For as long as I can remember, I have heard God referred to as a male. In the words of a song we often sang, “There’s a father up above and He’s looking down in love.” Recently, I’ve been giving it more thought. Is God male? Is God both male and female? If so, is there a ratio? Perhaps God is 30 percent female, for instance, but 70 percent male. Predominantly male and thus the pronouns are masculine.
After discussing it, most Christians would probably agree that God transcends male and female categories. However, my guess is that fewer Christians would feel comfortable using female pronouns for God. It’s all a bit much if one grew up in a traditional religious setting to sing there’s a mother up above and she’s looking down in love (though of course that particular song is problematic for other reasons too, which we won’t address today).
And yet I am posing the question.
Praying the Psalms forms the bedrock of my devotional life. One day last month I deviated and put in female pronouns instead of the male pronouns in our English Bibles. Now it read, “God has made her salvation known and revealed her righteousness to the nations” (Psalm 98:2). I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but that fresh reading led me to a minor theophany. Did my prayers displease God that day? If so I did not sense his/her disapproval.
I like the quip from the Mennonite writer Michael Pahl that God is not a woman but then neither is she a man. Or in the similar, but markedly more patriarchal, words of the Catholic Catechism: “God is neither man nor woman: he is God.”
Personally, I remain uncertain what to think. I see valid reasons both for and against the use of male pronouns for God.
Reasons for:
- Jesus often talked about God as father.
- Throughout church history, people often referred to God with male pronouns.
- It is lovely to think of God as initiator, a trait often associated with maleness.
Reasons against:
- Using only male pronouns downplays core characteristics about God.
- Jesus and other biblical figures used female imagery to talk about God. (Father is only one of many metaphors for God.)
- Some of us will find it hard not to attribute negative human male tendencies onto God if we use only male pronouns.
No matter what pronouns are appropriate, this seems certain: God must always transcend our current conception of God. As St. Augustine said, “If we understand it, it is not God.” We must always choose between a box-demolishing God or a God-demolishing box (Greg Boyd).
Of course, it is as easy to box God in as a female as it is to box God in as a male. The further I go in my faith journey, the more I see that God is not a fixed being with a street address. God is dynamic. God is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and truth. Personal, yes. Loving and relational, yes. But not a static old man on a throne somewhere. Both male and female, but also transcending both.
Closing thought: perhaps Jesus, God incarnate, came as a male because that was the most eloquent way for an omnipotent God to defy stereotypes of male power, show a radical willingness to lay aside might, and, ultimately, win us through sacrificial love.