Considering that Charles Dickens was an apostate Christian, who left the Church of England into which he had been christened in order to embrace the heretical Unitarian superstition, and who also openly disclosed his intense hated for both the Roman Catholic and Evangelical churches, in equal measure, and who as a Unitarian, by definition denied both the deity of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, and the existence of the Trinity (and thus also the deity and personal identity of God the Holy Spirit), I would argue that his views on gender of the Holy Spirit, whatever they may be, are, at least for our purposes, totally irrelevant.
I would also note that Pneumatomacchiansim (also known as Macedonianism from Macedonius, a proponent of this heresy), which constitutes the denial of the deity and/or the distinct, uncreated and individual personhood, identity and hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, coequal and coeternal with the unoriginate Father, from whom He proceeds eternally*, and the uncreated and only-begotten Son, within God the Holy Trinity (from the Greek “Pneumatos” meaning Spirit, and “Macchos” meaning fighter), is comorbid with Arianism, so that almost all Arians and Unitarians, in denying the deity of Christ and his uncreated and coeternal existence, for He is begotten by the Father eternally**, also deny the distinct personhood of the Holy Spirit as well as His coeternality and coequality with the Father and the Son.
Thus, when it comes to the Holy Spirit, we should pay no heed to the views of a Unitarian heretic such as Charles Dickens, a man not only apostatized from the Christian religion***, but who also hated Roman Catholic Christianity, for he is not qualified to provide any insights into the person of the Spirit, whose existence as a distinct coequal and coeternal Divine Person is directly contrary to the core doctrine of Unitarianism, which stressed the heretical belief that the Trinity does not exist and only the Father is God, with Christ being an enlightened human, and the Holy Spirit the impersonal breath of God (whereas Christians believe Indeed Roman Catholicism, despite having introduced the Filioque controversy, generally does a very good job maintaining a strong Trinitarian theology (and also limits the Filioque to its Western Rite churches, with most Eastern Catholics not adhering to the Filioque, for reasons we shall explore), with several Catholic peoples, particularly Sardinians, known for their intense devotion to God the Holy Spirit, who I feel like in some churches is reduced to being a poorly understood additional member of the Trinity, who does not receive the same attention as the Father or the Son (and is less likely than either to be the Person addressed in our prayers, indeed I think only the Eastern churches make a point of frequently addressing God the Holy Spirit in liturgical prayer****, with some Western churches not even addressing prayers to God the Son), and despite being the Divine Person who interacts with us the most on a daily basis.
* The Eastern churches additionally reject the
Filioque, a clause added to the Nicene Creed in the late 6th century by the Spanish Church in response to an outbreak of Adoptionism, which states that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son; the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian Church of the East, Ancient Church of the East, and strangely, most of the
Sui Juris Eastern Catholic Churches In communion with Rome (the RCC explains this by saying that the filioque would be heretical if included in the Greek-language version of the Creed, but since most of the Byzantine Rite “Greek Catholics”, who use the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, are not Greek-speaking but rather use Church Slavonic (or a vernacular Slavic language), Arabic or another language, such as Romanian or Hungarian, and since the Roman Rite when translated into those languages (which mostly happened to the liturgy itself, as opposed to the hand missals that allow the laity to follow the traditional Latin mass, in 1969 with the Novus Ordo Missae, however, in what is now Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Galgolithic Mass was created around the 10th century, which is a version of the traditional Latin Mass translated into Galgolithic, which is just Old Church Slavonic written in a Gothic alphabet rather than in Cyrillic), and these have always, as far as I am aware, featured the
Filioque.
The filioque is rejected both for canonical grounds, since replacing or modifying the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 is prohibited by the canons of the Council of Ephesus (the Third Ecumenical Synod, recognized by both Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches), and also doctrinal grounds, since in a worst case it can lead to a depersonalizing effect on the Holy Spirit by causing Him to become a sort of shared attribute of the Father and the Son.
Obviously we do not encounter a deprecation of the coequality, coeternality and unique personal identity of God the Holy Spirit among pious traditional Western Christians whether Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Calvinist, Congregationalist, Baptist or any other church with a well developed Trinitarianism which is central to their soteriology, but we do start to see it among less pious Christians and less conscientious clergy even from the aforementioned denominations, especially in non-denominational, evangelical, fundamentalist and dispensationalist churches where there exists a nominal belief in the Trinity, but the clergy are not well formed in the implications of Trinitarian theology or the basics of Pneumatology, that is to say, the Theology of God the Holy Spirit.
This depersonalization of the Holy Spirit is, in my experience, especially prevalent among clergy preoccupied with some other theological focus, such as Liberation Theology or Feminist Theology or Queer Theology or, ironically, even among some Charismatic and Pentecostal clergy (especially Oneness Pentecostals), where the supposed effects of the Spirit are regarded with more interest than distinct personal identity of the Spirit as a member of the Godhood, as stressed in the Holy Scriptures of both the Old and New Testament.
** The older translations of the Creed elegantly express this as “Begotten of the Father before all Worlds.”
*** Dickens was baptized into the Church of England and was nominally Anglican until formally separating himself from the Christian faith in the 1840s to join the heretical Unitarian cult, which has been consistently popular among writers and intellectuals since the late 18th century. Indeed, among other famous Unitarian writers of the mid 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson served as a Unitarian minister who was instrumental in the process of removing the lingering traces of Christianity by promoting Transcendentalism, and resigning with great show after a decade in the ministry over alleged objection to his program among his parishioners, and Leo Tolstoy, who adhered to his own personal belief system even more extreme than that of most 19th century Unitarians, and who sponsored the emigration of the Doukhobors, a Russian cult very similar in most respects to Unitarianism.
**** That said, the familiar Litany at the beginning of the Roman Catholic mass “Lord Have Mercy, Christ Have Mercy, Lord Have Mercy” is addressed sequentially to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
By the way I would appreciate any comment or correction to this post that might be offered by our pious and learned Orthodox friends
@prodromos @HTacianas @FenderTL5 and
@dzheremi , and our faithful and beloved Lutheran and Anglican friends
@MarkRohfrietsch and
@Shane R , and our promising new Methodist friend
@jas3 , whose knowledge of Orthodox Christian doctrine, and of Patristics and Ecclesiastical History is truly impressive, as is his dedication to traditional Christianity. Also we have another friend who is knowledgeable about the history of Unitarianism and Congregationalism, and also the Stone/Campbell movement; perhaps our Calvinist friend
@bbbbbbb might recall who I am talking about.
Also, I should note, lest anyone get the wrong impression, that I am not referring to my friends using the royal we, rather, I regard these members (all of whom I count among my friends, and some of whom I regard as very dear friends, and I pray that I might be a good friend to all of them) as being friends of everyone on the forum, and thus refer to them in the third person so that other members who might not be as well acquainted with them as I have been blessed to be, might be reminded as to their identity, and the scope of their immense contributions to the ChristianForums community.
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