On why God is not a “He” (and the alter-ego of Jesus is a “She”)

Like many of you, I’ve watched the events unfolding in the United States this week with a fair degree of horror, a horror I can only imagine that is intensified for those who call America home. And as someone with a previous life in contemporary Pentecostal/Evangelical Christianity, it is deeply disturbing to see political violence baptised in the very religious symbols I grew up with. Perhaps this should not be a surprise as it is truly nothing new to the Christian tradition, but it is still a bitter pill to swallow. And as a theologian all of this makes me think about our language for God, and how this flows into our view of the world and the things we’ll allow ourselves to do in the name of God.

So I want to take a slight tangent from directly addressing the uniquely American situation, to speak of some of the troubling and more widespread concerns in our language for God that I think contribute to how we find ourselves here (among many other things of course!).

All of our language for God is metaphor. In fact, all language itself is metaphor to some degree; at their most basic, words are symbols for things. When it comes to the divine, we are on a constant search for the most helpful symbols. Our language serves an important purpose, it helps us capture something of that which we experience or seek to know, but it will always be limited and must remain open to change.

The original authors of the Christian scriptures were also searching for ways to name and describe ultimate reality. The ancient Hebrew people found that the most appropriate way to speak of the divine was to not speak God’s name at all. The name symbolised by the tetragram YHWH was considered so sacred that it could not be spoken out loud. To speak it out loud would be to reduce it down to words and limit its profound mystery.

So given the limitations of language, one of the ways that the scriptures speak about God is through metaphor. Metaphors help us to engage our imaginations in contemplating who God might be, without limiting God to the constraints of any particular word, phrase or doctrine. In the bible, God is described as a king, a lover, a rock, a fire, a shepherd, a potter, water, a tree, a physician, light… and on and on the list goes. These ancient stories and songs employ metaphors and symbols as reference points that help us grasp that which is beyond our ability to fully comprehend.  

When the ancient texts say that God is a shepherd, this metaphor does not capture all that God is, nor does the entirety of the metaphor apply to God. If we start saying that God is a shepherd and so God must live in the countryside and this is why rural living is much closer to the way of God than city living; well, that would be a poor use of the metaphor. Instead we’re invited into an image that encourages certain understandings of God without limiting us to the specifics of that one metaphor.

One of the metaphors for God that we see Jesus use is the metaphor of Father, a metaphor that has become almost universally employed within the Christian tradition, along with other masculine terms. But when we limit ourselves to this metaphor (and other predominantly masculine language), we miss the depth and breadth of the divine. And by only using masculine metaphors and pronouns for God we come to believe, even if subconsciously, that God is more masculine than feminine.

The Christian theological tradition has technically maintained that God is beyond gender. That God includes all that we would name as masculinity and all that we would name as femininity. In our common language and formal liturgies however, and in the choice of our most-used metaphors, symbols and pronouns, we have largely excluded the femininity of God. By constantly using the language of He, Him, His, Father etc, we are repeatedly telling ourselves that God is closer to maleness than to femaleness. The historical consequence of this is twofold.

First, we have a deficient and dangerous view of God that hypes up some kind of masculine warrior-type figure who likes to throw his weight around and is waiting to smite someone with an almighty smiting of smite. Just this morning I watched a clip from an American preacher, railing against the election of Joe Biden, supporting the terrorists who stormed the Capitol, and claiming that Jesus would return to earth like Rambo (he finished this rhetorical moment by acting out Jesus gunning down his opponents). And as they stormed the Capitol some rioters waved the unintentionally ironic flag that simply said “Jesus Saves”. Even if these are examples of an awful and toxic exaggeration of more commonly held notions of a masculine God, it should remind us that using exclusively masculine symbols for God can result not only in an emaciated understanding of the divine feminine, but also a distorted and terribly dangerous version of the divine masculine.

And then secondly, because God is seen as masculine, the human man is intuited as superior to woman and as being somehow closer to what God is like. This has had devastating historical consequences and its impact is still felt in modern society. Patriarchal control, hyper-masculinity masquerading as religion, violence against and suppression of women and repeated demeaning of women in churches and in homes. The man is the head of the home, they said. Only men should be leaders. Only men can be priests. This kind of heretical masculinised Christianity stems from a male obsession with power over women, as well as an overly masculinised God that elevates misguided notions of maleness as worthy of divine status. (And of course you layer God’s apparent ‘whiteness’ on to this conception of God and you get the double whammy!)

But the scriptures offer us a much broader vision of God. In fact, they offer us the metaphor of God as mother. In Hosea, God is the mother bear who defends her cubs, and a breastfeeding mother who feeds her children. In Isaiah God is a mother comforting and nursing her children, and is likened to a woman in labour. In the gospels Jesus talks of God as a hen brooding over her chicks.

One of the most profound and sustained metaphors of God in the Old Testament is the image of wisdom in the book of Proverbs. In this book God is personified as Lady Wisdom - in Greek the word is Sophia - who walks in the streets calling people to follow her. This is also one of the ways that the New Testament authors speak about Jesus; they borrow the language of Lady Wisdom to speak about how God is present in Jesus. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, he says that Jesus is the Wisdom of God.

Jesus is Lady Sophia.

All of this to say that we need to renew our language of God. If you want to use He/Him language for God, you should also be comfortable using She/Her language for God. If you’re not comfortable with using ‘She’, you shouldn’t really be comfortable using ‘He’. And if you want to move beyond gender binaries, then the gender neutral pronouns of They/Them to refer to God might be useful for you too. 

This might seem frivolous in light of current events, but it’s really not. All language functions. And the function of some language is toward exclusion, oppression and violence, even if it’s not always apparent at first glance.