Quodlibet 14 – Gender in God talk.
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I’ve a heard a friend who did a Theology degree refer, a number of times, to the Holy Spirit as “she”. I’ve read that the Spirit is given a feminine noun in Hebrew, so why does the Jerusalem Bible refer to the Spirit exclusively in the masculine? Likewise the Nicene Creed – “He proceeds from the Father and the Son.” What is the Church’s teaching about the ‘gender’ of the Holy Spirit?‘Spirit’ is feminine in Hebrew (ruah), neuter in Greek (pneuma) and masculine in Latin (spiritus). In some ways the best pronoun would be ‘it’, at least when translating the Greek New Testament, except that the Church wants to maintain that the Spirit is a person of the Trinity, rather than (as some modern theologians have proposed) some kind of impersonal force. In that respect, one might say that ‘she’ is no better or worse than ‘he’, but – for historical reasons, some good and others perhaps not so good – the traditional pronoun associated with all the persons of the Trinity is ‘he’. In the case of the Spirit, this would have been perfectly correct in the Latin which was the Church’s language, biblical, liturgical and academic, for most of its history. To use ‘she’ now would be to make a fairly obvious, or even obtrusive, point.
It is important to point out that the Holy Spirit does not in fact have any gender, any more than the Father; the Son is of course masculine in his human nature, but the one divine nature which the second person of the Trinity shares with the other two is neither male nor female.
This quodlibet question was answered by one of our resident Scripture scholars, Fr. Richard Ounsworth O.P.
