I have a whole host of posts in my head at the moment and I want to get them down before I forget them all. Unfortunately I'm also quite busy and so I'm going to be short on analysis and comment and long on quotes and notes.
I'm really enjoying Tom Smail's book Like Father Like Son, even when I don't fully agree with it. I use the word a lot but it really is thought-provoking.
A difficulty with talking about the Holy Spirit is in keeping two things in balance. We can so understand his personal-nature that we seperate him from the other members of the Trinity and describing him as working outside of or apart from the finished work of Jesus and the finished written word. On the other hand we can understand him as an impersonal force which just a tool of the Father and the Son and not in anyway distinguishable from him. I know I have often not kept things in balance, but I think Tom Smail does quite well:
"He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you" (John 16:15). Pannenberg has fastened on this verse as a basis for understanding the Holy Spirit as a source of personal action distinct from the Son. The Spirit brings to the Son, from outside his own person, a new glory that he does not have within himself. Nevertheless, in the work of the Spirit it is the Son who is glorified. The focus of the work of the Spirit is the work of Jesus, not some work of his own that he accomplishes apart from or beyond Jesus. The Spirit is the one who unfolds all that is implicit in the work of the Son, applies it creatively and transformingly in the mission of the Church across the continents and down the centuries in an endlessly enthralling kaleidoscope of new creation in the men and women who, in the Spirit, are brought into the power of the love of the Father as it is savingly incarnate in the love of the Son.
(p.184, Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in our Humanity)
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