- Personally, I’m kind of surprised that this thread has been allowed to remain Public as long as it has, … which is not a complaint but an expression of surprise and evidence of my own confusion about “forum policy”.
- As someone else has pointed out, Sex and Gender are two different “animals”. It has been my impression that Public conversations about “Sex” here in the forum were permissible; conversations about “Gender” not so much. I would welcome Moderator clarification and guidance.
- That said, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d speak more freely about Gender in a Private thread.
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I think it’s extremely common for lay Christian’s and even theologians to point to the created order, Jesus’s comment on “in the beginning he made them male and female” also point to this. Many will also offer a theology of how men and women compliment one another. Eve was made as a companion for Adam by God. Some think the random, blind chance of evolution is just a bridge built way too far in light of that.
So I guess I would say is Jesus correct or not? Is the sanctity of marriage real? And does it tie into the created order as part of the providence and care of God? How do we specifically interpret what Jesus said?
One thing I notice on this forum is that many of us are all extremely adept at stating what we don’t believe. But what about what we do? What is the evolutionary alternative to Christian theology on gender and marriage? What do we make of Jesus’s own words?
I think a commentary on some scripture that accommodates evolution and common Christian ideology is what is needed. I think Genesis does teach the form and function of the world was created by God. If there is any inspiration or truth behind that then we need to deal with evolution and the proposed created order and Jesus’s appeal to it on marriage.
Vinnie
Terry, I think the difficulty in talking about gender and sexual issues it the way it can move away from the biologic and scientific realm and its effects on faith to becoming part of the culture war discussion, which we want to stay out of. Some of the posts may be tending that way so this makes this a good opportunity to remind posters to keep the conversation on topic, and not to stray into those areas.
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- Well and good. I’ll say no more “publicly”, and share anything I do have to say “privately”.
What is wrong with chance? What can’t it be part of creation? I don’t believe that God pushes genes around. I wouldn’t have much faith if I though that God directly causes terrible genetic diseases with mutations or directly creates human guinea worms.
For me the difference is between seeing humanity as created as some kind of instrument God wants to use to accomplish his mission or humanity being chosen as a helper God wants to relate to in accomplishing his mission.
We learn things about biology from science, but they don’t tell us why those things have meaning beyond biology. So when I read Genesis say God created humanity, male and female, to be his image bearers and rule creation as his representatives, I don’t think it’s explaining what our biology is for, I think it is calling humanity, men and women equally, to relationship with God.
God doesn’t have a gender, so all humans no matter their gender, have the same capacity to be God’s image. We are embodied beings and for most of us our gendered bodies are an important part of our identity and significantly affect how we experience the world, so I think God relates to us as men or as women and reveals truth in the Bible in ways that may hit men differently than women.
I think it is mainly society that constructs gender roles though and then reads the Bible through their cultural lenses to see what they expect to see. There are definitely gendered commands and commentary in the Bible, but teasing out what was a directive to a particular culture/society in light of their gender roles and what is some kind of universal truth for all humanity is something Christians debate.
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Jesus did teach to call Him Father.
New Revised Standard Version
Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
No kidding. There is meaning in the God as Father metaphor. Everyone knows who your mother is, but a father has to claim his children. And with that claim comes rights to his name and inheritance. God is also King not Queen, because in the ANE kings were different than queens. The fact that we use some gendered imagery to understand God and we traditionally use masculine 3rd person pronouns in English to refer to God doesn’t make God a male or mean that God is more manly than womanly.
You are part of the Bride of Christ, but that doesn’t make you a woman.
Amy Peeler just wrote a definitive scholarly book on the topic called Women and the Gender of God, here’s a podcast:
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Your points are well taken, but to whom do you pray?
Fathers are typically larger and stronger than mothers, and maybe more typically the family protectors, so the imagery is not arbitrary. Maybe likewise with kings in general.
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Some might even interpret this as meaning we see the image of God in this relationship between male and female (or more generally in the relationship between all of us in our diversity). After all, when regarding any limitations or restrictions of any particular group, we can easily say that God is bigger than that.
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I don’t want to speak for @Christy here, however, I don’t think she is saying we should or shouldn’t pray to God as ‘Father’ as in the Lord’s prayer. More that, as I understand it, praying to God as Father doesn’t make God any more male gendered than you and I being part of the Bride of Christ makes us female-gendered.
As I understand it, if the ANE were a matriarchal society Yahweh might well have revealed Yahweh-self to Israel as Mother and Queen. Again, as I see it, it is not what the titles ‘Father’ and ‘King’ tell about God’s being that matters, but what they tell us about God’s nature and character, and our relation to God as God’s people and children.
(Phew… It was tough to write that paragraph without gendered pronouns! 
)
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What if we evolved as a hermaphroditic, monoecious or sexless species?* (Since God’s providence seems to be excluded.)
*Hat tip to @heymike3
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I may have an answer to the question, which didn’t sit well with me. Certain what if questions seem to fall under the secret things that belong to God, but the things that are revealed (God as Father) belong to us and our children forever (Deut. 29:29).
I don’t understand why that’s a problem.
It seems to make the content of revelation very human centered
That’s it’s more about who we are, than who God is
Doesn’t it say God is sovereign? That is about him.
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To God, who doesn’t have a gender. Envisioning God as Father is not the same things as envisioning God as a man.
I agree the imagery is gendered and the gender informs the imagery, which we use to understand God’s actions and attributes. God is not like a father in all ways because he is not an embodied father. He has never physically inpregnated anyone. He has no biological offspring. He doesn’t have genitalia. He is not a man.
The Spirit of God in the OT is a grammatically feminine noun and God’s Divine Wisdom is personified as a woman in Jewish Scripture. That doesn’t make God’s Spirit female or ontologically feminine. Male and female only relates to bodies that sexually reproduce and masculine and feminine only relates to human societies that create gender roles based on experiencing sexual dimorphism. God uses our experience with sex and gender as embodied creatures to teach us things that are beyond our grasp about a spiritual, non-finite, transcendent being.
Of course it is. In order for God to communicate and relate with humans at all, he has to use human points of connection and accommodate human embodied experience and human conceptual frames.
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I don’t really have a problem with anything in particular that I can see, but I just feel like he’s been objectified and is being talked about like less than someone’s loved one. But admittedly, that is subjective on my part.
Maybe it’s the missing personal pronoun, talking about what God is medically more than who he is.