Theopedia

Procession of the Holy Spirit

“But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall bear witness of me.”

John 15:26 (KJV)

Definition

The procession of the Holy Spirit is the eternal relation by which the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, proceeds from the Father and the Son, as the Son is eternally begotten of the Father alone by eternal generation. Procession and generation are the two relations that distinguish the persons of the Godhead without dividing the one divine essence they share: the Father is unbegotten and proceeds from none, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son.1 This is the Western, or filioque, position; the Eastern Orthodox churches confess procession from the Father alone.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states, in the same paragraph that confesses the Son’s eternal generation: “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.”1

This formulation affirms three things at once. First, procession, like generation, is an eternal and necessary relation internal to the Godhead, not something that began at any point or could have failed to be. Second, procession is a personal property: it distinguishes the Spirit from the Father and the Son without implying any difference in essence, power, or glory between them, since all three fully share the one undivided divine nature.2 Third, and distinctively, the Spirit’s procession is from the Father and the Son jointly, by one undivided act, rather than from the Father alone.3

The confession does not claim to explain the manner of this procession, only to state that it is real and eternal. Reformed writers have generally followed the patristic caution here: the difference between generation and procession lies in the way each takes place, a distinction Scripture reveals without describing further.4

Biblical Basis

John 15:26 supplies the doctrine’s name and its clearest statement: Christ promises to send the Spirit, “the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father” (John 15:26). Because the verse lacks any word of exclusion, such as “from the Father alone,” it establishes that the Spirit proceeds from the Father without settling whether he also proceeds from the Son.3

Several other texts speak of the Spirit’s relation to the Son in the same terms Scripture uses for his relation to the Father. Paul calls him “the Spirit of his Son” (Gal. 4:6) and “the Spirit of Christ” (Rom. 8:9), and elsewhere “the Spirit of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:19); just as the Spirit’s relation to the Father, called procession, grounds the title “Spirit of the Father” (1 Cor. 2:11), the same relation to the Son grounds the parallel title.5 The Spirit is likewise sent by the Son as well as by the Father (John 15:26; 16:7), and Christ says the Spirit “will receive of what is mine” (John 16:14-15), which Mastricht reads as pointing to an eternal relationship between Son and Spirit rather than a merely temporal one.3 The river of the water of life is said to proceed “from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev. 22:1), and Christ’s breathing on the disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), signals in time what procession is eternally.3

Charles Hodge draws a similar argument from the way Scripture pairs the Spirit with the Son wherever it pairs him with the Father: “whatever is said in Scripture of the relation of the Spirit to the Father, is also said of his relation to the Son.”6 Since nothing in Scripture describes the Spirit operating through the Son the way it never describes him operating through the Father, Hodge takes the two relations as equivalent.6

Historical Development

The Nicene Creed, completed at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381, confesses the Spirit as the one “who proceeds from the Father,” following the wording of John 15:26 exactly.5 The Latin church later added Filioque, “and the Son,” to that clause. The Eastern churches objected that the West had no authority to alter an ecumenical creed unilaterally, and that in doing so it was, in effect, attempting to correct the wording of Scripture itself.5 That dispute, compounded by differences over liturgical practice and papal authority, hardened into the schism of 1054 that formally divided the Latin and Greek churches.7

An attempt at reunion came at the Council of Florence in 1439, which decreed that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son “eternally, as from one principle and by a single spiration.”3 The decree did not hold, and Peter van Mastricht judged that the schism was made worse rather than healed by it, since the Latins began pressing the doctrine as a necessary article of faith only after the council, having treated it as open before.3 Mastricht assigned fault on both sides: the Latins for amending a shared creed without the East’s consent, and, he adds, for using the change to extend papal authority over the Greek churches; the Greeks for rejecting, in his judgment, “out of mere ill-will toward the name of the Latins,” a doctrine he held to be both scriptural and patristic.5

The Particular Baptist John Gill described it as “a warm controversy between the Greek and Latin churches, whether the Spirit proceeded from the Son or from the Father,” and sided with the Latin position as the one that “seems most correct.”2 The Reformed and Baptist confessions that followed, including the Westminster Confession and its Baptist revision in 1689, held the Filioque as settled Western doctrine.1

Opposing Views

Eastern Orthodox: procession from the Father alone. The historic Eastern position, unchanged since the controversy above, is that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, who alone is the sole source, or arche, of the other two persons. Its chief textual support is John 15:26 itself, which names only the Father, together with the argument that Scripture nowhere states in so many words that the Spirit proceeds “from the Son.”3 Mastricht also reports a mediating position within Eastern theology, tracing to Basil, John of Damascus, and other patristic writers by way of Cardinal Bessarion at Florence, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, appealing to the pattern of prepositions in Romans 11:36 (“from him and through him and to him”). Mastricht calls this reading “more tolerable” than a flat denial and judges that, taken this way, the dispute comes closer to a disagreement over words than over substance.5 The Eastern churches nonetheless reject the Filioque as an unauthorized addition to an ecumenical creed and, on doctrinal grounds, as compromising the Father’s unique status as the single source within the Godhead.

Objections and Responses

John 15:26 names only the Father, so Scripture itself limits procession to him. The verse states that the Spirit proceeds from the Father; it does not add a word of exclusion such as “alone.” Read this way, it is fully consistent with the Father being one source of the Spirit’s procession without being the only one, and even the “through the Son” reading some Eastern theologians offer would not contradict it.3

Scripture never says in so many words that the Spirit proceeds “from the Son.” The cumulative texts above, calling the Spirit “the Spirit of the Son” and “the Spirit of Christ” (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:9; Phil. 1:19), showing him sent by the Son (John 15:26; 16:7), and showing him received by the Son from the Father eternally rather than only in time (John 16:14-15), establish the same relation to the Son that John 15:26 establishes to the Father, even without using that exact phrase.3

Affirming a double source disturbs the order within the Trinity, since the Father alone should be the sole unoriginate source of the other persons. The order still holds if stated with precision: the Father proceeds from none; the Son proceeds from the Father alone, by eternal generation; the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son together, by one undivided act of spiration, not by two separate or competing origins.3

Related Doctrines

Further reading

  • Gerald Bray, “The Double Procession of the Holy Spirit in Evangelical Theology Today: Do We Still Need It?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 41, no. 3 (1998): 415-426, PDF.

References

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

  2. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 31, “Of the Distinct Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit.” ↩ ↩2

  3. 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), 2:625. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10

  4. Gill, book I, chap. 28, “Of the Personal Relations, or Relative Properties, Which Distinguish the Three Persons in the Godhead.” ↩

  5. Mastricht, 2:624. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  6. Charles Hodge, “Chapter VI. The Trinity,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 478. ↩ ↩2

  7. 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.” ↩