Is God the Father a Male?
Here’s the problem: a “father” is a male. If God is Father, then God is male. If God is male, then men and women are not equal.
Amy Peeler, in her new and important book, Women and the Gender of God, contends that that logic – if father, then male – does not work because of the incarnation.
She opens a chapter with this: “God the Father is not male.” This matters, and it is not easy to perceive and plenty of voices today disagree.
The Challenge
Israel’s Scriptures often make statements about God as father. E.g., Deut 32:4-6 has “Is not he your father who created you, who made you and established you?” The king is as a son to a father with God (1 Sam 7:14). At times, too, God is depicted in maternal, and not just paternal, terms (e.g., Hos 11:3-4). But in the OT God is never depicted as father in a procreative sense,.
The NT, she says, “does not play it so safe.” God procreates in some sense his own Son, Jesus. And it this this that needs to be nuanced. Over and over God is Father in the NT, and much more so than in the OT.
Solutions
She works out on paper a few solutions:
(1) the apophatic solution that what is said of God may be true but never the full truth, or that we can only speak of God in what Scripture says – that is, that we as finite beings cannot comprehend the infinite in our terms. Linn Marie Tonstad, R. Kendall Soulen.
(2) A linguistic balancing: that is, the Father texts need to be balanced by the Mother texts, rendering not a male God or a female God but a God who transcends sex/gender. She does not think this resolves the problem.
(3) Use Father but catechize/educate the church out of making God a male. She thinks the more this is done the more it reinforces a male God.
None of these are compelling for her, and her research has been into the incarnation as a revelation of the gender of God. Her work is strong and many will find it compelling.
Peeler
Her thesis is this: God is a Father, but God is not a male. I completely agree.
First, the acts of God in the conception narratives (she’s not always as consistent with “birth” and “consistent” as one could be) are not like the common enough ancient stories of gods procreating with women. There is no sexual language about the Father with Mary in the narratives.
She says it this way: “God supplies what a male supplies in a normal pregnancy … without intercourse.” This is one of those nuances with a massive difference.
It is a creator-created conception, and the use of the word “slave” for Mary, while it may evoke sexual relations so common in master-slave relations in that world, Peeler’s emphasis is that this is God, this God is good, this God is holy, and the character of this God overrides any sense of coercion.
The acts of God in the Gospel stories are that God “comes upon” and “over shadows” but the act of God is not expressed in the language of penetration. “Her body will be cultivated, but her body will not be penetrated.” She appeals to Tina Beattie’s contention that the absence of the phallus turns the story away from those other stories to something distinct. Plus, Mary willingly permits the conception.
The conception is decidedly and overly nonsexual. Philo knows of God as fathering creation “but not as a male” (On Drunkenness 30). In that world a fathering of a child can occur without male acts defining a male relation. I find this evidence important.
Here's another important point for her: “God does not replace the man, God removes the man.” There are here four persons involved in the conception: Mary, child, Father, Spirit. The Gospels make this clear: it is not simply Father with Mary but also Spirit with Father and Mary. The “singular maleness of God,” thus, “is destroyed by the triunity of God.”
Thus, God can be Father and not be male. The incarnation is not sexualized. She also contends what is true of God here is true of God in eternity: God as Father is not God as male.
Very good! For me, this was very compelling and affirming.
This places us in the midst of the space of which The Spirit of God is swirling, God’s “Word” is created, and creating, and John clues us in with the beginning of his Gospel.
And “Tov” is in it all! Thank you!
Another insightful read. Thank you so much, Scot!