This post is in response to Monica Dennington, who is teaching that the Holy Spirit is female. This is heresy. Jacob Prasch explains how some languages tag nouns with a gender that has nothing to do with a person. The video that follows is worth listening to!
Per Jacob Prasch,
In regards to the gender of the Holy Spirit, unlike English, there are many languages which incorporate gender as part of their grammar, one of them being Greek. Gender in this case does not have anything to do with sex but is an element of grammatical construction. For instance “Jesus” is obviously a male but when He is called “petra” in Corinthians, the Greek word “petra” is rendered as a feminine word. That does not make Jesus “feminine”, it is just that in the Greek language feminine words are treated according to a particular set of grammar rules. When translating “petra” into English, there is no sense of the Greek gender of the word because “rock” in English is gender neutral. (English uses pronouns to identify the presence of gender.)
The Holy Spirit is identified in Scripture (as is Jesus Himself) as being a “He”, as having a determinate gender. Jesus Himself refers to the Holy Spirit as “He”. Since nouns in English do not have a specific gender unless modified by an accompanying pronoun, the appropriate translation into English is “He” and not the gender neutral “It”.
This is often a difficult concept for English speakers who have not studied other languages which incorporate the concept of a gender assigned to each noun. (This is also true in Slavic languages as well.) Each noun is, in and of itself, grammatically “male”, “female”, or “neuter” and the rules of the language reflect this. This does not however, make whatever they are referring to as automatically being “male”, “female”, or “neuter”. Just because “petra” in Greek is a “feminine” noun does not make Jesus feminine because He is called “the rock”. The proper English translation would be, “He is the rock”.
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