CONTRACTIONSThe Spirit gives birth to spirit.
The Spirit gives birth.Except a man be born of water and the Spirit he –
Except –And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And the Spirit is not 'It,' they said. Amen!The Spirit is 'He.'
The Spirit gives birth.You must be born again.
Look, here is water –Darkness is upon the amnion.
Let fall the form and content I would hold regardless;Spirit Who gives birth,
Deliver us.Carolyn Whitnall, 2019/21.
The word the Hebrew Bible uses to describe God's Spirit (Whom Christians later came to understand as the third Person of the Trinity) is ruach, a grammatically feminine noun. The Greek equivalent, pneuma, is grammatically neuter (i.e. neither masculine nor feminine).
It's interesting, then, that Christians typically default to male pronouns when referring to the Holy Spirit. And when I say interesting I mean, frankly, a bit sus.
I'm not suggesting that the Holy Spirit "is female." Grammatical gender ⇏ gender. And (as I've written about before) I hold firmly to the theoretically* uncontroversial** understanding that the triune God transcends gender.
** Uncontroversial: even (e.g.) John Piper insists that 'God is Not Male.' [1]
* Theoretically: very many of us Christians nonetheless think and speak and relate to God as though God is male.
The usual rationale for male divine pronouns is faithfulness to the biblical texts. Indeed, references to YHWH in the Hebrew Bible and to God the Father in the New Testament (for example) use language that is consistently grammatically masculine and seemingly straightforwardly rendered by the English "He/Him..." Though even here I question whether "formal equivalence" (i.e. the preservation of grammatical structure in translation) produces as exact a match as supposed: English is moving decisively away from its historic recourse to masculine generics; "He" no longer conveys the same potential for neutrality or inclusivity as the ancient language it stands in for.
Meanwhile, the portrait of the Holy Spirit that emerges across the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew-into-Greek texts comprising the Christian canon is complicated from the outset. Along with the feminine and neuter nouns mentioned above, there's also a few masculine ones (for example, where Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit using a masculine word meaning "Comforter"), and a corresponding mix of pronouns – as befits a Person Who transcends gender!
The fact that this complexity does not get preserved – neither in Bible translations, nor in the day-to-day speech, teaching, worship etc. of the Christian communities I've been a part of – is especially upsetting in the light of what does. Bible versions (such as the ESV) that follow a "formal equivalence" approach will use "brothers," "men," "man" to translate grammatically masculine words, with a footnote to clarify that the original words actually denote mixed groups or gender-nonspecific individuals. Erm, if that is what the text actually means, why not use English words that preserve this actual meaning (and that refrain from erasing large swathes of our community)? Or at least sustain the commitment to "formal equivalence" uniformly – because the decision to suspend it in order to consistently assign male pronouns to the Holy Spirit (where pronouns cannot be avoided, which is the other solution) is precisely that: a decision. Not an unreasoned one, perhaps, but certainly not objective, nor independent of theology/ideology.
In general church use, "He" can feel like the simple 'safe' option. It avoids depersonalising It; it mitigates gendering Her (at least, in the eyes of the mainly-men who have steered our traditions, to whom the masculine appears "more neutral"); it clarifies that They are singular (of course, if we struggle to conceive of a Person/person as They/they this contributes to failures of neighbour love as well as limiting our God-language). "He" protects us from the confusion of inconsistency, the temptation towards heresy, the distraction of cheap politicking.
But in a world of grossly disproportionate, and frequently abused, male power, there is nothing simple or safe about flattening those aspects of scripture that testify against our in-practice disregard of the lip-serviced truth that "God is not male." And yes, there's a reckless number of negatives in that sentence: let them stand as a reminder of just how prevaricatingly self-contradictory we Christians really can be on this subject.
In the often-quoted words of Mary Daly: "If God is male, then the male is God." [2] Her experience of Christian religion led to an eventual abandonment of faith and theology as fundamentally, unredeemably patriarchal and oppressive of women. For me, the Bible has been a (complicated, confusing, often painful) site of deepening encounter with a personal triune God Who transcends gender and created and loves all people in Their image. Church in this context is ... disappointing, difficult ... and profoundly (and usually unappealingly) vital. I am 'stuck' being part of the very real problem. But we are not without resources, when we allow the Holy Spirit to draw us into Pentecostal unity – a unity of harmony, not unison (to paraphrase Kevin Vanhoozer [3]) – and when we delve together deeper into scripture. As Wil Gafney puts it (in a short and lovely talk that I heartily recommend):
"The scriptures are rich and thick; even though they are Iron Age theology, they do a better job than we do who consider ourselves to be evolved and advanced. So if we want to adopt a new paradigm for how to talk about God, I suggest, in this regard, we become a bit more of biblical literalists." (Biblical Language for a God Who Transcends Gender)
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