Is the Holy Spirit a person?
The Holy Spirit depicted as a dove, surrounded by angels, by Giaquinto, 1750s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit , whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” The Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal (volume 16, 2011) includes an article written by Andrew David Naselli and Philip R. Gons titled “Prooftexting the Personality of the Holy Spirit: An Analysis of the Masculine Demonstrative Pronouns in John 14:26, 15:26, and 16:13-14.” Sounds like a journal article title doesn’t it? The article is an update by Gons of a paper that Naselli presented at an ETS ( Evangelical Theological Society ) conference in 2010. A standard argument for the personality of the Holy Spirit has been that John (the writer of the Gospel of John ) uses a masculine pronoun when referring to the Holy Spirit which goes against the grammar of the Greek. The word for spirit in Greek is neuter so a p