Take divinity. Mix with gender. Add pronouns. Stand well back. Wear safety goggles.
The Church of England, worried that it might be going through a bit of a quiet period and sensing the need to stir up some controversy, has launched a commission to explore the use of gender-specific language in its liturgy. The reaction was predictable.
“A culture war is brewing over God’s pronouns,” warned the i. “Now even God could be going gender neutral,” announced the front page of the Mail. “They’ve lost the plot!” claimed Mark Dolan on GB News.
In truth, not much is likely to change. A church spokesperson confirmed that “there are absolutely no plans to abolish or substantially revise currently authorised liturgies.” No archbishop is likely to put a motion to Synod proposing the Lord’s prayer begins “Our Caregiver who art in Heaven” any time soon.
If all this is news, it’s hardly new. Fifty years ago, the theologian Mary Daly proclaimed, in her book Beyond God the Father, “if God is male, then male is God.” Many demurred from her bluntness (she was eventually retired from academic teaching for refusing to allow male students into some of her classes) but still recognised the force of her point. God is a He is too easy an association.
In reality, however, the whole controversy goes deeper than pronouns or even gender, revealing a tension that runs through Christian thought and practice.
Any understanding of God as transcendent will recognise that God is beyond gender, and indeed beyond any human or earthly category. That being so, the natural way to speak of God is with non-gendered, non-anthropomorphic language. God is spirit, force, essence, Being, and so forth. This approach has often been adopted, and has some warrant in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
The problem is that such language is not only limited but also impersonal. This God is an essence, an entity, a life force, the ground of Being, etc. And that presents a problem for all the Abrahamic faiths because, for Christians, just as much as God is transcendent, God is also, in the words of one early Christian letter, love, a word that is mentioned (in its different Greek forms) over 250 times in the New Testament.
By this understanding, God is to be known not as an “it”, an identified object, a conclusion, the “God of the philosophers” as it were, but as a “you”, relationally, as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”. It’s a distinction that is famously hard to convey in English, with its blunt and ambiguous verb “know”, but a little easier in French, with its distinction betweensavoir (for facts) and connaître (for people), or German with its distinction between wissen and kennen.
This God is known—connu—through love, and the language of love, is irreducibly personal: particular, intimate, human. Even when we talk about loving things—music, holidays, football teams—we understand that the word draws its strength from the fact that, properly speaking, we use it to describe our relationships with the people who mean everything to us, without whom we are empty, broken.
Hence the tension. Religious language runs a constant risk by according to a transcendent God any earthly predicates, including gendered imagery or specific pronouns. At the same time, it cannot speak of God truthfully without drawing on personal terms and imagery to convey God’s nature. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
Tradition has navigated this in various ways. Thomas Aquinas restricted what could be literally said of God to a few bloodless, so-called “perfection terms”, such as “One”, “Being”, “Good”, etc, while recognising the legitimacy of a much wider and richer metaphorical vocabulary. The paradox-loving, ninth-century Irish theologian John Eriugena wrote that “nothing can be said properly about God, since He surpasses every intellect and all sensible and intelligible meanings”, and this “apophatic” tradition—approaching God through negation—has long counterbalanced the more confident “cataphatic” tradition of stating what God is. Words, negation, silence have all had their part to play in God-speak.
Ultimately, all these approaches derive from the blizzard of discordant epithets that the writers of the Bible use of God—king and servant; shepherd and lamb; rock and fountain; fortress and wing; spirit and father. Any liturgy that wants to reflect honestly this tradition and the deep tension that gives rise to it needs to encompass this restless and unsettling approach. It must, to appropriate TS Eliot, “be still and still moving”.
Which is why, for all the tabloid mockery and the fears of dragging God into the culture wars, the Church commission is to be welcomed. Probing the unthinking way we refer to God as he (which I have studiously avoided doing in this piece) is a profitable activity.
There are legitimate concerns. Sentiment around gender and pronouns is pretty febrile right now, and hardly conducive to a thoughtful evaluation of such matters. Nevertheless, it is undeniably true that, while not quite univocal in its gendered language, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures do tilt heavily towards masculine imagery and this has sometimes too readily been absorbed, without critical reflection, into the liturgical bloodstream. The result can be a cramped and unhelpful picture of God.
I very much doubt whether even those most upset at the proposed commission would claim that God actually is male. They simply think that the long-established use of male pronouns is the most appropriate (or perhaps the least inappropriate) way of speaking of God. They may be right, but it is certainly not the only way of speaking of God, and if we allow it to be, we will end up making God in our partial image.
