Except for an infinitesimally miniscule moment in the entirety of time, God is not human. A minute moment in history, God was human in Jesus, a man. That’s it. A blink in the eye of eternity. God is not human; not she, not he, not they. God is most likely Spirit, but that’s a human way of describing how God is God. No pronoun works. So?
When I was preparing for ministry in the 1980s, I had a deep long conversation with a man steeped in God-is-Male Christianity. I was told that I couldn’t be ordained because I was a woman, though I am part of a church which has done so for over 100 years. After a very detailed chat in which I defended my right (why did I have to do this?), I was finally told, “Well, I can see that you are called to be a minister. Maybe God wants you to have a sex change?” This was seriously said. The male-ness was more important than faith, and significantly more important that justice.
Yes, this is about me, but it is also a huge, huge deal for all of us. Huge. In Jesus’ time and in the few hundred years immediately after him, leadership of the followers and then the groups of early Christians had mixed leadership, in radical contrast to the culture in which Jesus-believers believed and in critical contrast to the religion in which Jesus grew. When the Roman empire appropriated a handy ‘new’ religion with lots of followers, the women left the mix, painted out of many of the images of women in leadership on the walls of the Catacombs under the streets of Rome. The church became a copy of the empire which used it. That leaders were and always are men became the marrow of the bones inside the new religion named after the Jew the believers followed.
This is a big deal. Look at any society in 2021 which is modelled on leadership as male. See injustice for many, not just for women. Look at any institution which is modelled on leadership as male. See the injustice couched in ‘experience’, ‘tradition’, ‘scripture’. We know that justice is not flowing on the ground in any country or institution – but look to those countries, religions and sects where leadership is modelled on male power, and we see far more denial of human rights for far more people of all colour, many sexualities and people in poverty. The male-ness of God is tied up in the male-ness of power itself and with it, inappropriate access to wealth and dangerous denial of basic human rights to swathes of people. Think education, health, the City, industry – many organisations taking their organisational models from religious practice. See injustice, inappropriate share of wealth, leadership filtered into a few elite wealthy men. Generally white. I could go on and on (and on and on).
To continue to push the God as He model is to feed the soil of human injustice. To continue to push the God as He model shrinks God to a human notion of what power is. Yet, in that one moment when God was associated with a pronoun, and from the testimony of people to this day whose lives were changed as a result, God is not power, but presence, courage and peace. To continue to Make God Male is more than diminishing to God, more than dangerous to ourselves and significantly dangerous to the societies of which we are part.
I call on my colleagues and friends. Let’s be as radical as we often say we are. To change our language is powerful and it changes societies. If we all truly mean to be people of justice, we have to change what we say. It is time. The world needs us to chip at the structures of power
