It’s female, Jim but not as we know it! (A third reflection on God and gender)

In setting out these thoughts on God and gender, I feel it is a good moment to consider where this has got to and the questions it poses.

This started with the declaration by the Bishop-elect of Sherborne that “the Holy Spirit may appropriately be called ‘He’ or ‘She’”, matched (as I was reminded) by the Bishop of Durham’s similar willingness to refer to the Spirit as ‘She’. Even Rowan Williams, at one point in The Body’s Grace, puts the word ‘his’ used in relation to God within inverted commas.

I have long felt that changing our gendered use of language with regard to God would be no trivial matter. Indeed, I rather agree with CS Lewis when he wrote that,

... a child who had been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. (‘Priestesses in the Church’ in God in the Dock)

For myself, as for Lewis, I am persuaded that this would not be a variation on Christian tradition but a departure from it.

The reasons for this in what has been written so far derive from the fact that we are limited in the options of what we might be doing when we use gendered language.

The first option is that we are following an essentially grammatical convention, such as is found in many languages today as well as the biblical languages of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. We may say that a thing is ‘feminine’, ‘masculine’ or even ‘neuter’, but we mean by this that the words used for them are declined according to the grammatical rules for feminine, masculine or neuter words.

Between the objects themselves, however, there is neither difference nor interdependency in gender terms. If the word for shoe is ‘feminine’, it does not require or follow that the word for foot will be ‘masculine’. Nor does any quality in the thing itself determine the grammatical ‘gender’. A battleship may be a ‘she’, and bunch of flowers could, in principle, be a ‘he’. It matters not at all.

Thus, in the case of the Holy Spirit, we know that the Hebrew for spirit is feminine and the Greek neuter (whilst the term Jesus used on one occasion, paraklētos, is masculine). In none of these instances does the declension of the word establish the gender of the object to which it refers. Indeed, it clearly could not, under ordinary conventions, be all three.

The first question we must put to our theologians and bishops (actual and potential) who advocate using ‘She’ for the Divinity is whether this is purely meant as a linguistic convention. Do they, to put it another way, intend that this means nothing different from what we have hitherto conveyed by using ‘He’?

My suspicion, however, is that this is not what they mean. Indeed, my suspicion is that when they advocate this usage they have half an eye on that section of their audience which is specifically female in the second sense we have established. For the second option is that we identify things as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ because they actually are male and female, objectively demanding the terms ‘he’ or ‘she’ which, if they are exchanged, simply denote the same qualities and differences by another term.

However, when asking in what sense things are objectively ‘male’ or ‘female’, the answer is not in terms of shared qualities or physical characteristics. Rather, a thing is, in this sense, male or female in relation to a complementary object. ‘Males’ may be big or small, strong or weak, passive or aggressive. ‘Females’ may be colourful or dull, dominant or submissive, loud or quiet. But what they all have in common is that for each male there is a complementary female, and vice versa.

That being the case, however, we must again ask our theologians and bishops whether this is what they have in mind when they suggest using ‘She’ for God or the Spirit. Do they mean that there is a complementary ‘He’? If not, then it would seem we are back to Option 1, that ‘She’ is not being used as distinct from ‘He’, except in a strictly grammatical-conventional sense. Yet, as I have suggested, I doubt that this is what they intend. We must then ask what exactly do they mean by ‘She’? And until we get an answer, we may say, with all due respect, that they are talking non-sense. That is to say, there is no sense that the rest of us can attach to their words, whatever they themselves may mean by them.

There are, I think, three difficulties that face those who are proposing this change and yet who want to argue that it makes no difference.

One is that it goes against the convention of millennia. As is clear from the move to do the opposite, the use of gendered language for God is well-established and hitherto almost unchallenged.

Secondly, it requires us to use language in ways that we simply have not done until now. Specifically, we have not used terms like ‘he’ or ‘she’ for persons as if they conveyed nothing about gender. This is not just a ‘theological’ problem —it is an issue of conceptualizing something for which we have no real concepts.

Thirdly, Scripture itself presents us with a dilemma. In Genesis 1:27 we are told that when God made man in his image he created ‘male and female’. And these are clearly ‘male and female’ in the objective sense of our Option 2, not the grammatical sense of Option 1.

In reality, the suggestion that we use ‘She’ for the Divinity seems to fall between the two. It is neither simply a grammatical proposal, yet nor is it clear what we are actually meant to understand by the term. It is meant, apparently, to refer to something ‘female’, but, it would seem, ‘not as we know it’.

John Richardson
22 June 2009

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In what sense is God ‘He’? (A first reflection on God and gender)

In what sense ought we to think of God as ‘He’?

The question is posed by divine revelation and by nature itself.

In the living world we find the two states of male and female. And although some organisms are capable of serving both functions, or alternating between both states, most species are exclusively either one or the other. Even in the plant world, where the characteristics of male and female are less easily recognized by most of us, the two conditions exist.

Within divine revelation, the God of Israel was worshipped within in a context where female deities were widely known, yet Yahweh was never regarded as one of them. The ‘generic’ term for ‘god’ in Hebrew, the language of the earliest Scriptures, is plural: ‘elohim’. Yet from the outset, Israel’s God is referred to by masculine singular verbs: “In the beginning created-he Elohim the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1).

Nor can we attribute this to Israel being a ‘patriarchal’ society, as if that determined the choice of deity. As far as we are aware, those societies which worshipped female deities were equally patriarchal. What is remarkable about Israel is not that they referred to their God as ‘He’, but that they only had one god to which they referred.

Circumstances thus force us into the kind of choice (if we may call it that) faced by Israel. If God is to be spoken of (not just grammatically, but conceptually), the way in which we speak tends towards one or other of the ways in which we speak of other ‘animate’ objects of our perception —to the male or the female. And since we worship only one God, it would appear we can make only one choice.

But whichever choice we make, what does it mean? Clearly, in Ancient Near Eastern culture, the ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ of the gods was conceived of in terms analogous to that of men and women. The gods had relationships, including sexual relationships with one another and with human beings. Equally clearly, the God of Israel was not like these gods, and that in one very important respect, namely that no form could be ascribed to Israel’s God.

The God of Israel was only to be directly encountered ultimately through hearing him:

Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. (Dt 4:15ff)

The list of exclusions clearly reflects the categories of the Creation narrative in Genesis 1, and thus “the likeness of male of female” is surely a reference to humanity itself (cf Gen 1:27). God is not to be imaged as a man or a woman. Yet within the unfolding revelation of Scripture, there is something enigmatic about this prohibition.

First, when God relates to Israel in ‘gendered’ terms it is as ‘male’. We have noted the use of grammar, but this is more particularly expressed in the interrelationship between God and his people as a (faithful) husband and (unfaithful) wife. Indeed, the eschatological hope is that Israel will know her God as a Bride knows her Beloved:

“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’ [ishi]; you will no longer call me ‘my master [baali].’” (Hosea 2:16; MT 2:18)

Thus although Israel is prohibited from making images of God as ‘male’, Israel is nevertheless directed by God to think of God in terms of His ‘He’ to her own ‘she’.

Secondly, we read in Genesis 1:27 that God has already done what God has subsequently prohibited:

So God created man in his own image [tselem], in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

By contrast, in Numbers 33:51-52, we read these words of God to Moses,

Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images and demolish all their high places.

The presuppositions behind Genesis 1:27 would have been very familiar to Ancient Near Eastern cultures. The ‘god’ (or the king) is ‘imaged’ so as to be present where the image is. The God who prohibits images, whether male or female, has thus already made of himself an adequate image, both male and female, in the form of the human race.

It is surely, however, the height of folly to say at this point that God is therefore neither male nor female. The two things we are specifically told about this image is that man (Heb: adam) is it, and it is male and female. Yet when God speaks of God to Israel, it is as ‘male’. As it stands, it is a conundrum, but we cannot cut this particular Gordian Knot by denying one of the two things the text explicitly draws to our attention.

At the same time, however, it is clear that God is not ‘a man’. Man (Heb adam) is God’s image, and is no more, therefore, ‘god’ in actuality than an idol was ‘the god’ or a statue was the king himself. An image, as Genesis 1:26 points out, is a ‘likeness’. But it is a likeness made in something other than the ‘substance’ of the thing being imaged. A photo may give me an image and likeness of my late great aunt, but I would never suppose that she herself was made of silver halides and paper, or sat forever in the same seat with the same clothes, hairstyle and expression.

The very notion of ‘image’ implies both congruity and dissonance —the image is both ‘like’ and completely ‘other than’ the thing being imaged.

Thus the ‘man’ of Genesis 1:26-27 images God in the stuff of this world. But that ‘stuff’ is as unlike the substance of God as dead paper is unlike living flesh —only, of course, more so. Similarly, ‘male and female’ images God, but God is not, thereby, ‘a male’ or ‘a female’ or (God indeed forbid) some androgynous hybrid of the two. We are confronted by an image which we cannot dismiss, but which equally, by virtue of being an image, conceals as well as reveals.

Thus we are forced by nature and Scripture to consider God in relation to our experience, and specifically our human experience, of male and female. This is the medium in which God has imaged God. But we are also forced to consider ourselves in relation to a God who adopts the position of ‘He’. We cannot evade these ‘givens’. Nor can we impose on them some other framework more conducive to our sensibilities. Israel of old was prohibited other gods, whether male or female. We today must similarly resist the temptation to fashion God in our image.

More work remains to be done.

John Richardson
20 June 2009

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