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phil8888
Guest
Is the Holy Trinity referred to as “He”? or not.
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scott122
Guest
If not “He,” then what? “They” or “It”? I’ve heard the Holy Spirt referred to as “It,” but that just sounded WRONG! God is three persons, but one God, so the pronoun must be singular and not neuter. Oh, and masculine, too. (I’ve heard that “Holy Spirit” is feminine in Greek because the word “spirit” is feminine. I don’t know what the Greeks do in that case.)
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phil8888
Guest
I know for certain that the Holy Spirit is referring to as He.
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Hereswith
Guest
My priest always referred to the Holy Spirit as SHE - because he felt that while the Father and Son were masculine, the HS was the feminine part of the Trinity… I have never heard a pronoun associated with the Holy Trinity, because there is I assume rarely an occasion in the language where that is required.
I think if I were pressed to choose a pronoun for the HT I’d choose “it”.
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fish90
Guest
I get pretty aggravated when people call God “she.” In orthodox understanding of the nature of Christ he was fully man and so male. Also, Christ tells us to pray to the Father and even in John 14:26 the Holy Spirit is referred to as he (even though this term may have been used for cultural reasons).
usccb.org/nab/bible/john/john14.htm
So, the referring of God as he is more correct since the Father and Christ are referred in the masculine and Christ was fully male; the usage of “he” is superior to “she,” because two out of the three persons in the Trinity are masculine.
Granted that the term “he” has become misogynistic in common usage (even though the use of “he” has been used for both male and female as a collection of human beings throughout history), a term of neutral origin would be advisable.
Best,
fish90
usccb.org/nab/bible/john/john14.htm
So, the referring of God as he is more correct since the Father and Christ are referred in the masculine and Christ was fully male; the usage of “he” is superior to “she,” because two out of the three persons in the Trinity are masculine.
Granted that the term “he” has become misogynistic in common usage (even though the use of “he” has been used for both male and female as a collection of human beings throughout history), a term of neutral origin would be advisable.
Best,
fish90
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willofgods
Guest
In as far as the Holy Spirit goes, one translation (two examples posted below) refers to the Holy Spirit in masculine. If God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are each referred to in masculine, then referring to the Three, we should refer to them as He.
[BIBLEDRB]Wisdom 1:5[/BIBLEDRB]
N.B. he shall not abide
[BIBLEDRB]John 14:26[/BIBLEDRB]
N.B. he will teach you all things
Furthermore, in CCC 234 we find "
[BIBLEDRB]Wisdom 1:5[/BIBLEDRB]
N.B. he shall not abide
[BIBLEDRB]John 14:26[/BIBLEDRB]
N.B. he will teach you all things
Furthermore, in CCC 234 we find "
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Jerok
Guest
Guys I think you’re derailing the thread. Didn’t he ask if the “Holy Trinity’ is a He, not the “Holy Spirit?” I’m wondering too if you call the Trinity “He” or 'They” or if both are acceptable.
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willofgods
Guest
[SIGN]Thanks for putting me back on track Jerok!
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Jerok
Guest
You had a very informative post sir. Now anyone have any ideas? I would think that both are acceptable, but usually when you refer to the Trinity you think of God and you call God ‘He.’[SIGN]Thanks for putting me back on track Jerok!
But would you say (in these badly formed sentences)
“The three persons of the Holy Trinity, They are God”
or
“The three persons of the Holy Trinity, He is God”
I think the first.
It’s the context the pronoun (or is it a proper noun?) is being used in. Surely whenever we refer to God we say “He” and that’s the trinity too.
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EasterJoy
Guest
You’ll notice that the Sign of the Cross is “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Three persons, but the Name, singular, not the Names, plural. That is because the Name of the Trinity is “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The nature of Undivided Unity that is the essential aspect of the Trinity means that we have to use a singular pronoun for the Trinity, too. The only way you would use “they” is if you were to refer to two Persons and mean to discuss them separately from the third Person, so that you were not referring to the Trinity, but talking specifically about the Persons as distinct so as to express some issue of the relationship. That is, if you meant to talk about the Son and the Holy Spirit but not the Father, you would use “they”.
I tell my religious education students that English is not well-equipped to express the Trinity in pronouns. For instance, all sentient beings, all persons, that we know of are “he” or “she”, not “it”. Among creatures normally expressed in English, there are no sentient persons without a gender. Also among creatures, there is no unity of persons such as is present in the Trinity. The closest thing is an organization, and that, more and more, lands you back into the land of the non-person “it”. Even in the world of science fiction, a sentient “it” is very “other” than we are. It puts a distance in.
Therefore, we have some choices. Which is more vital to expressing God: no gender or sentient with personhood? Sentient and personhood wins, so we can get rid of “it” as a possible pronoun for the Trinity. Which to use after that: “they”, “he”, “she” or a random choice? As noted above, the pronoun must be singular, so “they” is out. Well, it was not that long ago that the name for a species as a whole also named the male: horse, fox, man, and so on. So although the Trinity has no gender, the best choice of pronoun is “He”, since to use “She” would imply a female gender or a feminine identity. This is the traditional choice. (Traditionally the Church, which has no gender but was considered to have a feminine identity in relationship with God, is referred to as “she”, but that usage is fading.) As for the “random” choice, just try it. It is never random.
On the topic of the Holy Spirit, in Hebrew there is the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God, which is grammatically a feminine noun. Although people do it, and I can see the argument, the problem with using the grammatical feminine when alluding to this noun in order to speak specifically of the Holy Spirit is that English has pretty much lost all feminine and masculine nouns, save those which refer to actual genders. Referring to the Holy Spirit as feminine might work grammatically in other languages that have feminine nouns that refer to things not having a female gender. It does not work that way in English. If you use the feminine pronoun, you will be taken to mean a female. Unfortunately, more and more, if you use the masculine, you are taken to mean a male. This is too bad, because it makes it extremely difficult to use pronouns to talk about God without getting sucked into a “battle of the sexes”. It also sticks us with awkward sentence constructions where one has to use “he or she” or else artificially change to the plural “they” in order to not sound as if one refers to one particular gender. On the other hand, one can hardly talk of feminine and masculine, as one once did between God and the Church, without being taken to mean literally male and female. I still do so, but I realize I do it at my peril. Oh, well.
But that is another soapbox. The best we can do for now is to use “He”, with the traditional understanding that a grammatically masculine noun is appropriate for a God with no gender, whether referring to one particular Person of the Trinity, or to the Trinity as a Unity of Persons. That is how the grammatical experts have explained it to me; I’m not a grammatical expert.
Let us hope that between our political obsession with physical gender, the loss of grammatical gender, and the prevailing thought that complementarity must automatically branded as sexist, the language doesn’t evolve so as to make the question utterly impossible to answer. I do know this: if someone comes up with the pronoun equivalent of “Ms.” to deal with this issue, I may choke.
I tell my religious education students that English is not well-equipped to express the Trinity in pronouns. For instance, all sentient beings, all persons, that we know of are “he” or “she”, not “it”. Among creatures normally expressed in English, there are no sentient persons without a gender. Also among creatures, there is no unity of persons such as is present in the Trinity. The closest thing is an organization, and that, more and more, lands you back into the land of the non-person “it”. Even in the world of science fiction, a sentient “it” is very “other” than we are. It puts a distance in.
Therefore, we have some choices. Which is more vital to expressing God: no gender or sentient with personhood? Sentient and personhood wins, so we can get rid of “it” as a possible pronoun for the Trinity. Which to use after that: “they”, “he”, “she” or a random choice? As noted above, the pronoun must be singular, so “they” is out. Well, it was not that long ago that the name for a species as a whole also named the male: horse, fox, man, and so on. So although the Trinity has no gender, the best choice of pronoun is “He”, since to use “She” would imply a female gender or a feminine identity. This is the traditional choice. (Traditionally the Church, which has no gender but was considered to have a feminine identity in relationship with God, is referred to as “she”, but that usage is fading.) As for the “random” choice, just try it. It is never random.
On the topic of the Holy Spirit, in Hebrew there is the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God, which is grammatically a feminine noun. Although people do it, and I can see the argument, the problem with using the grammatical feminine when alluding to this noun in order to speak specifically of the Holy Spirit is that English has pretty much lost all feminine and masculine nouns, save those which refer to actual genders. Referring to the Holy Spirit as feminine might work grammatically in other languages that have feminine nouns that refer to things not having a female gender. It does not work that way in English. If you use the feminine pronoun, you will be taken to mean a female. Unfortunately, more and more, if you use the masculine, you are taken to mean a male. This is too bad, because it makes it extremely difficult to use pronouns to talk about God without getting sucked into a “battle of the sexes”. It also sticks us with awkward sentence constructions where one has to use “he or she” or else artificially change to the plural “they” in order to not sound as if one refers to one particular gender. On the other hand, one can hardly talk of feminine and masculine, as one once did between God and the Church, without being taken to mean literally male and female. I still do so, but I realize I do it at my peril. Oh, well.
But that is another soapbox. The best we can do for now is to use “He”, with the traditional understanding that a grammatically masculine noun is appropriate for a God with no gender, whether referring to one particular Person of the Trinity, or to the Trinity as a Unity of Persons. That is how the grammatical experts have explained it to me; I’m not a grammatical expert.
Let us hope that between our political obsession with physical gender, the loss of grammatical gender, and the prevailing thought that complementarity must automatically branded as sexist, the language doesn’t evolve so as to make the question utterly impossible to answer. I do know this: if someone comes up with the pronoun equivalent of “Ms.” to deal with this issue, I may choke.
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callmeChris
Guest
The Holy Trinity is ONE God in three Divine persons, Father, Son, and HS. The Father is pure spirit, but he is reffered to as ‘father’ because Jesus Christ himself (Who became MAN) called him Father as well as St. Paul who called him Father in Galatians 4:6.
Jesus himself taught his followers to direct their prayers to God calling him Father. In Matthew 6:8 Jesus said, “your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” When teaching his disciples to pray he said: “This, then, is how you should pray:
Our Father in heaven hallowed be your name …” (Matthew 6:9)
Jesus himself taught his followers to direct their prayers to God calling him Father. In Matthew 6:8 Jesus said, “your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” When teaching his disciples to pray he said: “This, then, is how you should pray:
Our Father in heaven hallowed be your name …” (Matthew 6:9)
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