God's Gender (& the Trinity)

I have been thinking a bit recently about God’s gender. I have some tentative thoughts. I do want to stress that they are tentative and may very well be completely wrong – do argue with me if necessary!

The Problem

Basically, we Christians know that both genders are made in the image of God. Genesis 1:27 reads:

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

We also know that we use male gendered language (“He”, “Father”, “Son”) to talk of God. While the Bible does use female-style metaphors for God, it doesn’t talk about “Our mother in heaven”; nor does it ordinarily call God “she”. These two things appear to be in tension.

Some people attempt to get out of it by claiming that calling God “He” was the only real option in a patriarchal culture. However, this seems pretty weak. Plenty of patriarchal cultures in the ancient world had religions focused around one female god. I really don’t think that we should be seeking to replace biblical language about God with anything else.

If there’s anything at all we have no right to do, it’s to worship God in a way He hasn’t commanded or revealed himself to be. So I feel distinctly uncomfortable about calling God “she” without biblical support. But I feel much more uncomfortable about implying that men are especially made in the image of God – which is in effect saying that men are better than women; more divine and therefore more human.

In the case of two persons of the Trinity, the language is very explicitly male. God the “Father” is male; God the “Son” is male. In both case, they are “He”; things they own are “His”, etc.

The Holy Spirit is a bit vaguer – just as usual in the Bible (for whatever reason you might want to give.) Basically, the Bible normally – but not always – follows the rules of grammar when talking about the Spirit. Hebrew and Greek are a bit like most modern languages (e.g. German), where words have genders – so the word for “table” or “book” might be masculine of feminine – you might say “she” about a book rather than “it” and it doesn’t have anything really to do with – I understand that you get odd things like a “teacher” might be a masculine word, even if the specific teacher is a woman – it doesn’t have much to do with gender, even though the language is gendered.

In the Bible, the Spirit is normally dealt with according to the gender of the word “spirit” – in Hebrew, the word “spirit” is female; in Greek, it is neuter. Therefore, in general, the Spirit is talked of as “she” in the Old Testament, and “it” in the New Testament. However, that’s not universally the case; the Bible might adopt another word (e.g. “another counsellor” is masculine), and some parts of the New Testament break the laws of grammar to call the Spirit “He” rather than “it”, presumably because the Holy Spirit is not an “It”, He is a person. So in the Old Testament (where what is a reference to the Trinity is perhaps a bit vaguer anyway), the Spirit is a “she”; in the New Testament, the Spirit is an “it” or a “he”; but it’s unclear how much the “she” and the “it” are important, when it’s just the way the language works that they end up like that.

So we have three persons – two are identified as male, one is either identified as male or of “questionable gender” (!) – but this seems to be a blatant contradiction of any belief that women are equally the image of God. If women are equally the image of God, they must equally reflect God. If they equally reflect God, then God must be equally female to male.

I really hope at this stage, everyone sees my problem here. I hope you see why I don’t want to take the easy way out and either say “oh, male language about God is just culture” or say “yeah, God is more male than female” – I’m pretty sure both are unworkable, and both seem fundamentally wrong.

The Solution

I’m pretty darn confident that what I’ve said above is true – that there does appear to be a tension here… what I’m not so sure about is the solution. I do want to present a tentative solution, but please do feel free to blast me.

What I want to suggest as a solution is that God is presented in these male terms in scripture primarily because that is most appropriate to the way he relates to us. However, the relationships within God – I want to argue – are not entirely like that. The Father has “male-like” roles; the Son has “female-like” roles. (Obviously the relationships God has are not identical in any sense with human gender roles. Nonetheless, it .)

I believe that there are differences in gender in how human couples do, or should, relate. I’m not sure what the differences are – but I can’t see any way of saying they’re not there. Men take, or should take, one role; women another. There are different views about what this role is, and I don't want to get into that, but there is something there. There is something about the male-female relationship (at least within marriage) which is similar to relationships within God. I don’t want to claim that everything is similar, but that there is something that is similar.

Or, to put it another way, of the following persons:

A. God the Father
B. God the Son
C. Male Humans
D. Female Humans

A is “male” in relation to B; C is male in relation to D. Both C and D are “female” in relation to A and B. Whatever this metaphorically “female” quality of relationship is, BCD have it in relation to A, C&D have it in relation to B, and D has it in relation to C. Similarly, metaphorical “maleness” is possessed by A in relation to BCD, B in relation to CD, and C in relation to D.

This has nothing to do with ontological greatness. A and B are ontologically equal with one another; as are C and D. In other words, they’re equal in being. However, A and B are both ontologically superior to C and D. This “maleness” and “femaleness,” whatever it is, has nothing to do with how great one is; the fact that A/B are greater than C/D is because of something else entirely.

According to this, God is both male and female within himself, but it makes sense why the Bible always uses male language (“He”, “Son”, etc) to talk about Him – He is acting that way in relation to us.

There is some biblical evidence for this. In the Old Testament, there are a few figures who we find out in the New Testament are OT revelations of Jesus. One is “the word” - who is neuter, per grammar. Another is “Wisdom” – who is portrayed in Proverbs as a woman in whom God (the Father) delights, etc.

We also see what seems to me to be a pretty explicit exposition of this in 1 Corinthians 11:3 – “Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.”

Head is obviously not meant to be taken literally here (as in, it is not a physical head). It’s not used often in Greek as a metaphor, but when it is it can mean several things – it might mean what we might metaphorically use “head” for (i.e. in charge), or it might mean head as in something like “source”, or something having a certain kind of preeminence. Each of those options would have interesting consequences for how one would define the gender roles, but I don’t want to make claims about which one is right. The only point I would like to make is that this passage pretty explicitly says that A is "head" of B, B is head of C, and C is head of D – as I have argued above.

However, I do propose this tentatively as a more widespread way of understanding God’s gender, and would be very eager to be contradicted and argued with so that I can think through this better.