The Holy Spirit is not a person

On the night before he died, Jesus told his disciples he was leaving, and he spoke at length about who would come in his place. “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate” (John 14:16). The New World Translation renders the word “helper.” Jesus had been their helper. The spirit would be another, doing for them what he had done.

Then he describes what this helper will do. The spirit “will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have told you” (John 14:26). The spirit will “testify about Me” (John 15:26). The spirit “will guide you into all truth,” will not speak on its own but will speak “what He hears,” and will “declare to you what is to come” (John 16:13).

Teaching, reminding, testifying, hearing, speaking, and guiding are what a teacher does. Jesus is preparing his friends to be without him, and he tells them they will not be left with a power alone, but with another helper who will teach them as he had.

Some Christians point out that John uses a masculine pronoun for the spirit in these verses, though the word pneuma is neuter. Grammarians debate how much that shows, since the masculine word “helper” is close by. This page does not rely on it. What the spirit does is enough.

Acts is a narrative of events in the early congregation, not poetry, and the spirit acts in it again and again.

• It speaks in the first person. While the congregation in Antioch was worshiping and fasting, “the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them’” (Acts 13:2). The spirit calls, and the work is “for Me.”
• It joins in a decision. The apostles and elders in Jerusalem, settling a dispute about the law, wrote to the congregations: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). The spirit is named as a party to the decision, alongside the men who made it.
• It forbids. Paul and his companions were “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in the province of Asia,” and when they tried to enter Bithynia, “the Spirit of Jesus would not permit them” (Acts 16:6-7).
• It can be lied to. Peter asks Ananias why he has lied “to the Holy Spirit,” and then says, “You have not lied to men, but to God!” (Acts 5:3-4).

You can direct a force, but you cannot lie to one. A force does not say “for Me,” choose people for a work, or agree with elders that a decision seems good.

Personification is a fair point, so test it against the Bible’s best example. In Proverbs 8, wisdom calls out at the city gates and describes herself as present when God made the world. It is vivid, and it is poetry. Proverbs uses the figure to teach the value of wisdom, and the reader knows it is a figure.

Compare what the Bible says of the spirit. No one in the Bible lies to wisdom. Wisdom does not choose missionaries, take part in a council’s decision, or stop a journey. And these things are said in letters and histories, about specific people, places, and days, not in a poem.

Paul adds more. The spirit gives gifts to each person “as He determines” (1 Corinthians 12:11). The spirit “intercedes for the saints according to the will of God,” and God “knows the mind of the Spirit” (Romans 8:26-27). The spirit can be grieved: “do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30). Deciding, interceding, having a mind, and being grieved are not things the Bible says of a force or of a figure of speech. Taken one at a time, a single verse might be explained as personification. Taken together, across Jesus’ words, Acts, and Paul, they describe someone with a mind and a will.

The Watch Tower Society describes the spirit as God’s power in action, and the Bible does connect the two closely. It also keeps them apart in a way that is hard to explain if the spirit is nothing more than that power.

Before Jesus ascended, he told his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you” (Acts 1:8). The power comes with the spirit’s arrival; the two are not the same thing. Peter says that God “anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38), naming them side by side. Paul prays that his readers will overflow with hope “by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13). If the spirit were God’s power and nothing more, that phrase would mean “by the power of the power.”

Luke 1:35, where the angel tells Mary that the spirit will come upon her and “the power of the Most High will overshadow you,” can be read either way, since Hebrew-style parallel lines often repeat one idea in two forms. The other verses do not have that ambiguity. The spirit has power and gives it, as a person does.

Jesus’ last instruction in Matthew is to make disciples, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Paul closes one letter with “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (2 Corinthians 13:14).

The Father and the Son are persons; you agree on that. In these verses the spirit stands with them in the same sentence and the same role: the one name into which disciples are baptized, and the giver of fellowship, a word for sharing life with someone. It would be strange to baptize people into the name of two persons and a force, or to pray that they would have fellowship with an energy.

This page has argued only that the Bible presents the holy spirit as a person. Whether the spirit is God is a further question, though Peter’s words in Acts 5 bear on it. How the Father, the Son, and the spirit relate is the subject of The Trinity is pagan.