Why is God considered by many to be a male?
Upvote:0
To be as brief as a breeze, The Bible speaks of God being a HE/HIM and is spoken of as a person, despite him being unseen and a Spirit, lastly, he is known as the incorruptible Father and when he speaks of something and or himself, it should be very clear.
Upvote:4
In many languages (including Hebrew) most nouns have a strong gender component—but the gender assignment is grammatical and does not necessarily indicate the physical gender of the object. In Spanish, a guitar (la guitarra) is feminine, and a car (el coche) is masculine. This has nothing to do with literal gender. For example, the Spanish word masculinidad, which means “masculinity,” is a feminine noun! Therefore, when translating from Hebrew into English, we must distinguish grammatical gender from our notions of sexual gender.
Another example is the English wisdom is grammatically neuter, but not so in Hebrew. The Hebrew word is chokmoth, and it is grammatically feminine. In Hebrew, it would have been natural to speak of wisdom as a “she.” That is why the book of Proverbs personifies wisdom as a woman.
With regards to God, the Bible informs us that God is neither male nor female:
“God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24).
Since God is a spiritual being, He does not possess physical human characteristics. However, sometimes figurative language used in Scripture assigns human characteristics to God in order to make it possible for man to understand God. This assignment of human characteristics to describe God is called “anthropomorphism.”
“Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is simply a means for God (a spiritual being) to communicate truth about His nature to humanity, physical beings. Since humanity is physical, we are limited in our understanding of those things beyond the physical realm; therefore, anthropomorphism in Scripture helps us to understand who God is.
Upvote:6
Because Christians believe God inspired the scriptures, and in the scriptures he predominantly uses masculine pronouns and masculine imagery to talk about himself. There are different views of inspiration, but in all the major branches of Christianity I think it would be accurate to say that most Christians believe that God has so worked inspiration that while the human authors did express their individual voices, what they wrote is exactly what God wanted to be written. While there are many cultural accommodations in scripture, the masculinity of God is not one, for it would have been very difficult easy to write about God as female or as both or as neither, as the pagan gods around them were of all genders.
I think there's a little bit of irony in this age of accepting and using people's preferred pronouns that some people don't want to use God's preferred pronouns ;). I think that ultimately comes from people not accepting that the scriptures are inspired by God.
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