Thursday, March 17, 2022

William G. T. Shedd vs. Translating John 4:24 as God is "a" Spirit

William G. T. Sheed (1820-1894) noted the problematic nature of translating πνευμα in John 4:24 as "a spirit" in light of Trinitarian theology:


God’s Spirituality

 

The words of our Lord to the Samaritan woman, “God is a Spirit” (John 4:24), although spoken for a practical purpose, are also a scientific definition. The original (pneuma ho theos) by its emphatic collocation of pneuma and omission of the article implies that God is spirit in the highest sense. He is not a spirit, but spirit itself, absolutely. The employment of the article in the English version is objectionable, because it places the deity in a class with other spiritual beings. But this is not the thought of Christ, who asserts that “no one knows the Father but the Son” (Matt. 11:27), thus claiming for himself a knowledge of the deity as the absolute and unconditioned spirit, who is not cognizable by the finite mind in the manner and degree that finite spirit is. Man knows the nature of finite spirit through his own self-consciousness, but he knows that of the infinite spirit only analogically. Hence some of the characteristics of divine nature cannot be known by a finite intelligence. For example, how God can be independent of the limitations of time and have an eternal mode of consciousness that is without succession, including all events simultaneously in one omniscient intuition, is inscrutable to man because he himself has no such consciousness. The same is true of the omnipresence of God. How he can be all at very point in universal space baffles human comprehension, though it has some light thrown upon it by the fact that the human soul is all at very point in the body. (William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology: Complete and Unabridged, Volumes 1-3 [Reformed Retrieval, 2021], 113, emphasis in bold added)

 

On John 4:24 itself, see:


Lynn Wilder vs. Latter-day Saint (and Biblical) Theology on Divine Embodiment