This is no doubt on the
back of a socio-cultural trend towards “accepting difference of all varieties",
where people can more easily "be supported to accept their own gender
identity or sexual orientation and that of others". Even accepting this as
a good basis for humans, that does not necessarily mean that it naturally translates
into a good basis for engaging with Deity - after all, we know from Jesus that
things that apply to humans do not necessarily extend to applying to God ('My kingdom
is not of this world').
The church is claimed to
be something over and above human construction (although it is full of human
construction too) – it is thought to be a body that represents the bride to
Christ’s bridegroom. Hence, in those terms, even at a metaphorical level, sex
is important; particularly as Jesus instructs us to pray to Our Father.
Obviously there is no
doubting Jesus' maleness - in becoming a man He took on all the properties of
manhood (even sin right at the end on the cross), and there is no difficulty
whatsoever in referring to Jesus in the masculine third person pronoun 'Him'.
But why did God the Father
refer to Himself in terms of maleness? Is it perhaps the case that being (I
presume) something spiritually beyond our comprehension, He may have
indentified Himself in terms of maleness in recognition of our difficulty in
conceiving a neuter singular indefinite personal pronoun that departs from the
‘He’ or ‘She’ concepts (I don’t think we would wish to refer to God as ‘it’ -
and both male and female being made in His image indicates Divine transcending
of sex).
But that doesn't satisfy
much, and I'll try to explain why. If God is transcendent of sex, and we can
call God 'Him' or 'The Father', can we equally well call God 'Her' or 'The
Mother'? I think you'd be hard pressed to find even a feminist Christian who
would say this is not a problem.
Similarly, to say that sex
has zero importance must be to admit that God could have equally well chosen
the incarnation to be in the form of a woman instead of the male Jesus.
Instead of Jesus on the cross as the Son of God, imagine a women on the cross
as the Daughter of God - I don’t think many Christians would think that is the
same religion. It would probably more closely resemble the worshipping of
Aphrodite or Iris or Athena, which may have qualities that Christianity does
not, but it wouldn’t be Christianity at all as we know it.
I am not making any
comment on whether the religions centred around goddesses or ideas centred
around ‘mother’ nature are better or worse than the more patriarchal religions,
but if the majority of Christianity's leading figures are seeking to retain the
status of God as Father and Christ as Son as central tenets of the faith, I
think we would be hard pressed to deny that this is entirely consistent with
scripture.
And I can equally see why
if Christianity departs from God as Father and Christ as Son it could easily
lose other core elements that make up its very essence. Perhaps those
wishing to retain maleness in Deity are doing so more as a humble fault than
out of allegiance to patriarchy - after all, they might be fearful that if the
church cedes more and more of its uniqueness and fades into the background of
an increasingly watered down, individualistic modern culture it may not have
many pearls left to share.
With Christ at the head (bridegroom)
of the church we are dealing with ‘male’ and ‘female’ not merely as facts of
nature but as shadows of deeper dimensional realities utterly beyond our
control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Given the foregoing, it is not
that we have chosen that God should be Him not Her, it is more likely that it
was chosen for us by God – and that to consider the church only as an analogue
to, or as having qualitative importance with, the other socio-political
institutions in the world is to diminish some of its power and gravitas.
And just as in his epistles
St Paul often seems to be giving exhortations regarding the severity of
the message of grace being impeded or disfigured by cult practices (the example
of the instruction against women speaking in church in the letter to the
Corinthians is not a universal edict to be taken doctrinally, but specifically
as a portent against the Aphrodite cult, which was rife with prostitution, and
priestesses immersed in the Christian church who were indulging in their own
brand of heterodoxy and heresy), I suspect that the notion of God as Father and
Christ as Son is central to the creation story in ways that none of us yet
understands except perhaps in terms of creation as a shy adjunct of God's
relationship with His creation.
I may be
over-interpreting things here, but when scripture refers to Christ as our
bridegroom, and Jehovah as our father and husband, perhaps this is to set a
template for our understanding some of the characteristics of God in terms of
characteristics of maleness. Perhaps it is redolent of the male archetype as
maker, protector, provider, leader - the kind of qualities that women seek in
men, and children seek in parents - also being the kind of qualities that
created creatures seek in their Creator.
You may object that these
roles of men and women in nature are mere human constructs, and because of which
we have imputed those properties onto the Divine - but I think that may be
getting the causality backwards. Because if you are alert to reading between
scripture's lines, you'll find that God uses pretty much all His most profound
methods of communication through the conduit of human constructs.
Animal sacrifices were
part of tradition long before Go instituted it into Hebrew culture as part of a
covenant. The same is true of war, prophecy, governments, kingdoms, priesthoods
and, most importantly here, the practice of crucifixion. The cross on which
humanity had its sin forgiven was a barbaric human practice that God used to
demonstrate His love for humankind and to draw us closer to Himself.
And I have a feeling that
that is also the case regarding God's maleness in terms of our salvation and a
relationship with us - He has co-opted human elements as conduits through which
He can reveal Himself as our maker, protector, provider, leader and saviour of
the world. No doubt our understanding of this is but a shadow of the full
profundity of the reality, but that's my best guess as to the relevance of God
being a He and not a She.
Perhaps a final illustration
will help if you're still on the fence with this one. Imagine you're at Golgotha about to witness Jesus die slowly on the cross.
Your strongest instinct would be to help him down, but I can conceive of a
situation where, however difficult, you could be talked into letting him suffer
and die because what he's doing is a noble act of sacrificial love that will save the world.
If the situation was the
same except for the fact that the person on the cross was a woman, I can't
think that leaving her up there to die slowly would be something we could ever
feel was instinctively right - I cannot imagine that any onlooking man or woman would
be absent of the overwhelming feeling that if someone is going to go through
this barbarous, lengthy period of intense suffering and death, that it ought to
be a man volunteering Himself up there in her place - not by coercion, but by the strongest compunction imaginable
- like a husband doing so to save his wife, or a father doing so to save his
son, or a Creator doing so to save His creation.
