Church of England Considers ‘Gender-neutral God’

The Telegraph of London has reported that a Church of England (CoE) project will ask if it is a mistake to refer to God as “he”—as the Bible and the historic liturgy routinely do. The Church’s Liturgical Commission and its Faith and Order Commission have apparently had this question in their sights for some time, and are now prepared to take it further. The Telegraph reassures its readers that “Any permanent changes or rewriting of scriptures” would eventually need to be approved by the Church’s General Synod.

Professor Helen King, vice-chairman of the Synod’s gender and sexuality group, defended the effort, noting that “For some…God as father may reinforce a bad experience of a strict disciplinarian as their father.  If we dig deeper, clearly God is not gendered, so why do we restrict our language for God in gendered ways?”

What are Anglicans—and Roman Catholics, and fellow Christians in other communions—to make of this? Or of the idea of “rewriting of scriptures”?

In some ways, the most telling statement in The Telegraph’s reportage is its own prefatory comment that “for decades, the gender of God has prompted debate within the Church.” This is certainly accurate. But the salient point is that this debate has run for decades, not centuries or millennia. There is a reason for that. It is because only in recent decades has anyone in Christian circles taken seriously the claim that God should be addressed equally as “Our Mother” or regarded as some kind of un-gendered being. The multi-generational consensus fidelium has held otherwise.

The doctrine of the Trinity reveals to us that God the Father and God the Son (along with God the Holy Spirit) have existed from all eternity as Father and Son. The fatherhood of the Father and the sonship of the Son predate and precede all human instances of father and son. Indeed, per St. Paul in Ephesians 3:15, all human fatherhood derives its name from the eternally-existing fatherhood of God the Father.

This is seemingly unfamiliar territory to the Rev. Ian Paul, whom The Telegraph singles out to represent conservative resistance to the proposed ungendered language for God. His resistance is worse than feeble. According to Rev. Paul, affirming the masculinity of God is “a heresy” since, as he puts it, “God is not sexed.”

That may seem like common sense to modern secularists, but it reflects a theologically shallow understanding of what the term “sexed” might actually mean. If the doctrine of the Trinity is true, and if St. Paul’s statement in Ephesians 3:15 is true, and if Christ is correct to command us to address God as “Our Father,” then we can conclude that masculinity, in its essence, must be something far higher than human genetic maleness. The ordinary aspects of human masculinity—and the relational realities which they engender—must be intended to help reflect, at their best, something of God the Father’s transcendent and pre-existing fatherhood and sonship. In other words, human males are masculine only derivatively. In that sense, it seems fair to say that God the Father is more metaphysically “sexed” than human men (if we must use the Rev. Ian Paul’s infelicitous language).

Then of course there is the pervasive biblical imagery casting God as the divine Bridegroom in relation to the people of Israel, and later the church, as the heavenly Bride. How is such a God “not sexed”?

The overarching truth is that God created Man male and female in His image; together they embody the imago dei. But in that overall context, God in His creative wisdom provided human masculinity as an incomplete glimpse at the fatherly aspect of his nature. This does not constrict the scope of His grace. The incarnate male Christ—born of woman, Son of Man and Second Adam—fully represents both men and women, and redeems them both.

In short, the Incarnation is not symbolically discriminatory; it is not a microaggression.

In addition, we face the great and difficult (to us) mystery that from the moment of Incarnation from Mary, until now when He is seated in heaven, Christ as the incarnate Son of the Father remains humanly male; there is no indication that the Resurrection or the Ascension entailed His physical emasculation or genetic reconfiguration. Indeed, very much the opposite seems to be the case, although we cannot fully understand this. Everything about the doctrine of the Resurrection, and every aspect of the biblical account of the resurrected Christ, militates against the idea of His emasculation. 

Human males often do a poor job of managing their masculinity to make sure that it reflects the higher masculinity of the Father and the Son. Men are fallen, and it shows. We cannot lightly dismiss the anguish of those who have had bad experiences with men in their lives. It is understandable that they may feel skittish about biblical and liturgical nomenclature marking God “he”—Father, Son, heavenly Bridegroom—especially if they have a minimal or inadequate understanding of historic theology.  The best way to help such sufferers is not to use language that obscures and displaces the eternality of God as Bridegroom and Father.  The way to bless such persons is to help them toward a clearer and more eternal understanding of God’s nature. God the Father and God the Son—in conjunction with God the Holy Spirit—are themselves the best medicine for any and all father-wounds.

Of course, the 19th century higher critics easily dispensed with this entire subject. Like Ludwig Feuerbach, they asserted that the notion of God’s fatherhood is merely a human contrivance—a contrivance by which people projected onto the sky their natural experience of human fathers. Thus they completely reversed the catholic and biblical understanding of the meaning of fatherhood and sonship. But that was easy for the higher critics: they simply asserted that the Bible is not inspired, that Christ was not who He claimed to be, and that the traditional catholic consensus of the Church was a fabrication.

If there is a tradition at work in the Church of England innovators who caught the attention of The Telegraph, it is a recent one that is indebted to the 19th century enemies of the faith they claim to represent.

Edgar Noble is an independent cultural commentator and Anglican Church in North America layman.