OT Holy Spirit

[Anastasia1]

Was the Holy Spirit around in some form or other before Christ or was it new?

[Severian]

^The Holy Spirit is a "He." He is an eternal person of the Triune Godhead who existed before all ages. He inspired the prophets of the OT. He was not a "new creation" of some sort.

[Asteriktos]

As Severian said, the Holy Spirit is coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, just like Jesus Christ.

[minasoliman]

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." (Genesis 1:1-2)

[HabteSelassie]

Greetings in that Divine and Most Precious Name of Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

Was the Holy Spirit around in some form or other before Christ or was it new?

The Holy Spirit always existed with the Father and Son as far as our limited perspective is concerned.  However, in the Old Testament, there was no universal indwelling of the Spirit, rather, God spoke and moved through selected Prophets and Patriarchs as He willed.  The Holy Spirit moved through people in the Old Testament, including through "heathens" such as King Cyrus or even Pharaoh.  However, after Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to ALL baptised Christians.  The Holy Spirit further indwells inside Christians who have been baptised and Christmated, even if they don't realize this or even abuse the privilege. 

However, the Fathers of the Church have titled the Spirit "The Giver of Life" and so it can also be assumed that the Holy Spirit has always been a mechanism of the life force behind human beings since Adam, however the Holy Spirit didn't necessarily speak through everyone just because He blessed them with life, this gift of life to God was enough alone

stay blessed,
habte selassie

[JamesR]

Existed forever. God is timeless and uncreated. The Holy Spirit is a part of God. Therefore the Holy Spirit is timeless and uncreated.

[NicholasMyra]

^^what they said about eternality and stuff.

Was the Holy Spirit around in some form or other before Christ or was it new?

My understanding is that the Holy Spirit indwells Christians in a new way.

Our lives/souls are being prepared for the life of the Coming Age in which we will have Pneumatized Bodies, σῶμα πνευματικόν (Soma Pnevmatikon), as St. Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 15. Our current bodies are constituted through a fallen soulish existence that will not abide with us forever, which is why we must re-constitute ourselves as sons of the Father through Christ and in the Holy Spirit.

In other words, Pentecost wasn't just for show. 

[EkhristosAnesti]

As others have suggested, the Holy Spirit was certainly operative, albeit in a different, limited way, prior to the advent of Christ. At our first creation, the Holy Spirit was fully accessible to man, but, as St Cyril of Alexandria taught, the fullness of the indwelling Grace of the Holy Spirit was lost when He departed from man as a consequence of the fall.

St Cyril identifies the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan as the decisive point at which the Spirit signifies His return to the human race. In responding to an Arian argument that in receiving the Holy Spirit at His baptism Christ demonstrated that He did not, therefore, naturally possess Him and was in some way in need of Him, St Cyril explains that Christ received the Spirit only so that He, "might preserve it in our nature and [so that] He who knew no sin might again inroot in us the grace which had left us…by reason of sin…" (Commentary on the Gospel of St John).

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