146. THEY/THEM - Why We Need To Be Gender-Neutral About God
“Have you heard?” I was asked last week by several teachers, students, and even random acquaintances who barely know me besides the fact that I teach Philosophy and Religion, “God’s not a man anymore, apparently.” In each case the comment was made with an implied eye-roll, a knowing smile, a subtext of derision. The Anglican Church had raised the notion of using gender-neutral pronouns when describing God instead of the default “He” and, according to many who spoke to me, this was evidence that the world had gone mad.
They were surprised, therefore, when I explained how I myself had been striving to keep God gender-neutral in my classroom for years. That I chastised myself whenever a lazy “He” escaped my lips and tried to use They/Them pronouns when discussing the Divine, or sometimes just simply “God”. That, yes, it sounded clunky and strange, but that was only because it’s battling against the expectations and norms of years of cultural upbringing.
Because of course God - a being defined in terms of transcendence - would not be confined to one single point on a spectrum or one limited half of a binary. The very terms of transcendence that makes God God would necessitate God being beyond either a gender binary or the limits of a single gender. The omnipotent God responsible for creating both men and women in their own image, logic would suggest, must possess an image inclusive of both male and female (and everything in between).
The idea that God is not a single gender really only seems to be radical within the Abrahamic traditions. In Hinduism, God, Brahman, takes the form of deities both male and female, human and non-human all the time. All is Brahman - everything is God, as the Vedic scriptures say. Buddhism too, which often does away with God altogether, speaks of everything in flux and constant change and impermanence. Why would God be a permanent gender when enlightenment teaches us that nothing is permanent? Meanwhile the name of God in Sikhism is Waheguru, or “wonderful teacher”. A name Sikhs try to dwell on as frequently as possible. The only thing equating being a wonderful teacher with being a man would be the social norms of a particular time. Throughout the Guru Granth Sahib, God is gendered as both masculine and feminine. Waheguru is no mere man. Waheguru is God.
Actually, it’s not all Abrahamic traditions either. Rabbinical tradition in Judaism has long argued that God must transcend gender too. Attempts at anthropomorphising God are widely discouraged across the faith, with many Jewish people not depicting God at all and some not even writing the word “God” in letters because attempting to reduce God (or G-d) into an easily understandable word - a word supposedly analytically identical with the deity themselves - offends the very idea of God’s transcendence and being beyond all understanding. In Islam, too, God is never depicted for fear that attempting to do so will fall short of God’s actual greatness and lead to possible idolatry of an image of something lesser than God falsely equated with God. Translations from Arabic to English of the Qur’an often translate the “I” of Allah to a “we” to demonstrate this idea of God’s inability to be captured in limiting human constructs. When a Muslim says Allah, they speak of The God, not Him. When God speaks they speak as “we” to intentionally demonstrate that God is something different, something beyond, the mere “I” of their human creations. God transcends: “no vision can grasp” Allah, as the Qur’an tells us.
I can’t even say it is Christianity that struggles with God’s transcendence of gender, as this entire discussion has come about because of attempts in the Anglican Church at reforming the use of gendered language and using gender-neutral pronouns for God instead of male ones. It is Christians themselves asking for the change. But it is in Christianity where the controversy rages. The Anglican suggestion has not been embraced by all, and not all Christians are Anglicans. Lamentations abound about “what will happen to the Lord’s Prayer now? Must it begin ‘our parent’ instead of ‘our father’?” And there is, of course, the sticky problem of Jesus. A human man, in whom God famously lives out their human incarnation, known as the heavily gendered “son”. In fact the Trinity consists in equally distinctly gendered ideas of a “father”, a “son”, and a Holy Ghost (gender unspecified). For those Christians opposed to the gender-neutral change the fact just is that God has revealed some specifically masculine characteristics. We can’t deny biblical fact with our silly woke agenda of inclusivity.
But is it denying biblical fact, or merely agreeing with what the bible says about the divine in whom “all things are possible”? Surely God would have to be gender-fluid for it to be possible for them to be gender-fluid? And if they can’t be gender-fluid then there’s something they can’t do, thus they cannot be God. A modern day version of the paradox of the stone. But it isn’t just philosophical riddles that suggest the Christian God transcends gender. The very idea of Trinity reminds us that a core Christian belief is that God is trinity - not three Gods, one God in three distinct persons. A deity that transcends even number and logic. So while Jesus, the man, may well be God, and perhaps Christians might be well licensed to refer to “him”, the divinity of Jesus to which we refer is not necessarily a “Him” just because Jesus is if God - all aspects of the Trinity - transcends everything. That such a God chose to incarnate as a man says nothing of God’s own gender. It merely notes that to talk to a patriarchal society and have them listen to you, God knew that a male mouth was the most likely to be listened to amidst ancient bigotry and chose accordingly. That is, of course, if we believe that the incarnation was a real event. Many Christians don’t, believing it to be, instead, a metaphor or myth which speaks some greater truth. A metaphor or myth more likely coloured by the male authors who wrote it into existence than by indisputable facts about a mysterious deity’s true nature. That same idea explains the “Father” part of the trinity. The word is clearly used metaphorically to both describe this overseeing authoritative God, and the the notion that Jesus is God’s “son”. But Jesus is not God’s son. Jesus is God themselves. The notion that Jesus is God’s “son” is to be understood poetically, again in a biblical time when authority was socially equated with maleness. If God needed to communicate with people in language they understood, evoking masculine traits to patriarchal people makes sense if divine authority is what you are attempting to communicate. But remember: to understand God is to understand that God is all aspects of the Trinity, not any single one in isolation, and that the concept of trinity itself was a guess of best fit from early Christians trying to understand and formulate a coherent doctrine contained within the mysteries of the bible. Which reminds us further that this handwringing over the supposedly male God depicted in the bible needs to also reckon with the very likely possibility that the scriptures in which such maleness is exemplified may be more than a little influenced by the men who wrote them. Even those who believe Jesus to be a real historical person and not divinely inspired metaphor or myth accept that the bible was written long after the death of this person, by men. Historically men have had a habit of writing women out of their rightful place in history. If it could happen to Jesus’ female disciples, relegated to bit-players and minor roles throughout the Christian scriptures, why not the feminine aspects of God themselves too? Remember, this is a faith which only started allowing women to hold positions of authority in the latter quarter of the last century, and a faith in which some groups still refuse to give women that authority. The charge of sexism and patriarchy is no mere hypothesis.
All of which is a long way of saying that I don’t think God would mind if we started the Lord’s Prayer “Oh God, who art in heaven”, instead of “Our Father”, any more than they mind those who changed the word “trespasses” to “sins”, “art in heaven” to “is in heaven”, or any number of other updates and modernisation to the prayer’s language over the years to make more understandable the core underlying message of the prayer supposedly gifted to us by Christ themselves. Words which, by the way, have also been translated from the Greek of the early Bible into English, themselves translated from the original Hebrew Jesus probably spoke. We adapt our language all the time to make it more inclusive, relatable, and understandable, whether it is using gender-neutral pronouns for God or the word “God” instead of Yahweh.
If God must be a man then that isn’t God. It’s some limited thing bound to a rigid gender narrative God’s own creation has been able to transcend.
Which isn’t to say that it won’t be difficult to undo a lifetime of male-centred language around God. I’ve held these ideas about God’s essentially non-gendered nature for my entire teaching career and still routinely misgender God as male because the indoctrination is deep. “He” rolls off the tongue because until I thought about it, God had always been “He”. But this difficulty in breaking free of my cultural programming hasn’t made the need to do so any less urgent. I simply correct myself and move on. Refusing to perpetuate the idea that authority must equal maleness and the lazy sexist assumption that any supreme authority would so obviously have to be a man.
If I say “He” one minute, I will say “She” or “They” the next. The change a reminder to students that one or the other alone would be too limiting to encompass the full extent of what God is. After all, any God worthy of our worship would be one incapable of being captured so restrictively in any one box. Neither male, female, or non-binary, God, if real, would have to be all three of those things wouldn’t they? Completely male, completely female, and completely neither. All at the same time. All three in one. Not three distinct and separate genders, but one God containing all three at once, yet each of the three being unlike each other. The whole three persons co-eternal together, and co-equal, in one divine being. A trinity of gender.
Is that such a hard idea for a Christian to accept?
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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