Naming the Holy Spirit (Just in Time for Pentecost)

There’s a problem with the English language. We don’t have a personal pronoun to refer to someone without saying that they’re male or female. Other languages have a word that can mean “he,” “she,” or “it” depending on the circumstances. We don’t. Normally, this isn’t an issue because we generally know the gender of the person we’re talking about, and we pick “he” or “she.” (“It” refers to stuff that isn’t a person, so that one doesn’t count.) Until about a generation ago, “he” could be used on those rare occasions when we didn’t know if it was a male or female that we were talking about. As the feminist movement helped us to become sensitive to how this can be a problem for some people, we’ve started to use the somewhat awkward “he/she” construction.

So what pronoun do we use for God? God is a person, so “it” just doesn’t cut it. We know that God is neither male nor female, so calling God “He” or “She” is equally inaccurate. Some people try to avoid the entire issue by never using a pronoun for God. But this can sometimes be ridiculous: imagine reciting John 3:16 by saying “For God so loved the world that God gave God's only Child…”. So I, and many people, use the male pronoun for God. I do it for two reasons. First, it’s the traditional and customary way to do it. Referring to God as anything other than “He” would take some of us a lot of getting used to. And the strangeness of calling God “She” would interfere with people’s ability to hear what’s actually being said. However, some people would argue that there is a good reason for breaking with tradition at this point, because calling God “He” reinforces the dominance of men over women in our society which has so often been unhealthy.

My second reason for calling God “He” is a better one. While we know that God is neither male nor female, Jesus instructed us to call the first Person of the Trinity “Father.” And when the second Person of the Trinity became incarnate, he came as the male Jesus. So two of the three Persons of the Trinity have been revealed to us through male-oriented language. It doesn’t make God a man, but it tips the scales for us to refer to God with male pronouns.

However, when it comes to the third Person of the Trinity, things are a bit different. The Holy Spirit is a person, just as the Father and Son are. But have you ever noticed how we sometimes refer to the Spirit as “It”? That’s just plain wrong. Imagine how demeaning it would be for you to say something like “I talked to my neighbor yesterday. It told me about its new car.” If you wouldn’t talk about another human that way, why in the world would you talk about God that way?

So, do we call the Spirit “He” or “She”? If I’m correct in thinking that many of us refer to the Spirit as “It,” then our traditional and customary language is wrong, and wrong enough that it needs to be changed. Calling the Spirit “He” would reinforce the wrong notion that God is male. So I suggest that we refer to the Holy Spirit as “She.” It may sound odd, but it’s no more incorrect than calling the Spirit “He.” In fact, there’s some Biblical justification for this, if we accept that Proverbs’ personification of Wisdom as a woman is a reference to the Holy Spirit, and if we take Jesus’ message to Nicodemus seriously that we must be “born of the Spirit” (John 3:8), since women have exclusive birthing rights.

Calling the Holy Spirit “She” isn’t a radical claim about the nature of God. It’s simply the best that we can do until the English language gives us better choices.