Commenting
on how much time it took for worship to the Holy Spirit to develop, Anglican Leonard
Hodgson (then-regius professor of oral and Pastoral theology in the University of
Oxford/Canon of Christ church) wrote:
Now it is true that, so far as I know, there
is extant no instance of hymns or prayers addressed to the Holy Spirit that is
certainly earlier than the tenth century. It is also true that the standard
form of Christian worship is a worship offered by the Christian to the Father
in union with the Son through the Spirit. But that this worship was ever felt to
be incompatible with the doctrine of the “heness” of the Spirit seems to me to
be unlikely from the fact that the Paraclete passages in the Fourth Gospel were
an integral part of the liturgical scriptures of the Church.
In the fourth century, St. Basil of Caesarea
devoted a great deal of his treatise De
Spiritu Sancto to a defence of that form of the Gloria which treated the Spirit as parallel to the Father and the
Son in the conglorification of the Persons of the Trinity. In § 73 he says that
this form was traditional, and had been used in the previous century by Origen
and by Julius Africanus. A similar strain is found in § 14 of the second
century document describing the martyrdom of St. Polycarp. This same
parallelism is preserved in the “Nicene” creed of 381.
When, therefore, from the tenth century
onwards, the Church began to use devotions directly addressed to the Holy
Spirit, it was enriching its prayer life by realising more fully the
potentialities of its traditional doctrine of God. (Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Trinity: Croall
Lectures, 1942-1943 [London: Nisbet and Co., Ltd., 1943], 232-33)
. . . It should also be added that the words for worship in Paul are never used of or for the Holy Spirit . . . While I will examine some Pauline passages that include the risen Jesus in various expressions and acts of worship it should be stated that there are no such examples of worship or expressions or acts of worship being given to the Holy Spirit. In short, there is no evidence that the Holy Spirit was directly worshipped in the Pauline faith communities and the Pauline letters do not seem to show any indication that the Spirit was worshipped. While the Pauline letters exhibit evidence of triadic passages (Rom 8:1-4; 1 Cor 12:4-6; 2 Cor 13:13[14]; Gal 4:4-6; cf. Eph 1:3-14; 4:4-6; 2 Thess 2:13-14; Titus 3:4-6), Paul never makes the Holy Spirit a recipient of worship as he does with God. The Holy Spirit in Paul seems to play a subjective experiential role in Christian worship as Paul describes his communities as those “who worship by the Spirit of God” (Phil 3:3 ESV) but again is never the object or recipient of worship. The NET for Phil 3:3n5tc states that “the NT does not seem to speak of worshipping the Spirit explicitly” (italics in original). The closest one comes to seeing a possible reference to a form of worship by way of prayer to the Holy Spirit is in the sole passage of 2 Cor 13:13(14), a passage I will deal with below under “Wish Prayers” . . . (Tony Costa, Worship and the Risen Jesus in the Pauline Letters [Studies in Biblical Literature vol. 157; New York: Peter Lang, 2013], 317 n. 18)
