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345 The Thomist 79 (2015): 345-81 THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE OLD TESTAMENT MATTHEW LEVERING Mundelein Seminary Mundelein, Illinois N DOMINUM ET VIVIFICANTEM, his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Pope John Paul II states that even though numerous Old Testament texts include a reference to God’s Spirit, “nevertheless in the Old Testament context there is no suggestion of a distinction of subjects, or of the divine Persons as they subsist in the mystery of the Trinity, and as they are later revealed in the New Testament.”1 It is a commonplace of contemporary biblical exegesis and theology that the revelation of the Trinity takes place in the New Testament; God’s “Spirit” is present in the Old Testament, but not explicitly as a distinct personal agent. With regard to the Spirit in the Old Testament, Pope John Paul II shares the view of contemporary exegesis: “Both in Isaiah and in the whole of the Old Testament the personality of the Holy Spirit is completely hidden: in the revelation of the one God, as also in the foretelling of the future Messiah.”2 1 Pope John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem 17, in The Encyclicals of John Paul II, ed. J. Michael Miller, C.S.B. (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 2001), 254. 2 Ibid. I have retained the word “personality” rather than change the Vatican’s English translation, but the literal translation here would be “person.” The Latin text (available on the Vatican web site, www.vatican.va) reads: “Sive apud Isaiam, sive in toto Vetere Testamento persona Spiritus Sancti prorsus latet: latet in revelatione unici Dei acque etiam in annuntiatione venturi Messiae.” William J. Hill, O.P., argues, mistakenly I think, that in fact the Spirit’s distinct personhood is completely hidden until John’s Gospel, and even then appears only implicitly. For Hill, “Pneuma in the New Testament is a symbolic expression articulating a people’s religious experience of God’s active immanence within their history. It does not take cognizance of a later alien and speculative question concerning distinct personhood. But, as symbol, neither is its I 346 MATTHEW LEVERING Dominum et Vivificantem grants that Isaiah 11:2, which connects the coming Messiah with the Spirit’s resting upon the Messiah, serves as “a kind of bridge between the ancient biblical concept of ‘spirit,’ understood primarily as a ‘charismatic breath of wind’ and the ‘Spirit’ as a person and as a gift, a gift for the person.”3 In this way, then, Isaiah can be said to inaugurate “the path toward the full revelation of the Holy Spirit in the unity of the Trinitarian mystery.”4 Yet, in accord with contemporary exegesis and theology, Dominum et Vivificantem remains clear that the Old Testament, including Isaiah, knows nothing of a distinct divine person called the “Spirit.” Rather, although the Spirit was active in Israel (and the world) prior to the coming of Jesus, the Spirit was not known as a distinct person, but rather was understood as acting “in accordance with the will of the Lord, by virtue of the Lord’s decision or choice,” and thus as a manifestation of the divine will.5 This separation of the Old and New Testament understandings of the Spirit is challenged, or at least nuanced, by Anthony Thiselton in his recent The Holy Spirit—In Biblical Teaching, through the Centuries, and Today. While certainly agreeing with Dominum et Vivificantem that no Old Testament author was consciously a Trinitarian, Thiselton points to Isaiah 63:10, which says of the people of Israel that “they rebelled and grieved his [YHWH’s] holy Spirit; therefore he turned to be evocative power closed off to such later ventures of understanding” (William J. Hill, O.P., The Three-Personed God: The Trinity as a Mystery of Salvation [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982], 298). This understanding of “symbol” has a certain value, but it does not do justice to the way the Spirit appears in Paul and Luke-Acts: see for example Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), 839-45, 898; Ben Witherington III and Laura Ice...

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