THE FEMININE GOD
A Matter of Pronouns
Rediscovering God’s feminine side: Part Two
Often people are willing to countenance the fact that God might have feminine characteristics but stop short of calling God ‘She’.
Does it make any difference?
I have been thinking about pronouns. I know. I lead an exciting life.
This is the second in a series of articles exploring the feminine character of God. I don’t know what your experience of God and Christianity and things spiritual in general is. It may be that you have been meeting God as She for some time. Or you might never have thought about it and, like me a few years back, find the idea somewhat alien. Maybe even uncomfortable.
As we start to explore God as feminine, we face the issue of what pronouns to use for God. Whatever we choose to do has, within it, some pitfalls.
Exploring the feminine aspects of God but keep calling God ‘He’ is not going to work very well for us. It has all the wrong connotations. It jars horribly. There are people who would definitely want to keep names and pronouns for God male. I was chatting with a friend about these things the other week. She was willing to concede that there are feminine aspects of God in the Bible but would only speak about it in terms of ‘the maternal characteristics of Father God’.
Which feels a little awkward, to say the least.
On the other hand, we are so conditioned to think of God as ‘He’ that talking of God as ‘she’ can feel very alien. Even transgressive. It has connotations of paganism and goddess worship, and other things that Good Christians are not meant to have anything to do with.
My first solution was just to avoid using either pronoun. That way, I thought I — and anyone else I was talking with — would be free to imagine God as male or female or both or neither.
However, there is a problem with this because we probably won’t. Freely imagine God as male or female when confronted with neutral language, that is. Two millennia of viewing God as ‘He’ means that neutral language isn’t nearly as neutral as we would like it to be.
The word ‘God’ is, in reality, about as gender neutral as the words ‘soldier’, ‘firefighter’ and ‘footballer’. Of course, all those people can be female, but the groove that culture and experience have carved into our minds, into which our thoughts automatically flow, is the one that views all these people as male.
You can picture female soldiers, firefighters and footballers, but you have to be pretty deliberate about it. So if we actually want to begin to envision and encounter God as other than male, neutral language is helpful but will only get us so far.
At some point, we have to give up neutrality and actually start using female pronouns where that’s appropriate. Although using ‘She’ and ‘Her’ might feel odd, to begin with — it really is the quickest way actually to begin to imagine God differently.
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