Doctrines

Holy Spirit

God and Divine Nature

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Holy Spirit." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/doctrines/holy-spirit.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Holy Spirit. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/doctrines/holy-spirit

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-holy-spirit,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Holy Spirit},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/doctrines/holy-spirit},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The Holy Spirit is the name Christian theology gives to God present and at work: brooding over the waters at creation, speaking by the prophets, descending at the baptism of Jesus, and poured out on the assembly at Pentecost. Trinitarian Christianity, the confession of the great majority of Christians, holds the Spirit to be the third person of the Trinity, a divine person and not a divine influence, of one being with the Father and the Son and worshipped together with them. That confession was not reached at once. The creed of Nicaea in 325 said only "and in the Holy Spirit", and the fuller article was written at Constantinople in 381 against those who denied the Spirit's full deity. Other bodies read the same scriptures otherwise, and the disagreements are recorded here as positions held by named traditions rather than as findings of the atlas.

Facts

Disputed

Point in Dispute

Whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son. The Latin addition of the Filioque to the creed divides the Western churches from the Orthodox East to this day. 5Christianity

Timothy Ware, writing as Bishop Kallistos Ware, in The Orthodox Church (Penguin, 1993), sets out the Filioque dispute over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son, examining the Latin creedal addition's ninth century Western origin against the unaltered Eastern creed. The Catholic West and most Protestant confessions hold the double procession, filioque; the Orthodox East holds procession from the Father alone and rejects the Western addition as both theologically wrong and uncanonically inserted into an ecumenical creed without an ecumenical council's consent. Each camp holds its own reading to be the faith of the undivided early church, and Ware records that a millennium of theological dialogue has narrowed the tone of the dispute but not closed the underlying question.

Position Profile

Earliest Formulation

The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 confesses the Holy Spirit as the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, and who spoke by the prophets. 3Christianity

Opposing Position

The fourth century Pneumatomachians denied the Spirit's full deity. Today Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians hold the Spirit to be God's active power rather than a person, and Oneness Pentecostals hold Father, Son and Spirit to be one person in three manifestations. 1Non-Trinitarian Christianity

Status

Status Within the Tradition

Defined and binding within this tradition 1

Belief

Defining Doctrinal Position

The Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, fully God, of one being with the Father and the Son, a person and not an impersonal force. 4Trinitarian Christianity

Origins

Held By

Christianity as a whole, which holds the Holy Spirit to be the third person of the Trinity, fully divine and co-equal with the Father and the Son; rejected in this fully divine, personal form by Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians and Oneness Pentecostals, who hold differing accounts of the Spirit's nature. 1

Historical Origin

The Hebrew Bible speaks of the ruach ha-kodesh, the spirit of holiness, as God's breath and presence active in creation and prophecy. Rabbinic Judaism treats it as the spirit of prophecy, not as a distinct person. 2Judaism

The Claim

Christian doctrine holds the Holy Spirit to be the third person of the Trinity, fully divine and co equal with the Father and the Son, active in creation, inspiration and the sanctification of believers. 1

Learn More

From Ruach to the Third Person

The word behind the doctrine is breath. The Hebrew ruach is the wind of God moving over the waters in the first lines of Genesis, the breath that makes the dry bones live in Ezekiel, and the spirit that comes upon judges and prophets so that they speak what they did not have in themselves to say. Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism spoke of the ruach ha-kodesh, the spirit of holiness, above all as the spirit of prophecy, and its departure was one way of describing the closing of the prophetic age.

The Christian scriptures take up the term at every turning point of their story: the Spirit overshadows Mary, descends like a dove at the baptism of Jesus, drives him into the wilderness, and is poured out on the assembly at Pentecost in wind and fire. John's gospel adds the most personal language of all, the Paraclete, the advocate and comforter who will remain when Jesus has gone. It took the church three centuries to decide what this amounted to.

The creed of Nicaea in 325 ended almost abruptly with "and in the Holy Spirit", and in the two generations that followed, those who denied the Spirit's full deity, remembered as the Pneumatomachians, the spirit-fighters, forced the question. Basil of Caesarea answered them without ever calling the Spirit God outright, arguing instead from the church's worship: the Spirit is glorified together with the Father and the Son. The council of Constantinople in 381 wrote exactly that caution into the creed still said today.

One Spirit, Many Confessions

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.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Belongs to Tradition

Anabaptism

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Anglicanism

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Baptist

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Calvinism (Reformed)

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Christianity

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Eastern Orthodoxy

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Lutheranism

Article I confesses the Holy Ghost as one of three persons of one divine essence, and Article V that the Holy Ghost is given through the word and the sacraments.

Source The Augsburg ConfessionPhilipp Melanchthon

Methodism

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including Methodism.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Oriental Orthodoxy

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Pentecostalism

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Presbyterianism

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Quakerism (Religious Society of Friends)

The Holy Spirit's direct, unmediated work in the believer is central to Inner Light theology and to unprogrammed Quaker worship.

Source Quaker Faith and Practice: The Book of Christian Discipline of the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in BritainBritain Yearly Meetingthe holders' own account

Roman Catholicism

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Seventh-day Adventism

The Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity is affirmed across Nicene Christianity, including this tradition.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Held Differently

Jehovah's Witnesses

Jehovah's Witnesses teach the Holy Spirit is God's active force, not a third divine person of the Trinity.

Source Jehovah's Witnesses: Continuity and ChangeGeorge D. Chryssides

Part Of

Trinity

In Trinitarian confession the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. The link records the doctrine's place in that framework; the non-Trinitarian readings are recorded on the doctrine itself.

Source The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of DoctrineJaroslav Pelikan

Related To

God (Abrahamic)

The Spirit is confessed in Christianity as God's own presence and power, of one being with the Father.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Jesus

The creeds confess the Son as conceived by the Holy Spirit. The Gospels place the Spirit's descent at the baptism of Jesus, and John has Jesus promise the Spirit as the Paraclete who will remain with the disciples.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Judaism

The ruach ha-kodesh of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature is the antecedent of the Christian term. In Judaism it is the spirit of prophecy, God's presence and inspiration, and not a person of a godhead.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

The Filioque

The Filioque dispute is a dispute about the procession of the Holy Spirit: whether from the Father alone, as the East confesses, or from the Father and the Son, as the West added to the creed.

Source The Orthodox ChurchTimothy Ware (Kallistos Ware)

Sources

1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition

F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005View the Source

2. Encyclopedia of Religion

Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source

3. Early Christian Creeds, 3rd edition

J. N. D. Kelly, Longman, 1972View the Source

4. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine

Jaroslav Pelikan, University of Chicago Press, 1971View the Source

5. The Orthodox Church

Timothy Ware (Kallistos Ware), Penguin Books, 1993View the Source