So What is the Holy Spirit’s Gender After All?
The short answer: It’s complicated.
If the Holy Spirit is indeed female or feminine, then She is by far my best gal pal since She has not failed me when other earthly women have. However, I came across this refutation post and hoped to gain some more perspective on the idea of a feminine Holy Spirit. This person called the idea of a feminine Holy Spirit “blasphemous doctrine” that will be used to “justify homosexuals, lesbians, and gender-benders”. Curious, I scrolled down and I found that these objections are not backed by any study of the original languages the Bible was written in or any various cultural contexts that the various authors of the Bible had lived through.
This post starts off by ignoring the phrase “Let us make mankind in our own image” in Genesis 1:26, but even the use of plural pronouns here is up for debate. However, in Christianity, people generally know that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all parts or aspects of God. Whether they are separate entities, the same entity, or both at the same time continues to be a hot topic in Christian debate, but that’s for another post that I’ll probably never write to avoid the massive headache. This use of Genesis 1:27 also fails to mention that, if both male and female were created in God’s image, then it would be logical to assume that God has a female image.
It ignores the separation of the aspects of God yet again and this gem comes up:
The Holy Spirit impregnated Mary with Jesus. Matthew 1:20 “…Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
A Female does not impregnate another female! This doctrine that the Holy Spirit is feminine is backwards and illogical!
God has a track record of transcending the laws of biology, physics, and chemistry on numerous occasions. It’s almost like the very bounds of nature cannot prevent God from doing what He wants and that this is the very thing Christianity is founded on. Who would have thought that God would use courses of action that go against human sensibilities and that doing so is a running theme that is meant to showcase His power and glory? Suggesting that a female Holy Spirit could not have impregnated Mary flies in the face of everything the Bible says about God’s power and tendency to use unlikely people to carry out His will.
The idea of God as a king is used as a metaphor for things that people can readily understand and observe. Look no further than the parables of Jesus as examples. However, like our minds, social attitudes, and understandings of various concepts change, our perception of God should not stay stuck in a rut. God has been father, mother, brother, sister, teacher, friend, and random supportive person to me when others have failed me. Since these objections failed to help me at all, I decided to poke around other sources for information on this matter.
Some people claim that the idea of a feminine holy spirit comes from the word Shekinah, which was used by scholars to describe God’s presence and that the phrase “the restrainer”, which refers to the Holy Spirit, translates to “he who restrains”. Others may the fact that the Bible uses grammatically gendered languages and the absence of the designation of the Holy Spirit as a person to assert the idea of genderless and impersonal Holy Spirit. However, a Scripture 4 All takes into account the use of feminine words to describe the Holy Spirit and, while browsing a theology forum, I found this gem of a quote:
“a 1. The Hebrew, like all Semitic languages, recognizes only two genders in the noun, a masculine and a feminine. Inanimate objects and abstract ideas, which other languages sometimes indicate by the neuter,
are regarded in Hebrew as masculine or feminine, more often the latter [feminine]”! — Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, p. 222, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1910. (also seventeenth edition)
Though the thread mostly consists of people screaming at each other and calling each other heretics, it is worth digging through to find sources. The Holy Spirit, according to this thread, appears to be a name for God’s power and not actually a spirit, which circles back to the debate as to what these three names for God really indicate. However, one must not ignore early Christian texts that referred to the Holy Spirit as “mother”. Even Jesus Himself is said to have referred to the Holy Spirit as His mother, but the “personhood” aspect of the Holy Spirit is still up for debate.
In the Bible, the Holy Spirit is shown as being capable of emotion and even speaking, which are distinctly personal characteristics. However, the Holy Spirit is shown to act as a force as well, such as when people are “filled with the Holy Spirit” or when the Holy Spirit purifies people from their mistakes and wrongdoings. This allows the idea that the Holy Spirit could be a genderless or dual-gendered and personal (non-binary) entity to exist, but the cast. Since the entire debate over the Holy Spirit’s gender hinges on the Holy Spirit’s personhood and even what exactly the concept of the Trinity says about God, this debate is more complex than it initially appears.
