A couple of days ago, Mark Oestreicher posted his thoughts on gender pronouns for God. He described his lengthy journey into understanding that solely using male pronouns limits God and alienates many women. It is an open an honest reflection on how seeking to understand God and scripture better brought him to a place of seeing how he needs to be careful about how he speaks of God. First, I want to thank Mark for being one of the first men I have encountered who not only thinks this way, but believes it is important enough to discuss. This is a huge issue for a lot of women and a significant issue regarding truth and idolatry (my thoughts on that here). I appreciate men being willing to acknowledge that and challenge taboos to actually discuss it.
But of course his post has stirred much controversy. There are those fearful that Youth Specialties will take a similar stance (to which my reply is – “what? actually be biblical?”). They claim that they (as youth pastors) would not be allowed to attend YS events if YS said that God isn’t strictly male. I personally find it depressing that a church would promote idolatry over unity or truth. Others there though claimed that if one doesn’t believe God is male then one therefore doesn’t believe the Bible is inerrant (which I think they are inappropriately using as a synonym for true). I was just fascinated by the whole thing. I’m used to this topic being taboo, I’m used to being told that it’s just easier to use male default language, I’m used to people being uncomfortable with including female metaphors in their God talk, but I haven’t heard such extreme “God has a penis” rhetoric in a long time. Do these people really think they are being biblical? (have they studied the Bible???) Do they just really hate women? Are they so narcissistic that God can only exist in their own image? I know those are harsh questions, but have they ever really thought about it?
I thought I’d ramble on here with my questions since I didn’t want to jump into the mess over there. I know this whole topic has been a journey for me, and I still often default to male pronouns for God. But I’m convinced that if I want to be respectful to God, this is an issue I can’t ignore. I don’t want to limit God by the smallness of my biases and God is constantly pushing me into a deeper relationship. I can’t go back now.