Who Do We Say God Is? - Part 1: The Holy Spirit

In this new teaching series, Who Do We Say God Is?, Bishop DeDe and Adam begin by exploring one of the most mysterious and often overlooked persons of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit.

As Pentecost approaches, this conversation invites listeners into Scripture, history, theology, and personal reflection as they ask deeper questions about who the Holy Spirit is, how Christians have understood the Spirit throughout history, and what it means for our lives today.

The episode explores the Spirit’s presence from the opening verses of Genesis through Pentecost and beyond, unpacking the movement from Ruach (Hebrew), to Pneuma (Greek), to Spiritus (Latin), and how language, translation, and history have shaped Christian understandings of God.

Bishop DeDe reflects on the Holy Spirit as the living, creative force of God moving through creation, wisdom, renewal, and everyday life. The conversation also wrestles honestly with questions of gender, imagery, and how our experiences influence the way we understand God.

Together, Bishop DeDe and Adam discuss:

• Why understanding the Holy Spirit starts with returning to Scripture
• Ruach, Pneuma, and Spiritus: how language shapes theology
• The role of gender in Christian history and our understanding of God
• Why the Holy Spirit can feel harder to understand than the Father or Jesus
• The gifts and fruits of the Spirit and how they shape our lives
• How the Spirit continues to heal, renew, and guide us today
• Why humility is essential when speaking about God
• What it means to cultivate a relationship with the Holy Spirit in daily life

This episode opens the door to a larger conversation on the Trinity while inviting listeners to reflect on their own experiences of God’s presence.

As Bishop DeDe asks throughout the episode: What aspect of God resonates most deeply with you—and how might knowing God more fully help you understand yourself as God’s beloved?

Join the conversation and prepare for the next installment as Who Do We Say God Is? continues with a look at the Trinity and the “economic Trinity.”

AI Disclosure: To support our staff in their limited time,  many of our episode summaries are first generated by AI and then edited by the Communications Director to accurately reflect and preview our podcast episodes.

Transcript

Bishop DeDe (00:03.382)
Welcome to Speaking of Faith. My name is DeDe Duncan-Probe. I am the Episcopal Bishop of Central New York, Canada to Pennsylvania, Utica to Elmira, and all the beautiful people and places in between. And welcome to this podcast, Speaking of Faith. I'm joined by Adam Eichelberger, who is our Director of Communications. In the next couple of weeks, we're gonna do a little bit of pivot. We're gonna talk a bit about the Holy Spirit, about the Trinity,

and about understanding the Godhead a bit more. In this season, we're going into this coming Sunday being Pentecost, the Sunday after that being Trinity Sunday. And one of the things about speaking of faith that is true, and we've talked, and we talk about this every week, I think, to a certain extent, but I really wanna highlight that in order to really speak our faith with clarity and to deepen our understanding, we first have to know what we're talking about and why.

And so part of that is learning. To speak about our faith is to have an open heart to learning and engagement with a deepening of our own understanding. And so when it comes to talking about the Holy Spirit in Pentecost, really returning to scripture is essential because these are scripturally rooted things that also, speaking about the person of the Holy Spirit, is a living.

engagement with God in our daily lives. So I'm to get right into it. I'm going to talk a bit about the history bits. When you look at scripture and you look at Genesis 1 and you look at especially 1 verse 2 about the spirit moving over the deep, this creative spirit and all through the Hebrew scriptures, there's reference to the spirit, the moving, living, creative force of God.

The spirit in the Hebrew scriptures is in Hebrew, Ruach. It's very interesting to note that Ruach is an actually feminine word. It's grammatically feminine. And so the understanding of the creativity and the fostering of creation as a feminine aspect of God. And then when you see the...

Bishop DeDe (02:24.684)
the Holy Spirit coming forward in history with the Septuagint and the translation of Hebrew into Greek, you have this move to Pneuma, which is actually neuter, the gender is neuter with Pneuma. And then with the Vulgate and the move into Latin, you actually have Spiritus, which is a male verb. And so this genderization,

is really important, especially today as we talk a lot about gender and a lot about the personages of God, a lot about how we understand our faith, to know that gender is part of our Christian theology. And often we kind of cover over it or we don't really look at it very closely, but it's really an essential part of our faith. I mean, you have early Christian,

of patristic fathers who viewed the God had father, son and Holy Spirit is specifically male and viewed salvation specifically for males. And so there's question of how we relate to our gender, both male and female. created them, but also this fluidity of gender in our understanding and to recognize that at the time of.

Genesis or these early days you had religions, you had pagan rituals that were centered around femininity. And so there is this wrangling that is happening all through history about gender that continues to today. We sometimes think that issues of gender and non-gender, that those are contemporary issues, that Jesus didn't have to deal with this for instance. And when you look at the scriptural text, you realize,

Not true, actually did deal with this and probably had a more understanding of this than we often give credit. So with the Holy Spirit, ruach, feminine, numa, neuter, spiritu, male, and you can see why in some ways around the ecumenical councils and this understanding of the Godhead, that there is this concern about

Bishop DeDe (04:46.286)
Christianity having a monotheistic belief. If you have three persons of God, the Trinity, the three in one, which we will be talking about next week, then male, male, male, they're all the same, means that this isn't Zeus and Hera. This is a different understanding of theology. And as contemporary people, we know that there is in diversity,

a complexity that opens up new opportunities to keep kind of alliteration going, that we can understand that one person can be many genders in some ways, that there isn't this limitation that we often put on it. And so with the Holy Spirit, you know, Ruach, with Duma, with Spiritu, this movement of understanding what is the Holy Spirit.

And often when I'm reciting the Nicene Creed in a service, we have it written out pretty standardly that the Holy Spirit is he. I tend to rotate the pronouns out of respect for the fact that we're receiving this history that's been fairly complex, where there's been this ongoing understanding that God has created humans in God's image. And so our genderization

is part of the created order. And we see this in plants and animals and all around us that God's prolific profundity, creativity, all of those things, that gender is really important. And when you think magnolia trees, think blueberry plants, it's really amazing to think the way in which God actually values gender and is respectful of gender. And so for us, we can get.

kind of complacent or feel like, we're so tired of this conversation in today's world, to step back and recognize with some respect, we need that conversation because it fuels how we understand our very identity as followers of Jesus Christ, that who we innately are does reflect God and the Godhead.

Bishop DeDe (07:04.95)
So with the Holy Spirit, the different aspects in Hebrew scripture, when you have obviously Genesis one, two, the spirit moving over the deep in the book of Job 33, four with, you know, that have been created with the spirit of God in me. I don't know if you've gone into a church or a place or out in the wilderness and you're going along and you just feel the spirit of God, this life giving life force just surrounding and unfold you and in you.

that sense of God being present to you in a way that is both intangible and very real intangible at the same time, that Holy Spirit in us. And so when we're celebrating Pentecost, when we're talking about the Spirit of God being upon us, the Spirit of the living God, to know that ruach, numah, spiritu, however we may refer to the Holy Spirit.

that the Holy Spirit is a moving, living life force that continues today to inform how we understand and know God. And then to recognize some of the symbology, you know, have the Trinitarian symbols with different Celtic images, but it's interesting that there's the fire of Pentecost and there's the dove.

In Celtic spirituality, there's the goose. They refer to the Holy Spirit as a goose. So that's kind of a new thing. And to recognize that down through the ages, we're always trying to understand the spirit of God that is moving in us, how we might get up one morning and feel drawn to something and not be able to name it. And so I want to stop there. This is a lot of information that I've gone through.

very quickly and narrowly, there's a tremendous amount of history. And if you're a person who's interested in that, I encourage you to be reading and especially reading scripture to pull out all the references to the spirit. Of course, there's wisdom, which is the spirit and wisdom. when Proverbs, you have a wonderful discussion. I think it's in Proverbs, what, 24 or something. I am looking here at my notes.

Bishop DeDe (09:22.984)
I think Proverbs 1, 20 through 23 is really the one that I was thinking of about wisdom and crying from the gateway and the sense that the Spirit of God is leading us to wisdom, this embodiment of God in us. So Adam, I'm going to invite you into this conversation about the Holy Spirit. What is kind of percolating for you as you think about how we understand this Holy Spirit of God?

Adam Eichelberger (09:52.567)
It's an interesting topic for me to speak about specifically and not to get too off topic, but it reminds me of when I was young, growing up in the Roman Catholic Church, we would have this thing on, whether it was Tuesday night or Wednesday night, we called it CCD class and we would go and we would learn about our faith. And I remember learning about the death and the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus. But then I remembered learning about the Holy Spirit and I have a very distinct memory as a child.

Bishop DeDe (10:08.941)
Right?

Adam Eichelberger (10:22.434)
thinking that the Holy Spirit was like a different bearded guy in all of the artwork that I saw, like, because we'd have like these workbooks and there was like, I didn't understand, I didn't make the connection between there was Jesus who was like a bearded guy. And there was this other thing, I was like, that's just the other bearded guy and that's the Holy Spirit. And when I started to learn about this kind of intangibility of the Holy Spirit, that there are these images that give us some visual

identity to the Holy Spirit in Scripture. I struggled a lot and I still even to this day struggle a lot with kind of placing imagery or identity to the Holy Spirit because it is, I mean, I don't think that maybe amorphous is the right word, but it's so, like I said, intangible. It is interesting to me that you bring up the idea of this fluidity of gender when we talk about God because

Bishop DeDe (10:52.898)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (11:19.01)
I don't know, listener or viewer, if you're anything like me, but you may have been raised in a tradition where like this is borderline apostasy or heresy to think that about the Holy Spirit. But the thing that kind of resonated with me as you were talking about this bishop is if we are people who believe that every person is created in the image of likeness of God, that imago Dei, that this makes a lot of sense that God can be bigger.

Bishop DeDe (11:38.22)
you

Adam Eichelberger (11:48.771)
than just this one gender identity that has been assigned to God. And I guess what, when we're talking about the Holy Spirit and we're trying to give it an identity that we can relate to, especially when we come, like if you're like me from a background where like this is not okay. I'm not saying it's not okay, but like we may have been raised in a way where like this sounds so out there.

Bishop DeDe (12:00.352)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (12:18.84)
do we start reconciling or doing the work of expanding our view of God, especially when it comes to the Holy Spirit.

Bishop DeDe (12:29.802)
It's such an important question. I think we, you know, I probably at the top should have said, you know, warning heresy, but, but I don't believe myself to be a heretic because I actually believe in scripture and I believe in God. And I also will come to my faith with humility and a curiosity to recognize that I'm not going to understand all things because I'm a mortal human being. I also feel like.

Adam Eichelberger (12:38.306)
Ha ha ha!

Bishop DeDe (12:59.352)
great company. And sometimes I wonder about people who get very strident and feel that they're completely right and want to point fingers at other people because I think what is that like to be so certain you're as big as God is? Because I don't think any of us are. And so when I look at scripture, and the reality is that in our Hebrew scripture, in our translation of the Bible, when you see in Genesis one to

the spirit moved over the deep in the original language of that text. It's it's Ruach and Ruach was a feminine.

Well, then to be orthodox is to go back to the scripture and say, this is where it begins. This is the foundational piece of it. And if we're so busy trying to put our fear of God being different than we want God to be on God, we're not gonna know God. I want to know God first and foremost, and I wanna know truth. And so when it comes to faith, for such a long time,

the church was bound by hellfire and damnation and you're either in or you're out, you are orthodox, you're in right thinking or you're not. But interestingly, that right thinking wasn't based on scripture, wasn't based on the foundations of our faith, it was based on an agreed to committee that decided they liked this bit better. And that to me is not orthodox.

to me, Orthodox for me as a person of faith, as a bishop in the Episcopal Church, is Scripture and tradition, of course, and reason, but primarily the revealed understanding of God, which takes us right to these passages of Scripture and to the historical movement of biblical translation. And so,

Bishop DeDe (15:02.242)
We have to be honest about this. And I think we have not been. We've tried to pretend that the Bible sort of appeared to us in a nice codified text on the shelf of my bookstore. It did not. It started out in papyri and sheepskin. And supposedly the first Bible, it took something like 43 donkeys to carry it because of the just sheer bulk.

You have monks, you know translating the scripture under by candlelight you have Koine Greek which is not spoken today, which did not have punctuation you have people Trying to do all of these things that is the truth of it now how we believe and how I believe is that Regardless of our interference that the Word of God is living and true and what is the Word of God?

The Gospel of John would say the Word of God is Jesus. And so I believe the Bible to contain all things necessary to faith, I've taken vows to that. And I believe that in studying scripture, in studying in languages, in reading it with an open heart, that the Holy Spirit allows us to read scripture. And we need the Holy Spirit's guidance with this. So I think we've...

fooled ourselves for a long time into thinking that we already know God, that we can say things with certainty. I do think there's things we can say with certainty. I don't believe God ever leads us to harm others. I think that would be a blasphemy of the Spirit. I do believe that Jesus is the Son of God. And so there are things that are very concrete and immovable.

But when it comes to the spirit of God and our understanding of the spirit of God, we're gonna have to have humility in that and be willing to be wrong and trust that the reason for the redemption of Jesus is that we can be wrong and that God is, that our desire to please God, as Thomas Merton would say, does please God. So good question. And so it is kind of mind-bending to think of this gender issue.

Bishop DeDe (17:21.234)
and to say what do we do about that? And I think the thing we do about that is in some ways accept that it is, in some ways accept that it isn't about our personal preference. We don't have to like things. We often want to go into our faith liking what God does. And we know for a fact that there's oftentimes things we don't like.

people die or bad things happen and we're like, well, why did God allow that? We don't like that. And yet God somehow in God's mercy is greater than those things. So very complex. This is a big conversation and to have this in a short amount of time is challenging. And for those of y'all who are playing along at home, yes, what about the Holy Spirit challenges you and is difficult and maybe God's opening that up for us to

have a deeper understanding instead of being afraid of condemnation.

Adam Eichelberger (18:22.863)
One of the other things that this really brings to mind is, again, I'm leaning into a little bit of my Catholic background, but when I was confirmed, when I was when I was a teenager in the Catholic Church, there was a lot of emphasis on the gifts of the spirit. And I think that these are things that as a 16 year old, I didn't give a lot of credence to these were boring things that were being taught to me in a classroom with fluorescent lighting, and I wasn't really paying attention.

Bishop DeDe (18:30.637)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (18:44.417)
Yep.

Adam Eichelberger (18:52.601)
to lot of this, but as an adult, as somebody who is trying my best to kind of grow in my faith, when I think about those things, those sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit, I see the value in them so much more as I've grown older, especially when it comes to how I do things like look at my faith critically or with reason, like we've talked about on the podcast, you mentioned it a moment ago, scripture, tradition, and reason.

Bishop DeDe (19:07.246)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (19:15.118)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (19:22.377)
Maybe can we talk just a little bit when it comes to our understanding of the Holy Spirit and how the gifts of the Spirit play a role in our lives as we are, wherever we are, navigating a relationship with God.

Bishop DeDe (19:38.898)
such a great, I mean, that's really an essential question because this is where we start to know God is through the gifts of the spirit. And so it's very important to engage and to be mindful of that when we're rooted in God, know, patience, love, self-control, that these gifts, that they become part of who we are, that.

We may have been a very, it may be a very impatient person, but when we yield to the work of the Spirit, when we focus in on Jesus, there is a patience that comes into us that we may recognize as kind of not part of organically who we may naturally be, but is nevertheless a gift of God in us, an aspect of God.

The temptation, and I wanna note this here, is to talk about the Holy Spirit as an it instead of a person of God. That we're talking about the economic trinity, which I'm gonna unpack more next week, but that this is a way in which God relates to us, is bringing us these gifts, these fruits of the Spirit that embolden us to be healed and renewed as God's people. And part of the salvation Jesus offers us,

is not just kind of a one-time thing for all, just not one-time payment as it's been talked about in history. mean, there's all these ways. know Ken and Megan in their podcast has talked about different understandings of atonement theory. But this isn't a one-off thing that the ongoing work of the spirit in us is healing us and renewing us, that we do have these gifts and they become part of who we are, not personalities, not...

you know, tasks, but charisms, gifts of the spirit that are in us and continue to heal and renew us as we are part of God's ongoing building of a kingdom. So really important to bring out. And important to note the difference. Often when we start to talk about the Holy Spirit, people will talk about glossolalia or go into prayer languages and go into other things. Those are...

Bishop DeDe (21:57.664)
Those are a different conversation than what we're having here today. We're talking about the gifts of the Spirit, we're power and love and a sound mind, we're talking about God's work in us, we're talking about a relationship with the person of God as the Holy Spirit.

Adam Eichelberger (22:17.313)
I think that's really, really good to remember. Again, like I talked about, the Holy Spirit was so vague for so long in my life and trying to actually remember that this is a person of the Trinity, that that language is used, that it's not just like this vapor or ethereal thing. is, the Holy Spirit is a person of the Trinity. And even see there, and just a second ago, I slipped and I said, it.

Bishop DeDe (22:37.518)
Mm-mm.

Adam Eichelberger (22:44.463)
And that's because I think I'm trying to be conscious of like gendered language and where that kind of falls in an understanding of God. And it's been really helpful for me to try and like you mentioned, like when I'm praying the creed, leaning into motherly feminine language for the Holy Spirit, because I think it gives me a more complete view of who God is. I've talked to you about this, Stephen Colbert, one of my favorites.

Bishop DeDe (23:06.656)
Hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (23:11.863)
in an interview one time who was a lifelong devout Catholic said he went to a Episcopal service one time and it was his only time that he had ever encountered female clergy. And he said that that was maybe the first time he had the most complete image of God when he was in that service. I think my kind of my last question as we're as we're kind of diving into getting to know the Holy Spirit a lot better is exactly that. When we're trying to get to know the Holy Spirit as a part of the Godhead as a part of

Bishop DeDe (23:21.646)
Yeah.

Bishop DeDe (23:27.854)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (23:41.818)
who God is as God. I think it's really easy for us to lean into the imagery of God the Father because we see that image so often. And it's really easy for us to lean into the image of and the relationship with Jesus because we see that so often. What do you think about how our ways that we as people who are exploring and trying to deepen a life of faith can identify specifically with the Holy Spirit? Because I feel like sometimes

Bishop DeDe (23:51.309)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Eichelberger (24:11.664)
The Holy Spirit is this kind of forgotten part or this forgotten God, you know, like it's something we insert into things like the creed or prayers, but I don't really know if I'm going to speak for myself. I've ever had a real relationship with the Holy Spirit. Hopefully this doesn't go in my personnel file, but how do we actually, how do we start fostering and cultivating a relationship specifically with the Holy Spirit?

Bishop DeDe (24:20.834)
Mm-hmm.

Bishop DeDe (24:29.038)
I'll touch your boss.

Bishop DeDe (24:39.618)
Whoa. And that leads us, that's really a great question because, know, words people often associate with the Holy Spirit, nebulous, intangible, you know, and those, and for obvious reasons, because you're really talking, I mean, you can say that a manual with us is part of the work of the Holy Spirit. You know, you can start to, you start to unpack this and biblical and theological, theologians out there probably, you know, wanting to jump in here.

So wherever you are, biblical scholars and theologians jump in with the people around you. We can't hear you here, but I know that you're going to want to talk about that. But the Holy Spirit is that movement of God. And because it is not as readily available to us in you know, a mode and here this talk about orthodoxy, having a heart attack. Sometimes I wonder.

if God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit isn't a bit of modalism.

because you're assigning a human understanding onto the personages of God. And this person of God who's created us, healed and redeemed us, empowers us, and through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, emboldens us to share the love of Jesus. Often our way, our terms of endearment for the Trinity are limiters.

And so God the Father, how many people have had real issues with God because of their father issues and their mortal human father issues or issues with Jesus the Son because of issues with damage done by a brother or a sibling. And so all of us come to faith with our brokenness and with our giftedness and God heals us in so many different and divergent ways.

Bishop DeDe (26:39.594)
So how we refer to God is often helpful because it gives us a place in our understanding to sort of place an understanding and can be a limiter. When we're absolutely certain that God is male and cannot be female, we need to ask ourselves why. It isn't about who's right, which is usually what we try to battle on. And right now, some of y'all may be like, well, God is this or that isn't really the point. The point is why does this bother us?

What is it about gender that is so destabilizing? What is it about thinking that God might be a woman that is terrifying or free or concerning? And what is it about God being male that is the same, the terrifying and concerning and free? So what we're trying to do, like Dick Norris, my theology professor, would have told us,

is we're like Hamlet trying to describe Shakespeare. We don't know, we can only have this limited, as St. Paul would say, we see dimly, we see in the glass darkly, but we will be known and know. And so in this interim time, in this now time, we trust God that as we seek to know, God will be revealed. Now for next time, and so I'm gonna point us to this next time.

We're going to talk about the economic Trinity. What is that? What does that even mean? It sounds like some sort of banker term. And what aspect of God resonates most with you? God, the creator, the father, the God of all, God, the son, the Redeemer, God, the Holy Spirit, you know, the comforter, the paraclete. And how does that inform both how you see God, but how you organically and innately see yourself?

Do you see yourself as a delight to God or an abomination to God? And how might knowing God more fully help you to heal and renew your own understanding of both your understanding of God, but your understanding of yourself as God's beloved child? So until next time, may you be blessed and be a blessing and keep talking and go talk with some folks about this. I pass the baton to you. It's a complex conversation.

Bishop DeDe (29:05.194)
And let us not be surprised if it brings up deep feelings in us, because those deep feelings often are fear, but also our passion to know God. And my prayer always is that we will know God and know God with truth and with mercy as we are known by God. So be blessed and be a blessing and we'll speak again soon.