On July 16, 1054, Cardinal Humbert marched into the Hagia Sophia during the afternoon liturgy and slammed a papal decree of excommunication onto the high altar, effectively severing Rome from Constantinople. While the dispute involved power, territory, and politics, at its ideological center was a single Latin word added to the creed: filioque.
The Western and Eastern churches went to war over whether the Spirit proceeded from the Father alone, or “and the Son.” That a single word about the Holy Spirit could permanently shatter global Christianity exposes a deep paradox: the Spirit has always been the most wild, elusive, and destabilizing concept in Christian history.
The irony is that the Bible never handed the church this problem. The church’s own later doctrines created it, and the fix came from the same place, more doctrine the Bible never mentions.
Starting with a creed that millions of Protestants recite every Sunday, today’s exclusive content takes up the questions the councils never had to answer, and it begins after the Sources and Further Reading section.
The Hebrew Word for Wind, Breath, and Spirit
The Hebrew Bible has no Holy Spirit in the sense later Christians meant. It has ruach, one word that covers wind, breath, and spirit, and the writers reached for it whenever God acted on people from the inside. In Genesis 1:2 it moves over the waters. In Judges it rushes onto Samson and he tears a lion apart with his bare hands, and later it snaps the ropes tied around him. It grabs prophets and makes them say things they hadn’t planned to say, and it fills the craftsmen who build the tabernacle with skill. Nobody prays to it, and nobody asks whether it has a will of its own, because it reads as God’s energy reaching out, the way a person’s breath belongs to the person.
The first followers of Jesus were Jews who knew this book by heart, and they carried that word into their new movement.
Fire at Pentecost and Four Different Job Descriptions
The New Testament gives several explanations, written by different people addressing different problems. Paul, the former Pharisee who wrote letters to churches in the 50s, treats the Spirit as the way Christ stays present in a community after his death, to the point of writing that the Lord is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:17). The author of Luke and Acts makes the Spirit a power that shows up on schedule: a rushing wind in Jerusalem, tongues of fire, and a crowd of pilgrims each hearing their own language. The Gospel of John, written decades later, gives the Spirit a job title, the Advocate, and has Jesus promise to send one who will teach the disciples and remind them of everything he said. Here the Spirit starts to take on a personality, because it speaks, teaches, and gets sent on errands.
Matthew’s Gospel ends with Jesus telling the disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (28:19), a line later writers leaned on hard. Matthew never says how the three relate, and neither does anyone else in the book.
A Mother in Syria and Prophets in Phrygia
In the second century, Christians had no agreed answer about what the Holy Spirit was, and many ideas later seemed awkward or strange. Some believed the Spirit was simply the pre-existent Christ under another name. Around AD 150, Justin Martyr, a philosopher in Rome, placed the Spirit third in worship but said little about its nature. In the Syriac-speaking churches of the East, the word for “spirit” was grammatically feminine, so the Spirit was often spoken of as a woman. A lost book called the Gospel of the Hebrews went even further and had Jesus call the Holy Spirit his mother. In the early third century, Origen, a respected scholar from Alexandria, quoted this passage and explained it, showing that the idea was still considered acceptable.
Around AD 170, a man named Montanus began prophesying in Phrygia, in Asia Minor. Two women who traveled with him also delivered prophecies. All three spoke as though the Holy Spirit itself were speaking through them in the first person. The movement spread across the Roman Empire and even attracted Tertullian, a famous theologian from Carthage. Church leaders eventually condemned it, having concluded that a Spirit speaking through so many people was difficult to control.
The Five Words at the End of the Creed
In 325, the bishops at Nicaea focused on the Son's full godhood. Arius, a priest in Alexandria, taught that the Son was created, and the council ruled against him. The creed they wrote dispatched the Spirit with the words “and in the Holy Spirit” and moved straight on to condemning anyone who disagreed about the Son.
The omission came with its own issues. Within a generation, some Christians who accepted Nicaea’s teaching about the Son argued that the Holy Spirit was a created being, perhaps the highest of the angels. Their opponents mockingly called them “Spirit-fighters.” Around AD 360, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, wrote from exile that the Spirit had to be divine because it makes believers holy, and only God could do that. Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, devoted an entire book to defending the Spirit’s importance, yet he was careful in public not to call the Spirit God directly. His friend Gregory of Nazianzus, who later briefly led the Council of Constantinople, thought this caution was a mistake and said so openly.
Gregory of Nazianzus was remarkably honest about the confusion. In a sermon around AD 380, he said that even thoughtful Christians disagreed about the Holy Spirit. Some believed the Spirit was simply God’s power at work, some thought it was a created being, some said it was God, and others admitted they did not know what it was. Gregory made these comments while arguing that the Spirit was divine, which shows that the issue was still unsettled among serious believers.
The Council of Constantinople in AD 381, supported by the emperor, finally expanded the creed’s statement about the Spirit. It described the Spirit as the Lord, the giver of life, proceeding from the Father, worshiped together with the Father and the Son, and the one who spoke through the prophets. Even so, the creed never explicitly called the Spirit “God,” reflecting the caution of theologians such as Basil. Church historians writing a few decades later also reported that a group of bishops who rejected the Spirit’s divinity left the council before the creed was approved.
The Clause That Split Christendom
In 589 a church council in Toledo, Spain, added a single Latin word, filioque, so the Spirit now proceeded from the Father “and the Son.” The addition spread through the western churches, Rome adopted it in the early 1000s, and the eastern churches treated it as an unauthorized edit to a text no single church owned. It figured among the grievances when emissaries of the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other in 1054, and it still divides Catholic and Orthodox churches today.
Behind the argument sat a worry each side found obvious. The western churches wanted to protect the Son’s full equality with the Father, the eastern churches wanted to protect the Father as the single source of the Godhead, and neither side could see why the other kept missing the point.
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Joachim’s Third Age and the Los Angeles Revival
Medieval Christians mostly left the Spirit alone until around 1200, when Joachim of Fiore, an Italian abbot, announced that history had three ages: the Father’s age of law, the Son’s age of the church, and a coming age of the Spirit when priests and institutions would become unnecessary. Church authorities condemned parts of his teaching after his death, but the idea of an age when ordinary believers would hear the Spirit directly never went away. English Quakers in the 1600s trusted an inner light over the Bible itself, and in 1906, in a rundown building on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, a Black preacher named William Seymour led meetings in a segregated city where Black and white worshipers prayed side by side and people spoke in tongues for days. What grew out of that building, Pentecostalism, now counts hundreds of millions of believers, mostly in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
The pattern repeats across all of these centuries. Ordinary believers report the Spirit as something they feel, and institutions respond by deciding what the Spirit is allowed to be.
The creed that emerged from this history leaves a list of questions its defenders have never answered publicly, and a few of them put the Protestant movement in an awkward spot. Paid subscribers can read the full list in the bonus section below: Questions the Councils Never Had to Answer.
Agree or disagree, the comments are open to everyone.
Sources and Further Reading
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003)
Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (HarperOne, 2014)
J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (1958)
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1971)
Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea (Baker Academic, 2011)
Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence (Hendrickson, 1994)
Christine Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Sebastian Brock, The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition (Syrian Churches Series, 1979)
Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1969)
Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
PAID SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE
Questions the Councils Never Had to Answer
Millions of Protestants stand up on Sunday and recite a creed that contradicts the only Bible verse about where the Spirit comes from. John 15:26 has Jesus…
"English Quakers in the 1600s trusted an inner light over the Bible itself" and "Theodosius, ... backed the side that wanted the Spirit’s divinity written into the creed". Has any expert discussed why these things happened?
I always found the 'Holy Spirit' kind of useless until you explained it's function. So when I prayed (at the age of about 5-6) to God, because I had not sold a single donut in the entire neighborhood (I think it was the first time I remember being really frustrated, but I'm positive it wasn't) and the nice lady who answered the next door bought 3(!) donuts and pastries, that I realize prayers can sometime be answered, that was the HS? Good to know.