who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified

The Text

The clause is the dogmatic climax of the catholic confession of the Spirit’s divinity. The previous clauses named the Spirit Lord and giver of life (clause 16) and confessed his eternal procession (clause 17). The present clause draws the dogmatic conclusion: because the Spirit is Lord and giver of life and eternally of the Father, he is co-worshiped and co-glorified with the Father and the Son. The argument is not stated as an argument; it is confessed as a doxology. But the logic is the logic of the whole fourth-century pneumatological settlement: worship is owed to God alone; the church worships the Spirit; therefore the Spirit is God.

The clause encodes the decisive patristic argument against the Pneumatomachi (the Spirit-fighters of the mid-fourth century, who held the Spirit to be a creature). Basil of Caesarea’s On the Holy Spirit (c. 375) was occasioned precisely by a dispute over a doxology — whether the proper form was Glory to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit (which could be read as subordinating the Spirit) or Glory to the Father, with the Son, with the Holy Spirit (which confesses the Spirit’s co-equal divinity). Basil’s treatise defended the second form, and the present credal clause is, in effect, the conciliar ratification of Basil’s doxological argument: the Spirit is co-worshiped (συμπροσκυνούμενον) and co-glorified (συνδοξαζόμενον) — worshiped and glorified by the same act and with the same worship as the Father and the Son.

The double co- (συν- / con- / together) is the dogmatic heart of the clause. The Pneumatomachi could grant the Spirit honor; what they could not grant was co-worship, because co-worship is the worship owed to God alone. The creed therefore confesses the Spirit’s full divinity not by a metaphysical formula but by a liturgical fact: the church worships the Spirit together with the Father and the Son, and this co-worship is itself the confession that the Spirit is God.

Translation Notes

Symproskynoumenon / simul adoratur — is worshipped [together]. The verb of divine worship, with the decisive co- prefix. προσκυνέω is the strong biblical word for the prostration-worship owed to God alone; the temptation Christ refuses in the wilderness is precisely an offer of προσκύνησις (Matt. 4:9–10), and the worship the angel refuses in Revelation (19:10; 22:9) is προσκύνησις, because it belongs to God. The συν- prefix makes the dogmatic claim: the Spirit is not worshiped after or below or through the Father and the Son, but together with them, in the one act of worship that the church offers to the one God. The 1973 ICEL and 2010 Roman Missal render this adored; the broader English liturgical tradition (ICET, ELLC, BCP, UMH) renders it worshipped. The substance is identical; adored is closer to the technical Latin adoratur (the worship of latria, owed to God alone, as distinct from the dulia or veneration that may be offered to creatures), and worshipped is the broader and more widely intelligible English.

Syndoxazomenon / conglorificatur — is glorified [together]. The verb of ascribing divine glory, with the decisive co- prefix. δόξα (glory) is the radiant majesty proper to God; the prophetic principle is absolute — my glory I give to no other (Isa. 42:8; 48:11). To co-glorify the Spirit is therefore to confess that the Spirit is not an other to whom God’s glory is improperly given, but God himself, to whom the divine glory properly belongs. The argument is the same as Athanasius’s argument for the Son’s divinity in clause 7 (the church worships Christ; the church does not worship a creature; therefore Christ is not a creature) — here applied to the Spirit.

Syn Patri kai Hyiō / cum Patre et Filio — with the Father and the Son. The phrase that names the trinitarian co-equality. The Spirit is worshiped and glorified with — not under, not after, not by way of — the Father and the Son. The clause confesses that the worship of the church is one worship offered to the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; there are not three worships, and there is not one worship of the Father-and-Son to which the Spirit is appended, but one worship of the Triune God in which the Spirit is co-equally adored.

Historical Context

The clause is the conciliar settlement of the Pneumatomachian controversy. After Nicaea (325) had settled the Son’s divinity, the divinity of the Spirit became the next contested question. The Pneumatomachi (also called Macedonians, after Macedonius of Constantinople, though the historical connection is uncertain) accepted the Nicene Christology but held the Spirit to be a creature — a ministering spirit, the highest of the creatures, but not God, and therefore not to be co-worshiped.

The decisive theological work was done by the Cappadocians in the 370s. Basil of Caesarea’s On the Holy Spirit (c. 375) is the foundational text. Basil’s treatise arose from a concrete liturgical dispute: Basil had used, in worship, the doxology Glory to the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit (rather than the more common Glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit), and had been criticized for innovation. Basil’s defense became the comprehensive patristic argument for the Spirit’s full divinity. His method is significant: rather than arguing from a metaphysical formula, Basil argues from the church’s practice — from baptism (the Spirit is named co-equally in the baptismal formula, Matt. 28:19), from the doxology, from the works the Spirit does that only God can do. The Spirit’s divinity is read off the church’s worship.

Notably, Basil’s treatise displays a certain reticence: he defends the Spirit’s full divinity and co-worship at length but does not, in On the Holy Spirit, ever simply write the sentence the Spirit is God or apply the term homoousios to the Spirit in so many words — a pastoral economy (oikonomia) intended to win the hesitant rather than to force a confrontation. Gregory of Nazianzus, by contrast, in Theological Oration V (c. 380), is direct: Is the Spirit God? Certainly. Is he consubstantial? Yes, if he is God. The two Cappadocian approaches — Basil’s pastoral reticence and Gregory’s dogmatic directness — together represent the patristic settlement.

The Council of Constantinople (381) ratified the settlement by adding clauses 16–19 to the Nicene Creed. The present clause (co-worshiped and co-glorified with the Father and the Son) is the conciliar form of Basil’s doxological argument. Notably, the council also exercised a measure of Basil’s reticence: the creed does not say the Spirit is homoousios with the Father in the explicit terms used of the Son in clause 8. It confesses the Spirit’s full divinity doxologically — by confessing co-worship and co-glorification — rather than by the explicit homoousios. The dogmatic substance is identical (co-worship is owed only to God; therefore the co-worshiped Spirit is God), but the conciliar form preserved Basil’s pastoral economy.

The clause has subsequently been the dogmatic foundation of the church’s entire trinitarian worship. The doxologies of the church — the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in excelsis, the trinitarian conclusions of the collects and the eucharistic prayers, the trinitarian hymnody — are all, in effect, performances of the present clause. The church does not merely believe that the Spirit is God; it worships the Spirit as God, and the worship is the lived confession.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit; Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration V; Gregory of Nyssa, On the Holy Spirit, Against Macedonians; Athanasius, Letters to Serapion; Didymus the Blind, On the Holy Spirit; Augustine, On the Trinity

The patristic settlement is the dogmatic foundation. Athanasius’s Letters to Serapion (c. 357–360) established the basic argument: the Spirit is in the divine triad, not among the creatures; the baptismal formula and the church’s worship presuppose his full divinity; the Spirit divinizes, and only God can divinize, therefore the Spirit is God.

Basil’s On the Holy Spirit is the comprehensive treatment, and its method — argument from the church’s worship — is the decisive patristic move that the present clause encodes. Basil’s careful distinction of the prepositions (the Spirit is the one in whom worship is offered and with whom the Father and Son are glorified) refutes the Pneumatomachian attempt to read a subordinationist hierarchy off the liturgical prepositions.

Gregory of Nyssa’s Against the Macedonians (On the Holy Spirit) presses the argument to its conclusion: the Spirit shares the divine operations (he sanctifies, gives life, divinizes, searches the depths of God); shared operations imply shared nature; therefore the Spirit shares the divine nature and is co-worshiped as God.

Augustine’s On the Trinity integrates the Western articulation: the Spirit, as the love and gift of the Father and the Son, is co-worshiped because he is co-equal in the one divine being; the Western love-bond pneumatology does not weaken the co-worship but grounds it in the unity of the divine being.

Strengths

• The patristic argument from worship is the permanent dogmatic foundation
• Basil’s On the Holy Spirit is one of the great theological treatises of the church
• The argument the Spirit divinizes, only God divinizes, therefore the Spirit is God is permanently valuable
• Basil’s pastoral economy (reticence to win the hesitant) is a model of doctrinal pastoral wisdom

Weaknesses

• The polemical context (Pneumatomachian) occasionally produced sharper articulations than the catholic substance required
• The conciliar reticence (no explicit homoousios for the Spirit) has occasionally been exploited by later subordinationist readings, requiring the church to make explicit what the council left doxologically implicit

Scholastic

Tradition: Peter Lombard, Sentences I; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.36–43, II-II.81–84 (on latria, the worship owed to God); Bonaventure, Sentences I

The scholastic tradition received the clause and articulated it under the doctrine of latria — the worship owed to God alone, distinct from the dulia (veneration) that may be offered to saints and the hyperdulia offered, in the Roman Catholic tradition, to the Virgin. Aquinas’s treatment in ST II-II.81–84 articulates the precise theology of adoratio: worship in the strict sense (latria) is owed to God alone, and to offer it to a creature is idolatry. The Spirit receives latria; therefore the Spirit is God. The scholastic precision on the distinction of latria and dulia gives the credal co-worship its mature dogmatic articulation: the Spirit is not venerated (as a creature might be) but adored (as God alone is).

Aquinas’s treatment of the divine missions (ST I.43) integrates the worship of the Spirit with the doctrine of the Spirit’s mission: the Spirit who is sent into the believer’s heart is the same Spirit who is co-adored in the church’s worship, and the believer’s prayer in the Spirit is itself a participation in the trinitarian life that the worship confesses.

Strengths

• The scholastic distinction of latria and dulia gives the co-worship its precise dogmatic form
• Aquinas’s integration of the Spirit’s worship with the Spirit’s mission is permanently valuable
• The scholastic precision protects the clause against every subordinationist softening

Weaknesses

• The Aristotelian-essence vocabulary requires translation
• The latria/dulia/hyperdulia schema has been a point of Reformation and ecumenical dispute (the Reformed tradition in particular has been wary of distinctions that, in practice, blur the worship owed to God alone)

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Large Catechism on the Third Article; Augsburg Confession I; Formula of Concord VIII; the Lutheran chorale tradition

The Lutheran tradition has held the clause in catholic form, with characteristic integration into the church’s sung worship. Luther’s pneumatology (see [[i-believe-in-the-holy-spirit]]) confesses the Spirit’s full divinity, and the Lutheran chorale tradition is, in effect, a vast sung performance of the present clause: the Spirit is co-worshiped and co-glorified in the church’s hymnody.

The Lutheran integration with the doctrine of the means of grace gives the co-worship a particular concreteness: the Spirit who is co-worshiped is the Spirit who comes through the word and the sacraments; the church’s worship of the Spirit is not the worship of an absent or abstract divine power but of the present-tense God who is, in the very act of worship, at work through the means of grace creating the faith by which he is worshiped.

Strengths

• The Lutheran chorale tradition is one of the great sung performances of the clause
• The integration with the means of grace gives the co-worship concrete location
• The catechetical tradition holds the dogmatic substance with pastoral clarity

Weaknesses

• The Lutheran tradition has occasionally been thinner on the doctrine of the Spirit’s co-worship as a distinct theme, subsuming it under the general doctrine of the Trinity
• Some Lutheran scholastic articulations pressed the doctrine into refinements the New Testament does not warrant

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes I.13; Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 53; Belgic Confession Article 11; Westminster Confession Ch. 2, 21; the Reformed regulative principle of worship

The Reformed tradition has held the clause in catholic form, with characteristic seriousness about the worship of the Spirit as a test of the doctrine of the Spirit. Calvin’s Institutes I.13.14–15 presses the argument: the Spirit is invoked, worshiped, and glorified in Scripture and in the church’s practice; therefore the Spirit is God; to deny the Spirit’s divinity is to make the church’s worship idolatrous. The Reformed regulative principle of worship (that the church may worship God only as God has commanded, not by human invention) gives the clause a particular Reformed weight: if the Spirit may be co-worshiped, it can only be because the Spirit is God, for the Reformed conscience refuses to offer divine worship to any creature.

The Heidelberg Catechism Q. 53 integrates the dogmatic substance with the personal application: the Spirit is true and co-eternal God with the Father and the Son, and is given to me to make me a partaker of Christ. The co-worship of the Spirit is grounded in the Spirit’s co-equal divinity and issues in the believer’s personal communion with the Spirit.

Strengths

• The Reformed regulative principle gives the co-worship a particular doctrinal seriousness
• Calvin’s argument (deny the Spirit’s divinity and the church’s worship becomes idolatry) is permanently valuable
• The Heidelberg Catechism integrates dogmatic substance and personal application

Weaknesses

• The Reformed wariness of liturgical elaboration has occasionally produced a thinner doxological-pneumatological practice than the catholic tradition’s
• Some Reformed scholasticism pressed the doctrine into refinement of the ordo

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: the Cappadocians; the Byzantine liturgical tradition; Gregory Palamas; the iconographic tradition; modern: Lossky, Bulgakov, Zizioulas, Stăniloae

The Eastern tradition has held the clause as central, and the Eastern liturgy is, in many ways, the fullest sung performance of it. The Byzantine Divine Liturgy is saturated with trinitarian doxology in which the Spirit is co-worshiped and co-glorified; the entry hymn, the trisagion, the cherubic hymn, the anaphora, and the dismissal all confess the co-equal worship of the Spirit. The Eastern emphasis on the epiclesis (the invocation of the Spirit to consecrate the eucharistic gifts) is the liturgical heart of the Eastern pneumatology: the Spirit who is co-worshiped is the Spirit who is invoked to make the gifts the body and blood of Christ.

The Eastern tradition holds the present clause as the dogmatic counterpart of its pneumatology of theōsis: the Spirit who is co-worshiped is the Spirit by whom the believer is deified, raised into participation in the divine life. The co-worship is not a remote dogmatic affirmation but the lived foundation of the Eastern Christian’s actual experience of God.

The Eastern liturgical preservation of Basil’s exact doxological forms (the Liturgy of St Basil is still celebrated on the great fasts and feasts) means that the Eastern church, every time it celebrates Basil’s liturgy, performs the very doxology over which the Pneumatomachian controversy was fought.

Strengths

• The Eastern liturgy is the fullest sung performance of the clause
• The integration with the epiclesis and with theōsis gives the co-worship its proper depth
• The liturgical preservation of Basil’s doxological forms is a living link to the patristic settlement
• The Eastern tradition has held the doctrine of the Spirit with permanent seriousness

Weaknesses

• The detailed liturgical-theological vocabulary requires translation for cultures unfamiliar with the tradition
• Some modern Russian sophiology has pressed the pneumatology in directions the catholic tradition has not received

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: the ecumenical liturgical convergence (ELLC); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1; Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life; Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self; Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology; the global Pentecostal-charismatic worship renewal

The modern recovery of trinitarian theology and the global renewal of pneumatological worship have both restored the present clause to ecumenical centrality. Geoffrey Wainwright’s Doxology (1980) develops the principle the clause encodes — lex orandi, lex credendi, the law of prayer is the law of belief — at book length: the church’s worship is the primary theology, and the church’s co-worship of the Spirit is the lived confession of the Spirit’s divinity, prior to and foundational for any dogmatic formula.

Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality, and the Self (2013) presses the experiential priority of the Spirit in the praying life: in the actual experience of trinitarian prayer, the Spirit is first — it is the Spirit who prays in us (Rom. 8:26), drawing us into the Son’s relation to the Father — even though the Spirit is third in the dogmatic order. The clause’s co-worship is therefore not a flat equality appended after the fact but the recognition that the Spirit is the very ground of the church’s capacity to worship at all.

The global Pentecostal-charismatic renewal has restored, in much of world Christianity, an intense and immediate co-worship of the Spirit; the ecumenical conversation between Pentecostal-charismatic worship and the historic doxological tradition has been one of the major liturgical-theological developments of the period.

Strengths

• Wainwright’s Doxology gives the lex orandi principle its mature modern articulation
• Coakley’s recovery of the Spirit’s experiential-prayer priority is permanently valuable
• The Pentecostal-charismatic renewal has restored an immediate co-worship of the Spirit
• The ecumenical liturgical convergence has restored the clause to common confession

Weaknesses

• Some modern reconstructions have so emphasized the Spirit’s experiential priority that the dogmatic order has been obscured
• Some popular charismatic worship has pressed the immediacy of the Spirit in directions that the catholic dogmatic substance must discipline

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of the co-worship of the Spirit is unambiguous and is, in fact, the living center of the Methodist tradition’s sung life. The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784), Article IV, confesses the Spirit as of one substance, majesty, and glory with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God — the dogmatic substance of the present clause stated in the Anglican-Methodist form. The phrase of one… glory with the Father and the Son is precisely the credal co-glorified.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the degree to which the co-worship of the Spirit is carried not primarily in dogmatic formulae but in the hymnody. The Wesleyan tradition is, more than almost any other, a sung tradition, and the Wesleyan hymnody is saturated with the co-worship of the Spirit. Charles Wesley’s hymns address the Spirit directly, in the second person, as God — which is, in the precise sense of the present clause, an act of co-worship. Spirit of faith, come down, / reveal the things of God, / and make to us the Godhead known, / and witness with the blood. To pray come down to the Spirit is to offer the Spirit the invocation owed to God; the hymn is the clause performed.

The Wesleyan integration of the co-worship of the Spirit with the doctrine of assurance is characteristic. The witness of the Spirit (Sermons 10–11; see [[i-believe-in-the-holy-spirit]]) is the inward testimony by which the Spirit assures the believer of adoption; and the believer’s response to that testimony is worship — the grateful adoration of the God who has, by his own Spirit, given the assurance of his love. The co-worship of the Spirit is therefore not a dogmatic appendix but the affective heart of the Methodist religious experience: the Spirit who assures is the Spirit who is adored.

Wesley’s Catholic Spirit (Sermon 39) bears on the clause as well: the co-worship of the Spirit is among the essentials of the catholic faith, the things on which all true Christians are agreed, and therefore among the things that should unite rather than divide. The Wesleyan posture is to hold the dogmatic substance with full catholic firmness while letting the sung co-worship of the Spirit be the unifying practice it has always been across the divided traditions.

Charles Wesley’s hymnody confesses the clause on nearly every page of the trinitarian and Pentecost repertoire. Maker, in whom we live, / in whom we are and move, / the glory, power, and praise receive / for thy creating love — and then, stanza by stanza, the same glory, power, and praise to the Son and to the Spirit, closing: Eternal, Triune Lord! / let all the hosts above, / let all the sons of men, record / and dwell upon thy love. The hymn is a four-stanza performance of trinitarian co-worship, with the Spirit’s stanza confessing exactly what the present clause confesses.

The pastoral Wesleyan posture: confess the co-worship and co-glorification of the Spirit without modification; receive it as among the catholic essentials that unite rather than divide; carry it primarily in the church’s sung life, where the Wesleyan tradition has always carried it best; integrate it with the doctrine of assurance, so that the Spirit who is adored is known as the Spirit who has witnessed to the believer’s adoption; and let the parish’s actual worship be, week by week, the lived confession that the Spirit is God.

Hymnody

The hymnody on this clause is the trinitarian-doxological repertoire and the direct-address Pentecost hymnody — the hymns in which the Spirit is worshiped, not merely described.

“Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty” (Reginald Heber, 1826) is the supreme English trinitarian-doxological hymn: Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee, / casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea; / … God in three persons, blessèd Trinity. The hymn is co-worship in the strict sense — adoration offered to the Triune God.

“Come, thou Almighty King” (anon., c. 1757) is the great trinitarian-invocation hymn, with its third stanza a direct co-worship of the Spirit: Come, holy Comforter, / thy sacred witness bear / in this glad hour: / thou who almighty art, / now rule in every heart, / and ne’er from us depart, / Spirit of power.

“Holy God, we praise thy name” (Grosser Gott; trans. Walworth, 1858; based on the Te Deum) confesses the trinitarian co-glorification: Holy Father, Holy Son, / Holy Spirit, three we name thee, / while in essence only one, / undivided God we claim thee.

“Spirit of faith, come down” (Charles Wesley, 1746) is the great Wesleyan direct-address co-worship of the Spirit: Spirit of faith, come down, / reveal the things of God.

“Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire” (Veni, Creator Spiritus; trans. Cosin, 1627) is the great Latin co-invocation of the Spirit, closing with the trinitarian doxology: Teach us to know the Father, Son, / and thee, of both, to be but one; / that through the ages all along / this may be our endless song.

“Father, we praise thee” (Nocte surgentes; trans. Dearmer, 1906) closes with co-worship: Monarch of all things, fit us for thy mansions; / banish our weakness, health and wholeness sending; / bring us to heaven, where thy saints united / joy without ending.

“All glory be to God on high” (Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr, Nikolaus Decius, 1525; the German Gloria) confesses the co-glorification of the Spirit in the Reformation chorale tradition.

“Holy Spirit, ever dwelling” (Timothy Rees, 1922) is a major modern hymn of direct co-worship: Holy Spirit, ever dwelling / in the holiest realms of light.

“Praise the Spirit in creation” (Michael Hewlett, 1973) is a substantial modern hymn of the Spirit’s co-glorification across the economy.

The Gloria Patri (Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit) is the church’s universal, constant co-glorification — sung at the close of psalms and canticles in the daily office and at countless points in the liturgy. Every recitation of the Gloria Patri is a performance of the present clause: the Spirit is glorified with the Father and the Son, in the one ascription of glory to the Triune God.

For the liturgical year: this clause is the dogmatic substance of Trinity Sunday and of Pentecost, and it is performed every Sunday in the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in excelsis, the trinitarian collects, and the trinitarian conclusions of the eucharistic prayers.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Three pastoral tasks attach to this clause.

The first is teaching the parish that they already obey this clause every Sunday. Most parishioners do not realize that the Gloria Patri — Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit — is the present clause performed; that the trinitarian conclusion of every collect (through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God) is the present clause performed; that every hymn addressed to the Spirit is the present clause performed. The pastor’s task is to make the parish aware that they have been confessing the full divinity of the Spirit, in the strongest possible form — by worshiping him — their entire lives. The doctrine is not a remote fourth-century formula; it is what the parish does every week.

The second is teaching the logic of the patristic argument. The clause encodes one of the most elegant arguments in the history of doctrine: worship is owed to God alone; the church worships the Spirit; therefore the Spirit is God. The pastor’s task is to make this argument available to the parish, because it is also the argument that protects the church from every reduction of the Spirit to a force, an influence, an energy, or a metaphor. The Spirit is not the power of God in the sense of an impersonal divine electricity; the Spirit is the Lord who is co-worshiped — and one does not worship a force. The argument from worship is the parish’s protection against the perennial temptation to depersonalize the Spirit.

The third is restoring the direct worship of the Spirit. Much Western Protestant piety addresses prayer to the Father (sometimes to the Son) but rarely to the Spirit; the Spirit is the one by whom we pray rather than the one to whom we pray. The catholic tradition has always held both: the Spirit is the one in whom we pray and the one whom we worship. The great prayers Veni, Creator Spiritus and Veni Sancte Spiritus are direct invocations of the Spirit; the Wesleyan hymnody addresses the Spirit directly; the present clause warrants and commends this direct co-worship. The pastor’s task is to restore, where it has been lost, the parish’s confidence that the Spirit may be addressed, invoked, adored — that the Spirit is not merely the atmosphere of prayer but its object.

For the preacher: this clause is the proper subject of the Trinity Sunday sermon’s pneumatological portion, and of any Pentecost sermon that moves from the Spirit’s work to the Spirit’s worth. The homiletical movement the clause commends is from what the Spirit does to who the Spirit is — and the bridge between them is worship: the church worships the Spirit, and therefore the Spirit is God.

For the liturgist: the constant, almost invisible performances of this clause — the Gloria Patri, the trinitarian collect-endings, the doxological hymn-stanzas — are among the church’s richest catechetical resources, precisely because they teach by repetition below the level of conscious instruction. The liturgist who ensures that the parish’s sung and spoken worship is consistently and fully trinitarian is teaching the doctrine of the Spirit’s divinity more effectively than any sermon.

Further Reading

• Deuteronomy 6:13 — you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve
• Isaiah 42:8; 48:11 — my glory I give to no other
• Matthew 4:9–10 — Christ refuses the worship owed to God alone
• Matthew 28:19 — the trinitarian baptismal formula
• John 4:23–24 — true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth
• Acts 5:3–4 — lying to the Spirit is lying to God
• Romans 8:26–27 — the Spirit himself intercedes
• 1 Corinthians 2:10–11 — the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God
• 1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19 — the believer as the temple of the Spirit
• 2 Corinthians 3:17–18 — the Lord is the Spirit
• 2 Corinthians 13:14 — the trinitarian benediction
• Philippians 3:3 — we… who worship in the Spirit of God
• Revelation 4–5 — the worship of heaven
• Revelation 19:10; 22:9 — worship belongs to God alone
• Athanasius, Letters to Serapion
• Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration V
• Gregory of Nyssa, Against the Macedonians (On the Holy Spirit)
• Didymus the Blind, On the Holy Spirit
• Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures XVI–XVII
• Augustine, On the Trinity I, XV
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I.8
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.36–43; II-II.81–84
• Luther, Large Catechism on the Third Article
• Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.13
• Heidelberg Catechism Q. 53
• Belgic Confession Article 11
• Westminster Confession of Faith Chapters 2, 21
• Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article IV
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermons 10, 11, 39
• Charles Wesley, “Spirit of faith, come down,” “Maker, in whom we live,” “Come, thou Almighty King”
• Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (St Vladimir’s, 1976)
• Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology (Oxford, 1980)
• Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (3 vols., 1979–80)
• Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life (Fortress, 1992)
• Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (Cambridge, 2013)
• John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (St Vladimir’s, 1985)