More than an analogy

The answer to Mary’s question is simple, if also startling. “The Holy Spirit will overshadow you.” With “Holy Spirit” Luke speaks of God in the dynamic way of the Jews. For Jewish tradition, as for Luke, God was alive—“the living God,” as Scripture said again and again—and such life meant for them that God could never be understood as a monad or an analogy to any of the philosophical accounts of “God" as the top Being in a variously tiered universe. God was, rather, a self-relational God, one whose internal life required the Jews to speak with a more subtle theological grammar: to talk of the Living God was to talk not just of his being God but of his Word and Spirit and Wisdom and Presence.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 119