In the Apostles’ Creed, which is based on the Christian belief in God as Trinity—the Father, his only Son, the Holy Ghost—the statement of belief concerning the Holy Ghost precedes the statement of belief about the church, forgiveness, and resurrection. To speak of the Holy Ghost is to speak about God. The grace of God, which may well be another term for the Holy Spirit, is the source of communion, forgiveness, and resurrection.

Christians confess that what they are (a new community) and that what they hope for (resurrection) is due to the operation of God for them and in them. They have experienced God’s forgiveness. They have seen what happened as they spoke of the life and death of Jesus. People who heard them came to believe their witness and to share their faith. How was this possible? They had an answer to the question. This was because God himself was at work. They called this the Holy Spirit. God was at work within them. God had come to them. He is the holy Spirit.

To say that God is "holy" means that he is other than, different from us. This otherness of God is sometimes called his transcendence. In the Old Testament, there is always mystery even when God manifests himself. God’s majesty, his secret, is not diminished even when he reveals himself. So we have something of an answer to the question: Why does the Christian confess God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? By so doing we preserve the unity of the creation, of the incarnation, and of the present salvation.

In other words, the God who created the world, the God who revealed himself in the man Jesus, and the God who continues to effect the work begun at creation and in Jesus Christ is one and the same God. The teaching of the Trinity expresses the meaning of Christian experience (forgiveness, joy, faith, fellowship, hope, and so forth). God is confessed as being present. If he were not actively present, he could not be confessed as God. The idea of confession, of witness, entails the present activity of God and involves the believer within the range of that activity here and now.

Thus, the Christian tells three stories. He tells story one: the story of God’s creation of the heavens and earth, and of his having guided Israel and having been active in her history. Then he tells story two: the story of Jesus—what he did, what he said, what happened to him. Then thirdly, he tells the story of his experience. Since we find a unity in all of these stories, Christians go on to say that these three stories are one story, the story of God’s activity, the story of the deeds of an active God. History is one long story, not a lot of bits and pieces, not meaningless episodes, one after the other.

The Holy Spirit is at work as the community bears witness to Jesus Christ. This corporate aspect is a very important one. The Spirit operates through the church, as in fellowship with Christ and with one another it is active in the midst of the nonbelieving world (note how in John 15 the Spirit is spoken of in a chapter with a two-fold context). It speaks of love amongst believers, on one hand, and witness in a hostile world, on the other. The Spirit is the word that stands for God’s active presence within the community as it testifies to a salvation accomplished already in its midst.

The presence of the Spirit in the believing community also has an important ethical aspect. The relations of member to member in the community are to be the occasions for the expression of love. The presence of God’s Spirit assists the community in its own distinctive life. Here is the source of the Christian virtues as well as the source of particular abilities. Both of these—the virtues and the abilities—will serve to build up, to unify, the community. People with different personalities and different backgrounds, people with different capacities, will all make their contribution to the unity of the church.

Where the church has particular needs to accomplish its distinctive mission, and where the church needs the genuine constructive human relationships that result from understanding and love, there the Spirit operates to bring these into expression. The way it is put by Paul is that the Spirit bestows gifts, charismatic gifts.

In the New Testament, (1) the gifts of the Spirit produce the varied abilities, which if employed in love will build up the church. Such gifts as prophecy, teaching, apostleship, working of miracles, and tongues (1 Cor, 12:28, John 11:30, Eph. 4:11–16) are mentioned. (2) The fruit of the Spirit consists of the development and manifestation of virtues, that is, love, patience, kindness, fidelity, and self-control (Gal. 5:22–24).

If we put these two together, we have an ideal picture of the Christian community. But if we look at the actual church we can readily see that the image of the church as a community of love bearing witness to the world is an ideal, one never attained in the actual Christian communities. However, in its failure the Spirit encourages the church to believe that it stands in a special relationship to God’s purposes.

Similarly, in the experience of the individual Christian, the Spirit who "dwells within" the believer encourages him to set an ideal for himself but assures him when he fails to reach that ideal that he is in relationship to God, that he is in his failure both judged and forgiven (Rom. 8:13, 14, 16, 26).

Neither the church as a community nor the individual as a person have attained what God demands. The New Testament speaks of the activity of the Spirit in view of the opponent and nonbeliever, on the one hand, and connects it with the striving toward an ideal, on the other, on the part of the church, an ideal that it has not yet achieved. So when Paul speaks of life in the Spirit, he recognizes both the sin of the believer and the community and the possibilities for progress.

In short, the activity of the Spirit gives the community the assurance of its relationship with God, of its acceptance with God. When Christians talk about the Spirit, they give expression to their experience of faith in Jesus Christ, as, struggling against opposition, weakness, and sinfulness, they attempt to exemplify to a degree the love of God himself.

This essay is adapted from the book I Believe, which is available from the author.

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