Donald D. Hook and Alvin F. Kimel, Jr.

Forum: Is God a "He"?

Only relatively recently has anyone objected to the exclusive use of the masculine third-person pronouns in English to refer to the deity of Judaism and Christianity. Not that any thoughtful Jew or Christian really thought that God was sexually male rabbis and theologians have rightly insisted that he was not but the assignment of masculine grammatical gender to the sexually transcendent creator has simply gone unquestioned. Not so anymore. Feminist thinkers today argue that such usage unambiguously identifies the Godhead as male, thereby depreciating women and justifying patriarchic social organization and domination by men. Two major alternatives to the customary usage of pronouns have been advanced; and the revision of Holy Scripture, lectionaries, liturgy, and theological discourse is now earnestly pursued. The feminist proposals, however, enjoy virtually no chance of public acceptance because they are based on expectations inconsonant with linguistic facts and realities. As early as 1971 Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, in their book The Rebirth of Feminism, state: "In feminist analysis sexism in all its manifestations cultural, political, social is subject to examination. Insofar as language reflects and reinforces this sex-role polarization, it too is to be analyzed." 1 During the past twenty years we have witnessed within American society a remarkably influential campaign to eliminate alleged sexist usage. For example, titles that end with the unaccented suffix -man (e.g., chairman, policeman) are in the process of being replaced by sex-neutral substitutes. The generic use of the masculine third-person pronoun is much less often encountered. (Still, 37% of the usage panel of the recently published third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary consistently uses the masculine pronoun for generic reference.) Less sucDonald D. Hook teaches linguistics and German language and literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Alvin F. Kimel is an Episcopal priest. He is the editor of Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism recently published by Eerdmans. 1 The Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Books 1971) 222-23.

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cessful has been the attempt to eliminate man and mankind as words signifying humanity as a whole; these two words are as prevalent as ever in the vernacular of Americans (and accepted by the overwhelming majority of the AHD's usage panel), though one does find a significant increase of humankind and humanity in the writings of more academic disciplines. Feminist theorists are now addressing the religious language of both Judaism and Christianity, specifically, the language used to refer to God. All masculine titles and metaphors are to be expunged, or at least iconoclastically balanced with feminine ones. This project of linguistic engineering reaches all the way into the structural components of the English language specifically, pronouns. Gail Ramshaw, one of the more influential feminist reformers, asserts that the replacement of grammatical gender in English with natural gender has brought about an actual sexual distinction in language such that the continued use of the masculine pronoun for God unequivocally marks God as male, in spite of all theological admonitions and disclaimers that God is without sex.2 Ramshaw's solution is to forego the expository use of third-person pronouns when referring to the deity and to substitute repeated use of the word God, the reflexive and intensive use of the neologism Godself, and the use of the word divine in possessive constructions. This total avoidance of pronouns when referring to God has become exceptionally popular among theologians, clergy, and ecclesiastics. Not all, however, have followed Ramshaw's lead. Rita Gross and Elizabeth Johnson, for example, insist that both male and female pronouns for God should be equally used. 3 This alternation of masculine and feminine has the advantage, it is claimed, of preserving the personhood of deity, while at the same time shattering all sexual stereotyping. The genesis of the feminist push for language change lies in many quarters. The emphasis on pronominal usage results in large
Gail Ramshaw-Schmidt, Worship 56 (1982) 117-31. Rita Gross, "Female God Language in a Jewish Context," in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: HarperCollins 1979) 167-73; Elizabeth A. Johnson, "The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female," Theological Studies 45 (1984) 441-65. But see her new book in which she advocates a practical exclusion of masculine language: She Who Is (New York: Crossroad 1992) 42-57.
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part from the confusion of gender, as a linguistic category, with sex. An inspection of the jargon and euphemisms of the last twenty-five years will reveal a decided tendency to avoid the blatancy of the word "sex" in most circumstances, except those describing a sex act or those connected with certain opprobrious epithets such as "sexist," "sex fiend," "sex object." (Try using "genderist," "gender fiend," "gender object"!) Even printed documents, such as application or tax forms, now often request one's "gender" rather than one's "sex." The resultant blurring of the distinction between biological sex (male and female) and linguistic gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter) has confused thinking and enabled feminists to soften discussion on such a matter as the linguistic consideration of gender. In this article we will consistently distinguish between gender and sex. What precisely is gender, and is it true that gender in modern English has been completely reduced to sex-reference? Gender refers to grammatical distinctions assigned to various parts of speech, such as nouns and adjectives, which then requires agreement with other words. The number and type of gender classes vary from language to language and do not necessarily correlate with sexual categories. Hebrew, Spanish, and French, for example, have two gender classes (masculine and feminine); Greek, Latin, and German have three (masculine, feminine, and neuter); Swahili six (not any of which correspond to the categories of male or female); Hungarian and Turkish none. Most Indo-European and Semitic languages possess what is commonly known as grammatical gender. Anyone who has taken high school Spanish or French knows that in both of these languages all nouns and adjectives are assigned a specific gender. While there is a typical correlation between the gender of a word and the sex of its animal or human referent, the assignment of gender to inanimate objects and abstract concepts appears to be arbitrary. For instance, consider the following words for "house": Fr. la maison (fem.), Ger. das Haus (neut.), Cz. dum (mase). Gender in modern English does function differently than in these more formally gendered languages. Nouns and pronouns are classified according to semantic distinctions usually sexual distinctions. This is called natural or notional gender. For most nouns gender is covert: the gender of the word is hidden until the referent is known. For example, in the sentence "The teacher lectured Forum
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brilliantly on the bankruptcy of modern secularism," the gender of teacher is either masculine or feminine, depending on the actual sex of its referent. Overt gender occurs in the third-person singu lar pronouns and in words marked for specific gender (such as father, mother, uncle, aunt, etc.). Overt gender is also marked for paired personal masculine/feminine nouns (such as actor, actress; host, hostess; and precisely to our purposes, God, Goddess). The gender marking of these words is morphological, that is to say, the marking belongs to the formal shape of the word in the ex amples cited the -ess suffix indicates feminine gender classification. It is important to recognize certain exceptions to natural gender reference in pronominal usage. As noted above, the generic use of the masculine pronoun is still operative in American society. Ships and other vehicles, nature, Church, and nations are often referred to by feminine pronouns. Infants are often referred to as "it." The feminine pronouns are commonly used to refer initially to cats, while the masculine pronouns are commonly used to refer initially to dogs. These exceptions, as we shall see, establish the linguistic precedence for the use of the masculine pronoun in modern English to refer to the sexually transcendent God of the Jewish and Christian faiths. In the Bible masculine pronouns are consistently assigned to the deity. This practice alone does not necessarily stipulate male sex ual identification, for both Hebrew and Greek possess grammatical gender. Yet English translators have universally attributed mascu line personal pronouns to God. We have only to examine the New Revised Standard Version and the Revised English Bible to see this practice. In the literary and narrative portrayal of divinity found in Holy Scripture, the grammatical gender of the God of Israel is unquestionably masculine. This is true for the original bib lical languages of Hebrew and Greek but also for modern English. Although grammatical gender does not always indicate sexual identity, regular correspondence in fully gendered languages between gender classification and the sex of personal beings is normal, especially among words for family members. Who would do otherwise than assign masculine gender to the words "father" and " s o n " and feminine gender to the words "mother" and "daughter"? The principal names, titles, and metaphors used within the Donald D. Hook and Alvin F. Kimel, Jr.

Scriptures to portray the God of Israel and Church are masculine gender. The deity is addressed or referred to as, among other things, Father, King, Lord, Shepherd, Judge, Husband, and Master. The Hebrew proper name for God, YHWH, appears to be a singular third-person masculine verb in the imperfect tense (often rendered as a future and designating an uncompleted act). The substitute title for the sacred name, 'adonai (my Lord), is also in the masculine form, as is the Hebrew word for God, 'elohim. All adjectives, pronouns, and participles that refer to Y W are H H universally masculine. Similarly, the New Testament Greek word for God, theos, and its attendant pronouns are masculine, while on the lips of Jesus the title "Father" virtually becomes a proper name for the deity. The feminine images for divinity found in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament are subordinated to this comprehensive masculine rendering. As Roland Mushat Frye has amply demonstrated, the relatively few feminine images for God typically appear in the form of simile and comparison rather than direct predication or vocatival address.4 Titular, metaphorical, and pronominal identification thus come together and form a unified narrative and anthropomorphic depiction that structures the biblical witness. Given this masculine rendering of divinity, English translators of the Bible are surely correct in designating the God of the Bible as grammatically masculine. At this point of our argument, theological and linguistic considerations join in subtle complexity. In more philosophical or mystical understandings of deity, the narratives of God in action can be easily dismissed as ancillary to true identification. Knowledge of deity is accomplished by other means such as through contemplation or negative theology or ideological dialectic. This cannot be true, however, for either Judaism or Christianity. For both, the stories of God are essential, necessary, and definitive and therefore unsubstitutable for the identification of God. The holy creator is the God of the biblical story, in all of its historical and concrete particularity. And in this story, this God is assigned masculine gender. We may not abstract ourselves from

Roland Mushat Frye, "Feminist Language for God: Problems and Principles," in Speaking the Christian God, ed. Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1992) 17-43.

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the scriptural narrative to speak of a God of whom no narrative may be told. We remind the reader again that grammatical gender cannot rationally be reduced to sex. We affirm emphatically the ecumenical doctrine that the creator of the universe utterly transcends the biological categories of human beings. The insistence on the sexual and cultural transcendence of God is grounded in the Scriptures themselves. The biblical deity, unlike the surrounding deities of the Middle East, has no consort. He creates the world not by sexual generation but through the speech of command (Gen i:3ff.). Nor is this God to be physically imaged "in the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth" (Ex 20:4). The God of Israel and Jesus utterly surpasses all creaturely limitations. Gendered language for the deity, therefore, must be seen as enjoying an imageless, nonmimetic relation to divine reality. "It is a remarkable fact about the religious genius of Israel," Paul Mankowski provocatively concludes, "that it convinces us so totally about YHWH'S maleness at the same time that it convinces us that He is 'beyond sexuality'."5 In language usage, in other words, God may be of masculine gender without actually being of the male sex. Nor does this understanding of the divinity's grammatical gender contest the claim that he possesses both masculine and feminine attributes, as do all human beings, who have been made in his image. Our point is simple fact in terms of linguistic analysis, and yet important theologically. Despite the different way gender functions in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and English, this contrast does not create any real problems in either translation or reader understanding. In his literary and iconological presentation, God is masculine; but he is not male, whether sexually or culturally. If the biblical God is appropriately assigned the masculine gender, two implications follow. First, the masculine pronouns are used properly both linguistically and theologically to refer to this God. Pronouns do not mean in and of themselves; they simPaul V. Mankowski, "Old Testament Iconology and the Nature of God," in The Politics of Prayer, ed. Helen Hull Hitchcock (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1992) 168. Or as Brevard S. Childs has written, "How do we know that God is not masculine [i.e., male]? We know it from the very Bible which speaks of God as 'he'!" Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1992) 377.
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ply point beyond themselves to their antecedents. Pronouns are not nouns but rather stand in their place. He, his, himself, therefore, connote maleness (sexual or cultural) only to the extent that the referents of their antecedents are apprehended or conceptualized as male (and indeed may possibly not signify an individual either male or female but mankind, i.e., the human race). Because theologians hold that the Judeo-Christian deity transcends biological sexuality, the use in English of masculine pronouns to stand for God does not compromise this conception. Claims that such usage is idolatrous and sexist are groundless. Second, the titles used to address or refer to God must also be masculine, at least in modern English. ("Father" and "Lord" are overtly marked for the masculine gender; "Savior" and "Redeemer" only covertly so.) These titles uniquely refer to their referent; they function as proper names. Because of this denotative function, it is necessary that such titles agree with the grammatical gender of their referent, thereby making possible successful reference. It is linguistically permissible, therefore, to speak metaphorically of the grammatically masculine God in feminine terms. It is linguistically impermissible to address God as "Mother," a term marked for feminine gender. To do so is to disrupt gender concord and thus confound the hearer. Some Christian reformers have accepted the masculine personal pronouns as proper pronouns for God the Father and Jesus the Son but have proposed that the feminine pronoun be assigned to the Holy Spirit. The basis of their argument is that the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac words for "spirit" are of feminine gender. Yet we know that the assignment of grammatical gender to inanimate and abstract nouns is arbitrary. For example, we note that Gk. pneuma is neuter, while Lat. Spiritus, OE gast (from which we get ghost), and Ger. Geist are masculine. There is little doubt that in English the word "spirit" is normally neuter, but within developed Christian theology the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Godhead who is properly worshiped and adored alongside the Father and the Son. Given the personhood of the Spirit, neuter pronouns are simply inappropriate. Biblical support for the personal pronoun is found in chapters 14-16 of the Gospel of John, where the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete is portrayed as a person distinct from Jesus and consistently assigned the masculine pronoun. In his classic reference work.

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Figures of Speech Used in the Bible, E. W. Bullinger quotes John 16:13 ("When He the Spirit of truth is come. He will guide you into all truth, for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall hear that shall He speak, and He will show you things to come") and comments: "Here, though the word 'Spirit' is neuter [in Greek], the pronouns are masculine, and this is so put in order to show and impress upon us that the Holy Spirit is a Person." It may well be that Bullinger is pushing a problematic grammatical point (one can argue that the antecedent of " h e " in v. 13 is the masculine noun paraklltos in v. 7); but his perception of the Spirit's personal reality in the Gospel of John is right on target. Contemporary versions of the New Testament have invariably assigned the masculine pronoun to the Holy Spirit, because a skewness in gender of the Holy Trinity will inevitably introduce sexuality into the Godhead and make of the latter either a bisexual deity or tripartite deities consisting of two males and one female. Consistent use of the masculine pronoun for all three persons of the Trinity therefore avoids the sexualization of the deity. We can call this neutrality-by-sameness. Furthermore, it seems only logical, in Athanasian terms, to expect that the one Holy Spirit will be pronominally identified by the same pronoun assigned to the one triune God. We have seen that the avoidance of third-person pronouns to refer to the deity is the most prevalent feminist proposal. This practice, however, butts right up against internalized grammatical convention. In English usage the word God profoundly influenced and shaped as it is by Jewish and Christian practice is always linked to masculine gender and pronouns. 6 In contrast, the synonymous term [the] deity possesses covert gender and is amenable to masculine, feminine, or neuter classification. The traditional assignment of masculine gender to God is confirmed by the popular counterpart Goddess, which is feminine gender. This means that one must self-consciously choose not to use masculine pronouns for God. The mere proscription of the masculine
For a detailed linguistic argument for the masculine gender of the English word God, see Donald D. Hook and Alvin F. Kimel, Jr., "The Pronouns of Deity: A Theolinguistic Critique of Feminist Proposals," Scottish Journal of Theology (forthcoming).
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pronoun will not alter the conventional gender assignment now internalized by American speakers. The practice of avoiding pronouns altogether by the repeated use of God, together with Godself as a reflexive or intensifier, is subject to serious misunderstanding. Consider the following sentence: "Sally sent Sally's daughter to the store to buy groceries for Sally." Since normal usage would suggest the substitution of pronouns for the two subsequent references to Sally, the hearer will assume that a second, and perhaps third, Sally is being mentioned. Now consider the sentence "God sent God's son into the world." Exactly the same linguistic dynamic is at work. The repetition of the possessive God's implies two different Gods. Even though we may stipulate that there is only one God, any native speaker of English will recognize that it is automatic and natural to expect a possessive pronoun in lieu of God's in this context. (Certainly, Ramshaw's adjective "divine" will not work.) Anything else runs counter to the grammatical grain of English. Secondly, the proposed reflexive Godself is doomed from the outset. Reflexive pronouns (and intensifiers) are constructed by adding the suffix -self (pi. -selves) to the determinative possessive forms of the first and second person and to the objective form of the third person. Because the first constituent part of GodseZ/(viz., God) is a noun, this precludes the word from ever becoming a reflexive pronoun. Nouns simply do not become pronouns. Consider the sentence "God gives Godself to humanity in Jesus Christ." Is not the sense here that God gives something to us which is not identical to his person? Godself will not be construed grammatically cannot be construed as a reflexive referring to the antecedent God. When self and nouns are joined, sei/- is a prefix instead of a suffix (e.g., "self-assurance," as opposed to "himself"). But note that not all nouns accept self- (e.g., "self-service," but not "self-chair"). Apparently, the noun must be derived from a transitive verb. Godself is, therefore, doubly unacceptable, as would be Janetself or Robertself. As a final objection to this innovation, let us repeat this construction in a single sentence and ask if it is anything but gibberish: "God Godself gives Godself to God's children in God's Church through God's son, Jesus Christ." It is abundantly clear that we cannot make up function words (i.e., words of limited number, such as prepositions, subordinating conjunctions, articles.

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and pronouns, that belong to the syntactic structure of a language and thus form a "closed class") to satisfy our preferences.7 The practice of avoiding third-person pronouns will most likely result in the depersonalization of the deity. In modern English the personhood or personality of an object is largely conveyed by the choice of pronouns. An honest reading of desexed liturgies reveals a disturbing quality of abstractness and dullness of the deity. Again we are confronted by two incompatible understandings of divinity. A philosophical and iconoclastic theology of God will eschew all anthropomorphisms and expressions of personhood as incompatible with the dignity of the Godhead. The infinite creator must not be limited by creaturely forms. A faith that seeks, on the other hand, to be faithful to the biblical revelation of God will glory precisely in such expressions. Emil Brunner warned some years ago that rejection of anthropomorphism in Judeo-Christian discourse is both rejection of divine revelation and "rejection of the truly personal God." 8 To refuse the received pronouns for God is to lose the God of our salvation. Nor is our theological discourse improved by recent proposals to alternate the masculine and feminine pronouns when referring to God. Since the completion of the gradual loss of grammatical gender in English by the beginning of the modern period (c. 1500), the pronouns she, her, hers, herself have been linguistically marked for the feminine gender and have almost always referred to female beings or to personified objects. Compelling the hearer to compare and contrast, the tandem usage of masculine and feminine pronouns will simultaneously make God both sexual and nonsexual, while at the same time confusing the hearer by the disruption of gender agreement between noun and pronoun. The grammatical categories of masculine and feminine are mutually exclusive; both are not normally used to refer to the same object. Tandem usage, therefore, violates the internalized grammar of American speakers and powerfully suggests, semantically and linguistically, a hermaphroditic deity. The current debate regarding pronouns for God is of course about talk. But religion is more than merely talk; it is a complex of
On function words, see Hook and Kimel, "The Pronouns of Deity." Emil Brunner, Dogmatics, vol. 1: The Christian Doctrine of God, trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1950) 124-25.
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associations including faith, love, charity, forgiveness, compassion, prayer, meditation, hope, and piety. All these characteristics of the Judeo-Christian tradition are to be found in the narrative center of belief in the stories of the Bible, the interrelationships of the people, and the traditions developed following the composition of the Bible which might be called the Judeo-Christian "magisterium" from biblical times down to our own day. The language of narrative is found in both the original discourse and in the written remembrance. Faithful Jews and Christians have always recognized the centrality of the language of the Sacred Scriptures and the expository traditions to the language of the liturgy and of the sermon. But the Judeo-Christian tradition has always talked and written in a language that is more than just everyday vernacular. Whether remembered oral discourse written down or composed writing, it is the language of God-fearing and pious humans trying to communicate with their creator and witness to the world of his mighty acts. The living God is not just a god or a goddess. This word ought to have an aura about it that inspires awe and love, a sacred name to both men and women. It ought not to be bandied about in alien pronoun forms to satisfy the pride of the many or the politics of the few. Neither can the received pronouns referring to God be tossed aside, replaced, or alternated with other pronouns. Not only will that everyday vernacular, upon which religious language bases its structure, lose its standard meaning, so will the language of the Judeo-Christian tradition be lost forever, transformed into something strange and unfamiliar. Imagine the linguistic dislocation that would result if English should do away with its pronouns, proper nouns, and singular forms of address. To misuse those elements in our religious language would make for the confusion of Babel. Deliberate efforts to alter our religious language to serve human pride or ideological agendas amounts to an assault upon the Judeo-Christian tradition itself. In his book The Edges of Language, Paul van Buren makes clear that "to examine the word ['God'] in isolation from its [role] in the life of religious people is to pursue an abstraction. 'God' as a [term out of context] is simply not the same word 'God' that occurs in religious discourse. In religious discourse, this word is at the center of a complex linguistic pattern and the role it plays is Forum
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related to everything else that the religious person wants to say." 9 To use religious language or any other jargon as if it were nothing more than an ordinary language of fixed reference is to be naive. All language is learned behavior, and the language of the Judeo-Christian tradition is as different as that of Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. The basis of the language of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a language of a specific and unique revelation which all believers in that tradition share. Is God a "He"? If by this question we are asking if God possesses male sexuality or is properly interpreted through the cultural lens of male experience, then the answer of both Jews and Christians must be an emphatic No! The incomprehensible creator transcends all such categories. However, the assertion of divine transcendence and ineffability does not resolve the question of which pronouns are properly used to refer to divinity. The masculine gender of God is a given of the biblical narrative and is firmly established in the various translations of the Scriptures into modern English. It is the peculiarity of the JudeoChristian God that he is identified by the telling of stories. "God is the one who rescued his people from bondage in Egypt and brought them into the promised land." "God is the one who raised his Son, Jesus of Nazareth, from the abyss of death on Easter morning." When one tells a story, it is necessary, at least in English, to assign grammatical gender to the characters. The gender of the living God the God made known in his Holy Scriptures is masculine. Because of the pervasiveness of Judeo-Christian religion throughout American society and history, the very word God has been internalized by English-speakers as masculine. The normal pronouns for this word must therefore be masculine he, his, him, himself. One can protest this, but it is unlikely that such protests will fundamentally alter the grammar of the vernacular. God is masculine. The internalization of this gender assignment must therefore call into question the viability of all feminist proposals to alter the pronominal identification of God, whether by the denial of gender or by the alternation of feminine and masculine. It is of
The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of a Religion (New York: Macmillan 1972) 70.
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course true that cultural elites can, with self-conscious effort, successfully impose rhetorical rules upon themselves and thus defy linguistic reality for a time; but such efforts rarely affect the depth grammar of a culture. Feminist language engineering is doomed to final failure, though in the meantime it can create havoc and much confusion. But within church and synagogue the stories of God will continue to be told and preached. And he will be a " H e . "

Nathan Mitchell

The Amen Corner

Beat! beat! drums! blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows through doors burst like a ruthless force. Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation. Into the school where the scholar is studying; . . . Beat! beat! drums! blow! bugles! blow! Make no parley stop for no expostulation. Mind not the timid mind not the weeper or prayer. Mind not the old man beseeching the young man, Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties. Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses. So strong you thump O terrible drums so loud you bugles blow. (Walt Whitman, "Drum-Taps," from Leaves of Grass) A young woman, regal in widow's weeds, walking slowly behind a flag-draped coffin. A caisson drawn by six stolid gray horses. Muffled drums relentlessly beating. Shrill pipes skirling dirges. A riderless horse, boots turned backwards in the stirrups of an empty saddle. A tiny young boy in his blue, double-breasted coat, bravely saluting his father's body. In paradisum deducant te angeli. The harsh nasal sound of an old churchman's voice: "May the The Amen Corner
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