The Council of Nicaea’s (AD 325) third article, “And in the Holy Spirit,” is a true statement. Yet, it will require further theological development in time. The Western tradition will adopt the Filioque clause from the Third Synod of Toledo (AD 589) into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (AD 381). This inclusion accurately attests that God the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son” (ex Patre Filioque). However, contemporary accounts of the Holy Spirit’s eternal relation of origin in the West do not consistently affirm this doctrine as historically conceived in creedal Christianity. In response, Christians ought to retrieve this doctrine. The Farewell Discourse (John 13:1–17:26), which contains the Paraclete passages, historically serves as central texts for confessing the Filioque.
In preparing Christ’s apostles for his departure, Christ speaks of the Paraclete’s subsequent presence. The Holy Spirit is this Paraclete. The apostles anticipate the Holy Spirit’s divine mission following Christ’s ascension whereby the Holy Spirit will be a terminus in God and be present in a new mode to God’s people. Traditionally, Western Christians rely on these biblical texts to identify the Holy Spirit proceeds via passive spiration in God, and this does not change in the divine mission. But Christian scholars, even within evangelicalism, do not consistently believe there is biblical warrant to confess the Holy Spirit’s eternal principle is the Father and the Son.
Moreover, Scripture does not explicitly state that Love is a proper name for the Holy Spirit. Yet I contend that John’s Gospel supplies textual warrant for Christians to follow Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas’s respective theological arguments. The divine mission testifies to how the Holy Spirit subsists in God’s divine life. The Love that Father and Son mutually share is the Love that God spirates and shares with all Christians whom God brings into the covenant community. The church militant and triumphant share in God’s personal Love whom they receive for the purpose of uniting them to God and other believers.
In this paper, I argue for the validity of the Western church’s traditional practice of affirming the Holy Spirit’s eternal principle is the Father and the Son based on the Farewell Discourse in John 14–17, which describes the Third Person as the passively spirated, mutual bond between Father and Son, and consequently explains why Love brings people into God’s regenerate assembly and creates Christian unity. I will defend my thesis in two steps. (1) I summarize Edward Klink’s excursus of the Paraclete figure from John. (2) I survey the five texts that underscore the Paraclete’s operations (14:16–17; 14:26; 15:26–27; 16:7–11; and 16:12–15), dividing each text’s discussion into two sections: an exegetical explanation and a theological interpretation.