This evening, we want to talk about God and gender language. And I have to be kind of careful here tonight because just today I finished a sermon for chapel on Wednesday in which I'm going to talk about the same issue. But I don't want to repeat myself in both places, say the same thing there. So I'm going to stay very carefully with the material that I have prepared for me tonight. Some time ago now, I think it was about a year and a half ago. I was watching the PBS program Frontline. And the program revolved around a controversy in the Evangelical Seminary. One of the subplots of this story concerned the dismissal of a female professor. The story made it appear as though the professor was dismissed from the seminary because she ran a foul of a certain click of theologians who were trying to take over the seminary and through the seminary the denomination of that seminary. Further, these theologians were really a bunch of reactionary conservatives. They weren't preaching the gospel. They were rather seeking to enforce a mean spirited political agenda and an intolerant arcane theology. Near the end of the story, however, in a very quick sound bite, one of the, I think it was a member of the board of trustees of the seminary actually enumerated the list of charges against the professor. If you will, the deviations from the tradition that the professor was found guilty of. And among those was the fact that the professor refused to speak of God as father. She preferred to speak of God as mother or as the goddess. I remember as I was watching this program that I thought there was a certain irony here. You see, we're a culture that prizes and protects means of address concerning ourselves. But it doesn't matter how we speak of God. What's important to us is not what we think and say about God's status but our own. We have rights. We proclaim them. We agitate for them. We protect them by status, excuse me, by statute. We seek redress when our rights are violated. But God has no rights among us, not even the rights of his own name. The question won't take up this evening is this. Does it matter what we call God? Does it really matter by what name we address? God. Well many people today suggest that we can call God mother as well as father. That we can speak of God as she, equally as legitimately as he. Or perhaps even more radically as suggested by some, that we should avoid gender terms altogether. Thus God is not father but divine parents. He's not king but monarch. He's not father, son and spirit but rather creator, redeemer, sanctifier. Well why can't we use Allah or the great spirits, the goddess or Sophia to refer to God? After all, come on. God knows he's being addressed. Does it really matter by what name we use? There's nothing magical about names. Come on you fundamentalist lighten up. One names is good as another. No it's not. Names matter. Forms of address are important. They're important to each and every person in this room. Unless your name is Fred, when the phone rings and someone asks to speak to Fred what do you say? I'm afraid you have the wrong number. You're not speaking to me. I don't answer just any name. I don't answer to the name Dan Doriani. I refuse to answer to the name Dan Doriani. It's not that there's anything bad about that name statistically. Somebody on this planet has the name Dan Doriani but not me. If you were to call me Dan Doriani it tells me that you don't know me and you don't know Dan Doriani. Names are important to us. We're offended when our names are used inappropriately. We're hurts and offended when the names of others are used to apply to us. Is it possible that the same is true of God? Well let me change that from a purely rhetorical question to a proposition and say this. God does not answer. He's offended when he's inappropriately addressed, when he's misnamed, when he's mistaken for someone or for something else. And amazingly this is very easy to prove biblically. The God of Scripture is not generic deity. He's not mankind's culturally generated ideal of what a God should be like. Rather he is, excuse me, who he declares himself to be and he refuses to answer the names that he does not authorize. How can I say this? Because repeatedly throughout Scripture God warns us he is not bail. He's not to be confused with Molok. His name is not to be used in the same breath with Ashtaroth. He answers only to his own name, the name that identifies him, the name that he gives us to call upon him. In the Old Testament, Yahweh, in the New Testament, the God of our Lord, Jesus Christ. But before we go there, that's going to be really Roman numeral three. I think it'd be helpful to examine some of the reasons that people typically put forth today to say that it's really doesn't matter what we call God, or to suggest that we can and should use female names or androgynous terms to refer to God. So Roman numeral two in our discussion, arguments against the use of male names, titles and pronouns. First of all here, many people claim that they simply can't relate to the male God of Scripture. And oftentimes the reason that cited is abuse. Their own father was absent. Their own father was cruel, abusive or indifferent. Or perhaps this concern comes from a frustration. A frustration in the face of social injustice against women in a male dominated church and society. The argument goes this way, moving away from male language and reference to God, re-imaging God as female or purging all gendered reference altogether is a small but important step in bringing to the gospel to those people who've been victimized. By males in their own experience, focusing upon female images might redress the offense of the long historical reality of the second class status of women. Well, let me respond this way. I think it's important to hear such voices. I think it's important to empathize when people have been hurt by an overbearing patriarchal culture. I think it's important to seek justice when people have been spiritually wounded by sinful father figures. But quite simply, the agenda suggested in the argument is seriously flawed. After all, the biblical point is not that we identify with God as a gendered being, but that we identify with God as personal being. It's not that we identify with Jesus as a gendered being, but that we identify with Jesus as human being. You see, how far can I take the issue of identity for the sake of relationship? May I as a white person claim that I can't identify with a Jewish savior? How far does God have to identify with me in order for me to relate to Him? Jesus was never middle-aged. I am. Jesus was a Jew, but I'm from white, Northern European stock. Where do I go to find a middle-aged, white, middle-class, professional deity? How can I possibly identify with the Jesus of history? A poor, young, Jewish, carpenter? Certainly, our gender is part of us. It's important to us. And I don't mean to trivialize it, but other aspects of our beings are important to us. Our language, our ethnic heritage, our education, our weight, our hairlines. Again, I don't mean to trivialize these things. I don't mean to trivialize gender, but we ought not to absolutize it either. It is not the soul or even the primary indicator of personhood. By the way, I admit, right up the front here, that just about everything I'm going to say tonight flies right in the face of where our culture presently is. I think that's okay. You see, most of the things that I'm going to say tonight, I think were assumed by Western culture until about the 1960s, and Betty for Dan's other feminine mistake. I think it's simply been the case since that time that many of the things that are claimed by the feminist movement are claimed on an unproven authority, and are so only because they claim it there or so. And quite frankly, what people need to do is stand up and say, prove it. Stand up and say, it's not the case that the word male is political, simply because you claim it's political. It was not assumed to be political before. They claimed it as such, and we can say the same thing about many other things this evening. For instance, God is not all things to all people. He is who is, and He demands that we deal with Him as He is. Now that's not all that provocative statement because it's also true of me. I am who I am, and I demand that you deal with me as I am. And so do you. You see, persons are not plastic. Persons are not negotiable. Anyone who has been married for a very short time knows that. At some point, you find out you can't turn that other person into that ideal person you'd like them to be. You're going to have to learn to live with them as they truly are. Yes, women have been damaged by men in our culture. There has been cultural prejudice against women. And this historical and cultural sin cries out to be addressed. But the agenda suggested here that we simply start calling God Mother is simply the wrong tool for the job. It will not fix what's wrong with our culture. And this is so because God's identity is not about us. God's identity is about Him. The key question here in relation to the critique of biblical and traditional language for God is whether that language necessarily leads to gender oppression or whether this admittedly tragic effect results from an abuse of the biblical language concerning God. Medieval theologians would have put it this way. The abuse of a thing does not destroy its legitimacy or its proper use. Does that make sense, guys? I believe that Mary Daly's now a famous and sarcastic aphorism since God is male. The male is God is both logically and theologically false. The dominance of masculine names, similes and metaphors in Scripture does not legitimate the essential domination of women by men. The Old Testament condemns the worship of either a male principal, the Bales or a female principal, Asheroth. Whenever we males equate ourselves with God, we slide into idolatry. Quite simply, biblical religion condemns the abuse of God-language in the service of the oppression and exploitation of women. Well, how do we address the abuse of women in our culture? Well, the way we're not going to address it appropriately is to regender God. The way we are not going to address it appropriately is by shelving God's fatherhood. One way we may appropriately address it is to let God's fatherhood rehabilitate our broken and sinful images of fatherhood, images of manhood and images of womanhood. Only a good father can judge and correct a bad one. You can't fix anything by running away from it. A second argument that people use, this is B here. People claim that we need to move toward feminine images or inclusive language for God because it was men who translated our Bibles. It was men and is men who have by and large been the interpreters of Scripture. And it was men who wrote our creeds and are responsible for our theological history. It's true that the translation of Scripture and the historical tradition of interpretation has been undertaken largely by males. But the dominance of biblical imagery in our Bibles simply can't be traced to this reality. Rather the dominance of male language in our translations and our interpretive history is due to the fact that male language for God is all but universal in Scripture. I think that women should study theology and women should study interpretive hearts. Women have as much insight to offer as males do. And oftentimes women can correct gender bias when it actually appears. But there's a difference between bias and honest exegesis. If the Bible says that God is ex, let's say the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we should have the honesty and we should have the passion for the truth that allows us to affirm ex, no matter what our biases are. We should not use the word of God to serve our biases. One of the very purposes for it is to what? Adjust our biases, crush our biases, replace our biases with its bias. Remember we've talked about this before. The biblical God will and should offend us. He speaks the lie to every human self-absolutization. He says no to every attempt to find ultimate meaning in intracreational or interhistorical reality. He does not say, be you male, Brian male. What he does say is be you holy, Brian holy, and that holiness relativizes all of us. Male and female alike. See, a third argument. Third argument goes like this. Masculine names and terms for God in the Bible are historically and culturally conditioned. And as such, they are not what God intends to teach the church. Given the reality that these things are simply the historical packaging of the biblical message they can be laid aside. Well yes, it's true. The gender language of Scripture is historically and culturally conditioned. But how do we move easily from that insight to the claim that this language is peripheral, is dismissible? You see, everything is historically and culturally conditioned. We haven't said much when we make the claim. On what basis are we to decide that this bit of revelation is not transcultural but is rather the negligible packaging of an archaic age or culture. At best, there's a kind of cultural elitism that rears its head here. We know better than they did then. And at worst there's a denial of the full inspiration and authority of Scripture. Is there some ideal that's inspired in the text? And you and I are free to decide what that ideal is. Of course, when we decide the ideal, we also decide the kernel, the husk, excuse me the husk, and we're free to dismiss it. What we do when we engage in this kind of picking and choosing is we ignore the fact that we, in our prejudices, our biases are also, historically, culturally conditioned, but one might point to the inherent difficulties of language here. And here I want to return back to some of our discussion in the past, our discussion about metaphors and our discussion about transcendence. Many people here will say that it's impossible to describe God in human language. And as an example, here you might think of the Bray and his discussion of apophatic theology in the Eastern tradition. It's commonly asserted that the biblical language describing God is analogical and character. And remember, an analogy says this is like that. But anological language presupposes a degree of equivocation, a degree of dissimilarity. An analogy says this is like that, but it's also saying this is not that. You understand that distinction? That's an important distinction. While these two things might share some attributes, they are not the same. It doesn't suggest that mere human language cannot do justice to the infinite. The mere reality of God's transcendence means that any attempt to describe God will be at best a vague approximation of God's own reality. And when we fail to recognize this, we inevitably fall into the idolatry of what is called biblicism. Thus, when the Bible tells us that God is a king or a judge or a father, these descriptions are to be understood as metaphors, rather than as actual depictions of who and what God is. And since metaphor only approximates correspondence or establishes a purely semantic or functional correspondence, these declarations are not to be taken to literally. And of course, I'm recounting the argument of some theologians. If metaphors are really pretty analogies, are really in perfect ways of talking about things, we can help our analogies with other analogies. Or we can trade off analogies. If God is not actually a king or a father, but is only somehow kinglike or fatherlike, we might use other analogies. The analogies of our own making, God is motherlike as well. But this entire line of discussion, I think, is faulty. And it's faulty because it's based upon a view of God's transcendence, which is intentionally meant to cast doubt upon scriptures, ability to speak truthfully and meaningfully about God. And to summarize the argument I put this way, the infinite can't be captured in the finite. And therefore, all language about God is equivocal. It may be true to all points, but it's also false. And it's false, at least to the extent that it's true. Human language is a poor medium of disclosure for the divine. Is that what we find? Is that the experience we have when we go to the Bible? No. We don't find a deity who is vaguely judged like. We don't find a God who merely approximates some characteristics of kingship. We don't find a God who can be said to be fatherly in some contexts, as if God is none of those things. But only appears to be something like them. What is a king? A king is a person who exercises dominion over subjects or around. God does king things. God is an actual king. What is a judge? A judge is a person who makes critical decisions about guilt and innocence. God does judge things. God is an actual judge. What's a father? A father is a person who gives life to another and then cares for, protects, nourishes, directs, and exercises authority over that other person in a familial context. God does those things. God is father. He does not merely appear to be or do these. Scriptures proclamation of God as king, judge, and father are not metaphors. They are actual declarations. Now to be sure, God transcends those declarations, even God's fatherhood, infinitely transcends our notion of fatherhood. The point of biblical language is that God is always more than what's there. Not less than. Even God's fatherhood is more than what's there. There's no reason to demean, deny, or dismiss the biblical language of divine fatherhood on linguistic or semantic grounds. D. Fourth argument is this. There are feminine and maternal images in Scripture, as well as there are masculine images. And the presence of these feminine images legitimate feminine references for God. Thus we can call God Mother equally as validly as father. Robert. Yes. No, I said they're actual. The word I used was actual. Jesus nowhere implies, for instance, Robert, that God is merely father-like to Him. Let's go back to the fourth one here. We can use Mother equally as father because there are feminine images in the Bible. Yes. There are feminine images in Scripture. But the reality is that there are exceedingly few. And I've written some of them down for you there. Isaiah 42, verse 14, speaks of God as crying out like a mother in labor. In Isaiah 49, 15, God is likened to a nursing mother. Psalm 131, verse 2 says the same thing. Isaiah 66, verse 13, likened God to a mother who comforts her child. Matthew 23, 37, speaks of God who, like a hen, gathers her chicks under her wings. Deuteronomy 32, verses 11 and 12, likened God to a nesting eagle who hovers over its young. And Hosea 13, 8, pictures God as a bear robbed of her cubs. I may have missed one or two, but only one or two. I mention the number of the apparent references here only because it's generally assumed, or at least generally intimated in some circles, that feminine images for God are rather common in Scripture. The fact is, for those who would want to make that argument, they're embarrassingly rare. I may not have gotten them all, but there's less than ten of them in the entire Scriptures.
But far more important than the number of feminine images is this reality. Not all imagery is equal. All the feminine references to God are figures of speech, metaphors, and similes. If you take the list that I've supplied there and read through them, you'll often see language-like. Language-like-like. You'll read the word like in English there a lot. Or as, that's the language of analogy, the language of comparison. And none of these text provide or authorize a divine name. And a figure of speech is not equivalent to a name. You can use a feminine figure of speech to apply to me. This one's not feminine, but it gets the example another way. After the test next week, a student might wish to refer to me as a real bear. But that figure of speech will never identify me in the same way that Mike will, or Dr. Williams. And surely, referring to me as a bear, will not authorize or license that student to bump into me in the hallway sometime and then call me Dr. Yogi. To name Godmother on the basis of a few feminine similes is to confuse functions of language. It is to confuse, similarly, and reference. Feminine images do not justify attributing feminine names to God. In fact, naming Godmother may be a violation of the third commandment, a commandment which protects God's name. Exodus, chapter 20, verse 7 says this, you shall not misuse the name of Yahweh, your God, for Yahweh will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Notice how God is protecting his name there. He's saying he has a name and it better be used right. You see, in the Bible, human beings do not name God. We don't have the right to name God. Rather, he names himself. He reveals his name and he gelously protects that name. When God encountered Moses on Mount Sinai and commissioned him to go to Egypt to seek the release of Israel from slavery, we recall Moses wanted to know who was talking about, who should he say is sending him? Well, God didn't say, oh, it doesn't matter. Just tell him anyone. And he didn't say, tell him the big guy in the sky. As a matter of fact, in his very question, Moses identified God as the God of the fathers. Yet that was insufficient. God gave Moses a name. Yahweh, God named himself Yahweh. You see, naming someone or something presupposes a kind of authority, a kind of power over it. An example here, my wife and I have two sons. We named them. No one else had the right to. No one else had the authority to. When God created man, he gave him the authority to name the animals. And yes, he gave Adam the authority to name the one taken from his side. But God named Adam and God names himself. I can put it this way. Giving God names that he doesn't authorize are not marks of worship. They're not marks of intimacy. They are, in fact, marks of hubris. They're marks of false familiarity. In short, she who is our mother in heaven is not the God of scripture. She's a false God, a grave an image, an idol. She's the creature of our making. Well, why protect the name? Well, we've talked about this because names have content. Names have meaning. In the biblical world names meant something. They revealed character. And if we recall our discussion of Yahweh, it speaks of God's essential character. And it's important for us to come back here and to be reminded here. Contrary to the modern depiction of the God of scripture as distant, officious, vindictive, judgmental, warlike, and authoritarian. Yahweh does not present himself that way. Yahweh is the God who relates to his people in intimate, caring, and active ways. By announcing his name as Yahweh, God pledges his presence with his protection over his covenant people. He commits his love to them in the context in which the divine name is first given in Exodus. It's clear that God wants Moses and Israel to understand that he can't be confused with the deities of Egypt. These deities who were decidedly remote, unapproachable, impersonal, and authoritarian. Yahweh is the one who is there for his people. Let's go to Romans 3. The issue of particularity. The real complaint today is over the term father. This is the name that's most offensive of all. After all, it's from the word father that we get such pated terms as patriarchal and paternalistic. This is the male God of classic patriarchy. We're told today that we can speak of God as mother because father is simply an archaic designation. Our sexually egalitarian culture knows that one is as good as another. We can lay father aside without any loss of meaning, without losing the kernel of what's being communicated. Unfortunately, a number of evangelical theologians are following just this kind of reasoning. Since God is spirit, we can speak of him as mother, equally as well as father. Or perhaps we should seek to de-gender God altogether and not use any gender references. I trust you can tell where I'm going here that I'm uncomfortable with this neither fish nor foul approach. And I say this because father is the New Testament name for the first person of the Trinity. In exact the same way that Jesus is the name of the second person and Holy Spirit is the name of the third. The name father is the privileged reference for the first person in the New Testament. Jesus came as the son of God, the father. He addressed the first person as father and he taught us to do the same in Lord's Prayer. Now does all that mean the Bible's patriarchal? Well if by that term we mean the dominance of men over women? No. But if we mean the sovereign fatherhood of God overall, yes. And I say this because if anything, Jesus exaggerated the divine patriarchy that we see in scripture. You see, Jesus referred to God as father no less than 160 times. And it's the only thing he ever called it. Oh, there's one time. He didn't. In the cry of dereliction, my God, my God. But if you forsaken, of course, that's an Old Testament quotation. Other than that, he always speaks of God as father. And if you think about it, could Jesus have? Could he have spoken about God as mother? What do you think? Wouldn't that have been to confuse God with Mary? When he used the word mother it would have had a natural reference. It would have referred to Mary. Now, we have to be honest here and say the word father, the term father, is applied to God relatively uncommonly in the Old Testament. There, the divine name is primarily Yahweh. But in the New Testament, Yahweh is differentiated into three persons. And the Christian tradition has always and I think rightly understood the divine name in the New Testament to the father, the son who is Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. And see, for example, here in Matthew 28, 19, in which Jesus instructed his disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. But some people might object right here. Father's not a name, it's a title, which is what is a name? According to Thomas Aquinas, and I have it for you on page 98 there, a name signifies that whereby a person is distinguished from all other persons. In other words, a name is a standard form of reference or address with unique personal reference. A name means that person. A name means that one. And the fact is, titles often do and can become names. The word Christ was originally a title. It comes from a Hebrew word for one who is anointed messiah. But Paul will apply the name Christ in the same way he will apply the name Jesus. It has a single unique reference. Christ refers only to Jesus. But let's go back to Father. Maybe we need to make our point with this one. To my four-year-old Sawyer, if you were to ask him, what is my name? I doubt he would say Mike or Michael. He would say Daddy. To him, Daddy is my proper name because for him, it's reference is me. It means exactly the same person as the name Mike. Titles can become names and as in Sawyer's use of Daddy, very intimate names indeed. But let me use the example of Jesus here, the second person of the Trinity. This starts to get at the issue as being not gender, but particularity. Scripture tells us that Jesus was fully human, normatively human even. And one of the realities of being human is the possession of sexually differentiated reproductive organs. Or to that sound bland. In other words, Jesus was a male. He wasn't a female. He wasn't both, and he wasn't neither. To have been both or neither would have meant that he was not normatively human. His being male, however, does not for a second glorify the male over the female. Nor does it make the female less than the male. What it does do is that it affirms us as a gendered species. To refer to Jesus as an it's rather than a hymn, or a her rather than a hymn, would not merely de-gender him, but it would also de-particularize and de-personalize him. Because it would deny the historical reality of who he is, and the same is true of the Father. You see, we linguistically use gender as a term per personhood. Not just sexual differentiation. No person is an it. We are all either he's or she's. Think here of an infant. You might speak of an infant as an it per well. But as soon as it starts demonstrating its personality, you will no longer speak of he or she as an it. Check out your own experience there. This is exactly how we function with infants. We will speak of them as it's for a while. Not for very long. Personhood always comes with gender identification. The scripture gives us no ground for speaking of God as an it. And no ground for speaking of God as she. Now I'm not suggesting here that God has sexually differentiated parts. God possesses no fleshly body. The issue of Father as a name for God is not a matter of affirmation of sexuality, important as that is for our culture. It's really a matter of God's personal particularity. You see, like any person, God can be known only as he actually is only as he reveals himself by his action and his words. And throughout scripture, God is revealed. He is depicted as male as him in his book, The Battle for the Trinity. Donald Blush gives us a helpful illustration here, I think. In a manuscript, he wrote the phrase God reveals himself. But when that manuscript went off to the editor, it was returned with this edit. Instead of God reveals himself, the editor had changed it to a gender neutral statement. God is revealed. Note what the editor did. He changed the phrase from a reflexive to a passive. Instead of God revealing himself, God is revealed. And he moved it from the personal to the impersonal. Blush rightly objected. Things are revealed because things are not agents. They're not persons. Persons act. Does that make sense, guys? At the beginning of his book, God, the Almighty, Blush claims that while God is the ground for both male and female, he has chosen to reveal himself as masculine, as father, son, spirit. He says this, quote, God will remain he because he is personal. And the substitution of a noun God for the personal pronoun invariably ends up in an impersonal God. That's where the issue here. God is personal, and he's particular. The same problem faces any attempt to think of God as mother. For as Blush concludes, outside of a consistent gender identification, God would have no personal specificity for us. And we simply lack the ground for speaking of divine motherhood. Conclusion here, language and Pascal's wager. The 17th century mathematician, philosopher and lay theologian, lays Pascal once said that even if one could not by irrefutable proof decide whether or not God exists, atheism would still be a fool's bet. You see, even if we can't prove that God does not exist, we should believe that he does. Why? Because if the atheist loses his bet, he loses. If he wins his bet, he still loses. Following Pascal's notion of the fool's wager, calling God's mother is a fool's bet. For it presupposes that we have the right to define or describe who or what God is. If we have such a right, if we can do that, then the word God has no reference. It has only a sociological, only a political force or power. Such a deity is decidedly underwhelming, theologically, but it's no more than a lifeless, voiceless block of wood that bears our own face. Again, read Isaiah 44, you can't offend this God, you can't listen to its voice, you can't be criticized by it, you can't be held accountable to it, you can't enjoy a relationship with it, and you most certainly can't be redeemed by it. And quite frankly, I think this is what stands behind a lot of the re-imaging movement. If we can do this with God, we don't stand in their God's authority, God stands under ours. We no longer feel the bites of either God's moral censure or his call to redemption. Just a second, guys. And this is precisely why the historical, personal, particularity of God is so crucially important. He is the God who acts. He's not the thing made in our image. He's the sovereign God of the universe who crafts us male and female in his image. A personal image and only this personal God can hold us accountable. Only a personal God can speak so that we hear his voice.