In this chapter, I set the stage for understanding how the Shepherd conceptualizes God as an enslaver and the role of the holy spirit in the maintenance of the enslaved–enslaver relationship. I begin by demonstrating how the Shepherd portrays the holy spirit as a somatic entity sent by God that dwells within the bodies of God’s enslaved persons and is called “the enslaver who dwells within you,” who is capable of influencing behaviors, reporting back to God, and leaving the body if frustrated. The human body itself is imagined to be a porous entity in which various spirits, including the holy spirit and other passion-causing spirits, can dwell. I explore how the Shepherd portrays the body of God’s enslaved persons as a vessel with a limited amount of space, within which spirits compete for room and control and upon which God’s enslaved are encouraged to act obediently in order to remain under the purview of the enslaving holy spirit.

How the Shepherd conceives of human–spirit relations leads me to examine two examples of the consequences of this entanglement of spirit possession and enslavement. I point first to how the holy spirit in the Shepherd functions similarly to the Roman enslaved overseer (vilicus) who represents the physically absent enslaver and surveils other enslaved persons. The Shepherd solves the problem that despotic writers (e.g., Cato, Columella) lament regarding how to guarantee that the vilicus is not mistaken for the absentee enslaver: God becomes both the enslaver and the vilicus, the ever-present surveillance over the enslaved through spirit possession. I also focus on one tricky passage in the Shepherd, a parable about an enslaved person working on a vineyard and its complex layers of interpretations offered by the Shepherd (Similitude 5), to better understand how the Shepherd conceptualizes the relationship between the holy spirit and the flesh that it treats as a vessel. I show how the Shepherd views enslavement to the holy spirit as a necessary risk for the enslaver, since the spirit can be polluted and defiled if the enslaved body in which it dwells is not constantly maintained.

The argument of this chapter is that the instrument doctrine, if held, sharpens our understanding of other mysteries of the Christian faith, including the hypostatic union, the Church, and the sacrament of the Eucharist. One reason that Aquinas held to the doctrine was the clarity it brought to these other mysteries. With Christology, the benefits are grammatical and speculative. Calling Christ’s humanity an instrument leads us to think of the one who possesses it, namely, the Logos, and so it can render single-subject Christology clearer to the intellect. If Christ’s humanity is held to be an instrument, it also implicates in our understanding the divine power through which the Logos works. With the theology of the Church, the instrument doctrine supports the biblical idea that Christ sends the Holy Spirit on the Church as a human being, and not only as God. And with the theology of the Eucharist, the instrument doctrine assists Catholic faith in perceiving how Jesus gives us a share of the divine life through sacramental communion.

This chapter argues that Augustine preaches on the Trinity both in sermons devoted particularly to particular trinitarian questions, and throughout his homiletic corpus insofar as Augustine’s understanding of creation and salvation as a whole is founded on his understanding of the inseparability and co-equality of Father, Son and Spirit. Through these different types of sermons Augustine also consistently emphasizes both the importance of accepting in faith knowledge handed on to us, but which we cannot yet comprehend, and the importance of struggling to think of God in terms beyond the material and the temporal. It is also noticeable that Augustine makes little use of the language of persona and natura in his preaching, preferring to define his belief through a series of Nicene principles (such as the inseparability of the divine three in their acts), and through presenting Nicene exegeses of key verses as hermeneutical keys.

Jesus Christ names the Trinity’s defining purpose. The Holy Spirit names the Trinity’s unfolding purpose. We recognise as the work of the Holy Spirit the occasions when it anticipates or echoes the action of God in Christ. More vividly, Christ, along with the Father, sends the Spirit, to point to Christ, to make Christ present in creation, to foster the ways human beings are with Christ, to prepare the way for Christ’s first and second comings. Hence this chapter explores Israel, church and God’s realm as particular lenses through which we see that Christ-prefiguring, Christ-imitating and Christ-replicating action of the Holy Spirit. The purpose of this chapter is to articulate the continuous activity of the Holy Spirit in actions of bringing people into relationship with God – in their being with God, one another and the wider creation.

While the basic outline of the soteriological narrative of Cyril of Alexandria is a near repeat of Athanasius, Cyril reverses the role that Athanasius had given to physicalism in this narrative. While Athanasius had said that the physicalist (i.e., universal and automatic) transformation of human nature was related to humanity’s ability to receive the Holy Spirt and not connected to the salvation of humans from death, Cyril says the opposite: the physicalist transformation of human nature does not change humanity’s ability to receive the Holy Spirit (which is salvific), but it does save every human being from eternal death (which, in itself, is not salvific). Cyril demonstrates the limitations of physicalism within a theology that also includes the creationist ensoulment model: the physicalist effects of the incarnation are limited to the body. Cyril’s physicalism is part of his nuanced use of the Adam-Christ parallel in which Cyril carefully balances the agency of Adam and Christ.

This article explores the notion of worship as a natural and universal disposition, described by Thomas Aquinas in ST II-II, q.81. Worship, however, is for Aquinas most relevant in the context of divine friendship or caritas with God, which Aquinas describes in ST II-II, q.23. This article, therefore, explains a possible connection between worship and love. How can the task to worship God grounded in the debt to God qua creator and the appreciation of the excellence of God be reconciled with the proximity and closeness with God that caritas implies? Drawing from Jewish philosophy, especially Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationships, and new findings in experimental psychology, in particular joint attention, a second-personal model of worship can be developed. This form of worship encompasses, on the one hand, the intimacy and sense of presence of God that worship can involve, and on the other hand, the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of God, essential for a worshipful attitude. The aim of this article is to explore how second-personal relatedness with God is possible in worship directed to God. Since God seems to be present in worship in a twofold manner, the interest is in the role the Holy Spirit can play in worship.

Here I begin my constructive account of a Christocentric incarnational theology. The Trinity has a chapter on its own: only thus may I express my insistence that this is fundamentally a story about God, and that creation, human beings and their divine destiny must stand in the light of that priority. My concern is to withstand the anthropocentrism of so much theology, which centres human existence and need, rather than God’s character and purpose, as the story’s focal point. The eight dimensions of being with provide a helpful structure through which to articulate the claims made about the Trinity.

This chapter contends that in Romans 2, Paul argues that the prophetic promises to make Israel obedient via the “Torah written on the heart” and the “circumcision of the heart” and a “new heart and new spirit” are presently being fulfilled. But in a startling twist, he includes uncircumcised gentiles among those receiving these things promised to Israel, building on his case in Rom 1 that Israel’s historic idolatry and immorality opened the door for gentiles to be included due to God’s impartiality.

This chapter focuses upon the Holy Spirit’s renovating work in the heart of the individual believer. Wholly by grace, the Spirit turns sinful humanity from the love of nothingness to the love of God, creating in the hearts of those being redeemed Christ’s own human desires.

This chapter outlines the Laudian critique of puritan scripturalism, and the ways in which what the Laudians saw as the puritan insistence of the right of every Christian to a private judgement of what the scripture meant and a consequent duty, on the basis of that judgement, to hold the doings of their superiors in church and state to account. This, the Laudians claimed, undermined the authority of both the clergy and the church, not to mention order in church, state and society. At stake was not only a right to interpret scripture, but also claims to the testimony of the Holy Spirit. For the Laudians, such claims upset, indeed inverted, social and gender hierarchies, and utterly subverted the authority of the clergy. Again the result was a de facto, if not all too often, a de jure, separation.