We are five years away from the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea that was designed to bring an end to what historians call the Arian controversy.
This was the controversy engendered by the denial of the deity of both the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit by an Alexandrian elder named Arius in the late 310s. Instead, the Council initiated a further 60 years of intense theological reflection and controversy. It led eventually to the promulgation of the Creed of Constantinople (381) in which the full divinity of Christ and His Spirit are confessed, and, implicitly, the formula – one God in three persons – taken as essential grammar for our speaking about God.
Confessing the Holy Spirit as God
In the final stage of this controversy (358–380) the focus was on the deity of the Holy Spirit. And it was the writings of the fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers – Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, their close friend Gregory of Nazianzus, and Nazianzen’s cousin Amphilochius of Iconium – that played a critical role in elucidating for the church the biblical data regarding the person and deity of the Holy Spirit. One of the arguments that they brought forth for the deity of the Holy Spirit was based on the fact that He is designated in the New Testament as holy.
This connection between the Spirit’s innate holiness and His deity is clearly brought out in a letter that Basil of Caesarea wrote in 373:
‘We glorify the Holy Spirit together with the Father and the Son, from the conviction that He is not separated from the divine nature: what is foreign by nature does not share in the same honours. …[For] the creature is sanctified; the Spirit sanctifies. Whether you name angels, archangels, or all the heavenly powers, they receive their sanctification through the Spirit, but the Spirit has His holiness by nature, not as received by grace, but essentially His. From this, He has received the distinctive name of Holy. What then is by nature holy, as the Father is by nature holy and the Son by nature holy, we do not allow to be separated and severed from the divine and blessed Trinity’ (Letter 159.2).
At the heart of this argument for the divine transcendence of the Spirit is the fact that He sanctifies others, for only that which is holy by nature – and thus divine – can sanctify another.
Holiness: a divine attribute
Basil rightly understood that innate holiness is a divine quality. In a study of the concept of holiness in the ancient world, Hannah K. Harrington maintains that, for pre-Christian and first-century Judaism, holiness describes God more closely than any other designation. His very essence is holiness. One could say that holiness is God’s ‘innermost reality’ to which all of His attributes are related.
To describe God as holy was, for these Jews, to speak of His transcendent perfection and, in Harrington’s words, to speak of His ‘exalted, powerful otherness that brings people to both admire and fear Him’.
When the New Testament, therefore, describes the Spirit of God as the ‘Holy Spirit’ (1 Thess. 4:8), ‘the Spirit, the Holy One’ (Eph. 4:30), or as Romans 1:4 puts it, ‘the Spirit of holiness’, a profound statement is being made about the nature of the Spirit. Since innate holiness belongs only to God, to call the Spirit ‘holy’ implies that He is holy by nature and must be divine.
This is quite a contrast to inter-testamental Judaism, which rarely uses the epithet of holy for the Spirit. And when the term ‘Holy Spirit’ is found in inter-testamental Judaism it refers more often than not to a ‘God-given disposition to holiness’ and principle of obedience, and not the Spirit of God. Harrington suggests, rightly in the mind of this author, that the reason why ‘the Rabbis do not refer overly much to the Holy Spirit’ is due to the Spirit’s ‘strong personification as a separate divine being in early Christianity’.
While there is no extended discussion in the New Testament of the Spirit’s nature, the arguments of the Cappadocian Fathers for the full divinity of the Holy Spirit’s person rightly interpreted and intuited what is presupposed throughout the whole of the New Testament: the Spirit is fully God and therefore worthy of divine honours.
