Having dealt with the topic of Christ's achievement of a saved situation, we now go on to deal with how individuals do share in that situation. This work is normally attributed to the Spirit. So it is that part of theology that deals with the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

Who or what is the Holy Spirit?

This may seem an odd question to ask, since traditional Christianity does not view the Spirit as a ‘what’. However, the most prominent biblical picture of the Spirit (if one includes both the Old and the New Testament) is of a power that does not have a personality of its own but is simply God in action. Yet the New Testament does also give us a picture of the Spirit as a distinct person and in post-biblical times the idea developed that the Spirit was the third of three persons making up the Trinity. Do we have to choose then between the Spirit being a power or a person? No. The Spirit is both. But the way in which the Spirit is both is very interesting and illuminating – if one follows the western idea that the Spirit is God's love. For we are then able to say that the Spirit is a person whose very identity is constituted by being the power of God's love, by being the way in which Father and Son are united to each other by the power of their love for each other. But this is to run ahead of ourselves. Let us first look briefly at the biblical data and then go on to examine such post-biblical ideas.

Biblical data

The word ‘spirit’ has as its root meaning ‘wind’ or ‘breath’. In Old Testament times, wind or breath were seen as mysterious things, filled with power (wind) and life (breath). It is not surprising then that God's mysterious, powerful, life-giving actions were pictured as God's ‘wind’, God's ‘breath’. The phrase ‘Spirit of the Lord’ therefore originally meant ‘the wind/breath of the Lord’. However, it soon came to be a phrase that simply referred to the powerful, life-giving actions of God in the world. More precisely, it came to refer to the way in which God was present to God's people in a powerful, life-giving way.