Divine Revelation and the Holy Spirit

Abstract

Abstract Ponder an immediate dilemma. The propositional content of divine revelation generally includes reference to the Trinity, and thus includes reference to the Holy Spirit. To be specific, the Holy Spirit is understood to be a Person in the Trinity, that Person, in contrast to the Father and the Son, who proceeds eternally from the Father. This vision of the triune God is clearly grounded in part in divine revelation. So any appeal to the activity of the Holy Spirit as critical in claims about divine revelation will already assume the existence of the Holy Spirit; hence, the whole operation is prima facie hopelessly circular. We appeal to divine revelation to underwrite claims about the existence of the Spirit as one Person in the Holy Trinity; we then appeal to the Holy Spirit to articulate and underwrite our claims about divine revelation. How can this be? After resolving this dilemma, this chapter proceeds as follows: first, it develops and deploys a schema for thinking through the relation between revelation and the action of the Holy Spirit; secondly, it suggests that representative material on the work of the Holy Spirit systematically operates on a reductionist and narrow range of issues; finally, it offers a diagnosis of what has gone wrong and makes a handful of suggestions for future research.