“Send down Thy Holy Spirit”

Sermon delivered at Holy Communion at a conference of the Church Service Society in Dundee in September 1978 by the Society’s President, the Revd Professor J K S Reid. He attacks recent theology’s assault on the transcendent, which does not realise that the Bible never allows its cosmology to taint its theology. Modern theology in this is not traditor but traitor. Transcendence is the best symbol we have to name a God who slices through the self-suffiency of the world. Thus in the epiclesis we ‘send down’ the Holy Spirit.