I know a priest who has the unusual habit, for a Roman-collared fella, of always replacing ‘He’ with ‘She’ when reading biblical texts that refer to the Spirit. I don’t know if any of my more hard-line fellow pew sitting comrades have reported this apparent lapse to the powers that be yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Most of us Catholics, particularity older ones like me, are hard wired into conceptualizing God as male. My Roman-collared friend, however, being no slouch in theology, has a genuine point in proclaiming the Spirit as She. There is plenty of good scholarship that shows the copious use of Spirit in Hebrew scripture is decisively feminine. Put simply, in Hebrew, the word for Spirit (ruach) is feminine, and this occurs throughout the Hebrew Bible.
Scholarship also clearly demonstrates that this feminine Spirit (ruach) conception was fully understood and embraced by Jewish Christians in the early centuries of Christianity. Indeed, historian of religion Susan Ashbrook Harvey is convinced that the feminine grammatical gender role of the Spirit was of significant interest to Syriac Christians. She writes:
It seems clear that for the Syrians, the cue from grammar—ruach as a feminine noun—was not entirely gratuitous. There was real meaning in calling the Spirit ‘She’.1
A…men to that, there is indeed real meaning in calling the Spirit She!
That we find the “He Spirit” in Christian texts is a historical, and frankly, most unfortunate, translation error. This seems to have transpired at some point along the way when the original Hebrew texts were translated into Greek and later into official lingua franca of the church, Latin. I’m not saying there was a patriarchal conspiracy at play here to rebrand the Spirit from female to male. But hey, let’s not rule out that possibility!
Sometimes minor errors have big consequences, and this one, however it occurred, certainly did, because boy did it stick. There is no shortage of Christians of this or that persuasion right until today who remain entirely unmoved, and dare I say it, even violently opposed to giving even an inch to such arguments about the original content and context offered by the Hebrew writing scribes. Or the early Christians’ understanding of the same.
As for me, well, I’m entirely convinced. Of course, the He Spirit gang has a point. Without doubt there are serious consequences of adopting the She Spirit God writ large, not least of which is an entirely new approach to gender equality. It is perhaps not incidental that those afore mentioned early Christian communities were highly egalitarian and included women leaders. Something sadly lacking in my own church during the last millennium and a half.
If the original intent of the Hebrew scribes, and let’s face it, they were almost exclusively men fully entrenched in patriarchy themselves, could knowingly embrace the Spirit of God as female! Then surely, it’s now time to let the revolutionary She Spirit fly. May her emblematic attributes of peace and love fly high, and into the hearts of the ever-recalcitrant old boys club. Better late to the game than never comrades.
– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
- Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Feminine Imagery for the Divine: The Holy Spirit, the Odes of Solomon, and Early Syriac Tradition,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 37, nos. 2-3 (1993): 136. [↩]