This was the earnest question of a young woman to me not long ago, and it reflects a concern of many outside of the Church and a growing number within it who are repulsed by the idea that the Christian God is perceived as masculine, and, therefore, exclusive of the feminine. The pendulum swings both ways of course: if masculine language has seemed dominant the tendency of those who have been marginalized will be to exclude masculine speech altogether in favor of the feminine. Balance is hard to achieve in such debates, and nuanced arguments tend to be ignored amidst polarization to one extreme or the other. Does Christianity believe in a male deity? Is it acceptable or in some way noble now to call God our Mother? Does gender speech even have a place in address to God?
Christians believe that God is Spirit, that is, not confined to physicality. God transcends all body language we may assign. Further, in asserting that God created humanity in God’s “own image”, it is clear that both the human masculine and the human feminine have their sources in God and are perfectly united to one another in God. God is not male or female, but masculinity and femininity are found within God and are not divided from one another in God. The picture of one man and one woman coming together in marriage is a picture of this unity within God: the two becoming one whole.
The reason, then that Christians address God as “our Father” rather than “our Mother” has nothing to do with the assumed masculinity of God. It has to do with Trinity. Triunity is fundamental to the nature of God and is consequently fundamental to the actions of God (as well as to the responses of God’s people in divine relationship). The God-life is Trinitarian. The mutual relationality of Father, Son, and Spirit is the basis of our understanding of God as Love, God as Savior, God as Source. God is Father to us only because he is the Father of our Lord Jesus. An assertion of the Fatherhood of God is not, as some in recent decades have misunderstood, a statement about God’s gender or a control-device of a patriarchal power structure bent on suppressing feminine images. It is a Trinitarian assertion about the relationship of Jesus to the Father and our consequent relationship as adopted children of that Father. The Spirit that we receive as the Spirit of Adoption is such to us because he (she?) is the Spirit of Love and Unity between Father and Son. Our relationship to God happens in the context and within the interplay of God’s relationship within himself. We are reconciled to the Father by Christ in the Holy Spirit. We have no life in God that is not experienced in Trinitarian terms. Any changes in the language used to express these Trinitarian relationships, including gender language, are indicative in changes within our understanding of the nature of Trinity, thus the nature of God.
Christians within any culture wrestle with the dialogue between their faith, passed down through centuries and cultures with their own languages and concerns, and the current culture with its own demands. The culture, especially in its leftward leaning expressions, is offended at any language which seems to assert power or dominance, especially male power or dominance. If the Fatherhood of God is misunderstood as a contrivance of a patriarchal power structure of an outworn church, it will be rejected and replaced. The trouble is that it will be replaced by a culturally contrived image that will itself become outworn and replaced. The Fatherhood of God, though, is rooted in God’s own self-revelation in the Scriptures. It is not, Christians, maintain, our own language to tinker with. Our religion is not determined by what our culture thinks, after all, but what our Father says to us.
