Accomodation and a Genderless God?
The decision of some Reformed Jewish leaders in England to transform a book of prayer into a means for breaking the gender barrier (described here for instance) raises an old, pretty simple issue. But it also reveals a much deeper problem about how people attempt to evade the Bible’s message and use the very tools intended to clarify scripture to muddle it.
The simple issue is whether masculine pronouns and images used about God throughout scripture–indeed, used on almost every page–communicate something true about the nature of God. Christians have been arguing more and more about whether God is male, or masculine, over the past half century. C.S. Lewis’ article on what he refers to as priestesses in the church (in God in the Dock) is his response to the Anglican push in 1948 to ordain women to the priesthood! This article at Crosswalk illustrates how common the topic is by raising it as the first question at issue after the existence of God.
With so many obviously masculine references to God, from “He” to “King” and “Father”, why would anyone doubt the propriety of referring to God as male? The motivational answer to that question is different from the pronounced answer to it. The motivational answer is obvious, and more significant culturally than theologically. That is, those who endorse the feminist movement of the past century tend to erase gender differences of all kinds, mistakenly thinking that equality is the only solution to historically unjust prejudices against women. (The alternative to equality is equivalence, and provides the same benefit to justice without pretending there are no differences between the sexes–but that argument is for another day.) But erasing gender differences eventually demands an erasure of what seems an injustice to women, that God as described in the Bible is related directly and naturally to men, but only indirectly to women through the man’s nature–an inaccurate description, but one also intolerable to an egalitarian feminist. So God needs to be described in gender neutral terms to avoid the offense. Obviously, that motivation is a case of wishful theology. “We need a gender neutral God, so that’s how we’re going to begin to describe “_______”. (The blank is there because nothing which could satisfy the goal of the sentence could also satisfy the nature of God, including the term “Godself”!)
But the pronounced answer is different. Weak arguments include that masculine pronouns do not entail the masculinity of God–weak because the pronouns referring to proper names of God are masculine, and proper names of God are themselves masculine, making it impossible (at least epistemologically, though obviously not volitionally) to miss the implication that God is masculine. Dan Reid with IVP made a concise clarification of that issue at the end of 2007. Other weak arguments refer to feminine analogies in the Bible extended beyond their contextual intent–that is, through the fallacy of analogy, and to God’s non-biological nature–a misunderstanding of the essential nature of gender.
But the most significant arguments advocating a genderless God appeal to accommodation. Accommodation is the idea that God adjusts the language of revelation in order to accommodate the culture of His audience. While accommodation is an acceptable way to describe some features of revelation, it is futile as an argument for egalitarians (regarding gender).
The argument against using accommodation to justify a genderless God is simple. The only point to arguments against using masculine terms for God is that it perpetuates unjust prejudices against women. That is, if there is no moral benefit to promoting egalitarianism, then there is no remaining motivation for advocating a genderless God. (Of course, the case could be made that there are other motives for advocating a genderless God–pure theology and so forth–but those arguments would all be vacuous avoidance of the real issue, as mentioned above.) But if there is a moral reason for overcoming masculine language, then there can be no appeal to accommodation in revelation, since God would be perpetuating immorality through His revelation. The suggestion that God accommodates His language to immorality is absurd. That is, it is absurd unless what an egalitarian means by revelation is simply a record of patriarchal beliefs and not a record of divine inspiration. So if a person believes in inspiration, so that Scripture is an accurate revelation from God, and believes that God is revealing what is good and true, then he must also believe that God would not accommodate immorality with His revelation.
If gender neutrality is not a moral issue, there is no reason to change the language in reference to God–there is no benefit. If it is a moral issue, then, by the previous paragraph, advocates of gender neutrality appealing to accommodation must admit simply that they do not believe the scriptures are a record of God’s revelation. Either way, they are wrong about referring to Him in any other way.
Tags: Complementarian, Feminism, Gender
[...] I have read a number of posts recently on the topic of the Gender. Some on the gender of God (here and here) and even more on the theological issue of gender surrounding the complementarian vs. [...]