Last week, someone sent me an article with the shocking title “Church of England considers abandoning Christianity.” Well, the CoE has done some wacky things, but this?

I ignored the sensationalist headline and read the article. There is upset that the CoE wants to use more “gender neutral” pronouns. This, the author says, goes against Jesus’ teachings, as He referred to God as “Father.”

I’m a bit wrung out with pronoun quibbling these days, so please forgive me for rolling my eyes a bit.

I can understand where the author is coming from. I also think there is a lot of energy going into something that is….well (IMHO), a bit petty. (Now, if you want to talk about some of the other things the CoE has focused on recently, go right ahead!! But this post will focus on the pronoun discussion. God’s pronouns, that is.)

I’ve never had a problem referring to God as “He.” (I also don’t freak out if you refer to God as “She…” and please bear with me before you scream “heretic!”) I don’t have a problem (at least not yet!) with so-called gender neutral language as long as it doesn’t get cumbersome. To me, “God” doesn’t imply gender one way or the other.

In my mind, to assign a pronoun to God is to attempt to humanize that which cannot be humanized. And it’s natural for us to do that, for how else are we going to wrap our simple brains around the idea of God?

“But Jesus called God his Father!” Yes, and how can we possibly argue with that? Of COURSE God is our Father! God is also our Mother. God is much, much more than we can imagine. And isn’t that glorious?

Jesus alone intimately knew the nature of God, and – I would suspect – realized that our feeble human brains could NOT possibly comprehend this nature. “Abba” summed it up. So did Father. (I wonder how the audience would have responded to Mother)

I also wonder about the response if Jesus had said “Father and Mother.”

Although…perhaps his listeners would have gotten that. They would have been familiar with this creation story in Genesis:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26-27)

I’ve often encountered the supposition that the Holy Spirit is, in fact, feminine in nature. One could say that to categorize aspects of God as “male” and / or “female” is simplification. It is, but our human brains need simplification. And we naturally understand the aspects of male and female.

When you get down to it, we can’t fully know the mind of Jesus; but we can follow Him and study God’s word. While we can never (in this life, anyway) fully understand the whole nature of God, we can know that God is both Father and Mother, Creator and Birther, Redeemer and Comforter, a Glorious Mystery. We believe in the Trinity, and know that God is all of these and so much more. I really don’t think God will be offended if someone uses a wrong pronoun. Those pronouns are for our comfort. Remember: God often calls us to step out of our comfort zones.

This is just my opinion, but…to sum up God with a pronoun is like putting limits on what is Limitless, Eternal, and Beyond all Knowing.

Y’all keep on quibbling about pronouns, I’ll just continue to work on my relationship with God and pray for this broken world.