Nature of God

• The Bible almost wholly uses masculine language to describe God: ‘Father’, ‘King’, ‘Lord’, ‘He’; The Holy Spirit is also referred to as ‘he’ (though the Hebrew ‘ruach’ is feminine and the Greek ‘pneuma’ is neuter).
• Christians believe that God chose to be incarnate as a male; all of these facts contribute to liturgy and hymnody depicting God as male.
• There is, however, some feminine imagery for God in the Bible: God is pictured as a mother in Isaiah 66:13 and Luke 15:8-10.
• God is personified in the Book of Proverbs as ‘Sophia’ (wisdom).
• Jesus taught that God was beyond gender (John 4:24) and Genesis 1:27 implies that God includes both genders.
• Sallie McFague believes that God is beyond language; therefore, any description of God must involve metaphors, using words that are not literally applicable.
• The problem with Christian theology is that metaphorical language for God as ‘Father’ hardened into a ‘model’ for believers which they took as literally true.
• We should speak of God using the metaphor of personhood as this helps us relate to life personally rather than abstractly.
• The monarchical model leads to escapism (God will solve all problems) and militarism (Kings invade and conquer) and is partly responsible for issues with the environment and human rights.
• McFague believes that a helpful metaphor is God as mother, focusing on God as caring, nurturing and helping people to flourish.
• This leads her to the complimentary metaphor of the world as god’s body and a new interpretation of the Trinity: Mother, Lover and Friend.
• Some Christian theologians have insisted on the ‘impassibility’ of God: that God is unable to suffer, is immutable (unchanging), fully transcendent.
• Jurgen Moltmann believes that this view merely produces an irrelevant church, impervious to real suffering; furthermore, it denies what is truly unique about the Christian message: that God suffers.
• Moltmann uses the doctrine of the Trinity to make the case that, as Jesus is fully God, then as Jesus suffered, God suffered.
• This means that suffering is a part of the God-experience and anyone claiming to be a Christian who does not suffer on behalf of the poor, the powerless and the excluded is not experiencing true spirituality.
• Moltmann’s theology rejects ‘religious’ views of God as a ruler, a philosophical principle or a moral force as these remove God from the world; if atheists reject these notions of God, they have not necessarily rejected the God of Jesus.