In his discussion with the Samaritan woman in John 4, Jesus has some profound things to say about the nature of worship, as well as the nature of God: “The hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24).
Start with Jesus’ observation about God: God in the divine essence is, by definition, spirit not flesh, not a material being. And yet in the same breath Jesus is perfectly happy to call God “Father.” In our over-sexed and gender-language-sensitive culture, it is understandable that the juxtaposition of “God is spirit” with “God is Father” might seem like an oxymoron. Doesn’t father imply male, and doesn’t maleness require flesh and gender? In fact, as the New Testament shows, the answer to this question, when it comes to God, is no. God is not male, God in the divine essence does not have a gendered identity, and yet God is the Father of Jesus and by extension the Father of all his adopted children as well. How so?
In this same Fourth Gospel we hear that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God (John 3:16). This is meant to convey the notion that while the rest of us, by God’s grace, may become the adopted children of God (see John 1:12–13), the relationship between Jesus and the Father is one of direct kinship. Jesus and the Father are one, such that those who have seen the Son have seen the Father, according to the gospel.
This doesn’t mean that the Son was literally begotten by the Father, only that they had a unique, distinctive, even exclusive family relationship to one another. The language of Father and Son implies intimacy, deep kinship, sharing of a nature (in this case a divine nature) and the like. It is relational language, not gender language. Similarly, calling believers “sons and daughters of God” is not gender language either. They have not been begotten in any literal sense by God. The new birth doesn’t involve sex or intercourse, or gender for that matter. Here, too, it is relational language.
Thus the attempt to treat the “Father” language used of God as either a bad manifestation of a male-dominated patriarchal culture or a clue to the actual masculinity of God is wrong on both counts. It also ignores an important fact. The reason Jesus did not call God “Mother” is not just because God is never prayed to or directly addressed that way in the Bible, but also because Jesus had an actual human mother. He did not wish to dishonor her by using language appropriate only of his relationship with her, of the one he called Abba.
Part of the reason for many misreadings of the New Testament’s God language is ironically because English is not a gendered language (unlike Hebrew and Greek, in which nouns, even inanimate ones, have a gender). When we see male or female nouns or pronouns, we assume they must imply or entail gender. This is false. The Greek word for wisdom, for example, is Sophia and in Hebrew, Hokhmah. They are both feminine nouns. In neither case are they used to say something specific or exclusive about women. There is no connection between gendered language and gender identity in such cases. Our cultural biases have led to the overly sexualized reading of the God language of the Bible.
In his discussion with the Samaritan woman in John 4, Jesus has some profound things to say about the nature of worship, as well as the nature of God: “The hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24). Start with Jesus’ observation about God: God in the divine essence is, by definition, spirit not flesh, not a material being. And yet in […]
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