Theopedia

Filioque Clause

Definition

The filioque clause (“and the Son”) is the Western church’s addition to the Nicene Creed’s article on the Holy Spirit, inserted after “who proceeds from the Father” to read “who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”1 It first appeared in a creedal text at the Third Council of Toledo in 589, stating in the church’s central confessional document what Western theology holds as the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s double procession: that the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son as from one principle.2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the same double procession the clause confesses, in the same paragraph that distinguishes the three persons of the Trinity by their relations of origin: “The Father is of none, neither begotten, nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Spirit eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.”3 Reformed Baptist confessional theology therefore holds, with the Western creed, that the Spirit’s procession is from the Father and the Son jointly rather than from the Father alone.

Historical Development

The Nicene Creed, in the form completed at the Council of Constantinople in 381, confessed the Spirit as the one “who proceeds from the Father,” following the wording of John 15:26 exactly and without further addition.1 The Latin church later inserted filioque into that clause. A. A. Hodge’s printed text of the creed marks the insertion directly: “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son (this phrase ‘filioque’ was added to the creed of Constantinople by the council of the western church held at Toledo, a.d. 589), who, with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.”4

The addition was contested from the start but spread gradually through the Western church over the following centuries. John Thomas English records that “although there was some controversy at the time of introduction, it was not until 1017 when the term received official sanction in Rome by Benedict VIII,” and that Rome’s own adoption of the clause was followed by the East-West schism in 1054.2

That schism had more than one cause. Herman Bavinck names the filioque alongside other, older sources of estrangement between the Greek and Latin churches: “differences in usages, rites, and especially with respect to the filioque, led to the final schism of 1054.”5

Opposing Views

Eastern Orthodoxy: an unauthorized addition to a shared creed. The Eastern church’s objection to the clause was as much about the manner of its addition as its content. Petrus van Mastricht reports that when the Greeks found the Latin text no longer matched the Constantinopolitan wording they themselves recited, they took the change as evidence “that the public canons of the church were being changed by the private authority of the Latins,” and, further, that the Latins “wanted to correct Scripture itself, from which the words of the Creed had been taken,” namely John 15:26.6 On this reading, the objection stands even for a reader who grants the underlying doctrine, covered at Procession of the Holy Spirit, since an unauthorized amendment to an ecumenical creed is a distinct wrong from a mistaken one.

Mastricht himself judged the fault was not one-sided: “There was sin here on both sides: by the Latins because they added something to the Constantinopolitan Creed, and in so doing intended obliquely to extend the authority of the pope to the Greeks; but by the Greeks because they rashly rejected a dogma consistent with the Scriptures and acknowledged by the more ancient Fathers of the church, out of mere ill-will toward the name of the Latins.”6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Samantha Ming Sum Cheng, “Introduction,” in “Retrieving Eternal Procession: A Dogmatic Western Account of the Holy Spirit’s Relation to the Father and the Son in the Triune God’s Divine Life” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2025), 1. ↩ ↩2

  2. John Thomas English III, “The Procession of the Spirit and the Authority of Scripture,” in “Thus Says the Lord: A Trinitarian Account of the Authority of Scripture” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2014), 142. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩

  4. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 7, “Creeds and Confessions,” 117. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩

  6. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 27, “God the Holy Spirit,” 624. ↩ ↩2