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Protestant Apologetics

Galatians 4:6

NT Letters
Galatians 4:6
6And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!”
Read in NWT ↗
JW Usage

The Watchtower treats "the spirit of his Son" as a metonym for Jehovah's impersonal holy spirit — the "active force" by which God adopts believers. The possessive ("of his Son") is softened into an objective genitive ("the spirit that testifies to or comes from the Son"). The Spirit's cry of "Abba, Father!" is reassigned to the believer using the spirit — not to the Spirit himself.

Protestant Usage

Paul's phrase is devastating to the "active force" reading. The Spirit is called the Spirit of his Son — the Son possesses the Spirit. uses the same phrase as a synonym for "the Spirit of God" and "the Spirit of Christ" interchangeably; calls him "the Spirit of Jesus Christ." An impersonal force does not belong to a person. And the Spirit's action in 4:6 is personal: he cries "Abba, Father" — the intimate Aramaic address Jesus himself uses in Gethsemane (). The parallel in makes it explicit: "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are God's children." Crying, witnessing, adopting — these are person- acts, not the behaviours of an energy field. If Jesus is a creature, how does a creaturely "active force" belonging to him cry to the Father in the believer's heart?

NWT Issue

The NWT renders to pneuma as lowercase "spirit" and uses the neuter "it cries out" where every major English translation capitalises "Spirit" and uses the personal pronoun ("who cries out" — ESV, NIV, NASB). This is one verse in the NWT's systematic depersonalisation of the Spirit, documented more fully at ("as it wills"), ("that one" / "it"), and . The lowercase and the neuter together mean a JW reading in the NWT never encounters the Spirit as "he."