The Holy Spirit - 9780310491705

Who is the Holy Spirit and how does the Spirit come to be in relation to the Father and the Son? What is the mission of the Spirit and where does it come from? Chris Holmes takes up the questions surrounding the Spirit’s procession and mission with the help of three of the church’s greatest teachers—Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Karl Barth.

Drawing on their engagements with the Fourth Gospel, Holmes presents an account of the Spirit’s identity, origin, and acts, to show how the acts of the Spirit derive from the Spirit’s life in relation to Father and Son—and the extent to which the Spirit’s mission testifies to the Spirit’s origin.

Holmes presents a way forward for pneumatology. Housed within the doctrine of the Trinity, pneumatology’s joyful task is to describe the Spirit’s acts among us in light of their source in the Spirit’s acts in God. The end of this inquiry is our beatitude—knowledge of the Trinity that yields to love of the Trinity.

This series seeks to retrieve the riches of classical Christian doctrine for the sake of contemporary theological renewal. Following in the tradition of G. C. Berkouwer’s Studies in Dogmatics, this series provides thoughtful, concise, and constructive treatments of major theological topics, expressing the biblical, creedal, and confessional shape of Christian doctrine for a contemporary evangelical audience.

NSD volumes exhibit: (1) Awareness of the “state of the question” pertaining to the doctrine in both classical and contemporary discussion; (2) Attention to the patterns of biblical reasoning from which the doctrine emerges; (3) Engagement with relevant ecclesiastical statements of the doctrine in the Church’s historic creeds and confessions and by leading theologians of the church—patristic, medieval, Reformation, and modern; (4) Appreciation of the doctrine’s location within the larger system of theology and its contribution to Christian piety and practice

NSD Advisory Board:

John Webster, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Katherine Sonderegger, Henri Blocher