Someone asked me this a while back and I’ve been chewing on a substantive answer, that clicked for me in conversation the other day. We could phrase it another way: ‘why is the Holy Spirit not a ‘she’?’
To be fair, they asked me a slightly more nuanced question: why is God presented as male? Why does the Bible use male language for God? The distinction is important, though I’d like to defend both statements.
We cannot deny that God is described in male language throughout the Bible. There are, of course, some feminine images used of God (e.g. Psalm 91). We would have to be feeling obtuse to decide this meant that God is not described in male language. The Father is a father, the Son is in the most literal way, a man, and the Spirit—well, this is where it gets trickier. Some argue the Spirit should be called she because pneuma (the Greek word) is a neuter noun and ruakh (the Hebrew word) is a feminine noun and breath and wind are not explicitly masculine terms.
The facts there are true, the conclusions are not.
God is not a man, but God is ‘male,’ if we can be allowed to speak that way. To make the softer argument: God is presented as male consistently. There are three reasons for this:
The Trinity is undivided
Trinitarian doctrine requires that either what we say of one person of God is true of all three persons or that it’s a claim about the relations between them. That’s not in technical language but is the essence of it. The doctrine of the simplicity of God requires that what is true of God is true of God.
Our claim that God is described in masculine language—which I haven’t argued for but think is quite easily established from both testaments—requires that God is masculine. To suggest that the Spirit is female while the Father and Son are not requires tritheism.
Of course, there are some out there who will claim that God is female, or that claiming anything approaching a ‘gender’ to God is incorrect. God clearly does not have a sex—except that the Son incarnate does—and does not have a gender in the sense that we use that word today (i.e. a gender identity). While confusing to modern ears, we could speak of God as having gender in much the same way the boats are female. That’s not a particularly clarifying statement, but this article from Daniel Hindman puts forward the argument that Genesis 1 claims this form of gender as an organising principle of the universe.
Heaven is male
In Genesis 1, Heaven is ‘male’ and earth is ‘female.’ Notice, for example, that Adam is a union of heaven and earth; he is made of the breath of God and the soil. In the previous days of creation God has been separating: waters from heavens and waters from earth. Now he separates Adam—with a wound in the side—into male and female.
The man and woman tell something of the story of the rest of creation: two things are separated and their union brings life. This is why we can call heaven ‘male’ and earth ‘female.’ This is not a statement of hierarchy or worth, though I fear most will read it that way. Instead, it’s the claim that the New Testament makes: marriage exists as a symbol of something greater. This means that men and women exist as a symbol of something greater too. We exist to tell a story, as symbols, of the story at the centre of the cosmos.
God is a husband
The deepest reason we should use male language for God? Because you’re his wife.
Christ came to marry the Church. The prince slew the dragon so that he could win the princess. The Bible is relentless in its pursuit of this theme. Israel is Yahweh’s wife. The Church is Christ’s. Those statements are not truly different.
The Church is female, probably why she has had more women than men in her since the beginning, and Jesus is male. We worship the ‘Jesus God’ to use Glen Scrivener’s lovely paraphrase. Jesus is the one who reveals the Father (John 17). His Spirit is not separate from him (1 Peter 1). The Three-in-One is male, because the church is female.
That’s the biggest reason our male and femaleness matters, and that our bodies tell us what our male and femaleness is, because reality is a story. We were made so that redemption is hard-coded into everything you’ve ever seen, the gospel is the operating principle of the cosmos. When we get right down to brass tracks, to the very stuff of life, and ask what reality is and how it works, when we get into the kind of questions that Physicists and Mathematicians ask, we can say that reality is a love story. Things exist because God loves you and wants you to know you’re loved. Answers that don’t make ultimate reference to that truth are not ultimate answers. Physics that isn’t about the joy of heaven meeting earth and getting married just hasn’t got to the bottom of things yet. I assume new creation physicists and poets will feel like they’re doing similar things: showing that all things are a story, and it’s the best one there is.
Why is God male? Because at Easter he smashed death to bits and ate him (Isaiah 25), then he married his sweetheart (John 21, Revelation 19).
Photo by Roman Skrypnyk on Unsplash
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