Sunday, January 21, 2007

The Gender of the Holy Spirit

Here's one that surprised me...

For years, I've been taught that the Holy Spirit is a person of the Trinity. Not a physical person, but a person in the way that God the Father is a person. The Holy Spirit isn't an inanimate substance. And there's been plenty of evidence given for that, much of it very good - like the fact that we're told not to grieve the Holy Spirit, for instance. I still agree with all of that.

And there have been several consequences spelt out for this - like the fact that we shouldn't say we want more of the Holy Spirit, because we can't have more of a non-physical person. We can get to know them better, we can surrender to them more completely, but we can't have more of them. Also fine, and a helpful corrective to some of the garbage that passes for theology these days.

But one of the big pieces of evidence I've heard cited and one of the big consequences I've heard time after time turns out to be wrong. It's this....

I've been told that the correct pronoun to use for the Holy Spirit is "he". And indeed, it's the pronoun that the NIV uses, that the ESV uses, etc. The problem, as a friend pointed out to me, is that it's not the pronoun that the Greek uses (or the Hebrew, for that matter). Take John 14:17, for instance, which we were looking at at church tonight.

even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
John 14:17, ESV

In Greek, the pronouns are implied most of the time, but there's one pronoun in there where the gender is clear, which is the one translated "whom". In Greek, it's neuter.

Now, I can kind of understand why it was translated "him" in English. Because there are so few impersonal nouns with masculine or feminine genders in English, we tend to think of "he" and "she" as personal and "it" as impersonal. That's not true in Greek - there's no real distinction between personal and impersonal pronouns. And the noun "Spirit" is neuter, so it gets the neuter pronouns. Now I can see why the translator did it - the early ones wanted to make the point that the Spirit was personal not impersonal, and male was the default gender then. I guess the NIV and ESV translators would say they're just following tradition. My Hebrew isn't good enough yet to check, but I'm told in the OT, the word for Spirit is feminine and takes feminine pronouns....

Interestingly, of the supposedly gender-neutral translation, both the NRSV and the TNIV have "him" in John 14:17. Nick King however craftily repeats "Spirit" so as avoiding using any gender-specific pronouns.

Of course, when the Greek word for the Holy Spirit is παρακλητος ("helper" / "comforter"), which is masculine, you get masculine pronouns too like in John 14:26; 15:26 and 16:13-14. But it seems very much that the Holy Spirit does not have a gender which imposes itself on the pronouns used.

Interestingly, Grudem cites those verses as breaking the "rules" of Greek grammar in giving the Spirit a masculine gender (which is what I'd heard happened too). But actually it's just referring to the masculine noun παρακλητος.

I'm fine with the theology here - I just find it surprising that so many people have just taken it on trust that only masculine pronouns should be used...

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

In the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit is always feminine.

John said...

So I've heard, though based on experience I'd quite like to check it myself (except my Hebrew isn't good enough yet).

Rather neatly, if true, that means the Holy Spirit gets masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns.

Anonymous said...

In latin certain nouns which appear feminine, agricola (farmer) for example, are actually masculine. I'm wondering if this could apply here in any way. I don't know any Greek or Hebrew so I'm pretty much in the dark on that.

AD

John said...

Greek does have an equivalent to that, but none of the words involved are the relevant ones and the pronouns are still all the same gender as the corresponding nouns are meant to be.

Wayne Leman said...

The fact that the Hebrew word for spirit is grammatically feminine and the Greek word is grammatically masculine illustrates the fact that many gender assignments in languages are arbitrary, that is, there is no biological connection to the grammatical gender of the words for spirit in Hebrew and Greek. If we translate purely by grammatical gender, we will not be translating anything of significance from the real world or the spiritual world, for that matter. There is no spiritual significance to the fact that the Greek word for law is masculine but its word for righteousness is feminine. We have to be careful not to read too much into grammatical gender in the biblical languages or any other language for that matter.

God doesn't have a gender. He has chosen to reveal himself many times to humans in terms of father, but he also sometimes reveals himself in feminine terms, as that of a mother hen. Neither metaphor indicates that God is male or female. Jesus, on the other hand, was human, as well as divine, and as a human was a biological male. He is correctly referred to with masculine pronouns.

It seems to me to make sense to refer to God, especially as God the Father, with masculine pronouns. But in doing so, we need to be careful that we do not read any theological significance into the pronouns we use than what God might have intended. And what is that? I don't know, and I'm not sure anyone else does either. So this is an area in which we need to speak with grace toward each other and allow for some differences of opinion.

Interesting topic. Thanks for posting it.

John said...

Agreed. My issue was, of course, that I had long been taught to use the masculine pronoun for the Holy Spirit....

damienjc said...

Grammatical gender in languages such as Greek (and many others apart from English) implies nothing of and by itself. These assignments certainly appear arbitrary.

However, a study of the translation of all such pronouns connected with the word spirit in Greek (pneuma)will reveal that they are mistranslated very often in nearly all translations of the NT. The only reason for this can be a doctrinal presupposition. This practice is never, to my knowledge, referred to in the translators' comments.

It is also true in Greek that natural gender can, and does, override grammatical gender. There are many examples of this in the New Testament. However, the writers of the New Testament never chose to exercise this option with regard to the Holy Spirit. Not once! If they regarded the Spirit as a person it is very odd that they never showed the respect to it (him) to use personal rather than neuter forms of the pronouns used to stand for it.

ultrabert said...

This thread seems long dead, but for the record:

"John uses the masculine personal pronoun ekeinos of the Holy Spirit in John 16:13, 14
without referring to the masculine noun, parakletos/Comforter. As such, John identifies the
Holy Spirit as a personal being."

Got this from here , and found it a helpful read on this.

Cheers.

John said...

Sorry - still doesn't work. v7 has "For if I do not go away, the Paracletos (m) will not come to you... v8 and that one (ekeinos) coming, he will convict the world... (all one sentence until v11). In the next sentence, v12-13, ekeinos is used again to refer to the Spirit (as in v8 and 14), but the obvious way of reading it is that v7-8 sets up who ekeinos is (i.e. the Paraclete), and v13 and v14 are repetitions of ekeinos to carry the meaning through, still referring to the Paraclete.

It's a nice example, but it just doesn't work in Greek Grammar. The masculine pronoun once again refers back to the masculine noun paracletos rather than to the neuter noun pneuma.

ultrabert said...

Fair enough.

I was interested because I was reading a book on the Trinity that mentioned in passing that masculine pronouns are used to refer to the Spirit despite spirit being neuter. This appears to be incorrect, but more importantly, not even pertinent to the question of the personhood of the Spirit (compared to, say, calling the Spirit a paraclete like the Son)

Thanks and Cheers.

John said...

Agreed - the Spirit is clearly a person who can encourage / comfort, who can be grieved, etc.

little2u said...

In Genesis, it is written, "Let US make man in OUR image" and then male and female were formed. To me, this implies that "feminity" was somewhere in the Godhead. The Bible says, "As above, so below". So if there is feminine below, there must be feminine above. More importantly, I look at the basis of the family. Mother, Father, Son. In Christianity today, the "mother" is missing. Could this be why women are treated as they are today because we have no example of how to treat women with dignity?

John said...

I think from Genesis that it is quite clear that women are just as much in the image of God as men are. It's interesting that the Holy Spirit gets masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns, so I don't think that we can strictly say that the Spirit is feminine.

If you want a good example of how to treat women, the supreme Biblical one is how Christ treats the Church, as in Ephesians 5.

Unknown said...

little2u, thank you for doing just a little thinking. the truth is coming forth and many men will have a hard time swallowing it while women will be empowered like never before.

Lennart said...

Thank-you for this post. And the added comments make it even more valuable. I know that some "modern" theologians refer to the Holy Spirit as our Mother, as did Count Zinzendorf (1700–1760), the famous founder of the Moravian Church. He referred to the Spirit as “our Mother.” I also understand that in some of the eastern churches, for example the Syriac Church, this idea was, and still is, quite common. However, I think we have reasons to be careful when we speak about the nature of God.

Unknown said...

if you look at the original texts the spirit is always female, not feminine, feminine implies an inanimate object.

John said...

Simply ain't true, Nick.

In the original texts, pneuma (Gk) is always grammatically neutral, paracletos (Gk) is always grammatically masculine and ruach (Heb) is always grammatically feminine.

Nowhere is the Spirit spoken of as either male or female.