God’s Gender

Why would Christians assign a male gender to the God of all creation? First, many of us including myself don’t, at least not intentionally. More on that later. However many Christians inherited referring to God as a male directly from scripture. In ancient Israel, it would have been natural to think of the highest ruler as male. It would also have been natural to think of God as an earthly king with earthly qualities such as domination and violence toward other people.

I generally think most people have moved beyond thinking that the violence of God in the Old Testament is a literal description of God’s true nature. I mean, we’re faced with three general paths in dealing with stories of divine violence. Perhaps God really is a domineering, violent, even genocidal God. That seems to be what is required if you take the Old Testament as an historical document penned by God. Or perhaps God was a violent God and is in recovery together with humanity. I’m open to this, more as an honest mythological and literary approach to the nature of God as we’ve inherited in these traditions. Yet there are problems with this approach, principally that it would imply that the God of all creation is less than perfect. That may be true, but that isn’t the God of classical theism as I understand it. Regular readers will anticipate my third answer — our stories are bound up in the cultural mores in which they were written. God was a violent, even tyrannical warmonger because that is how we understood rulers in that era. We’ve since moved beyond that quite comfortably. We teach our children that God is love. We don’t put the genocide of the Book of Joshua on children’s Sunday school posters.

Of course, there is always Marcionism. But I much prefer the simpler approach that human ideas will always fail to perfectly capture God’s nature. Duh.

So if we can accept that God is only described in war-faring terms because that was the limit of ancient imaginations, why can’t we accept that God is beyond gender? I realize that for most of my readers I’m choir-preaching. I don’t think many of us believe God actually has a gender, mostly because it offends our logical faculties. Also, science continues to affirm that gender is not a binary switch. Gender is not a point on a line, it is a spectrum, a circle, and it can be quite fluid based on your culture and willingness to accept ambiguity. It only feels like a point in the line because many people are sitting on a particular point. But if you grasp the full diversity of creation, you can understand that the world is a much bigger place than your limited experience. And guess what — God is even bigger.

Most of us continue to reflexively refer to God as He. It’s hard to break decades of religious enculturation. There is a very strong pattern of language in our scriptural tradition. But that is no excuse. In fact, the Bible employs feminine references to God as well.

The Bible contains several instances where feminine imagery and references to God can be found, though they are less common than masculine references. Here are a few notable examples:

• The Book of Proverbs, especially in Proverbs 8, personifies Wisdom as a woman. Even as a young child growing up in a very conservative denomination, it was natural for me to perceive the Holy Spirit as a feminine presence. Certainly where wisdom plays a role in creation, how can we not sense motherhood?
• In Isaiah 66:13, God is compared to a mother comforting her children: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.”
• It’s hard to make sense of Deuteronomy 32:18 without imagining that editors were forcing masculinity upon a motherhood metaphor. I mean, what kind of father gives birth? “You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.” Bizarrely, the NIV clings to the language, “You deserted the Rock, who fathered you,” here.
• Jesus Himself — yes by all means continue to refer to Jesus Him because being male was a peculiarity of His incarnation — seemed quite comfortable referring to Himself with feminine qualities. In Matthew 23:37 Jesus says, ““Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

I understand that some Christians are so handcuffed to the exact words and images employed over 3,000 years ago that they think it is sacrilegious to not gender God specifically as a male. But take a step back. What makes more sense to you, that the God over all desires to be referred to as an alpha male, or that a long history of fragile alpha male doubts and insecurities driven by a patriarchal society forced a gender upon God where one doesn’t belong?

There are a ton of reasons to try to move past the male gendering of the source of all being. I know this will offend certain fundamentalists, many Texas pastors and other intolerant megalomaniacs. Good. Assigning a male gender to God is alienating to the majority of humans — yes the majority by a point or two, probably because males are not as clever at staying alive — who don’t identify as male. We can be better. It is our duty to extend the spirit of our Christ-centered faith beyond the cultural norms of ancient times. It is completely derelict for us not to move past gendered language in all matters but especially in our faith language.

We cannot let that faith language fail to capture the fullness of the divine nature simply because that’s how they understood it centuries back. God cannot be contained in any box, even gender, so why would we limit our understanding of God’s unfolding revelation?

So how do we move forward? Pete Enns has suggested using, “they,” as God’s pronoun and there is strong scriptural support for this as, “Elohim,” is often plural. Pete is not alone. I’ve tried this on through multiple occasions, but the grammar curmudgeon in me bristles around it. I need to get over my language bias, because there is no reason not to evolve here. For the most part, I resort to using, “God,” where a, “Him,” or, “Her,” might better fit. Consider this clunky phrase I used in a blog post: God limits God’s self. Wouldn’t “themselves,” actually be easier on the reader? But in general, I find myself reoriented in the gender-neutral decisions of the NRSVUE and the United Church of Christ, tending to use words like Godself, Creator, Source and the like. At least it is an attempt to shift away from a strictly male image.

I think God’s motherhood needs to be named right now because it’s frequently missing.

Other times I believe it is important to highlight the feminine aspects of God. I’ve written two songs in my catalog, “God is a Mother,” and, “Mama Mama Please,” that deliberately imagine God as a mother because those are divine aspects of which we need steady reminders. So please understand, I’m not ignoring the male aspects, I just think those are so ingrained they don’t need special highlights. If I lost track of a friend on a hiking trip and I ask, “where is Tabitha,” you should not assume that I care less about the rest of the party. It’s just the rest of the party is standing right in front of me and doesn’t need to be named. I think God’s motherhood needs to be named right now because it’s frequently missing. Reclaiming feminine imagery that is so present in other faiths and mythologies can help us balance our image of God toward something healthier than the abusive king of the Old Testament.

I know some of you feel uncomfortable revising liturgies and I get it. Part of the point of liturgy is we’ve done it that way for 2,000 years. I would just encourage you to consider what is that 2,000 year old liturgical way. It’s not about the specifics of language and culture, it’s about praise, prayer, confession, communion and thanksgiving. If we can do these things in a more inclusive way, we can welcome even more into God’s Church and Kingdom. We can cultivate a more expansive, inclusive vision of God that sparks our theological imagination, enriches our liturgy with greater meaning and promotes greater acceptance of all of God’s diverse creation.