This post is part five in a series looking at Donald Hook and Alvin Kimel’s 1993 article, “The Pronouns of Deity: A Theolinguistic Critique of Feminist Proposals,” published in Scottish Journal of Theology and currently freely accessible through Alvin Kimel’s academia.edu page.
Next, the authors look at gendered language for the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Here, some theologians have recommended feminine pronouns, on the basis that the gender of words for the Spirt in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac is grammatically feminine. But this is perhaps a particularly Anglophone mistake, which confuses grammatical gender with human or personified gender: “As we have seen above, the assignment of grammatical gender to inanimate and abstract nouns is arbitrary and communicates nothing materially about the object denoted. Thus we note that the Gr. pneuma is neuter, while the Lat. spiritus, OE gāst (from which ghost derives), and Ger. Geist are masculine. In the specific case of the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost), the recognition of grammatical gender is irrelevant to the question of translation into modern English” (310).
This is a topic for another time though. The authors do not consider instances (if there are any), in languages where the Spirit is grammatically feminine, of feminine personification of the Spirit. This would establish a link between grammatical and personified gender in this particular case. The grammatical gender of words for the Spirit in other languages (Greek, Latin, Old English) would also be irrelevant because it would only show that this feature has been lost in translation, which will always happen on some level when translating. While I have not answered this objection, then, I feel like further questions need to be asked before accepting it.
In some modern Bible translations, the Spirit is given neuter pronouns, it. But neuter pronouns function differently in English to those in languages with grammatical gender. In contemporary English, it denotes inanimateness. Thus, for the authors, “The neuter gender is inappropriate, for it removes from the Spirit the essential elements of individuality, particularity, and personal identity that we associate with the third person of the Holy Trinity” (311). This is an interesting argument, and I am partial to it, though neither is it without its problems. First I think it is in danger of confusing trinitarian personhood with personality. The word person and its synonyms (prosopon, hypostasis, etc.) play a specialised role in trinitarian theology, denoting not personality (i.e. personal traits) but the distinctness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Effectively, the three are called persons simply because the tradition has produced no better collective term by which to identify their distinctness from one another. Famously (and controversially), Karl Barth rejected the term precisely for its connotations of personality and individuality, employing mode of being instead. This does not mean that the Spirit is not depicted in a personal way in Scripture, or, perhaps more importantly, that the Spirit does not interact with us personally, but neither do I think it absolutely necessary to reject the neuter, which rightly reflects the impersonal depiction of the Spirit in Scripture, with dominant images such as fire, power, breath, wind, and the dove.
I do think there is a place for using feminine (and masculine) pronouns of the Spirit, but I’ll withhold from anything too constructive at this point without further research. I want to continue to the authors’ next point, which is again problematic in my opinion: “The use of the feminine pronouns for the Holy Spirit, while continuing to use the masculine pronouns for the Father and the Son, will inevitably introduce sexuality into the Godhead” (311). They continue, “The consistent use of the masculine gender when referring both to the specific persons of the Holy Trinity and to the Godhead considered as one being actually allows the hearer to dissociate the deity decisively from all sexuality, thereby enabling the conceptual distinction between God as grammatically masculine and God as sexually male, female, or some hermaphroditic combination of the two” (311-12).
My problem with this argument is that it could just as well be made of anything that distinguishes the three persons in Scripture. Does referring to the first and second persons respectively as Father and Son not already inevitably introduce sexuality into the Godhead? And if not, could not the same accompanying theology that discourages this also discourage the connotations of sexual difference that might appear with the use of feminine pronouns for the Spirit? Or, does not the use of the word Spirit connote impersonality and imply that the Spirit is in some sense less than the Father and the Son? No, the Spirit is alike fully God. The impersonality of the Spirit, supported by its accompanying imagery in Scripture, reflects how the Spirit has appeared to us in Scripture and in no way undermines what might otherwise rightly be said about its personal nature (I am in controversial territory–this personal nature may be identical with the personal nature of the one God, which the Spirit communicates to us [so Barth], or we may say that Father, Son, and Spirit are in some sense three distinct personalities or subjects [so social trinitarianism]). That is (and there are plenty more examples), trinitarian imagery and terminology is already ripe for confusion, a confusion that must be continually addressed in theology and preaching. If there is a tradition of the feminine Spirit to be recovered then let it be done so critically, but the particular criticism that such an undertaking threatens to confuse popular understandings of the Trinity overlooks the necessarily metaphorical and analogical nature of trinitarian theology.
In the next post, I will look at the authors’ discussion of using no pronouns for God, alongside the notorious Godself.
Other posts in this series:
#1 Feminist proposals
#2 Grammatical gender
#3 Gender and pronouns in English
#4 The masculine God in Scripture and English
‣ #5 The gender of the Holy Spirit
#6 Pronoun avoidance and the issue of clarity
#7 Godself
#8 Pronoun avoidance, depersonalisation, and other reformist proposals
Cameron Coombe 