Unusually for a Christian book, William P. Young's The Shack (Now A Major Motion Picture) caused quite a stir in the wider publishing world. For those unfamiliar, it is a story about a man in the wake of life-wrecking tragedy, who finds himself the invited guest of the triune God in a shape-shifting cabin in the middle of a forest. All sorts of healing and self-understanding and provocative conversational exchanges ensue, as you might imagine.
The book was unexpectedly popular (topping the New York Times Best Seller list for fiction between 2008 and 2010) and predictably controversial. Among the several charges laid against it by 'concerned evangelicals' was the 'idolatrous' depiction of the first and third Persons of the Trinity – as an African-American woman, in the case of God the Father, and as an Asian woman, in the case of God the Holy Spirit.
Now, actually, old habits die hard and I am still 'concerned evangelical' enough to be rather uncomfortable myself with direct depictions of God – except as revealed in Jesus. Outrageous though the claim is, I do believe that God 'took on flesh' as a Middle Eastern second temple era Jewish man and lived among other human beings who recorded things that he said and did whilst in that body. We don't have any photos of his precise appearance but I'm kinda OK with attempts to imagine or draw or dramatically represent Jesus as best we can based on what we know about him, and to use those portrayals to get to know him better. (N.B. I am however not OK with the fact that we frighteningly often make him white, as this wilfully ignores what we know about him and starkly reveals the shameful white-centricity of Western Christianity).
Still, I can't help but wonder if all those crying "idolatry!" would have been quite so vociferous if The Shack's images of God had aligned better with their own mental ones. If God the Father had been male, and white, and bearded, for example. Because I defy even someone whose faith recoils from pictures of God to not carry one around in their head. And countless images of bearded white men a) are quite some clue to our collective imagination; b) inevitably reinforce our collective imagination, and c) are unlikely not to influence the individual imaginations even of those who insist against having any pictures at all.
I hope it goes without saying that God is not actually white. In white-centric culture we routinely commit the sin of giving disproportionate power and attention to people who are white, and of disproportionately representing that which is powerful or interesting via white people. Not that it makes sense to apply any ethnic or racial categorisation to the Divine, beyond acknowledging the incarnated ethnicity of Jesus.
I am pretty confident that we don't need a discussion about whether God has a beard.
But...God is not male...? Should we believe this? Do we believe this? Do we relate to God – and to other people, for that matter – as though we believe this?
There's no getting away from the fact that many of the Bible's metaphors for God have a masculine leaning – father, king, warrior, shepherd, agriculturalist. Then again, even in the Bible women may be warriors (e.g. Deborah), shepherds (e.g. Rachel) and agriculturalists (e.g. Proverbs 31's 'Woman of Valour'); and, whilst not kings they can be monarchs (e.g. Queen Candace), so perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to overly-gender these comparisons. And besides, female pictures are also very much present, even if they take a bit more looking for. God is like a human mother who gives birth (Deut 32:18) and breastfeeds (Isa 49:15) and cares (Hos 11:3-4) and comforts (Isa 66:13); God is like a mother bear who fiercely defends her cubs (Hos 13:8); God is like a mother eagle who hovers over her nest and has her chicks' backs as they learn to fly (Deut 32:11-12); God is like a mistress instructing the maids in her service, who depend on her mercy (Ps 123); God is like a woman in search of a precious gold coin she has lost (Lk 15:8-10). There is also a subtle and frequently recurring metaphor embedded in the Hebrew word for compassion, which derives from the word for womb (considered the seat of compassion), and is significant in describing the bearing of God towards human beings. (See Chapter 2 of Phyllis Trible's God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality).
It is also true that the Bible never addresses God with a female title or pronoun. I'm not sure how much this tells us, though, given that ancient Hebrew, like many languages (including common-use English, until recently [2]), had no gender-neutral third person pronouns and typically resorted to masculine constructions in the generic case ('he/him' for singular 'they/them'; 'brothers' for 'brothers and sisters'; 'mankind' for 'humankind') [3]. I have heard it asserted (e.g. here) that God "chose" masculine names and pronouns for Himself in the Bible, but I would like to suggest that what God mostly did was entrust (patriarchally conditioned) human writers to describe God’s self-revelation in human lives and history in their own words. There is one very particular and special occasion in the Bible when God explicitly chooses a pronoun, and it is the gender-neutral first person pronoun:
1. Switch out the pronouns.
Not all of the pronouns all of the time; this is not about rejecting familiar male language and pictures that play a needed part in helping me relate to a transcendent God. I still delight to call Him Father. But sometimes, especially in these repetitive modern worship songs, they come at you in such unnecessarily relentless streams that it's almost as though someone is trying to make a point ("He loves me so; He loves me so; He loves me so, He's so good to me..."). I feel a pang that calls to mind that bit with Paul in Athens: "his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols" (Acts 17:16b). Now, actually, I'm not quite there with 'She'; I don't think it's wrong (or, rather, it's exactly as 'wrong' as anything else), but as yet I still find it sufficiently unfamiliar that it creates just as big a distraction from worship and relationship as the 'He' it replaces, which defeats the purpose. Plus, in group settings, I don't want to cause misunderstanding or confusion for those around me. My similar unreadiness to use 'They' forces me to confess that, however needed and useful I know the singular gender-neutral pronoun to be, I still have some work to do incorporating it fully into my own natural vocabulary. [Edited to add, April 2023: I hope I've progressed with that work since the time of writing but, in some groups at least, 'They' still risks being mistaken for a plural.] So, depending on the construct, for now I tend to opt for either 'God' or 'You'. "You love me so; You love me so; You love me so, You're so good to me." (Which, in this instance, still leaves a problematic abundance of 'me's – another tendency of Christian thinking that's been on my mind lately).
2. Complicate scripture with scripture.
For example, when I see the word Father I think as well about the passages that show God relating to us in Mother ways. When we talk about God's compassion I remember the Hebrew word and ponder what it means to love from the womb. When we talk about God as Lord I reflect on Psalm 123 in all of its uncomfortable language of servitude: "as the eyes of a female slave look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God". I pair the parable of the man looking for his lost sheep with that of the woman looking for her lost coin. I marvel at the parallels between Jesus in Colossians 1 and Wisdom Sophia in Proverbs 8 and wonder, could they be about the same Person? I check that other Christians have had the same idea, and reassure myself that it's very different to the gnostic "bathwater" it's too often thrown out with. Emboldened, I try swapping the Greek word Logos for the Hebrew Sophia in John 1. Jesus took on biologically male flesh but that's not to say that he was male from eternity. Nor can we say much with any certainty about his resurrection biology, given that there is "no marriage at the resurrection" (Matt 22:23-33) and "no male and female" in Christ (Gal 3:26-29). And above all I remember that even the Bible's metaphors and descriptions are partial and inadequate pointers towards the transcendent I Am, who is not those things at the same time as being like those things (Exodus 3:13-14). [5]
3. Grow my catalogue of mental pictures.
I may be uneasy with Octavia Spencer portraying God the Father, as in The Shack, but I find her role in Hidden Figures an excellent source of metaphorical material for visualising aspects of God's character. She plays Dorothy Vaughn, a mathematician at NASA with (unremunerated) supervisory care of a segregated division of black female employees; her tireless and ingenious advocacy for their fair treatment and future job security operates like a modern-day parable of God's faithfulness, nurturing care, and heart for justice. General Leia in Star Wars (particularly The Last Jedi) broadens my ideas about what it means for God to be a Warrior; Judi Dench's M in the Bond films gives me new pictures of authority and leadership when I think of God as Master; Shuri in Black Panther enriches my thinking about God as Creator and Healer. And then there are the women I know in real life – women who love from the womb, who lead with wisdom, who stand against injustice, who parent with courage, who minister reconciliation, who look after the earth, who make remarkable things, who bring health where there's sickness, who help rebuild lives, who presence themselves in ways that build hope. None of them are by any means perfect, of course, but they embody glimmers of qualities that are perfected in God, and they do this in female bodies. Making a habit of noticing this is not to idolise women or the feminine, but to guard against the far harder to avoid converse danger.
[2] Which is to say, we have had the gender-neutral pronoun 'they' for hundreds of years, but its use in the singular case has been inconsistent and its recent relative revival has been met with unpleasantly-motivated resistance.
[3] I've realised since writing this that ancient Greek, by contrast, does have neuter pronouns. And apparently Hebrew sometimes uses feminine generic constructions (I think typically for inanimate objects rather than people). I don't what difference, if any, this makes here; just pointing it out so as not to mislead.
[4] For more on this, see Maggi Dawn's superb blog post on Inclusive and Expansive Language for God.
[5] The Bible describes Jesus as "the exact representation of [God's] being" (Hebrews 1:3) – but there is a difference between reading about a Person and meeting that Person face-to-face. Besides, the idea that God was made perfectly known in the Incarnation surely serves to confirm the limitations of language for that purpose.
[Thumbnail image 'God the Father' by Cima da Conegliano (in the public domain).]
The book was unexpectedly popular (topping the New York Times Best Seller list for fiction between 2008 and 2010) and predictably controversial. Among the several charges laid against it by 'concerned evangelicals' was the 'idolatrous' depiction of the first and third Persons of the Trinity – as an African-American woman, in the case of God the Father, and as an Asian woman, in the case of God the Holy Spirit.
Now, actually, old habits die hard and I am still 'concerned evangelical' enough to be rather uncomfortable myself with direct depictions of God – except as revealed in Jesus. Outrageous though the claim is, I do believe that God 'took on flesh' as a Middle Eastern second temple era Jewish man and lived among other human beings who recorded things that he said and did whilst in that body. We don't have any photos of his precise appearance but I'm kinda OK with attempts to imagine or draw or dramatically represent Jesus as best we can based on what we know about him, and to use those portrayals to get to know him better. (N.B. I am however not OK with the fact that we frighteningly often make him white, as this wilfully ignores what we know about him and starkly reveals the shameful white-centricity of Western Christianity).
Still, I can't help but wonder if all those crying "idolatry!" would have been quite so vociferous if The Shack's images of God had aligned better with their own mental ones. If God the Father had been male, and white, and bearded, for example. Because I defy even someone whose faith recoils from pictures of God to not carry one around in their head. And countless images of bearded white men a) are quite some clue to our collective imagination; b) inevitably reinforce our collective imagination, and c) are unlikely not to influence the individual imaginations even of those who insist against having any pictures at all.
I hope it goes without saying that God is not actually white. In white-centric culture we routinely commit the sin of giving disproportionate power and attention to people who are white, and of disproportionately representing that which is powerful or interesting via white people. Not that it makes sense to apply any ethnic or racial categorisation to the Divine, beyond acknowledging the incarnated ethnicity of Jesus.
I am pretty confident that we don't need a discussion about whether God has a beard.
But...God is not male...? Should we believe this? Do we believe this? Do we relate to God – and to other people, for that matter – as though we believe this?
So God created mankind in his own image,Right from the very beginning of all things pertaining to human people the Bible introduces us, in our full sex-differentiated diversity,[1] as co-image-bearers of God. What it means to be an image bearer is not made explicit, and has been debated ever since, but it is unambiguous and significant that neither male nor female separately suffices for the part.
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
There's no getting away from the fact that many of the Bible's metaphors for God have a masculine leaning – father, king, warrior, shepherd, agriculturalist. Then again, even in the Bible women may be warriors (e.g. Deborah), shepherds (e.g. Rachel) and agriculturalists (e.g. Proverbs 31's 'Woman of Valour'); and, whilst not kings they can be monarchs (e.g. Queen Candace), so perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to overly-gender these comparisons. And besides, female pictures are also very much present, even if they take a bit more looking for. God is like a human mother who gives birth (Deut 32:18) and breastfeeds (Isa 49:15) and cares (Hos 11:3-4) and comforts (Isa 66:13); God is like a mother bear who fiercely defends her cubs (Hos 13:8); God is like a mother eagle who hovers over her nest and has her chicks' backs as they learn to fly (Deut 32:11-12); God is like a mistress instructing the maids in her service, who depend on her mercy (Ps 123); God is like a woman in search of a precious gold coin she has lost (Lk 15:8-10). There is also a subtle and frequently recurring metaphor embedded in the Hebrew word for compassion, which derives from the word for womb (considered the seat of compassion), and is significant in describing the bearing of God towards human beings. (See Chapter 2 of Phyllis Trible's God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality).
It is also true that the Bible never addresses God with a female title or pronoun. I'm not sure how much this tells us, though, given that ancient Hebrew, like many languages (including common-use English, until recently [2]), had no gender-neutral third person pronouns and typically resorted to masculine constructions in the generic case ('he/him' for singular 'they/them'; 'brothers' for 'brothers and sisters'; 'mankind' for 'humankind') [3]. I have heard it asserted (e.g. here) that God "chose" masculine names and pronouns for Himself in the Bible, but I would like to suggest that what God mostly did was entrust (patriarchally conditioned) human writers to describe God’s self-revelation in human lives and history in their own words. There is one very particular and special occasion in the Bible when God explicitly chooses a pronoun, and it is the gender-neutral first person pronoun:
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:13-14)So yes, I think we should believe that "God is not male", because it's scriptural. And I'm not just talking about belief in the sense of assent to a theoretical statement – almost all Christians, even those most committed to expressly conservative agendas, are willing to go that far (again, see here). To me, it seems increasingly that there is a pressing need for us to "get" this; to actively integrate it into our thinking and being. Because not "getting" it has consequences; it narrows and distorts our understanding of God, and it sets up an idol of masculinity [4]. As post-Christian feminist theologian Mary Daly quotably wrote in 1973, "if God is male, then the male is God". That is, a perception of God as male legitimises and perpetuates the presumption of male ascendancy. Some Christians think that society and the church have already achieved gender equality, while others consider gender hierarchies to be good and life-giving and in need of preservation or reinstatement. Frankly, both of these positions seem highly dubious to me in light of the evidence – recent conspicuous examples being the revelations of the #MeToo and #ChurchToo abuse awareness movements. Inequality persists, and results in people made in God's image inflicting harm on other people made in God's image.
For me personally, the process of "getting" it is slow going. All of our images and metaphors for God are necessarily partial and imperfect in the extreme, and require caution and humility in our use of them. But I find it much easier to remember – contrary to this decade's most popular Christian novel – that God is not a black woman than I do to remember – contrary to countless artists and cartoonists and writers over many centuries – that God is not a white man. I'm working on it, though; here are some things that I have started to do to help me dismantle my mental graven image of 'God as male':
1. Switch out the pronouns.
Not all of the pronouns all of the time; this is not about rejecting familiar male language and pictures that play a needed part in helping me relate to a transcendent God. I still delight to call Him Father. But sometimes, especially in these repetitive modern worship songs, they come at you in such unnecessarily relentless streams that it's almost as though someone is trying to make a point ("He loves me so; He loves me so; He loves me so, He's so good to me..."). I feel a pang that calls to mind that bit with Paul in Athens: "his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols" (Acts 17:16b). Now, actually, I'm not quite there with 'She'; I don't think it's wrong (or, rather, it's exactly as 'wrong' as anything else), but as yet I still find it sufficiently unfamiliar that it creates just as big a distraction from worship and relationship as the 'He' it replaces, which defeats the purpose. Plus, in group settings, I don't want to cause misunderstanding or confusion for those around me. My similar unreadiness to use 'They' forces me to confess that, however needed and useful I know the singular gender-neutral pronoun to be, I still have some work to do incorporating it fully into my own natural vocabulary. [Edited to add, April 2023: I hope I've progressed with that work since the time of writing but, in some groups at least, 'They' still risks being mistaken for a plural.] So, depending on the construct, for now I tend to opt for either 'God' or 'You'. "You love me so; You love me so; You love me so, You're so good to me." (Which, in this instance, still leaves a problematic abundance of 'me's – another tendency of Christian thinking that's been on my mind lately).
2. Complicate scripture with scripture.
For example, when I see the word Father I think as well about the passages that show God relating to us in Mother ways. When we talk about God's compassion I remember the Hebrew word and ponder what it means to love from the womb. When we talk about God as Lord I reflect on Psalm 123 in all of its uncomfortable language of servitude: "as the eyes of a female slave look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God". I pair the parable of the man looking for his lost sheep with that of the woman looking for her lost coin. I marvel at the parallels between Jesus in Colossians 1 and Wisdom Sophia in Proverbs 8 and wonder, could they be about the same Person? I check that other Christians have had the same idea, and reassure myself that it's very different to the gnostic "bathwater" it's too often thrown out with. Emboldened, I try swapping the Greek word Logos for the Hebrew Sophia in John 1. Jesus took on biologically male flesh but that's not to say that he was male from eternity. Nor can we say much with any certainty about his resurrection biology, given that there is "no marriage at the resurrection" (Matt 22:23-33) and "no male and female" in Christ (Gal 3:26-29). And above all I remember that even the Bible's metaphors and descriptions are partial and inadequate pointers towards the transcendent I Am, who is not those things at the same time as being like those things (Exodus 3:13-14). [5]
3. Grow my catalogue of mental pictures.
I may be uneasy with Octavia Spencer portraying God the Father, as in The Shack, but I find her role in Hidden Figures an excellent source of metaphorical material for visualising aspects of God's character. She plays Dorothy Vaughn, a mathematician at NASA with (unremunerated) supervisory care of a segregated division of black female employees; her tireless and ingenious advocacy for their fair treatment and future job security operates like a modern-day parable of God's faithfulness, nurturing care, and heart for justice. General Leia in Star Wars (particularly The Last Jedi) broadens my ideas about what it means for God to be a Warrior; Judi Dench's M in the Bond films gives me new pictures of authority and leadership when I think of God as Master; Shuri in Black Panther enriches my thinking about God as Creator and Healer. And then there are the women I know in real life – women who love from the womb, who lead with wisdom, who stand against injustice, who parent with courage, who minister reconciliation, who look after the earth, who make remarkable things, who bring health where there's sickness, who help rebuild lives, who presence themselves in ways that build hope. None of them are by any means perfect, of course, but they embody glimmers of qualities that are perfected in God, and they do this in female bodies. Making a habit of noticing this is not to idolise women or the feminine, but to guard against the far harder to avoid converse danger.
If these suggestions make you uncomfortable, honestly, I know how you feel. But my Christian tradition has urged on me the importance of not being overly swayed by my feelings. I've done a lot of thinking about this; "God is not male" is not controversial, nor is it a new belief for me, but it's one that has acquired new content and conviction through prayerful study. It's about time my head knowledge became heart knowledge; expanding my openness towards all that God is requires practice, you see, and these are my ways of practicing. It also, really, given Jesus' emphasis on the connectedness between relationship with God and relationship with one another, requires community ... so, who's with me?
[1] Edited to add, April 2023: While Genesis 1:27 is often presumed to imply an essentialising and prescriptive gender(=sex) binary, it seems natural to me to read "male and female" as a descriptive and inclusive merism – a rhetorical device common in biblical Hebrew and used elsewhere in Genesis 1 whereby two contrasting parts are combined to refer to the whole ("the heavens and the earth," "evening and morning"). I recognise that not everyone is persuaded by this interpretation, but I find it surprising as it seems a more coherent fit with what I take to be the verse's primary emphasis – namely, the profoundly inclusive scope of the image-bearing status (see e.g. Richard Middleton's The Liberating Image).
[3] I've realised since writing this that ancient Greek, by contrast, does have neuter pronouns. And apparently Hebrew sometimes uses feminine generic constructions (I think typically for inanimate objects rather than people). I don't what difference, if any, this makes here; just pointing it out so as not to mislead.
[4] For more on this, see Maggi Dawn's superb blog post on Inclusive and Expansive Language for God.
[5] The Bible describes Jesus as "the exact representation of [God's] being" (Hebrews 1:3) – but there is a difference between reading about a Person and meeting that Person face-to-face. Besides, the idea that God was made perfectly known in the Incarnation surely serves to confirm the limitations of language for that purpose.
[Thumbnail image 'God the Father' by Cima da Conegliano (in the public domain).]
Comments