No article of the creed is confessed in more different ways than the third. Trinitarian Christianity, which is Catholic, Orthodox and the great majority of Protestant confession, holds the Spirit to be a divine person, fully God, of one being with the Father and the Son. Within that shared confession sits the oldest unhealed dispute in Christian history: the West added "and the Son", Filioque in Latin, to the clause on the Spirit's procession, and the East has never accepted either the theology or the right of one part of the church to amend a conciliar creed. The line runs through the middle of the schism of 1054 and remains a formal point of division.
Outside the Trinitarian consensus the readings multiply. Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians hold the Spirit to be God's active force, power rather than person, and read the personal language of scripture as figure. Oneness Pentecostals hold that Father, Son and Spirit are one divine person in three manifestations. The Latter Day Saint movement confesses the Holy Ghost as a distinct personage of spirit within a Godhead of three separate beings. And Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, now a large fraction of the world church, has made the experience of the Spirit, baptism in the Spirit, healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues, the living centre of congregational life, which is less a new doctrine of the Spirit than a new insistence on the old one.