For Part 1, see here. Is the divine Spirit male, or female, or neither? People have thought of the Spirit in all these ways. Most churchgoers in America probably instinctively refer to the Spirit as an “it” and think of the Spirit as some sort of “force,” even though the more experienced Christians in their more thoughtful moments will insist that actually the Spirit is a “he” and is personal, not impersonal. Max Lucado has insisted on this view: “Can you join me in a pledge? I hereby resolve never to call the Holy Spirit an it. The Spirit is a person.” Indeed, Christian theologians have traditionally referred to the Spirit as a “person” of the Trinity. But a person is not necessarily male; would it be offensive somehow to refer to the Spirit as a she? Offensive toward whom? Stepping outside of the Christian faith for a moment, we know that the concept “god” is not tied specifically to males, because there were plenty of goddesses in the ancient world: Asherah, Tiamat, Isis, Athena, Juno, to name a few. In Hinduism, Vishnu is a male deity and Lakshmi is his wife. Deities are often male or female; examples abound. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. So, the Christian God: male or female? Most Christian theologians would say that the concept of gender does not actually apply to the Christian God. Listen to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in the 1990s. In no way is God in man’s image. He is neither man nor woman. God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes. But the respective “perfections” of man and woman reflect something of the infinite perfection of God: those of a mother and those of a father and husband. (CCC 370) This statement from the Catechism agrees with traditional Christian theology. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus asked some probing questions. Do you take it, by the same token, that our God is a male, because of the masculine nouns “God” and “Father”? Is the Godhead a female, because in Greek the word is feminine? Is the word “Spirit” neuter in Greek, because the Spirit is sterile? (Oration 31.7; trans. Wickham, pp. 121–22) Another fourth-century theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, says forthrightly, “For the Divine is neither male nor female” (οὔτε ἄρρεν οὔτε θῆλυ τὸ θεῖόν ἐστιν; Homily 7 on the Song of Songs, p. 225). Zeus is definitely male, because he’s married to Hera, and he has sexual intercourse with human women and impregnates them. Zeus has specifically male body parts. Some ancient stories about Zeus also depict him impregnating women without sexual intercourse (see Talbert in this book). Without being too vulgar, I will say that one of the most important stories Christians tell about their God is how he did, indeed, cause a woman’s pregnancy. In fact, there are multiple such stories in the Christian Bible, but only one in which there is no human male partner, and this one is far and away the most important of these stories. In this instance, the woman’s name was Mary. As the story is told, especially in the Gospel of Luke, no sexual act contributed to the pregnancy, certainly not like those stories familiar to us about Zeus. By the way, I have found help with this concept from Amy Peeler’s recent study, Women and the Gender of God (2022). While the Bible does sometimes speak about the arm of the Lord, or the eyes of the Lord, or talks about God walking, Christians have typically understood these expressions as anthropomorphisms not to be taken literally; God does not actually, in God’s essence, have body parts. (But, see, Charles Halton, who can, though, give off Amelia Bedelia vibes.) In the Bible, God can take on a body, as he sometimes does in the Hebrew Scriptures—for instance, when he eats with Abraham in Genesis 18—but, according to traditional Christian theology, God’s essential being does not have or need arms or eyes or legs. Such descriptions of God, anthropomorphisms, have usually been understood by believing Bible readers as accommodative language, essentially, describing God in the image of man. (Peeler, pp. 25–26, is helpful on this point, interacting with Ps-Dionysius, On the Divine Names 9.5, and modern scholars.) While scholars have increasingly given attention to the corporeal descriptions of God, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament—and most of this work is indebted to a seminal 2009 monograph by Benjamin Sommer—still, whatever body God inhabits in Jewish Scripture, and however the term “body” is defined (e.g., localized presence), it is not a body like the one humans inhabit. At least, the denial that God has a body with sexual characteristics is faithful to one way of reading the biblical text—the most common way of reading it, in fact. The Scriptures of Israel gender God as male only insofar as they use paternal titles for God rather than maternal ones, though at times, authors described God with maternal images (Hos 11:3–4; 13:8; Deut 32:11–12, 18; Isa 42:14; 49:15; 66:13; Ps 123:2–3), but the texts resist any portrayal of a sexualized male deity. (Peeler 2022: 22) “When procreation is the focus, the Hebrew text explicitly depersonalizes God so as to avoid a sexualized association: God is the ‘Rock’ (צור [tsur]) who begot you (Deut 32:18)” (Peeler 2022: 20). Peeler then cites (n. 3) Janet Martin Soskice (p. 2) as saying that “Paternal and maternal imagery in quick succession effectively rules out literalism, as does the astonishing invocation of a parturient rock.” Traditional Christian theology insists that God—not as he is described in Scripture, but in harmony with such descriptions—God in God’s very being or essence is incorporeal, bodiless (see discussion in Markschies, chs. 2 and 6). If that is the case, we would need to think very carefully about whether it makes any sense to attribute a particular gender to the Christian God. If we are going to disagree with traditional Christian theology, especially on a matter that has usually been considered very important, we should do so with our eyes open, fully conscious of our departure from the likes of Origen and Athanasius and Augustine. I myself am very wary of disagreeing with the Great Tradition when it comes to the nature of our God. (See Leonard Allen.) The principle of Chesterton’s Fence comes to mind. I know that I have been using gender-specific pronouns for God, but I have reasons for doing this, reasons that we will get to later, reasons that have nothing to do with God’s essence as male, which I deny. I’m not even sure if we should talk about people having gender in their essence. I accept what has become the conservative position that sex is a biological category that applies to many creatures. Usually it’s pretty obvious which sex applies to creatures, just by looking. There are some instances in which it is not obvious, and this is true for humans. There are intersex people, and people with ambiguous genitalia. As the journalist Kevin Williamson wrote last year, the occasional difficulty in classifying a newborn into one sex or the other “is no more relevant to the fact of sexual dimorphism in H. sap. than the fact that people sometimes are born without a limb negates the bipedal nature of the species.” Does that sound right to you? It sounds right to me. Let me take this opportunity to talk about the question “What is a woman?” This question sometimes comes up in political discussions, or at confirmation hearings for federal judges. It is a great gotcha question because if you can’t answer it, you look like an idiot. Nevertheless, I can’t answer it, and I bet you can’t either. Wikipedia tells me that “A woman is an adult female human,” and I agree, but that just dodges the problem. Now we have to define female. I say it’s a great gotcha question, but if the question were ever turned around on the questioner, I doubt they could give a satisfactory answer, even satisfactory to themselves. How shall we define woman? By the presence of certain sexual organs? Surely not. Does it have something to do with chromosomes, or something else? Look, it is well-nigh impossible to develop a simple rule that includes everyone you think ought to be included, and excludes everyone else—and that is entirely because of the rare ambiguities that nature presents to us. And yet, in the vast majority of cases, we all know what a woman is, even if we can’t give a simple definition. This aspect of the term “woman” in no way makes it unique. We could say the same thing for many concepts, including ones that are more within the usual purview of my expertise, such as Apocrypha, or Septuagint, or, indeed, Scripture. We have been talking about the category of sex, a biological category, but what about the category of gender? Let me again recommend to you the essay by Kevin Williamson, but here I will quote two paragraphs from his piece. He says that traditionally, gender is a grammatical category—as we saw in the previous post, when we noticed that the word for spirit is usually feminine in Hebrew, neuter in Greek, and masculine in Latin. Williamson continues: The more contemporary uses of gender are recent neologisms: Gender meaning the “behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex, as in ‘gender roles,’” as our friends at Merriam Webster put it, dates from the second half of the 20th century. “Gender identity” and “gender expression” were unknown expressions before the 1960s and 1970s, respectively. Sex therapist Jackie Golob put it the way one most often hears it described: “Gender identity is how you feel about yourself and the ways you express your gender and biological sex. … Biological sex is physical, while gender is feeling.” That is a common view, and
