God is not a he, but god is!

God is not a he, but god is!

It has been a rather busy week for the grammarians of god. Yesterday I shared my thoughts on the question of the capitalization of the word god. In reaction to my post some have asked my thoughts on the question of god vs g-d. I’ll address this question briefly before commenting more fully on an article posted today by the BBC on the question of god’s gender.

In certain traditions it is forbidden to say or to write the name of god. Nevertheless, people (religious or otherwise) want to discuss god and have navigated the path between this desire and respect for this tradition by writing g-d in place of god. The tradition of avoiding writing or pronouncing the name of god is indeed an old one. The oldest complete manuscript of the Septuagint (c. 2nd century AD), for example, consistently replaces the name YHWH with kyrios or theos (lord or god, respectively). When I was first introduced to the study of ancient religious texts (far too long ago) it was most common (in instances where an author avoided the name YHWH) to see god’s name replaced by “tetragrammaton” or “the tetragrammaton”, a term which literally means “the four letters” (I’ve always found it amusing to think that the name of god is the original four-letter-word). I appreciate this tradition, but it also seems to imply that writing g-d in place of god is senseless. After all, the common noun god is used in the Septuagint precisely to avoid writing the name of god, suggesting that god is not the name (as if it were a proper noun) of god. I’ve never told a student not to write g-d, nor do I plan to do so in the future, but I do regularly explain the grammar of god, which allows me to make (what I believe to be) some interesting historical and theological points.

(Now, to the main purpose of this post.) Today the BBC posted an article on the gender of god entitled, “Why is God not female” (note that the word god is capitalized in the original). The topic is a worthy one (and certainly a hot topic in religious conversations--as the article itself makes clear), but requires a rather subtle distinction between theology proper and the grammar of theology--and requires a modicum of knowledge of the history of ancient languages (disclaimer: my expertise is not in Hebrew or the semitic languages, but in Latin, and, to a lesser degree, in Greek). Unfortunately, the BBC article does not make the necessary distinction (though it could have easily done so, as it vacillates between grammar and theology proper throughout), preferring to concentrate on theological traditions.

The BBC article correctly points out that there is a long tradition of rejecting the idea that god (the entity) has a gender, as if god has a penis or a vagina. Some traditions do this by simply rejecting a gender of god altogether, others by suggesting that god is both mother and father. (Incidentally, there are other very good reasons--of ancient provenance--for describing god as mother; the creative power of the ‘mother’ is a venerable tradition.) The primary purpose of reminding ourselves that god is genderless is to avoid anthropomorphizing the deity. Indeed, there is a whole tradition of mysticism and negative theology that suggests no words are adequate to describe god, gendered or otherwise, and the best policy is to remain silent (this is a grossly simplified expression of this mystical tradition).

However, there is also a very good reason for referring to god as he (and this has nothing to do with the question of god’s genitalia). The word god in both Greek and Latin is masculine in gender, theos and deus respectively. And the rule in every gendered language is that a pronoun (e.g., he, she, it, they) must agree in gender (as well as number and case) with the noun for which it stands. English is not gendered in the same way as, say, French, so that, when one replaces dieu with il in French, there is no need to ask why an author/speaker did not use elle--the simple answer is that dieu (the word, not the entity to which the word refers) is masculine. Replacing dieu with elle is simply grammatically erroneous. This also explains the quite ancient tradition of referring to the Holy Spirit as she; Hagia Pneuma (Holy Spirit in Greek; I am not certain why the BBC article gives the Latin spiritus here, when the other examples provided are all Greek) is feminine (again, the words, not the entity to which they refer). (There is also a long-standing tradition of associating the Holy Spirit with Wisdom, Sophia, also a feminine noun in Greek.)

That said, I am not at all opposed to referring to god as she, so long as the purpose is to correct an unfortunate anthropomorphism--that is, the practice is theologically sound, even if grammatically incorrect. However, the BBC should perhaps have explained the origin of the traditional use of he by distinguishing between grammar and theology. Separating the theological point from the grammatical would avoid the inevitable rejoinder of the grammarians (and would have been far more instructive).