divine influence, but not fully God in the same sense as the Father. Basil of Caesarea’s treatise On the Holy Spirit (375) is the major patristic response; Gregory of Nazianzus’s Theological Orations expand it; the Constantinopolitan Creed codifies it. The Spirit is Lord, life-giving, worthy of the same worship as the Father and the Son, the agent of the prophets and (by extension) the inspirer of the entire Scripture.

The Apostles’ Creed, in its developed Latin form, did not adopt the Constantinopolitan expansions. It remained terse: Credo in Spiritum Sanctum. The terseness is not a deficiency; it is a property of the genre. The Apostles’ Creed is a baptismal interrogation, not a conciliar decree. The believer being baptized is asked to confess the Holy Spirit, not to adjudicate metaphysical disputes. The clause is small because it is enough — enough for the baptismal moment, enough for the daily life of faith.

The Latin Western tradition later added filioque (“and from the Son”) to its recitation of the Nicene Creed, beginning in Spain in the 6th–7th centuries and gradually moving into the rest of the Western liturgical tradition. The addition was not accompanied by ecumenical conciliar action and is one of the proximate causes of the Great Schism of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople. The Apostles’ Creed itself, however, never received a filioque expansion; the clause has remained, in all branches of Christendom, Credo in Spiritum Sanctum.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit (375); Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Orations 31 (“On the Holy Spirit”); Augustine, De Trinitate esp. Books V, XV; John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I.7–8

The patristic settlement on the Holy Spirit was hard-won and arrived late — only at Constantinople in 381, more than fifty years after Nicaea had settled the divinity of the Son. Basil’s On the Holy Spirit, written for the deacon Amphilochius against the Spirit-fighters, makes the central case: the Spirit shares the worship of the Father and the Son, and what is worshiped is God. Gregory of Nazianzus’s Theological Oration 31 supplies the famous formula: “This too is God.” Gregory observes that revelation was given in stages — first the Father in the Old Testament, then the Son in the Gospel, and now the Spirit in the church — and that the church’s progressive deepening into the Trinity is itself the work of the Spirit who is revealed.

Augustine’s De Trinitate, especially Book XV, develops the analogy that has shaped Western pneumatology ever since: the Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son, the bond of charity in which the persons of the Trinity are united. The analogy is not metaphysically careless; Augustine is careful to insist that the Spirit is fully a person, not a mere relation, but the relational character of the Spirit’s identity is the analogical key.

Strengths

• Anchors the divinity of the Spirit in the worship the church already offered to the Spirit in baptism, doxology, and prayer
• The Augustinian “Spirit as love between Father and Son” gives the doctrine doxological warmth and relational shape

Weaknesses

• The full doctrinal articulation of the Spirit took longer than the doctrine of the Son and has sometimes left Western theology in a state of partial pneumatological undernourishment
• Augustine’s relational analogy, when pressed beyond its limits, has been blamed (rightly or wrongly) for the Western drift toward filioque

Scholastic

Tradition: Anselm, On the Procession of the Holy Spirit; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 36–43

Aquinas treats the Holy Spirit in eight questions of the Summa — the procession (q. 36), the names of the Spirit (“Love,” “Gift”) (qq. 37–38), and the wider doctrine of the Trinity (qq. 39–43). The framework is Augustinian: the Spirit’s procession is the eternal act of love by which the Father and the Son are united. Aquinas defends the filioque on the basis of the relational character of the Trinity: the Spirit’s procession from both the Father and the Son is what distinguishes the Spirit’s person within the divine life.

Anselm’s On the Procession of the Holy Spirit is the major scholastic defense of filioque in the context of the post-Schism East-West debate. Both Aquinas and Anselm proceed from the conviction that the filioque is not a Western innovation but a clarification of what was already implicit in the conciliar tradition.

Strengths

• Holds the doctrine of the Spirit firmly within a doctrine of the Trinity, refusing to detach pneumatology from Trinitarian metaphysics
• The relational ontology — persons distinguished by their relations of origin — is theologically precise and remains useful

Weaknesses

• The scholastic synthesis cannot, on its own, resolve the filioque controversy and has often deepened it
• The intricate metaphysics of procession, while important, can leave the experiential and ecclesial dimensions of the doctrine underdeveloped

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Large Catechism, Third Article; Augsburg Confession, Article I

Luther’s treatment of the Spirit in the Large Catechism is concrete, ecclesial, and pastoral. The Spirit, Luther says, is the one who makes me a Christian — without whom no one would have heard a word of the gospel, much less believed it. The Spirit is the agent of the entire ordo salutis: calling through the Word, gathering the church, enlightening the believer, sanctifying and preserving in true faith. The third article of the creed is, for Luther, the article of the believer’s own membership in the Christian story.

The Lutheran tradition has maintained the filioque and the Western catholic doctrine of the Trinity in unaltered form. The distinctive contribution has been the strong link between Word and Spirit: the Spirit works through the Word and the sacraments, not apart from them. The “Word-and-Spirit” pairing has been a permanent Lutheran answer to every form of charismatic enthusiasm that would set the Spirit’s immediate inspiration against the ordinary means of grace.

Strengths

• Makes the doctrine of the Spirit pastorally immediate without losing the trinitarian foundation
• Holds Word and Spirit together in a way that protects against both rationalism and enthusiasm

Weaknesses

• The strong link to Word and sacrament has sometimes left Lutheran theology slow to articulate the Spirit’s work beyond those means
• The catechetical concision can underplay the Spirit’s role in vocation, social life, and the wider creation

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.1 (“The things which have been said about Christ profit us by the secret operation of the Spirit”); Heidelberg Catechism Q. 53; Westminster Confession Ch. 1.5

Calvin’s treatment of the Spirit is the most sustained pneumatology of the Reformation. The whole of Book III of the Institutes — the longest of the four books — is dedicated to the work of the Spirit in applying Christ’s saving work to the believer. The opening sentence of III.1 is the doctrinal hinge: the things which Christ accomplished in his flesh are useless to the believer until the Spirit makes them ours. The Reformed tradition has historically been called, with reason, the tradition of the Spirit: the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti (the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit) is the Reformed account of how the believer knows the Bible to be the Word of God; the Spirit’s work in regeneration is the Reformed account of how the soul comes to faith.

The Heidelberg Catechism puts the pastoral application beautifully (Q. 53): “What do you believe concerning the Holy Spirit?” A. “First, that he is true and coeternal God with the Father and the Son. Second, that he is given also to me, to make me by true faith share in Christ and all his benefits, that he comforts me and shall abide with me forever.”

Strengths

• The deepest pneumatology of any Reformation tradition; the work of the Spirit is named at every stage of the ordo salutis
• The internal testimony of the Spirit grounds Scripture’s authority in something more than ecclesial endorsement

Weaknesses

• The strong emphasis on the Spirit’s application of Christ’s work can occasionally underplay the Spirit’s wider work in creation and culture
• The internal-testimony doctrine, when isolated, can drift toward an individualism the Reformers themselves resisted

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Gregory Palamas, Triads; Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944); the entire Byzantine liturgical and iconographic tradition

The Eastern tradition has been the great voice of the Spirit’s distinct personhood within the Trinity. Against what Eastern theologians have perceived as a Western tendency to subordinate the Spirit’s identity to the Son’s (the filioque dispute is partly about whether the Spirit’s procession from both Father and Son makes the Spirit’s distinct personhood derivative), the Orthodox tradition has held the Spirit’s origin from the Father alone — ek tou Patros ekporeuomenon — as the doctrinal protection of the Spirit’s full personhood.

Gregory Palamas’s distinction between God’s essence (unknowable, transcendent) and God’s energies (the divine acts in which God is genuinely encountered) provides the framework for the Eastern doctrine of the Spirit’s work: the Spirit is the divine energy by which the believer is deified — participates in the divine life without becoming divine in essence. The doctrine of theōsis is, in its Eastern form, a profoundly pneumatological doctrine; the Spirit is the agent of the believer’s transformation into the divine likeness.

Strengths

• The strongest patristic defense of the Spirit’s distinct personhood and full divinity
• The theōsis framework gives the doctrine of the Spirit a transformative-experiential register

Weaknesses

• The Orthodox refusal of filioque can, in polemical forms, drift toward a reading of the Western tradition that exceeds the actual differences
• The essence/energies distinction has been criticized by Western theologians as introducing an unnecessary division within the divine life

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below for the full treatment.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 §12; Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (3 vols., 1979–80); Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life (1991); John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (1985)

The 20th century has been called the century of the pneumatological recovery. Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/1 §12 puts the Spirit at the center of the doctrine of revelation: the Spirit is the subjective reality of revelation, the one in whom revelation reaches the human subject. Yves Congar’s three-volume I Believe in the Holy Spirit (1979–80) is the major Catholic synthesis of patristic, scholastic, and modern pneumatology, written partly in conversation with the Charismatic Renewal. Jürgen Moltmann’s The Spirit of Life (1991) recovers the Spirit’s work in creation and in the public order. John Zizioulas’s Being as Communion (1985) articulates an Eastern pneumatology in conversation with Western theology and has been one of the most ecumenically influential pneumatological texts of the modern period.

Strengths

• Has decisively recovered the Spirit as a major doctrinal locus after centuries of Western underdevelopment
• The cross-tradition conversation has produced unprecedented ecumenical convergence on most pneumatological questions (the filioque alone remains formally outstanding)

Weaknesses

• The 20th-century pneumatological renaissance has sometimes produced enthusiasms that the older tradition would have called for discernment about
• Some modern recoveries lean toward making the Spirit so wide a category that the distinct biblical and creedal features of the doctrine blur

Evangelical / Pentecostal

Tradition: William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival (1906–9); Gordon Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (1994); Frank Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit (2006)

The Pentecostal and Charismatic movements of the 20th century have been the most consequential pneumatological development in the post-Reformation period. The Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles (1906–9), under the leadership of the African American holiness preacher William J. Seymour, gave rise to a global movement that has reshaped world Christianity. The classical Pentecostal teaching holds that baptism in the Holy Spirit is a distinct subsequent work of the Spirit after conversion, evidenced by speaking in tongues and other charismatic gifts. The Charismatic Renewal of the 1960s–70s extended these convictions into the historic mainline denominations. The Pentecostal tradition has had to do most of its theological work in mid-flight; works like Gordon Fee’s God’s Empowering Presence and Frank Macchia’s Baptized in the Spirit are the more careful theological articulations.

Strengths

• Has dramatically restored the church’s expectation of the Spirit’s active and surprising work
• The Pentecostal movement has been a major engine of global Christian growth, especially in the global South, and a recovery of dimensions of the doctrine that Western Christianity had often muted
• The Azusa Street origin, with its multiracial leadership, recovered a New Testament feature of the Spirit’s work (Acts 2:5–11) that the segregated American church had abandoned

Weaknesses

• The two-stage doctrine of Spirit baptism (subsequent to conversion, evidenced by tongues) has been hard to ground exegetically against the New Testament’s more varied vocabulary
• Some Pentecostal/Charismatic communities have made charismatic experience the test of authentic Christianity in ways that the New Testament itself does not (1 Cor. 12:29–30)
• The tradition’s looser relationship to creedal and confessional theology has occasionally produced doctrinal drift that the older Pentecostal leaders themselves would have resisted

Wesleyan Voice

The Wesleyan tradition has been, almost from its origin, a tradition of the Holy Spirit. The 18th-century evangelical revival under the Wesleys was conscious of itself as a pneumatological awakening; the language of the Spirit’s witness, the Spirit’s regenerating work, the Spirit’s sanctifying work, and the Spirit’s empowerment for ministry runs through Methodist preaching from the beginning. Wesley’s sermon “The Witness of the Spirit, I” (Sermon 10, 1746) and “The Witness of the Spirit, II” (Sermon 11, 1767) form the doctrinal heart of the Methodist account: the same Spirit who applies the work of Christ to the believer also bears witness in the believer’s heart to the reality of that work, and this direct inward testimony is the empirical center of the assurance of salvation.

What Wesley brought to the doctrine, beyond Reformation precedent, was the strong link between the Spirit’s witness and the believer’s actual transformation. The Spirit who testifies That you are a child of God (Rom. 8:16) is the Spirit who produces the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23) in the believer’s life. The witness without the fruit is suspect; the fruit without the witness is incomplete. Wesley’s doctrine of Christian perfection — that the believer can in this life be brought, by the Spirit, to love God with all the heart and one’s neighbor as oneself — is the high point of his pneumatology and the most distinctive Wesleyan claim within the wider Protestant world.

The Methodist tradition has also held the Spirit deeply liturgically. The annual Covenant Renewal Service, observed traditionally on the first Sunday of the new year, places the words “I am no longer my own, but yours” in the mouth of every Methodist Christian, and asks each to receive afresh the Spirit’s transforming work for the year ahead. Wesley adapted the service from earlier Puritan sources; it has become one of the great Methodist liturgical inheritances. The Covenant Prayer is, in its theological substance, a prayer of full surrender to the Spirit’s disposal: “Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed by you or laid aside for you, exalted for you, brought low for you. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.”

The Methodist instinct, at its best, holds together what other traditions have sometimes separated: the Spirit’s witness to the believer, the Spirit’s transformation of the believer, the Spirit’s gathering of the believer into the church, and the Spirit’s sending of the believer into the world. The four are one work of one Spirit. Methodism’s Pentecostal and Holiness offspring later developed individual strands of this fourfold work — Pentecostalism took up especially the Spirit’s empowerment for witness, the Holiness movement took up especially the Spirit’s sanctifying work — but the Wesleyan original holds them together.

Hymnody

The Wesleyan hymnody on the Holy Spirit is among the deepest and most-sung in English-language Christianity.

“Come, Holy Ghost, our hearts inspire” (Charles, 1739) is a translation and reworking of the 9th-century Latin Veni Creator Spiritus, joining the Methodist revival to a thousand years of catholic Pentecost hymnody. The hymn names the Spirit as the giver of the seven gifts and as the bond of the church’s unity.

“O Thou who camest from above” (Charles, 1762) — drawing on Leviticus 6:13 — is one of Charles Wesley’s most distinguished hymns and a sustained meditation on the Spirit’s sanctifying fire: “O Thou who camest from above / The pure celestial fire to impart, / Kindle a flame of sacred love / On the mean altar of my heart… Ready for all thy perfect will, / My acts of faith and love repeat, / Till death thy endless mercies seal, / And make my sacrifice complete.”

“Spirit of God, descend upon my heart” (George Croly, 19th c., not Wesleyan in origin but central to Methodist worship): “I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies, / No sudden rending of the veil of clay… But take the dimness of my soul away.” The hymn names the Spirit’s quiet, daily work without devaluing the more dramatic gifts.

“Breathe on me, Breath of God” (Edwin Hatch, 1878) makes the breath-and-Spirit metaphor a sung prayer: “Breathe on me, Breath of God, / Fill me with life anew, / That I may love what thou dost love, / And do what thou wouldst do.”

“Holy Spirit, Truth Divine” (Samuel Longfellow, 1864) is in the standard Methodist repertoire as a Pentecost hymn for occasions when the more vivid imagery of Veni Creator would be unwelcome.

“There’s a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place” (Doris Akers, 1962) is the modern Methodist gospel-hymn favorite, especially in African American Methodist congregations.

For Pentecost: the Wesleyan tradition draws on a Pan-Christian inheritance — Veni Sancte Spiritus in its various translations, “Come down, O love divine” (Bianco da Siena, 14th c., trans. Littledale), and the more recent “Sweet, sweet Spirit.” The Methodist hymnal has been consistently rich on this clause, perhaps richer than on any other.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Spirit is a degraded word in modern English. School spirit names a vague, organized enthusiasm — pep rallies, fight songs, the right team color on Friday. Spirit Halloween sells costumes that play with the very Christian doctrine of life-after-death by reducing it to children in white sheets. The spirits of New Year’s Eve — both the bottles and the parties — name a kind of cultural elevation that is partly real and largely commercial. To confess I believe in the Holy Spirit is to take a word that the surrounding culture has weakened almost beyond recognition and load it again with the freight it carries in Scripture.

The Holy Spirit is fully God. This is the first thing to say and the thing the surrounding culture is least prepared to hear. The Spirit is not a vibe. The Spirit is not an inspirational current. The Spirit is not the human spirit at its best. The Spirit is the third person of the Triune God — the same God who said Let there be light, the same God who took flesh in Mary’s womb, now present to the believer in unmediated immediacy. To confess the Spirit is to confess that God is here, not there; with us, not over us; for us, in the very act of becoming Christian.

Augustine’s analogy is the most pastorally useful image the Western tradition offers. The Father is the Lover. The Son is the Beloved. The Holy Spirit is the love between the Lover and the Beloved. Love is the right word for the third person, and the love between names what the Spirit eternally is before it names what the Spirit eternally does. To receive the Holy Spirit is to be drawn into the love that the Father has always had for the Son and the Son has always had for the Father. The Christian life is, on this account, the slow human habituation to that love.

This is also where the Spirit’s holiness becomes practical. To say Holy Spirit is to confess the criterion by which the church has always discerned spirits. There are many spirits at large in the world. There is the spirit of the age. There is the spirit of self-justification. There is the spirit of partisanship. There is the spirit of mere personality. The test by which the Spirit of God is distinguished from these is given in Galatians 5: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against the works of the flesh — sexual immorality, hatred, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, factions, envy — the Spirit’s presence is known by what the Spirit produces. A tree is known by its fruit. The Spirit is known by what the Spirit grows in the believer’s life.

This has a sober corollary the modern church must keep in front of itself. The Spirit cannot be invoked to underwrite what we wanted to do anyway. The most subtle and most dangerous temptation of Christian piety is to baptize one’s own preferences with the language of the Spirit’s leading. Wesley’s discipline on this point was severe and necessary: the Spirit’s leading is tested — by Scripture, by reason, by the fruit, by the discernment of the wider church. One cannot tell, alone, whether the spirit moving in oneself is the Holy Spirit. The fruit is visible from the outside; it is not a private experience. I can’t tell if I am loving by myself.

There is also a register of the Spirit’s work the modern Western church has tended to mute. The Spirit is mischievous and wild. The wind blows where it wishes (John 3:8); the same Spirit that descended at Pentecost as tongues of fire is the Spirit that drove Jesus into the wilderness (Mark 1:12); the same Spirit who spoke through the prophets is the Spirit who breaks the church’s settled patterns when those patterns have grown idolatrous. To confess the Holy Spirit is, among other things, to keep one’s hands loose enough on the controls that the Spirit can do what the Spirit will do. This is what Pentecostalism, at its best, has tried to recover. It is also what the older traditions, at their best, have tried to test. The Spirit’s freedom and the church’s discernment are partners, not enemies.

And finally, the Spirit transforms. The believer who confesses the Holy Spirit is not affirming a static doctrine. The believer is opening, in the moment of confession, to the refiner’s fire. To say I believe in the Holy Spirit is to consent — perhaps unwittingly, perhaps for the first time — to the transformation that the Spirit is presently and will continue to work. Wesley’s Covenant Prayer, prayed at the turn of every Methodist year, is the disciplined liturgical form of this consent: “I am no longer my own, but yours.” The Spirit is the agent of the no longer my own. The Christian life is the slow, painful, joyful, never-finished surrender to the love between the Father and the Son.

Confess the Holy Spirit, and brace for what comes.

Further Reading

• Genesis 1:2; 2:7 — the Spirit at creation and the breath of life
• Ezekiel 36:26–27; 37:1–14 — the new heart, the new spirit, and the valley of dry bones
• Joel 2:28–32 — the pouring out of the Spirit on all flesh, cited at Pentecost
• John 14–16 — the Paraclete discourses
• Acts 2 — Pentecost
• Romans 8 — the Spirit who indwells the believer
• 1 Corinthians 12–14 — gifts, body, and love
• Galatians 5:16–26 — the fruit of the Spirit
• Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit (375)
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration 31 (“On the Holy Spirit”)
• Augustine, De Trinitate esp. Books V, XV
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I.7–8
• The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) — the fuller pneumatological clause
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 36–43
• Martin Luther, Large Catechism, Third Article
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.1–2
• Heidelberg Catechism, Question 53
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, “The Witness of the Spirit, I” (Sermon 10, 1746); “The Witness of the Spirit, II” (Sermon 11, 1767); “The Witness of Our Own Spirit” (Sermon 12)
• John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766)
• The Wesley Covenant Prayer and the Service for the Renewal of the Covenant
• Charles Wesley, “O Thou who camest from above” (1762); “Come, Holy Ghost, our hearts inspire” (1739)
• Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1 §12
• Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (3 vols., 1979–80)
• Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life (Fortress, 1991)
• John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (St. Vladimir’s, 1985)
• Gordon Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (Hendrickson, 1994)