A bit of a row erupted on Twitter over the weekend (no change there then) prompted by reports in the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail (no change there then) about a campaign to call God “she”. The story goes that some women vicars want to start challenging the patriarchy by adding an “s” to the usual pronoun “he” to describe God. The pesky feminists!  For many of us with a theological persuasion the debate about gender-specific pronouns for the Divine is as dated as a fondue set and flares, but apparently to some normal people this is not the case. Last week I was at a debate on women bishops and at the end of a very enjoyable and affirming evening, Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner sang the 23rd Psalm using feminine pronouns. None of us batted an eyelid. But it obviously riled a journalist in the audience.  The argument goes that the Bible calls God “he”, that Jesus called God “Father” and so God must be a man. (I hesitate to point out that Jesus called his disciple Peter “the rock” and at no point do I think the Messiah thought his follower was made of granite.) But language lets us down. So what should we say? To call God “it” doesn’t seem right either so we have to settle on something.  Language lets us down. To call God 'it' doesn't seem right either so we have to settle on something  And it’s here we hit the good old-fashioned patriarchy. The men, wonderful and learned though many of them were, wrote the theology, they wrote it about men and for men, of course they were going to use the pronoun that they feel most at ease with. Of course they would call God “he”. If Jesus had been the “daughter of God” rather than the son and had chosen female disciples (s)he would have been at best ignored by 1st century Palestinian society and at worst stoned to death before she uttered a word or healed anyone. Context is everything.  Although God as feminine is nothing new. Scripture and Christian tradition often describes God using female imagery. God as mother hen protectively gathering her chicks under her wings. God as a woman making bread, moulding and shaping us. God as a nursing mother, feeding and connected to her child. On the occasions during services when I’ve said “she” it’s also been a great catalyst for discussion about the nature of God. It can be deeply pastoral. Many people who have had unhappy relationships with their fathers are unable to use those terms to describe a loving God; God as mother makes more sense to some.  Yet our language, limited by fragile and feeble human brains, will never be enough to describe God, so we tie ourselves in knots, getting our knickers and Y-fronts in a twist when someone calls God “she”. This theological reflection is perhaps best exemplified by that bastion of post-modern expression I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! and in particular the bushtucker-eating trials.  Celebrities challenged to eat the bits of a kangaroo that wouldn’t make your average tin of better-priced dog food often declare: “It tastes just like chicken!” Of course it doesn’t. Chicken tastes like chicken and kangaroo bits taste like kangaroo bits. But the contestant has no other way to describe it, given that most of us never have, and probably never will, taste the part of the kangaroo they are dining on. We cannot describe the indescribable and for me that’s what it’s like when we try to use human language to describe God.  God is not a woman. And God is not a man. God is God. But we can only describe God in the terms we can easily comprehend, comparing God to something we know better.  Did I just compare God to a kangaroo’s unmentionables? I think that might be heresy.
The language we use to talk about God is not a patriarchal conspiracy. God transcends gender but we need terms we can comprehend