Personhood of the Holy Spirit
“And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.”
Definition
The personhood of the Holy Spirit is the doctrine that the Spirit is a person — possessing intellect, will, and the capacity for relationship — not an impersonal force, influence, or mere power that God exerts.1 Scripture attributes to him the kind of acts only a person can perform: he searches, teaches, wills, intercedes, speaks, and can be grieved, none of which make sense said of a mere influence.
Confessional Definition
The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession lists the Holy Spirit among the “three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit,” each distinguished from the others “by several peculiar relative properties and personal relations” rather than by any difference in nature or degree of personhood.2
Biblical Basis
Paul warns believers not to “grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Eph. 4:30), a response only a person can have. The Spirit “searches everything, even the depths of God,” comparing his own self-knowledge to a human being’s knowledge of his own thoughts (1 Cor. 2:10-11), and distributes spiritual gifts “to each one individually as he wills” (1 Cor. 12:11). Jesus promises the Spirit as a Helper who will “teach you all things” (John 14:26) and “guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13), speaking rather than merely operating: “the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul’” (Acts 13:2). Paul describes the Spirit’s own prayer for believers in the same terms as a person’s intercession: “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26).
Objections and Responses
Isn’t the Spirit’s activity in Scripture just a figurative way of describing God’s power at work, the way a nation might speak of a “national spirit”? Hodge answers that the acts Scripture attributes to the Spirit are consistently the kind that imply intelligence and will, not bare power: “personal acts are constantly attributed to the Spirit in the Bible; that is, such acts as imply intelligence, will, and activity or power. The Spirit searches, selects, reveals, and reproves.”1 A power can be exerted; it cannot search, will, grieve, or speak in the first person the way the Spirit does in Acts 13:2 and elsewhere.