# What Calling God "Him" Implies **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 7, 2003, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-calling-god-him-implies/159783 "2003-03-07T19:44:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![candida](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f14d63/32.png) [@candida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/candida)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2003, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-calling-god-him-implies/159783/41 "2003-03-10T17:40:31Z")
Surely ascribing any kind of, even theoretical or notional, physicality to God is _idolatry_ - the use of ‘He’, or ‘She’, implies merely a ‘personhood’ or ‘being’. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2003, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-calling-god-him-implies/159783/42 "2003-03-10T18:36:14Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by candida \* > \*\*Surely ascribing any kind of, even theoretical or notional, physicality to God is _idolatry_ - the use of ‘He’, or ‘She’, implies merely a ‘personhood’ or ‘being’. \*\* Would that include the Incarnation – the idea that one Person of a three-personed single Godhead took on human form? (A similar question could be asked in Hinduism, by the way, to keep this from being a total-Christianity hijack.) I maintain that the problem lies in the lack of human conceptualization of a Person who is not endowed with a bodily gender (and recent discussions about the nature of transsexual individuals might be instructive in dealing with the question of what gender “really” is). **Martin Ibn Martin** ’s comment about the Arabic pronoun “Hu” is really intriguing in this regard. For us Christians (including **Shodan** ), the conceptualization has got to be that God is three Persons (who have to be conceived of in human terms, however inadequate, in order to preserve their nature as Persons) – one of whom took on human form as a male individual. Please note that God’s chosen people were a group who were patriarchal, and that Jesus came and taught in a society that was predominantly patriarchal in its nature. Having God send the Second Person of Himself as a baby girl who was His Only-Begotten Daughter would have put Her in a very different and much more unusual role, one harder for the Jews and Grecianized cosmopolitan society of the Roman Empire to have assimilated. And that the single metaphor chosen by Jesus as descriptive of the role of the First Person of the Trinity was that of a Loving Father – real, close, and personal – not an abstract Judge or Creative Spirit. That that metaphor implies masculinity is inherent in the patriarchal society in which He taught, not in the nature of God Himself. I’m with **Shodan** in that the language of God the Parent and God the Child (which my church did experiment with) loses something in the gender-neutrality – it doesn’t convey the flavor of up-close personness that Father and Son do. God is beyond our comprehension – we cannot _grok_ God, to employ Heinlein’s useful neologism for total comprehension. We can know Him only as He reveals Himself, and that in human terms. Any attempt to grasp what He is in other than human terms has got to be abstract conceptualization that in becoming abstract loses the concrete nature of individual I:Thou relationship which is key to one’s personal connection to Him. Even in saying this I am employing limiting terms that are not appropriate to talking about God. ---
**Author:** ![candida](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f14d63/32.png) [@candida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/candida)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2003, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-calling-god-him-implies/159783/43 "2003-03-10T18:43:17Z")
“Incarnation” \ Fortunately for me, being Jewish, I don’t have the problem you were addressing; my use of ‘personhood’ and linking to ‘being’ should be taken to imply that God is not an ‘it’ but an entity with whom human beings could have a relationship. ---
**Author:** ![ClawsOfCatt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/87869e/32.png) [@ClawsOfCatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ClawsOfCatt)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2003, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-calling-god-him-implies/159783/44 "2003-03-10T20:35:07Z")
[QUOTE] \*Originally posted by Polycarp \* **I absolutely will not dispute the claim that Hebrew society was strongly paternalistic – though it might interest you to know that women were accorded a signficantly higher role in society among them than among most of their neighbors.** [quote] You could probably also claim that slaves were treated better in society among them. That does make slavery good or right. > [@](#): > > \*\* And an unreasonable amount of the Christian image of God derives either from them or from Paul, who is notably mysogynistic. \*\* We are in agreement there. > [@](#): > > However, “your take,” IMO, is simply founded on the apparent personality characteristic that you have a strong prejudice against anything invented by males. Prejudice? When it assigns women to a second-class status, I’m prejudiced for objecting to it? Or maybe you just think I’m uppity. > [@](#): > > However, people don’t “invent religions” – at least not successful ones – for the most part. They evolve from a human need to find meaning in existence, and their experiences which they understand as encounters with the Divine, however described. Medicine evolves from our need to heal, air conditioning evolves from a need to keep cool. Both are invented. > [@](#): > > **But for us monotheists, there is one God, who is neither male nor female, but who is most effectively conceived as the ideal of what a Father is supposed to be.** This implies there is something that a father can do that a mother CAN’T. > [@](#): > > My point in saying it is to get you past the dominant-masculine conceptualization that has historically characterized what was IMHO never intended to be a vehicle for male dominance, but a promise of freedom and richer life for men and women alike. \*\* Never intended to be a vehicle for male dominance? Then how did it just happen to work out that way? And if it wasn’t intended to foster male dominance, why conceive of a god with male sex at all? And why are the two oldest of the religions – Judaism and Catholicism – the ones with centuries of refusal to ordain women? ---
**Author:** ![candida](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f14d63/32.png) [@candida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/candida)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2003, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-calling-god-him-implies/159783/45 "2003-03-10T22:07:22Z")
Ooooh, tell me more about ‘ordination’ in Judaism. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-calling-god-him-implies/159783.md?page=2)