I’ve been wondering - when was the earliest known explicit statement that God is not literally male / has no gender, for the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions?
Not really sure, king of spain. I do know that when Jesus was teaching His disciples to pray, He said "Our Father. So that’s good enough for me to know that He is masculine.
But I don’t think He has a literal body like ours at all because the Bible says He is Spirit.
God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. John 4:24
The Bible always refers to God as He or His or Father; that denotes masculinity. Doens’t necessarily have anything to do with genitalia. As I said, He is Spirit.
Don’t know if that helps any.
It’s definitely in the Koran, but that’s not until thousands of years after Abraham.
All nouns in ancient Hebrew are either masculine or feminine. The most common words like God, Lord, etc are masculine; the word for the imminent divince presence, however, is feminine. So both masculine and feminine terms are applied to God at the time the books of Moses were written – probably around 1200 - 1000 BC.
I can’t think of any gender-neutral pronouns…and since the Torah/Bible/Qu’ran were scribed by Male-centric cultures, The Almighty was of course referred to as masculine.
The terms God and Christ are masculine in Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of nearly all of the Bible; in both, the Holy Spirit is expressed by a feminine noun and adjective.
God is described in one of the creeds as “without body, parts, or passions” and transcends gender. The key point, though, is that He is Person, not amorphous entity, and human beings experience persons as either male or female.
Obviously Jesus Himself was a male human being, and His preferred metaphor for God was “Father” – leading to the use of “the Father” as the identifying term for the First Person of the Trinity, on whom the other two depend.
So His’s post, though slightly naive in tone, is accurate for all religious purposes. We need to regard Him as a Person, and following Jesus’s example, we use “Father” as the appropriate epithet, and conceive of Him in male terms.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that even in Scripture there are occasional female metaphors for Him, and Jesus Himself uses the maternal one in His apostrophe to Jerusalem: “How long have I desired to gather you to Myself as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings!”
In short, tradition overwhelmingly prefers the identification with a male figure, while recognizing that God is beyond having a human gender, but will allow the sense that God is in some ways like a mother, a nurturing parent, a birther of creation or of new life, and other “feminine” imagery, if with a bit of discomfort.
Since Jesus was born of Mary and the Holy Spirit, doesn’t it make sense that Jesus would refer to God as Father, since Mary is obviously his mother?
I think the burning bush would be asexual…
Mary was not the actual mother of Christ, she was only a vessel used to bring forth the Son. The Holy Spirit did not actually have sex with Mary, either. The Holy Spirit simply implanted the zygote of Christ into Mary, who then carried Him to birth.
Hmm. Okay, I really appreciate all the responses, but I think I phrased the original question badly. I already knew most of this about Biblical language, but that’s not what I was after.
What I’m looking for is specific thelogians (again, from any of the three Abraham-based faiths) who directly addressed the subject of God’s gender, and came up with some explicit statement along the lines of “Although Scripture tells us it is usually appropriate to refer to God by masculine language, as a Spirit, He has no gender in the literal sense.” Anyone?
2 questions about what’s already been posted:
So how come the Nicene Creed I was taught goes, “We believe in the Holy Spirit…with the Father and the Son He is worshipped and glorified; He has spoken through the prophets”? If the Holy Spirit is referred to as feminine in the Greek New Testament, when & why was the change introduced?
Cool - I knew this idea went way back in Islam, but I wasn’t sure if it was actually in the Qur’an. Do you know of any specific cite so I can look up exactly what the Qur’an says about this?
Well, considering the fact that she did give birth to him, raised him until he was old enough to go out on his own, and even while he hung on the cross he referred to her as his mother, I’d say she was indeed his actual mother.
Polycarp:
Do you mean that the word “He” is Person or that God is Person?
Some human beings also experience people as primarily spiritual beings. And many of them also experience God as something other than “person.”
Am I right that in French, some nouns are feminine and some are masculine – but it has nothing to do with actual gender? Is that the way it is in Hebrew?
You are right, Zoe. I am not sure about Hebrew but tons of other (not English, I mean) languages have gender-ized nouns, but they don’t actually mean “this item is a female/male”. I remember from a class I took that, for example, the [some language] word for “wife” is actually a masculine noun but obviously it doesn’t mean “male”. It’s confusing to English speakers but pretty common in the world.
I need a cite for this (except for the part about the Holy Spirit not having sex with Mary, which I think anyone not out to generate drive-by sarcasm would agree with).
It’s my understanding that the eternal God the Son entered into the human embryo conceived by Mary “through the power of the Holy Spirit” to make Jesus at once truly God and truly man. On your account, he had no connection with the human race save for the coincidence of having been brought to term in the uterus of a human woman, like some sort of parasitic alien changeling. IMHO, the Christ of the Gospels is very much one with the people whose lives He touches.
The latter. Whatever else may be true about his ineffable self, He presents himself to humans under a personal mode. But I do understand what you have to say as against this, and don’t disagree.
Yep. Many languages have “grammatical gender” and Latin, Greek, and Hebrew are among them. There’s a case in Biblical studies where a controverted translation was resolved by the careful analysis of the scholars of the grammar, and the commonly accepted translation was rejected because the pronoun would have had to be masculine singular to have the referent it had been assumed to have, and it was in fact feminine plural.
I didn’t say that the Holy Spirit was regarded as being feminine, but that the nouns for the Holy Spirit in Hebrew and Greek were feminine gender. As for the “He” in the creeds, that’s an English word, inserted to keep the English translation from being an unwieldy long complex sentence – the Latin uses qui (“who”) in its place, masculine to agree with Spiritus Sanctus, the (grammatically masculine) Latin translation of (Hebrew) ruach adonai and (Greek) pneuma hagia (though the literal translation of the first is “Spirit of God”).
Christians differ on this from time to time, but the mainstream Christian belief (certainly since the Council of Ephesus in 431) is that Mary is, in every sense, the mother of God. The contrary view was condemned as the Nestorian heresy (and the bulk of the Nestorians still accepted Mary’s maternity, but argued that she was the mother of Christ’s human nature, not his divine nature).
I don’t know of any mainstream Christian denomination which generally holds that Mary was a “surrogate mother”, as it were, of the physical Christ (though I’m always open to having my ignorance fought).