Outside the box
Photo by Kaboompics .com on Pexels.com
Does God have pronouns? Should we care? I’m more than a little casual regarding including my pronouns in my emails, Zoom name, and other forms of identification. It’s not that I’m opposed to the formal identification of pronouns, whether in conversation or print. It’s more that I’ve not got around to making the point for myself. I’ve focused on other issues. However, for my ministry, I’ve been incredibly conscious about using the pronoun “he” when referring to God. Wherever it might be more conventional or traditionally acceptable after one has first referred to God in the first person to subsequently refer to God as “he” or “him,” I’ll keep running with “God” no matter how it sounds. Why? God is God, and we are with one with questions about language, gender, and identity.
When scripture reminds us that we are created in the image of God, this does not mean that we are created as carbon copies of God. We are merely an image and a reflection of something much grander and unimaginable than ourselves. Too often, when we hear these words, we often place the cart before the horse; we imagine God exists in our image. Instead, we are a pale reflection of our creator, a creator we name God, a creator we seek to know, a creator who exists beyond our linguistic and cognitive abilities to characterize, describe, and ever fully understand. We are an image, born into reality, trying to find an unknown presence called love, seeking light in darkness, order in chaos, order from disorder, and peace amid violence. These interrelated quests lead us to speak malformed words which will eventually take on order and sound to describe the world around us. As we describe ourselves, we will naturally seek to characterize the God that made our journey possible. Whether out of gratitude, curiosity, grief, or fear, we will want to speak to the reflection in whose image we are made. In truth, until we realize our relationship the image of God, there are no Psalms to sing, God has no attributes, and we are mute.
The image of God exists beyond and above any qualities we choose to impose upon God’s image (i.e., humanity). Being made in the image of God does not mean that God’s image mirrors the intricacies in which we have come to define our gender and identity. The image of God, which is all we know, is neither male, female, black, white, straight, gay, American or any specific nationality. God is God. God is God, so that God can be God to all at all times and all places. God is not our father, mother, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, or cousin. God does not belong to any one of us as a possession. God does not belong only to me or anyone else. God is not, “he, she, they, them, or ours.” God is God and “we” are in God’s image.
It may be helpful for us, in our attempts to understand God, to envision God assuming different roles. Yet, God is ultimately none of those things. God is more than a figurehead ensconced in stained-glass. For those brutalized by a parent (or authority figure), it may be unhelpful to think of God as a father or “daddy.” In such cases, God may be a source of creative life to which we pray and give thanks for our daily bread. God moves beyond our language, trauma, and malformed images. God is always one step beyond where we stand with God at any given moment, ready to love, adapt, and embrace the images of God’s goodness God made and called good.
While we may adopt pronouns to identify ourselves, let’s leave God’s pronouns as nouns: God, God, and God.