A caller claims that the only way God can create women is to be female. Jimmy answers this claim and explains the reasons God was able to create both man and woman.
Transcript:
Caller: The Holy Spirit is really female, and there can be no other way because there’s no other explanation for the universe to happen, and it would have to have some type of concept of male and female in order to do the marvelous, wonderful thing in its creation.
Jimmy Akin:
There are aspects of what you’re saying that are true. It is true that God is not limited by this, by the sexes the way we are. The catechism talks about this. The catechism talks about how, in His essence, God is neither male nor female.
God does not have sex in his essence. He in fact he includes and it has within himself the virtues of both sexes. So he has the virtues of masculinity and the virtues of femininity. Now he’s chosen to reveal himself to us, using for two of the three persons of the Trinity using masculine imagery.
So that’s why we read about the father and the son that those are God’s own terms for himself. So we’re not at liberty to just completely reconceptualize those. So it’s good that you’re still using those when it comes to the Holy Spirit.
The situation is a little more complex and it’s more complex than most people realize. But I want to correct something, which is the idea that God would have to incorporate a female person in order to be able to conceive of females.
That is not true. God is omniscient. He knows everything. And therefore, he knows things that he knows things automatically. He doesn’t even have to think about them. He doesn’t think. He doesn’t have to reason his way through things.
In order to have ideas. He has an infinite number of ideas, including things that, as far as we know, he chooses not to create. So, for example, God doesn’t have to create a unicorn in order to have the idea of a unicorn and God.
So there doesn’t have to be a person of the trinity who is a unicorn for God to be able to create unicorns if he chose, he already knows the idea. And in the same way, God doesn’t have to have a person of the Trinity who is a woman in order to be able to understand the idea of
women and be able to create women. And the same thing is true of everything else in creation. So I would caution you against the idea of supposing that the persons of the Trinity must be a certain way in order for God to be able to come up with created realities that are like that.
That’s actually not the case. God doesn’t have to incorporate something as one of his persons in order to be able to think of the idea and being able to think of the idea is all he needs in order to be able to create it.
So what about the gender of the Holy Spirit? Well, for a long time, I just, based on cultural impressions, would think of the Holy Spirit as masculine and I didn’t see any alternative to that. And I would resist when people proposed that, you know, the Holy Spirit could be understood in non-masculine terms.
And eventually, I did a study of scripture, both Old and New Testament. And what I found was more complex, actually the so in Greek, they have three genders masculine, feminine and neuter. Now, these are grammatical genders. They don’t necessarily tell you what the gender of a biological being is.
But in terms of the pronouns that get used in the New Testament, they aren’t all masculine. The Greek, what they do and this is true of of languages like this is the pronouns and the and in Hebrew as well.
The verb forms will take the gender of whatever noun they’re referring to. At least that’s the typical way it works. And so when the authors of the Greek New Testament refer to the Holy Spirit using the word for spirit in Greek, which is pneumatos or pneuma they well, pneuma is a neuter word, and so they will
use the pronoun it or the Greek equivalent of it. And so you’ll have the Holy Spirit being described as it in the Greek New Testament. But sometimes they use other words besides the word for spirit. Sometimes they use the word for counselor or a comforter or paraclete.
Which in Greek is Parakletos and Parakletos is masculine. And so when they refer to the Holy Spirit as the Parakletos, they use the Greek equivalent of he. So you have in the Greek New Testament, you have both it and he being used for the Holy Spirit.
Depending on the passage. What about what about the Old Testament in Hebrew? The word for spirit is ruach, and in Aramaic it’s rucha, and both ruach and rucha are feminine and they take female pronouns in Hebrew and Aramaic when the Holy Spirit’s being referred to either in the Hebrew sections or in the Aramaic.
There’s a little bit of Aramaic in the Hebrew in the Old Testament, but also we have the Aramaic translation of the Old Testament and the New Testament. And we have the targumin that were the Aramaic translations of the Old Testament they used in the synagogue.
And when the Holy Spirit gets referred to in Aramaic as rucha the Spirit, it takes female pronouns. And so whereas with the father and the son, we have very definite masculine imagery that’s used not because God is intrinsically masculine, but just because this helps us understand certain things about God.
He’s like a father. The son is like a son. We don’t have a definite consistent gender that’s used grammatically in the revealed materials for the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit gets alternately described using masculine, feminine or neuter language, depending on the context.