The “Person” of the Holy Spirit

Of the three “persons” to the concept of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is often shrouded in more mystery than the other two. While the person of God the “Father” as the creator and sustainer of creation is well established in the scripture and the history of Judaism and Christianity, and while the person of Jesus the “Son” as an actual person in the course of human history is well documented in history and scripture, the person of the Holy Spirit is a person whose characteristics are not well defined. While the responsibilities of the Holy Spirit are often documented throughout scripture, the question of how to address the Holy Spirit is sometimes vague. While there is plenty of scriptural attestation to the Holy Spirit, and while Jesus does use personal pronouns to describe the Holy Spirit, the modern depictions of the Spirit are often amorphous, lacking definition, and sometimes even pictures that do not infer personhood as much as substance, such as depictions of the Holy Spirit as a, “tounge of fire.” Some theologians have pointed to the scripture to attest to the personhood of the Holy Spirit in the same way as Jesus and the Father (with some scripture point to personal pronouns such as “he”) while others are more concerned with the function of the Holy Spirit rather than the form. This begs the question as to whether or not it truly matters what the Holy Spirit is rather than who the Holy Spirit is. The Holy Spirit is first mentioned in the first verses of the Old Testament book of Genesis. Genesis 1:2 states, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Stanley Grenz points out that in the history of the Old Testament, many Jews saw the Spirit of God as God’s transcendent work in the world. They understood that there was an