You may of heard a bit of “fake news” last year in regards to the Church of Sweden deciding to stop calling God ‘He’ or ‘Lord’. Headlines read like this: “Priests to be banned from calling God “He” or the “Lord.” But that wasn’t exactly what had happened. The Swedish church had merely decided to make some updates:
“The Church Assembly, a 251-member decision-making body, voted on Thursday with a large majority to update the handbook, which includes the Church’s aim to use language that is ‘more inclusive’….
Some of the updated language includes three alternatives for the words to use at the start of worship services, including one which is gender-neutral: “In the name of the Father and Son, and the Holy Spirit,” “In the name of God, the Father and Son, and the Holy Spirit”, and “In the name of the triune God”.
The Church Assembly also agreed to use the female grammatical gender for the Holy Spirit, as it the case in Hebrew as well as in the 2000 Swedish Bible translation (‘den heliga anden’ as opposed to ‘den helige ande’).”
Changing the grammatical gender of the Spirit in order to match the Hebrew is a good idea. It’s one step toward acknowledging the feminine aspect of our amazing God.
OK, I don’t have too much a problem calling the Holy Spirit “She,” but this is a bit of a mind-bender… If God is genderless, some insist, where do we go with “man and woman created He…”? Here we have the image of God that is revealed as being BOTH genders: masculine and feminine. And we have a Trinity revealed as being Father (masculine), Son (masculine) and Holy Spirit (feminine).
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.” – Luke 1:35
So the Holy Spirit is here said to be the Most High, and have “overshadowed” Mary, therefore “impregnating” her with God’s Son. I don’t have time right now to do a whole research for original text equivalent but I’m curious: how would you ascribe gender to a Trinitarian God (in itself a mind-bending attribute!).
Blessings from Taber! 🙂
André
I’m an extra fundamental Christian, i.e., I go only by Holy Scripture, all of it. I do not care for what churches teach.
About this subject then, there is only one thing that matters, and that is – What does the inspired Scripture say about this!
There is no translation that assigns feminine gender to God.
All angels in Scripture when showing themselves to people were given masculine bodies.
When Jesus in his prehuman form were God’s means of creation, he functioned as a mother would, but when God sent him to earth, he was born male. So, in fact, there is no gender in heaven of body, only of function. As our Lord, he is said to be our King, a masculine identification.
Holy Spirit: there are two separate kinds! God’s general holy spirit, and the Helper sent in Jesus’ name. This latter Helper is said to be he in translations. If this is debatable, I know not. I checked Strong’s, but the answer to me is unclear.
The whole issue is not about our desires, but God’s and the Lord’s!