The Gelding of God

The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury has asserted that God should not be seen as male of female, because he is ‘beyond human language’ and is ‘not a father in exactly the same way as a human being is a father’. There is nuance in these words, rather more than in the way that the press has reported them (e.g. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-can-t-pin-god-down-as-man-or-woman-says-archbishop-of-canterbury-justin-welby-558l2h03m). Nevertheless, the Archbishop is an intelligent man and would have known exactly how his words would be taken. And so, on the authority of the Archbishop, many Christians will today be wondering whether they have been wrong to call God ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ and Jesus their ‘Lord’ and ‘King’.

The archbishop’s words are correct, in a sense. God is not a Father in exactly the same way a human being is a father. Of course not, for we are the image of God; just as my image as I looked in a mirror this morning was not human, or aged 44, or male, in exactly the same way as I am all those things. But to whatever extent my image reflects those characteristics, it is because I am really those things, in a way far more profound than the image is.

Therefore the archbishop’s statement that ‘It is extraordinarily important as Christians that we remember that the definitive revelation of who God is was not in words, but in the word of God who we call Jesus Christ. We can’t pin God down.’ is false. Of course our words are inadequate to define God. That is because we are an image of God, and he is the original; our words describe our knowledge of him which is only a reflection, an image of his knowledge of himself. But for that reason we are bound to use the words he has used of himself. Jesus is indeed God’s word made flesh, God revealing himself to us. Jesus is the fullness of God’s being united to human flesh. And so Jesus teaches us the words that we finite humans have to use to understand God. The Word made flesh is not in competition with the word written; rather, the Holy Spirit has taken the Word made flesh and brings us his words in the words of Scripture. And first of all the words that we have been told we must use to understand God is the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we call our god anything else, whichever god it may be it is certainly not the God who has made himself known in Jesus Christ.

Let us then going back to the image in the mirror. Of course God is not a man in exactly the same way that a human being is a man. Whoever would have said otherwise? But what is emphatically clear, from the first chapter of the Bible onwards, is that our male-ness and female-ness is an integral part of how God displays his image in mankind. And so when Jesus directs us to call God our Father, and to know him as the Son, he is doing so because these things in humanity are images of the reality which is present in God. God is truly Father, the one from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth receives its name (Ephesians 3:14-15). And this points to the reality that the sexual difference speaks both of the difference between God and his creation, and of God’s design to bring mankind into married union with himself.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

Notice that here, in this verse which establishes that mankind’s existence is a universally sexed existence, God explicitly refers to himself as ‘he’. The reason is not hard to see. God is the original masculine. We are feminine with respect to him. He designed us to be husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, so that we would understand what it means for us as his creatures to relate to him. He directed us to use the words Father, Son, Lord, King, Bridegroom for him because the human relationships these words describe are pale images of the reality we encounter in God.

Male and female are designed for marriage. Genesis 2 makes that perfectly clear; and as Paul says in Ephesians 5, that initial design is and always was about Christ and the Church. All true encounter between human beings and God are always gendered encounters: we as feminine relate to God as masculine. Specifically, we as bride relate to God in Jesus as our Bridegroom; and because Jesus is the Son of the Father, The Father (who is truly the Father of the Son, the one after whom all fatherhood is named) becomes our Father. The joyful surrender of a bride to the covenant love of her new husband speaks of the far more joyful and far more total surrender which the church offers to Christ. The trusting dependence of a child on his or her human father speaks of the far more total trusting dependence of every Christian upon God.

Because masculinity is about being a giver of life. Just as no woman can become a mother without a man, and no child can come into the world without being begotten by a father,  so no human being can either exist, nor come to the full compass of what humanity means, without the truly masculine God who comes to us from outside of us. God’s covenant giving of himself in Christ is a giving of fruitfulness to mankind of which the self-giving of a faithful husband to his wife, which issues in the new life of children, is just an image. God has designed us this way so that we would understand how much we need him, so that our very nature as sexed creatures would speak of the gospel of his life-giving covenant in his Son.

To imagine a gender-less God is to imagine a non-God, a God with nothing to give which we could not give ourselves. It is to imagine a god who may suit us but whom we could perfectly well do without. In CS Lewis’ memorable image, creatures trying to govern themselves without knowing their creator is like a female trying to beget young upon herself. If we are not met by the masculine one who comes from outside of us, we can never be fruitful, never be what we are made to be, never be complete, never have life. And so if we do not approach God as being truly masculine, in a way which human masculinity points to, and understand ourselves to be feminine with respect to him, we do not approach God at all. We trust him as our Father, and Christ as our Husband and our Lord, or we do not trust him at all.

Paganism, of course, knows nothing of this. It has always tried to subvert the gendered nature of reality both by championing sexual immorality of various kinds and trying to re-gender the divine. Goddesses and Priestesses abound in non-Christian religion. Pagan gods are gelded gods, with hungry mouths to feed but no life-giving power to give us that which we could not give ourselves. The Church of England’s rush to embrace the gender-less gospel of contemporary secularism will be seen by future generations as a capitulation to exactly the same spirit. To de-masculinise God is to claim that we have all the life we need already in ourselves.

But Christians who have encountered the living God and his covenant love in Jesus Christ will always delight to be the feminine to his masculine; the beloved (and undeserving) wife to him as our redeeming husband; the adopted child to him as our Father. We delight to confess that we believe in God, the Father Almighty; in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord; and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.