Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today, the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, part one.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Today we begin a new section in Defender's class. Before we do so, let's step back and

reconnoiter so that we see the big picture. For the last year or so, we've been studying

the doctrine of God, the existence and nature of God. And the first subject that we looked at under this

general heading was the attributes of God. And we looked at such properties as omniscience,

omnipotence, as satiety, eternity, holiness, love, and so on. Then we did an excursis

on natural theology looking at arguments for God's existence, such as the cosmological argument, the moral argument,

the teleological argument, and then looked at arguments against God's existence as well.

Finally, most recently, we just finished a subsection on the doctrine of the Trinity. And today, we want to

start with a new subsection of the doctrine of God, of the Holy Spirit. Theologians often refer to

this area as the area of pneumatology. That comes from the Greek

word, Pneuma, which means spirit or wind, obviously the word from which we get our word

pneumatic, as in a pneumatic drill or pneumatic hammer. And so we're going to be studying together

now, pneumatology, or the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has rightly been called

the forgotten person of the Trinity. When you look at the early post-apostolic fathers, it seems that they were virtually binitarians rather than trinitarians.

They believed in God the Father and His Word or Logos who proceeded from the Father, but there was almost nothing said about the

person of the Holy Spirit. And the Trinitarian and Christological controversies that dominated

the early church for centuries precluded any in-depth discussion of the person of the Holy Spirit.

And so, for example, in the Apostles' Creed, all you find with regard to the Holy Spirit is the

statement, I believe in the Holy Spirit, which begs the question, well, what do you believe about the Holy Spirit?

Or in the Nicene Creed, it's even briefer after saying, I believe in the Father,

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