Is the God of the Bible a Male Deity?
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| Adam and Eve (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Summary: God is a he because God is personal and “our Father” because God acts like a loving father. He is neither male nor female, nor a combination of both.
While human beings typically come into the world either male or female, there are a very small number of hermaphrodites whose genes, for reasons still unclear to embryologists, fail to determine their sex in early development, thus producing a baby of mixed sexuality.
It should be noted, however, that people with combination sexual organs exhibit otherwise normal human characteristics. Clearly, their person hood is more basic to their natures than their sex. The mere fact that there are now numbers of people who have experienced a “sex change”, and are living among us often unnoticed, shows that sex is a far more superficial category than person hood. It should also be noted that human beings share sexuality with horses and butterflies, and with many plants, though they do not so share the image of God with any of these. The creational evidence points to sexuality being based in biology rather than in spirituality.
But that is the real question, is it not? God is obviously a person, but is God also a male? And what kind of question is this? Is it properly theological, biological, philosophical or sociological? All these fields have a contribution to make,1 but we should not reduce the subject to any one of the academic disciplines. For Christians, behind all attempts at human knowledge lies the truth of God as he reveals it in nature and the propositional content of the Scriptures (Ps 19; 2 Tim 3:16–17; 2 Pet 1:19–21). In this brief study, the biblical evidence will be primary, and examples from other disciplines will be illustrative only.
The nature of gender has attracted much attention and generated a considerable literature in the last thirty years. For the sake of clarity and conciseness, the present case will be developed by answering some of the key questions that are often asked on the topic. In the interest of honesty, we must from the outset admit that even our questions may have a freight of assumptions riding on them and that our presuppositions will generally influence our results.
Isn’t it obvious from even a first reading of the Bible that Scripture usually refers to God as “he” and “him”, suggesting that God is in some sense male?
The short answer to this is no. It does not follow from the use of masculine pronouns that God is male in his essential being. To begin with, few languages have personal pronouns that are neuter. Certainly Hebrew, Greek, Latin and English do not. It is therefore not possible to refer to God (or any person) in these languages in the singular without using he or she. The neuter pronoun it has an impersonal flavor in most languages and is tied to the grammatical gender of nouns, which tells us nothing about the sex of the subject. In the Greek New Testament the word for Spirit (pneuma) is neuter, whereas in the Hebrew Old Testament the word for Spirit (ruah) is feminine. In Latin, flowers (flos) are male and fogs (nebula) are female, if the gender of the nouns is considered. Thus the question of God’s “gender” must be settled on grounds other than the gender of pronouns. The Bible’s references to God as he refer to his personhood, not to an inherent gender. The God of the Bible has knowable attributes that distinguish him from all other gods. God is further distinguished from the pagan gods in that sexuality is not among his attributes.
The gods of the Gentile nations were always depicted as male or female, and that for two reasons. Not only are the pagan deities little more than “human foibles writ large”, but they often symbolize the “eternal masculine” and “eternal feminine” principles, the cosmic sex drives that provide the great life-dynamic of the pagan cosmos. Sexual activity between these cosmic principles was supposed to animate the cycle of the seasons from year to year. This is why so many sacred ceremonies in their temples were variants of sexual activity and their devotees were often sacred prostitutes. In contrast, no hint of sexuality attaches to Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, while the pornographic images of the pagan idols are constantly treated with great contempt by God’s prophets. Archaeology has confirmed this state of affairs in vivid detail.2 By contrast, in the Bible, the Jews were never invited to speculate about the “masculinity” of God, and God is never once said to be “male” (zakar).3
If humans—who are sexual beings—are made in the image of God, then doesn’t this mean that God must be sexual or gendered in some sense?
After creating the physical world, God created men and women to populate and manage it. Genesis 2 only expands on the primary statement in Genesis 1:26–30. The important point for us now is that the sexuality of both animals and ʾadam (humanity, male and female, Gen 1:27) was created for the primary purpose of reproduction, though also for fellowship and pleasure. Sexuality is therefore represented in Scripture as being a created thing, not an eternal cosmic “principle” of masculinity and femininity. What the pagan (and Romantic) worldviews see as the eternal masculine and eternal feminine is just the ancient pagan notion that the life-dynamic of the cosmos is best expressed by sex and its variants and is personified in such divinities as Baal and Astarte. We will not dally here with God’s attitude to this worldview, which is best illustrated by the total destruction he commanded for the Canaanite culture when his people took possession of the land (Deut 20:16–18).
Clearly both Adam and Eve were equally created in God’s image. The story of Eve’s creation (Gen 2:18–25) only establishes this point more strongly, for Eve was created from the substance or nature of the man Adam. From the few references in Scripture to man and woman being made in the image of God,4 we may conclude that such human features as rationality, language, the ability to choose and the ability to love others in fellowship with them are among the essential characteristics of the imago Dei. Such passages as Ephesians 4:22–24 and Colossians 3:9–10 also suggest that our first parents started out with a created righteousness, an original holiness and an inherent knowledge, much of which was corrupted in the Fall but may be renewed in Christ. However, there are no suggestions in Scripture that sexuality is part of the image of God in humanity; rather, it is part of the created order that is shared with many of God’s other creatures.5
The conclusion must be that sexuality is a created thing and not one of God’s attributes. God is “neither male nor female”. Even so, members of the new covenant community are directed by the apostle Paul to drop the barriers to ministry and religious status that gender, race and class posed in the old covenant, and to be the community of the redeemed in the new creation order (Gal 3:28).6 The sanctification of God’s people therefore requires the elimination of sexism (a result of the Fall, Gen 3:16) from the Christian community.
But wasn’t Jesus a man rather than a woman? Doesn’t this tell us something about the gender of God?
In order to become incarnate in a human nature, Jesus had to be either a male or a female human. To be neither (or somehow perfectly both) would render Jesus nonhuman. For the Savior to assume all in us that needs to be redeemed, the Second Person of the Trinity assumed a human nature. Thus the Son of God incarnate has both a human nature and a divine nature. His human nature, being human, is bodily, exists in time and space, and is culturally Jewish, as well as male. But it would be a theological blunder to think that because the two natures are now united in one divine person that the divine nature has taken on human characteristics, such as sexuality. As the early church figured out with much deliberation, the two natures should not be thought of as being fused or confused. Each nature remains what it is, but now exists in communion with the other under the direction of the Person of the Son. That is to say, Jesus is and remains both divine and human. The divine nature of Jesus did not become male nor did the human nature become divine. The divine nature cleaves to the human and lifts it up to sanctify it in and through the entire life and death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Jesus’ humanity is sanctified in its communion with the divine nature in and through the history of the incarnate Son of God.
The assumption of a creaturely form does indicate something about God the Son, namely a divine humility. That is, we see in Jesus the outworking of the perfect relationship of the divine and human. The human is perfected, not obliterated or transmuted into something else. The masculine gender of Jesus’ human nature, then, was sanctified and perfected in and through that relationship. But it would be theologically improper to project the creaturely characteristics of the human nature onto the divine nature. Doing so would amount to confusing the two natures, turning the divine into the human. So in no way can we conclude that because Jesus assumed a male humanity that God is sexual (male or female) or that human masculinity is divine. Such an error, in the end, would result ultimately in confusing the human creature with the divine, making God into a creature. The incarnation is no excuse to project upon God creaturely characteristics such as gender.
If God is without gender, then what does the Bible mean when it uses gendered imagery to describe God?
Gendered imagery for God is metaphorical language. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a comparison of two things is expressed by a statement that X is Y, or by calling X a “Y”. The two things are sufficiently similar for the comparison to be appropriate for the author’s purpose in that context. This means that unless we recognize the figure as a metaphor, it might be confused with a literal proposition. To say that God is loving or wise or good are literal propositions about God’s personal nature as he reveals himself to us in specific revealing and saving acts, because they precisely describe his acts. God’s actions may also be compared (metaphorically) with how we show our love for our children, or how a careful judge would evaluate a case, or how a teacher might inform a pupil by supplying needed information.
There are metaphors in the Bible that describe God as an eagle, a chicken, a strong-armed soldier and a man with removable eyeballs that roam the earth (this last being found in 2 Chron 16:9). And lest King Balak should imagine otherwise, he is told that “God is not a human being, … that he should change his mind” (Num 23:19). The phrase “not a human being” (Heb. ʾish) is a literal statement from which we are to conclude that once God settles something, he will not repent of what he has said as human beings so often do. When we read in Genesis 6:6 or 8:1 or Exodus 32:14, that God “was sorry”, or “remembered” something, or “changed his mind”, we must understand this as a metaphor of the type called an anthropomorphism.
But that is the real question, is it not? God is obviously a person, but is God also a male? And what kind of question is this? Is it properly theological, biological, philosophical or sociological? All these fields have a contribution to make,1 but we should not reduce the subject to any one of the academic disciplines. For Christians, behind all attempts at human knowledge lies the truth of God as he reveals it in nature and the propositional content of the Scriptures (Ps 19; 2 Tim 3:16–17; 2 Pet 1:19–21). In this brief study, the biblical evidence will be primary, and examples from other disciplines will be illustrative only.
The nature of gender has attracted much attention and generated a considerable literature in the last thirty years. For the sake of clarity and conciseness, the present case will be developed by answering some of the key questions that are often asked on the topic. In the interest of honesty, we must from the outset admit that even our questions may have a freight of assumptions riding on them and that our presuppositions will generally influence our results.
Isn’t it obvious from even a first reading of the Bible that Scripture usually refers to God as “he” and “him”, suggesting that God is in some sense male?
The short answer to this is no. It does not follow from the use of masculine pronouns that God is male in his essential being. To begin with, few languages have personal pronouns that are neuter. Certainly Hebrew, Greek, Latin and English do not. It is therefore not possible to refer to God (or any person) in these languages in the singular without using he or she. The neuter pronoun it has an impersonal flavor in most languages and is tied to the grammatical gender of nouns, which tells us nothing about the sex of the subject. In the Greek New Testament the word for Spirit (pneuma) is neuter, whereas in the Hebrew Old Testament the word for Spirit (ruah) is feminine. In Latin, flowers (flos) are male and fogs (nebula) are female, if the gender of the nouns is considered. Thus the question of God’s “gender” must be settled on grounds other than the gender of pronouns. The Bible’s references to God as he refer to his personhood, not to an inherent gender. The God of the Bible has knowable attributes that distinguish him from all other gods. God is further distinguished from the pagan gods in that sexuality is not among his attributes.
The gods of the Gentile nations were always depicted as male or female, and that for two reasons. Not only are the pagan deities little more than “human foibles writ large”, but they often symbolize the “eternal masculine” and “eternal feminine” principles, the cosmic sex drives that provide the great life-dynamic of the pagan cosmos. Sexual activity between these cosmic principles was supposed to animate the cycle of the seasons from year to year. This is why so many sacred ceremonies in their temples were variants of sexual activity and their devotees were often sacred prostitutes. In contrast, no hint of sexuality attaches to Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, while the pornographic images of the pagan idols are constantly treated with great contempt by God’s prophets. Archaeology has confirmed this state of affairs in vivid detail.2 By contrast, in the Bible, the Jews were never invited to speculate about the “masculinity” of God, and God is never once said to be “male” (zakar).3
If humans—who are sexual beings—are made in the image of God, then doesn’t this mean that God must be sexual or gendered in some sense?
After creating the physical world, God created men and women to populate and manage it. Genesis 2 only expands on the primary statement in Genesis 1:26–30. The important point for us now is that the sexuality of both animals and ʾadam (humanity, male and female, Gen 1:27) was created for the primary purpose of reproduction, though also for fellowship and pleasure. Sexuality is therefore represented in Scripture as being a created thing, not an eternal cosmic “principle” of masculinity and femininity. What the pagan (and Romantic) worldviews see as the eternal masculine and eternal feminine is just the ancient pagan notion that the life-dynamic of the cosmos is best expressed by sex and its variants and is personified in such divinities as Baal and Astarte. We will not dally here with God’s attitude to this worldview, which is best illustrated by the total destruction he commanded for the Canaanite culture when his people took possession of the land (Deut 20:16–18).
Clearly both Adam and Eve were equally created in God’s image. The story of Eve’s creation (Gen 2:18–25) only establishes this point more strongly, for Eve was created from the substance or nature of the man Adam. From the few references in Scripture to man and woman being made in the image of God,4 we may conclude that such human features as rationality, language, the ability to choose and the ability to love others in fellowship with them are among the essential characteristics of the imago Dei. Such passages as Ephesians 4:22–24 and Colossians 3:9–10 also suggest that our first parents started out with a created righteousness, an original holiness and an inherent knowledge, much of which was corrupted in the Fall but may be renewed in Christ. However, there are no suggestions in Scripture that sexuality is part of the image of God in humanity; rather, it is part of the created order that is shared with many of God’s other creatures.5
The conclusion must be that sexuality is a created thing and not one of God’s attributes. God is “neither male nor female”. Even so, members of the new covenant community are directed by the apostle Paul to drop the barriers to ministry and religious status that gender, race and class posed in the old covenant, and to be the community of the redeemed in the new creation order (Gal 3:28).6 The sanctification of God’s people therefore requires the elimination of sexism (a result of the Fall, Gen 3:16) from the Christian community.
But wasn’t Jesus a man rather than a woman? Doesn’t this tell us something about the gender of God?
In order to become incarnate in a human nature, Jesus had to be either a male or a female human. To be neither (or somehow perfectly both) would render Jesus nonhuman. For the Savior to assume all in us that needs to be redeemed, the Second Person of the Trinity assumed a human nature. Thus the Son of God incarnate has both a human nature and a divine nature. His human nature, being human, is bodily, exists in time and space, and is culturally Jewish, as well as male. But it would be a theological blunder to think that because the two natures are now united in one divine person that the divine nature has taken on human characteristics, such as sexuality. As the early church figured out with much deliberation, the two natures should not be thought of as being fused or confused. Each nature remains what it is, but now exists in communion with the other under the direction of the Person of the Son. That is to say, Jesus is and remains both divine and human. The divine nature of Jesus did not become male nor did the human nature become divine. The divine nature cleaves to the human and lifts it up to sanctify it in and through the entire life and death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Jesus’ humanity is sanctified in its communion with the divine nature in and through the history of the incarnate Son of God.
The assumption of a creaturely form does indicate something about God the Son, namely a divine humility. That is, we see in Jesus the outworking of the perfect relationship of the divine and human. The human is perfected, not obliterated or transmuted into something else. The masculine gender of Jesus’ human nature, then, was sanctified and perfected in and through that relationship. But it would be theologically improper to project the creaturely characteristics of the human nature onto the divine nature. Doing so would amount to confusing the two natures, turning the divine into the human. So in no way can we conclude that because Jesus assumed a male humanity that God is sexual (male or female) or that human masculinity is divine. Such an error, in the end, would result ultimately in confusing the human creature with the divine, making God into a creature. The incarnation is no excuse to project upon God creaturely characteristics such as gender.
If God is without gender, then what does the Bible mean when it uses gendered imagery to describe God?
Gendered imagery for God is metaphorical language. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a comparison of two things is expressed by a statement that X is Y, or by calling X a “Y”. The two things are sufficiently similar for the comparison to be appropriate for the author’s purpose in that context. This means that unless we recognize the figure as a metaphor, it might be confused with a literal proposition. To say that God is loving or wise or good are literal propositions about God’s personal nature as he reveals himself to us in specific revealing and saving acts, because they precisely describe his acts. God’s actions may also be compared (metaphorically) with how we show our love for our children, or how a careful judge would evaluate a case, or how a teacher might inform a pupil by supplying needed information.
There are metaphors in the Bible that describe God as an eagle, a chicken, a strong-armed soldier and a man with removable eyeballs that roam the earth (this last being found in 2 Chron 16:9). And lest King Balak should imagine otherwise, he is told that “God is not a human being, … that he should change his mind” (Num 23:19). The phrase “not a human being” (Heb. ʾish) is a literal statement from which we are to conclude that once God settles something, he will not repent of what he has said as human beings so often do. When we read in Genesis 6:6 or 8:1 or Exodus 32:14, that God “was sorry”, or “remembered” something, or “changed his mind”, we must understand this as a metaphor of the type called an anthropomorphism.
God seemed to have changed his mind from the standpoint of a human being on earth observing what he did. But God cannot literally change his mind because, as an omniscient being, God lacks no knowledge that might cause him to change his mind. God always has exhaustive knowledge of all states of affairs, past, present and future. Such a metaphor may also be called phenomenal language, meaning that the situation is being described according to ordinary human appearance, rather like the reference a modern astronomer might make to a beautiful “sunset” when he knows quite well that the sun did not “set” or “go down”, but that literally the earth revolved on its axis.
Likewise, when we read of God’s “outstretched arm”, or of his being a “strong tower”, we understand these things metaphorically, simply by comparison. That is, his actions show that he is in some way like a tower of refuge or like a strong soldier wielding a javelin or sword. The metaphors of hens and soldiers and towers and lions describe what God does redemptively, not what he is ontologically.
The same is true of God’s being described and spoken of in Scripture in gendered imagery. The Bible tells us that God is a personal being, but by a “person” we normally mean another human being like ourselves. Thus the temptation is to make human personhood the standard for God’s personhood. But this gets the order reversed.
Likewise, when we read of God’s “outstretched arm”, or of his being a “strong tower”, we understand these things metaphorically, simply by comparison. That is, his actions show that he is in some way like a tower of refuge or like a strong soldier wielding a javelin or sword. The metaphors of hens and soldiers and towers and lions describe what God does redemptively, not what he is ontologically.
The same is true of God’s being described and spoken of in Scripture in gendered imagery. The Bible tells us that God is a personal being, but by a “person” we normally mean another human being like ourselves. Thus the temptation is to make human personhood the standard for God’s personhood. But this gets the order reversed.
God’s personhood came first, and then he created humankind (Heb. ʾadam) “male and female” (Gen 1:26–28). To say God is “a person” is a literal truth describing God’s ontology. This statement does not borrow from human categories, as is the case with the Bible’s gendered imagery for God or the examples of metaphor in the preceding paragraphs. Thus God’s personhood does not entail that God is either male or female, or a cross between maleness and femaleness, or a blending of both.
Accordingly, Scripture uses both male and female imagery to describe how God acts. He exhibits love and wisdom and compassion for sinners by acting toward his people like a merciful and wise king or a forgiving parent might act (Deut 23:5; 1 Sam 8:7, 22; Ezek 16:6; Lk 15:20). In another context he is like a mother eagle lifting her babies on her wings (Ex 19:4) or a hen gathering her chickens (Mt 23:37). Any created being might exhibit wisdom or love or compassion through his or her actions, but God’s prior creatorial sovereignty makes him the source of the meaning of any comparison or metaphor, not the result of it. God simply chooses the appropriate comparison to illustrate his actions.
Because we are limited by our finite humanity, God speaks in metaphors of comparison, in carefully modulated propositions conveying literal truths in symbolic language. Such metaphorical language to describe God begins in Genesis 1:2, where the term ruah (Heb. for “wind” or “spirit”) is used to signal God’s creative activity. Later revelation makes it clear that God’s Spirit is not just his power in action but also the Third Person of the Trinity.
There is a sense in which language is largely metaphorical. This is why translations from one language to another always lose something or add something to the shades of meaning employed by the original author. Yet sufficient and true communication is indeed possible from one language to another, because our minds are sufficiently locked in to our common empirical experience to make such comparisons adequate.
There is also a sense in which all language has a primary literal content. When I point to an object on the path and say “stone”, I am using a term as a literal label, expecting that everyone will agree that the word stone should always correspond to that type of physical object. Likewise, when God opens his revelation with the proposition that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, he is providing an exact literal correspondence between the words and the actual state of affairs at the “beginning”. This statement is literal, not metaphorical, and supplies the consistent presupposition of everything else said about God in the Bible. We may reasonably conclude from this opening statement of revelation that there was a beginning to the universe, that God was indeed there first, that he actually caused everything to come into existence, that both heavens and earth are created (cf. Gen 1:16), and that nothing existed before God created it. This foundational creator-creature distinction is basic to all Christian interpretation of experience.
Inherent in the imago Dei is our created capacity to use language and to understand and express God’s truth through language. We can receive God’s revelation and respond to it in faith and worship, recognizing that there is indeed a reality behind the words, a reality we can comprehend in the form of knowledge.10 God’s knowledge is immediately exhaustive while ours is developmental and partial at all points. But the limitation of finiteness does not mean that our beliefs are false or in any way misleading when it corresponds to what God has said about himself in Scripture.
When I appeal to God as my “Father in heaven”, the words correspond sufficiently to the real state of affairs to be true, but not exhaustively true. He is my Father in a more limited sense that he was Jesus’ Father, because Jesus was himself the eternally divine Son, as well as becoming physically incarnate in time. My physical life was inherited ultimately from Adam, whose life was created directly by God, while I was directly regenerated by God some time in 1953, thereby becoming his son in a fresh spiritual sense.
But surely “Father” and “Son” are personal names for God, not just metaphors. As such, don’t they tell us something fundamental about who God is and so point to God’s masculine or male-like nature?
The simplest answer to this is that the distinction between a name and a metaphor is not complete or definitive: a name may be metaphorical, or a metaphor may be used as a personal name.11 Jesus is also called Immanuel, the Lamb, the Branch, the Alpha and Omega, the Good Shepherd, and the Lion of Judah, all of which are both names and metaphors. None of them is a literal description; each is true of Christ in some sense yet not true of Christ in another sense. Likewise with the metaphorical name of “Father” for God.
We have already seen that much of language has a metaphorical element. For example, sodium is represented by the sign Na, short for Natrium, an ancient location in Egypt, while chlorine is so called because it has a greenish tinge, and chlōros is Greek for “greenish yellow”. One of my names is McGregor, which indicates some Scottish ancestry. The name literally means “son of a watchman”, but this says absolutely nothing about me personally. All this shows that names may be meaningful metaphors or just arbitrary labels like Na for the element sodium. As metaphors, names may suggest one similarity but not another.
God’s masculinity would need to be established on more secure grounds than the assertion that Father is a personal name. It would seem that this argument suffers from the fact that its premises do not warrant the intended conclusion. The terms Father and Son do not tell us about the masculinity of God; rather they tell us about the Second Person of the Trinity being sent from heaven to redeem fallen humans, and the fatherlike actions of the First Person of the Trinity toward both the incarnate Son and those whom he has redeemed to become his children.
It should also be noted in passing that the fact that God is not gendered does not justify altering the language of the Bible such that God is called “our Mother” as well as “our Father”. Inserting gender-inclusive God language in the text is an unjustifiable paraphrase. This is just to replace one error (i.e., attributing masculinity to God) with another error and only serves to underscore the importance of letting Scripture speak for itself. The Bible makes perfectly clear that God is not male, and changing the text is simply unnecessary. God is not a gendered she for the same reason God is not a gendered he.
If God is not essentially masculine or gendered in any sense, then why does the Bible use predominantly masculine language to describe God? God is often called “Father”, but never “Mother”.
The first observation on the claim that God must be masculine because he is never called “Mother” is that it is an argument from silence and is therefore invalid. God is never called a Trinity in the Bible either, but all the essential structural elements of the Trinitarian model can be exegeted from specific passages, and only this model of God includes all the textual material without contradiction or residue. Likewise with the biblical egalitarian model of human nature and relations. The Bible never uses the word egalitarian to describe Christlike patterns of human relationships, yet this is the only exegetical construct that logically accounts for all the textual evidence.12 So the absence of such an expression as “God our Mother”, or anything like it, means nothing except perhaps to signal God’s contempt for the pagan goddesses.
Although God is less often described in feminine terms than masculine, there is a significant amount of feminine imagery for God in Scripture. God is said to be like a mother eagle (Ex 19:4; Deut 32:11), and early in the creation account the Holy Spirit is said to “hover” over the waters (Gen 1:2 TNIV) like a bird over her nest. God is said to both father Israel and to bring Israel to birth (Deut 32:18, Heb. “writhe in pain” as in child-birthing), and Job speaks of God in terms of both mothering and fathering (Job 38:28–30).
The Prophets also use female imagery. In Isaiah God is depicted as being in the pain of childbirth, giving birth and feeding a child at his breast (Is 42:14; 46:3; 49:14–15). Like a mother comforts her child, God will comfort his people (Is 66:13). Hosea likewise describes God as attacking his enemies like a mother bear robbed of her cubs (Hos 13:8).
In the Psalms, poetic language naturally abounds and feminine metaphors are common. God is a midwife (Ps 22:9–10) and a mistress of a household (Ps 123:2). He gives birth to the cosmos at creation (Ps 90:2), and he is also compared to a mother who breast-feeds her child (Psalm 131:2). These images give us real information about God’s actions toward us, but there is no reason to press their metaphorical content to define God’s ontology or eternal being. In Proverbs, the divine Wisdom is repeatedly personified as a woman (Prov 1:20–21; 4:5–9; 8:1–11; 9:1–6). God clearly has a deep respect for the wisdom of the wise woman.
In the New Testament, Jesus compares himself to a mother hen seeking to gather her offspring under her wings (Mt 23:37) and to a woman hunting for a lost coin (Lk 15:8–10). The “new birth” itself is described in female imagery in John 3:1–8 and James 1:18. God not only begets us like a father but births us like a mother.
These metaphors indicate that God is neither male nor female, but is capable of actions toward us that can be illustrated in terms of both. God’s personhood is brought out more forcibly by the combination of male and female likenesses, without capitulating to any type of gender fixation. Sometimes female imagery is used and sometimes male imagery, depending on what situation God is responding to or what divine attribute is being expressed.
The predominance of male imagery is in part an accommodation to a patriarchal culture, in which men owned and inherited land and so held most of the social and political power, while women were usually limited to caring for children and their homes. It is also in part a byproduct of the limitations of languages that usually express personhood only by male pronouns, unless a literal woman is the subject. Masculine images of God signify anthropomorphic metaphors only. Our heavenly Father does not have the eternal attribute of divine masculinity any more than he has the eternal attribute of divine chickenhood.
Every systematic theology refers to the “fatherhood of God”. If this key theological concept does not speak of God’s masculinity, then why is God referred to as “Father”?
In the New Testament, the fatherhood of God is revealed in terms of Jesus’ relationship to God as his Father. Jesus was well aware that, while Mary was his natural mother, Joseph was not his natural father. In fact, God himself created the genetic contribution to Jesus’ begetting, since Mary could not provide both sets of chromosomes (although God’s part in Jesus’ conception had nothing to do with male sexuality, since Christ was born of a virgin).
Accordingly, Scripture uses both male and female imagery to describe how God acts. He exhibits love and wisdom and compassion for sinners by acting toward his people like a merciful and wise king or a forgiving parent might act (Deut 23:5; 1 Sam 8:7, 22; Ezek 16:6; Lk 15:20). In another context he is like a mother eagle lifting her babies on her wings (Ex 19:4) or a hen gathering her chickens (Mt 23:37). Any created being might exhibit wisdom or love or compassion through his or her actions, but God’s prior creatorial sovereignty makes him the source of the meaning of any comparison or metaphor, not the result of it. God simply chooses the appropriate comparison to illustrate his actions.
Because we are limited by our finite humanity, God speaks in metaphors of comparison, in carefully modulated propositions conveying literal truths in symbolic language. Such metaphorical language to describe God begins in Genesis 1:2, where the term ruah (Heb. for “wind” or “spirit”) is used to signal God’s creative activity. Later revelation makes it clear that God’s Spirit is not just his power in action but also the Third Person of the Trinity.
There is a sense in which language is largely metaphorical. This is why translations from one language to another always lose something or add something to the shades of meaning employed by the original author. Yet sufficient and true communication is indeed possible from one language to another, because our minds are sufficiently locked in to our common empirical experience to make such comparisons adequate.
There is also a sense in which all language has a primary literal content. When I point to an object on the path and say “stone”, I am using a term as a literal label, expecting that everyone will agree that the word stone should always correspond to that type of physical object. Likewise, when God opens his revelation with the proposition that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, he is providing an exact literal correspondence between the words and the actual state of affairs at the “beginning”. This statement is literal, not metaphorical, and supplies the consistent presupposition of everything else said about God in the Bible. We may reasonably conclude from this opening statement of revelation that there was a beginning to the universe, that God was indeed there first, that he actually caused everything to come into existence, that both heavens and earth are created (cf. Gen 1:16), and that nothing existed before God created it. This foundational creator-creature distinction is basic to all Christian interpretation of experience.
Inherent in the imago Dei is our created capacity to use language and to understand and express God’s truth through language. We can receive God’s revelation and respond to it in faith and worship, recognizing that there is indeed a reality behind the words, a reality we can comprehend in the form of knowledge.10 God’s knowledge is immediately exhaustive while ours is developmental and partial at all points. But the limitation of finiteness does not mean that our beliefs are false or in any way misleading when it corresponds to what God has said about himself in Scripture.
When I appeal to God as my “Father in heaven”, the words correspond sufficiently to the real state of affairs to be true, but not exhaustively true. He is my Father in a more limited sense that he was Jesus’ Father, because Jesus was himself the eternally divine Son, as well as becoming physically incarnate in time. My physical life was inherited ultimately from Adam, whose life was created directly by God, while I was directly regenerated by God some time in 1953, thereby becoming his son in a fresh spiritual sense.
But surely “Father” and “Son” are personal names for God, not just metaphors. As such, don’t they tell us something fundamental about who God is and so point to God’s masculine or male-like nature?
The simplest answer to this is that the distinction between a name and a metaphor is not complete or definitive: a name may be metaphorical, or a metaphor may be used as a personal name.11 Jesus is also called Immanuel, the Lamb, the Branch, the Alpha and Omega, the Good Shepherd, and the Lion of Judah, all of which are both names and metaphors. None of them is a literal description; each is true of Christ in some sense yet not true of Christ in another sense. Likewise with the metaphorical name of “Father” for God.
We have already seen that much of language has a metaphorical element. For example, sodium is represented by the sign Na, short for Natrium, an ancient location in Egypt, while chlorine is so called because it has a greenish tinge, and chlōros is Greek for “greenish yellow”. One of my names is McGregor, which indicates some Scottish ancestry. The name literally means “son of a watchman”, but this says absolutely nothing about me personally. All this shows that names may be meaningful metaphors or just arbitrary labels like Na for the element sodium. As metaphors, names may suggest one similarity but not another.
God’s masculinity would need to be established on more secure grounds than the assertion that Father is a personal name. It would seem that this argument suffers from the fact that its premises do not warrant the intended conclusion. The terms Father and Son do not tell us about the masculinity of God; rather they tell us about the Second Person of the Trinity being sent from heaven to redeem fallen humans, and the fatherlike actions of the First Person of the Trinity toward both the incarnate Son and those whom he has redeemed to become his children.
It should also be noted in passing that the fact that God is not gendered does not justify altering the language of the Bible such that God is called “our Mother” as well as “our Father”. Inserting gender-inclusive God language in the text is an unjustifiable paraphrase. This is just to replace one error (i.e., attributing masculinity to God) with another error and only serves to underscore the importance of letting Scripture speak for itself. The Bible makes perfectly clear that God is not male, and changing the text is simply unnecessary. God is not a gendered she for the same reason God is not a gendered he.
If God is not essentially masculine or gendered in any sense, then why does the Bible use predominantly masculine language to describe God? God is often called “Father”, but never “Mother”.
The first observation on the claim that God must be masculine because he is never called “Mother” is that it is an argument from silence and is therefore invalid. God is never called a Trinity in the Bible either, but all the essential structural elements of the Trinitarian model can be exegeted from specific passages, and only this model of God includes all the textual material without contradiction or residue. Likewise with the biblical egalitarian model of human nature and relations. The Bible never uses the word egalitarian to describe Christlike patterns of human relationships, yet this is the only exegetical construct that logically accounts for all the textual evidence.12 So the absence of such an expression as “God our Mother”, or anything like it, means nothing except perhaps to signal God’s contempt for the pagan goddesses.
Although God is less often described in feminine terms than masculine, there is a significant amount of feminine imagery for God in Scripture. God is said to be like a mother eagle (Ex 19:4; Deut 32:11), and early in the creation account the Holy Spirit is said to “hover” over the waters (Gen 1:2 TNIV) like a bird over her nest. God is said to both father Israel and to bring Israel to birth (Deut 32:18, Heb. “writhe in pain” as in child-birthing), and Job speaks of God in terms of both mothering and fathering (Job 38:28–30).
The Prophets also use female imagery. In Isaiah God is depicted as being in the pain of childbirth, giving birth and feeding a child at his breast (Is 42:14; 46:3; 49:14–15). Like a mother comforts her child, God will comfort his people (Is 66:13). Hosea likewise describes God as attacking his enemies like a mother bear robbed of her cubs (Hos 13:8).
In the Psalms, poetic language naturally abounds and feminine metaphors are common. God is a midwife (Ps 22:9–10) and a mistress of a household (Ps 123:2). He gives birth to the cosmos at creation (Ps 90:2), and he is also compared to a mother who breast-feeds her child (Psalm 131:2). These images give us real information about God’s actions toward us, but there is no reason to press their metaphorical content to define God’s ontology or eternal being. In Proverbs, the divine Wisdom is repeatedly personified as a woman (Prov 1:20–21; 4:5–9; 8:1–11; 9:1–6). God clearly has a deep respect for the wisdom of the wise woman.
In the New Testament, Jesus compares himself to a mother hen seeking to gather her offspring under her wings (Mt 23:37) and to a woman hunting for a lost coin (Lk 15:8–10). The “new birth” itself is described in female imagery in John 3:1–8 and James 1:18. God not only begets us like a father but births us like a mother.
These metaphors indicate that God is neither male nor female, but is capable of actions toward us that can be illustrated in terms of both. God’s personhood is brought out more forcibly by the combination of male and female likenesses, without capitulating to any type of gender fixation. Sometimes female imagery is used and sometimes male imagery, depending on what situation God is responding to or what divine attribute is being expressed.
The predominance of male imagery is in part an accommodation to a patriarchal culture, in which men owned and inherited land and so held most of the social and political power, while women were usually limited to caring for children and their homes. It is also in part a byproduct of the limitations of languages that usually express personhood only by male pronouns, unless a literal woman is the subject. Masculine images of God signify anthropomorphic metaphors only. Our heavenly Father does not have the eternal attribute of divine masculinity any more than he has the eternal attribute of divine chickenhood.
Every systematic theology refers to the “fatherhood of God”. If this key theological concept does not speak of God’s masculinity, then why is God referred to as “Father”?
In the New Testament, the fatherhood of God is revealed in terms of Jesus’ relationship to God as his Father. Jesus was well aware that, while Mary was his natural mother, Joseph was not his natural father. In fact, God himself created the genetic contribution to Jesus’ begetting, since Mary could not provide both sets of chromosomes (although God’s part in Jesus’ conception had nothing to do with male sexuality, since Christ was born of a virgin).
Jesus was conscious from early childhood not only that Mary was his mother but also that God was his father (Lk 2:49), and he stated later that he “came from God” (Jn 6:25–33; 16:27–28; 17:8). The whole point of the virginal conception and birth was that Christ was the “seed” of both God and Mary (Gen 3:15; Is 53:10). Jesus frequently intimates his full awareness that he was “from above” (anōthen), the same term used to describe our being “born again”, showing that our regeneration and his coming are from the same fatherly source.
Accordingly, when Christians call God “our Father”, nothing is being said of God’s gender, but only that God is the one who gives life to everyone (Acts 17:25). Through regeneration God gives life to believers in an additional sense: protecting, training and disciplining us like a father with his children (Heb 12:1–12). As with all metaphors, God may be Father in one sense but not in another. God describes himself as our Father because he acts like a father, first toward Jesus (Mt 17:5) and then toward us (Eph 1:3; 1 Pet 1:3, 17). We are to emulate the relationship that Jesus has with his Father (Mt 6:9; Gal 4:6; 1 Jn 2:23–24).
Whatever the reason Scripture calls God Father rather than Mother, it cannot be because God is essentially masculine or male. For if God were male in essence, then this aspect of the divine image would be more fully reflected in men than in women, which would entail that men image God more fully than do women. But this is ruled out by the biblical teaching that all human beings bear God’s image without degree or distinction (Gen 1:26–28).14 If women were not in God’s image in the fullest sense, they could never have been given the gift of prophecy (Acts 2:17; 21:9),15 which involved speaking for God as his representative. After all, how could a woman speak for the “eternal masculine”?
Nonetheless, God reveals himself in Scripture as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 1:3) and not as “Mother”. Nor does God present himself as a “Mother-Father” complex as if he embodied (the right word!) “masculinity” and “femininity”. The concepts of masculinity and femininity are inseparable from human sexual differences. Sexuality and its genders are eternal spiritual principles only in a pagan cosmology.
As we speak of God in the language employed by Scripture, we should do so with a clear theological understanding of what this language does and does not mean. God is to his Son—and to his many “sons” redeemed by his Son—a faithful and loving Father. But the divine nature is Spirit, not flesh, and does not in any way partake in gender or sexuality, which characterizes created, physical bodies only.
But surely an understanding of our divinely designed masculinity and femininity is crucial to our obedience to God and his Word. Isn’t fulfilled manhood and womanhood a key biblical goal for the body of Christ? How could something be this important to God, yet have nothing to do with God’s nature?
The insistence that God be thought of as revealing an eternal masculinity is really only a reification (an ontologizing) of an abstraction never mentioned in the Bible. The ideas of “masculinity” and “femininity” are created by a process of abstraction from the physical sexual differences between human beings.
Accordingly, when Christians call God “our Father”, nothing is being said of God’s gender, but only that God is the one who gives life to everyone (Acts 17:25). Through regeneration God gives life to believers in an additional sense: protecting, training and disciplining us like a father with his children (Heb 12:1–12). As with all metaphors, God may be Father in one sense but not in another. God describes himself as our Father because he acts like a father, first toward Jesus (Mt 17:5) and then toward us (Eph 1:3; 1 Pet 1:3, 17). We are to emulate the relationship that Jesus has with his Father (Mt 6:9; Gal 4:6; 1 Jn 2:23–24).
Whatever the reason Scripture calls God Father rather than Mother, it cannot be because God is essentially masculine or male. For if God were male in essence, then this aspect of the divine image would be more fully reflected in men than in women, which would entail that men image God more fully than do women. But this is ruled out by the biblical teaching that all human beings bear God’s image without degree or distinction (Gen 1:26–28).14 If women were not in God’s image in the fullest sense, they could never have been given the gift of prophecy (Acts 2:17; 21:9),15 which involved speaking for God as his representative. After all, how could a woman speak for the “eternal masculine”?
Nonetheless, God reveals himself in Scripture as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 1:3) and not as “Mother”. Nor does God present himself as a “Mother-Father” complex as if he embodied (the right word!) “masculinity” and “femininity”. The concepts of masculinity and femininity are inseparable from human sexual differences. Sexuality and its genders are eternal spiritual principles only in a pagan cosmology.
As we speak of God in the language employed by Scripture, we should do so with a clear theological understanding of what this language does and does not mean. God is to his Son—and to his many “sons” redeemed by his Son—a faithful and loving Father. But the divine nature is Spirit, not flesh, and does not in any way partake in gender or sexuality, which characterizes created, physical bodies only.
But surely an understanding of our divinely designed masculinity and femininity is crucial to our obedience to God and his Word. Isn’t fulfilled manhood and womanhood a key biblical goal for the body of Christ? How could something be this important to God, yet have nothing to do with God’s nature?
The insistence that God be thought of as revealing an eternal masculinity is really only a reification (an ontologizing) of an abstraction never mentioned in the Bible. The ideas of “masculinity” and “femininity” are created by a process of abstraction from the physical sexual differences between human beings.
These concepts are not defined or discussed in Scripture. However, the extent to which these presuppositions control the agenda of such a traditionalist text as Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is overwhelming—as we see in John Piper’s introductory chapter, where he promises to define these concepts and then offers behavioral illustrations but no definitions.
Despite the verses he refers to, the Bible in fact sets forth no doctrine of universally and trans-culturally prescribed male and female roles that permit certain activities and behaviors for one gender and prohibit those behaviors for another gender—especially not with respect to spiritual status, gifts and ministries in the body of Christ, where the freedom and equality of every believer in Christ is presented in the New Testament as a governing principle for the new covenant community.
When Piper tells us that differentiated roles for men and women “are never traced back to the fall of man and woman into sin”, he is no doubt correct, for the idea of “roles” is a modern sociological notion and the Bible never mentions it—neither in the Genesis narrative nor elsewhere. An oft-stated goal of evangelical traditionalists is fulfilled manhood and womanhood. Yet the Bible says nothing about this either, but rather exhorts all believers without distinction to be full of the Holy Spirit and conformed to the image of Christ. Since masculinity and femininity are concepts explicated nowhere in Scripture, it is not surprising that the “definitions” Piper gives are actually summaries of his own conclusions about these two rather mystical reifications.
Our conclusion must be that there are no biblical grounds for the controlling influence of the ideas of “masculinity” and “femininity” for our understanding of God’s essential nature. God is a he because God is personal and “our Father” because God acts like a loving father. He is neither male nor female, nor a combination of both. Notions of a gendered God are intrinsic to a variety of paganisms, but are absent from a fully biblical Christianity.
Author: Pierce, R. W., & Groothuis, R. M. (2005). Discovering biblical equality: complementarity without hierarchy (pp. 287–300). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
When Piper tells us that differentiated roles for men and women “are never traced back to the fall of man and woman into sin”, he is no doubt correct, for the idea of “roles” is a modern sociological notion and the Bible never mentions it—neither in the Genesis narrative nor elsewhere. An oft-stated goal of evangelical traditionalists is fulfilled manhood and womanhood. Yet the Bible says nothing about this either, but rather exhorts all believers without distinction to be full of the Holy Spirit and conformed to the image of Christ. Since masculinity and femininity are concepts explicated nowhere in Scripture, it is not surprising that the “definitions” Piper gives are actually summaries of his own conclusions about these two rather mystical reifications.
Our conclusion must be that there are no biblical grounds for the controlling influence of the ideas of “masculinity” and “femininity” for our understanding of God’s essential nature. God is a he because God is personal and “our Father” because God acts like a loving father. He is neither male nor female, nor a combination of both. Notions of a gendered God are intrinsic to a variety of paganisms, but are absent from a fully biblical Christianity.
Author: Pierce, R. W., & Groothuis, R. M. (2005). Discovering biblical equality: complementarity without hierarchy (pp. 287–300). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
