Holy Spirit and indications of grammar
clayton stirling bartholomew
c.s.bartholomew at worldnet.att.net
Sun Sep 20 01:02:31 EDT 1998
Dan Ebert wrote:
>
> Is the Holy Spirit referred to 'grammatically' as a person? Does it have
> the proper 'grammatical' indicators for being a person?
>
Dan,
This question is a bit open ended. I will assume that you are raising the
issue of PNEUMA being a neuter noun.
Every time this question comes up I am reminded of a comment by C.S. Lewis
which I will misquote from memory "Using the phrase 'a person of feminine
gender' is like saying 'a person of the accusative case.'"
Gender marking in Greek functions within the domain of syntax and not within
the domain of lexical semantics. For this reason the question "Can a neuter
noun have a personal referent" is similar to the question "Can a noun in the
accusative have a personal referent."
Another way of saying this is that gender has no impact on a lexical item's
semantic domain nor does it restrict the field of possible referents. The fact
that PNEUMA is a neuter noun does not tell us anything about the range of
meaning of the word or the possibility or impossibility of PNEUMA referring to
a person.
Without a doubt, I have overstated the case here for the sake of clarity and
someone will want to reply with at "yea but . . ."
--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062
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