Yours Faithfully: Biblical language refers to God as male but could He be a She?

Last week I found myself at the heart of a media flurry around how we talk about God.

Is sometimes talking about God as She ‘unholy twaddle’, as some of the responses to the original article suggest?

But it was good to see that this interested people. Clergy are always pleased when people want to talk about God.

The debate raises interesting questions about our language and how tradition copes with changing attitudes to gender.

God is usually referred to as He. We talk about God as Lord, Father and King. These are Biblical titles.

Yet it is important to note that the Old Testament uses lots of different metaphors to portray God.

When God appears to people we see fire, cloud, glory and even a still small voice.

Among these metaphors we do find feminine images of God, being like a mother as well as God as father.

The Israelites were keen to show that their God, ‘I am’– Yahweh, was very different to local idols and fertility goddesses. They emphasise the sheer majesty of the Creator.

However, central to the Jewish and later Christian faith is the personal nature of God.

The people of Israel wanted to express that God was speaking to them, fighting for them, showing mercy to them and making a covenant with them.

To describe a meaningful relationship, language is needed which conveys the personal.

So it is not surprising that the pronoun He is used for God.

In a world in which power, authority and leadership was male, it was the most appropriate pronoun to use for the all powerful Yahweh of Israel.

For Christians, the male language about God is strengthened by Jesus – a fully divine yet human male – when he addresses God as Father.

This was strengthened by the Trinitarian understanding of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So for many Christians it is an open and shut case. God is male because he is our Father. So why begin to question this?

The issue is less about God and more about how the gender we say God is can impact our understanding of who we are.

Clearly, God is not male in the sense of human sex differences. God is not a man. In fact, God is beyond the kind of human differentials that are so important to us.

God is not male or female, black or white, blonde or ginger because these are all to do with our human bodies.

The Bible tells us in Genesis that humanity is made in the image of God, male and female.

So something of what it is to be human – whatever kind of human we are – is reflective of God.

To put it another way, we can learn some things about who God is by understanding who we are as human beings.

If we only use masculine language about God, we can begin to assume, as many do, that male humanity is more like God than female humanity.

This, alongside the tendency to see man as the normative human and woman as the other, can lead to the oppression of women and their exclusion from spiritual practice.

If men and women are equally made in the image of God, then the human experience of women needs to be taken seriously as a resource for both sexes.

Sometimes we need familiar language we know and love, but at times we need images that make us feel uncomfortable, to remind us that the God we worship is beyond our human capacity to describe.

To remind us that women, as well as men, are made in Her image.