Article 9: I believe in the Holy Spirit

The first section of the Creed speaks of the sovereign Father; the second of the Word made flesh; and the third, which begins with this article, of the Spirit - the Creed's Trinitarian structure, noted in the first article of this series, which grew out of the rite of baptism.

In the classical theology of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is imaged as the love between the Father and the Son. The Son is the Word of God, and the Holy Spirit the love of God. The analogies of "word" and "love" are drawn from the work of St Augustine , who thought that human nature was constituted by knowing and loving.

The way analogy works is that since there is no "divine" language to refer to divine realities, human language stretches human qualities or attributes to their nth degree, and applies them to God. Thus the Father doesn't simply know the Son, but knows Him perfectly , and it is this knowledge that generates the perfect love that is the Holy Spirit.

The Nicene Creed adds additional features to the one-sentence affirmation of the Apostles' Creed. The Holy Spirit is the "Lord and giver of life".

Just as much as Jesus is Lord, so the Spirit too is Lord.. The Holy Spirit also gives life, presiding at birth and at baptism. Where the Spirit blows, life quickens; where it descends, the desert blooms, and the barren becomes fertile.

The Spirit also "spoke through the prophets". Gentile Christians could not therefore reject the Jewish Scriptures (the Old Testament). It is the same Spirit who is the author of both Jewish and Christian Scriptures.

The Spirit is also the indwelling Spirit, in believers and in the Church. Within the Church it teaches and leads "into" all truth. Within believers it instructs and enlightens, that all may know God (Jer 31:31). Both forms of teaching constitute what St Augustine called the " internal magesterium ", that it, authoritative teaching from within.

From the Spirit also come distinctive fruits : love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22 ). It is by such fruits that one identifies those who are led by the Spirit.

These fruits do not exhaust the gifts of the Spirit. The Acts of the Apostles speaks of the Spirit as fire which gives light and warmth. Jesus promised the Spirit as advocate and comforter . It is the Spirit, in the well-known prayer, that re-creates and renews the face of the earth.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests this renewal in his wonderful sonnet, God's Grandeur : " And for all this, nature is never spent;/There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;/And though the last lights off the black West went/O, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs/Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings ."

Article 10: "the holy, catholic Church."

The Church is the assembly of people, called (or called out) and summoned by the Holy Spirit. These are the root meanings of the Greek ekklesia /church, from ekkalein , to "call out" or to "summon". The Spirit unites those who are summoned, and moulds them into a community. The Spirit is the power that converts the community into the body of the Lord, and members of one another.

In the Letter to the Ephesians, St Paul speaks of this work of the Spirit as creating a temple out of the members, the latter being the temple's living stones. It is therefore not the goodness of the members that establishes the Church's holiness. The indwelling Spirit is prior. It remains the indispensable source and origin of the Church's holiness.

The indwelling Holy Spirit guarantees that sin can never be the Church's defining characteristic, though the shadow of sin can loom and has loomed large in the Church's life. This is the paradox of a pilgrim community imbued with an in-dwelling divine presence.

It remains holy yet sinful, indefectibly holy because of the presence of the Holy Spirit, sinful because comprised of weak and fallible human beings.

The Church is also holy because she possesses the ordinary means of holiness, which are the sacraments, and which are accessible to all. All members have at their disposal whatever is necessary to live not simply decent lives, but heroic lives of holiness.

Such heroism is part of the Church's past and present. The holiness of the Church is thus also visible in the exemplariness of her saints.

The inclusion of the word catholic represents a latter addition to the established text. It underlines that church ideally means everyone, all the living and the dead, in one assembly, under one Lord and King.

Catholic also connotes non-elitist, non-exclusive, non-provincial, and cosmopolitan. It means that "Jew" and "Greek" no longer matter in a way that defines and excludes non-Jews and non-Greeks. It means an affirmation that all human beings and all human cultures are touched by the unfailing grace of the Holy Spirit.

We face the issue of universality today in terms of the inclusion of the non-Western world. The first generation of Christians faced it in terms of inclusion of the Gentiles. To become a follower of Jesus Christ were you obligated to become a Jew?

Today the form of the question is: to become Christian, must one become Western? We will very likely have to become more used to the differences in the way Christianity looks from the perspective of two different cultures.

The issue also presses today in the sense that non-Christian religions and unchurched or non-believing populations outnumber those who belong to the visible Church.

People choose to remain within the religious (and cultural) traditions they were born into; others do not believe in God, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that God cannot be proved; others remain apart, again for a variety of reasons, from "organised religion".

If the will of God is that all be saved, and if all salvation is only through the grace of Jesus Christ, then the grace that saves the non-Christian, the non-believing, and the non-churched must be operative in ways hidden from us and different from grace's familiar modes of operation.

This is the context to which the theologian Karl Rahner applied the unfortunate expression "anonymous Christianity". The solution was well-meaning, but the expression condescending, if not imperialistic. It turned non-Christians into Christians, albeit anonymously, in order to save them.

The issue remains one not of substance but of naming. How does one refer to grace - or salvation, for that matter - in a non-Christian, non-religious context?