Is God a boy or a girl?

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Yeah, so let's hear this kid question.

So it's, I was amazed, three years old. I don't know, maybe there's something in the water where I live, but like, it seems to me, like it's a really important question that has a lot of sort of pastoral implications too, you know, that it's kind of like asking the question, like the sort of emotional impact of it could be something like having a superhero that looks and acts and talks just like you, or having a sports figure that looks and acts and talks just like you. So if it turns out that there are none of those and nobody looks and talks and acts, or that, you know, there are people who looks and acts and talk just like those people, but you're not one of them. And there's going to be this element of exclusion and alienation that inevitably occurs. And so I think it's a really important question and I'm really, I'm really glad to be able to talk about it.

It seems to me like there's one really good way to talk about it. Maybe it'd be to break it down into maybe two questions. Cause, in my mind, there's a, there's a God part of the question and then there's a boy or a girl part of the question. There's like an upstairs part and a downstairs part, you know, like the God part's upstairs and the gender part's downstairs. You need both of them, right?

But it helps to think about it in that way, I think, because to answer that question, well, we got to know really clearly, what is God, you know? And can these words like boy and girl apply to God? And then we also need to know what is a boy and a girl.

So in my mind, I don't know, do you have a preference over which one you like to tackle first?

And there's things about that that are hard to understand. But this feels like an important part of that, part of that question. So let's start with what is God?

The only thing that's in the non-creature bucket is God. And then everything else that exists is a creature. So there's, and then there's no sort of remainder, right? Everything that exists is either God or made by God. But the fact that those two are the sort of fundamental ways that we look at the world should tip us off about this, what theologians like to call the creator creature distinction, which is just this helpful reminder that at all times we have to remember that we are creatures and that God is not a creature.

And so then we have to think about, okay, well, can creatures who are made by God use the categories that sort of belong to creatureliness and apply them to God? And theologians are like racks their brains about that for a long time. When I, when I talk about it in class, I like to say it's, imagine like an ant colony, you know, the, the ants, the little insects, not the right, an ant colony. And they are trying to get together to understand human civilization. And I'm like, well, how, how successful would they be?

They would be pretty, they would do a pretty bad job of it, because there's such a separation between ants and human beings that did this, the separation between ants and human beings and the separation between human beings and God, that second separation, much bigger, is much bigger. And so it's, we, we, before we get to the part where we can say like, it's a gift that we get to talk about God, we have to remind ourselves that, like, it's actually supposed to be remarkably difficult, not just because we are sinful, but because we are finite, we are creaturely and God is, God cannot be put in a box. All of those caveats aside,

there, when we start talking about words that we can apply to God, we can talk about God in two different ways. We can talk about, we can answer the question, what is God? And we can answer a question, who is God? What, what is God and who is God? The, what is God?

This is what theologians typically call the divine essence or the divine substance. Imagine if this is going to tick off all of my systematic theologian friends, but it's a good analogy and all analogies for God are bad.

God is loving. God is kind. God is just. God is merciful. Those all go into the divine essence bucket, right?

And anything that's in the bucket, you can say, you can ask the question, what is God? And you can get, you can see in there that, okay, God's good. God's good, just, and merciful, right? Anything that's in the bucket applies to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, right? There's.

no, it's not like God. the Father is good and loving, or usually we get it the other way around, right? Like Jesus, through. the Son is good and loving, and the Father is just. And so, like you got this?

like internal fight between the Father and the Son. No, nothing like that.

You can go back to episode eight with Dr. Fred Sanders for more about that. We're going to keep having episodes about the Trinity because there's a lot to learn. But what's important here is that everything that is true of God's essence is true of all three persons, because we worship one God in three persons. It's confusing, but we'll keep talking about it.

That's a big fight we don't have time to get into. The important thing here is that Dr. Dovale is describing for us what language we should use to distinguish the three persons. It's not characteristics like being just or merciful or loving that distinguishes the three persons.

And so my answer ultimately is no, because being a boy or a girl is a creaturely thing. It's a thing that, and in fact, it's not just a creaturely thing, it's a creaturely thing specific to human creatures.

And part of that, there's a lot of different ways to work that out. And theologians have really tried to sort of think through that in a couple of different ways. One thing to remember is that creator-creature distinction. So when we say father, about God, the Father, we're not saying God is a father like I'm a father, right? God didn't have to, you know, this is a kid-friendly podcast.

I'm not going to talk about how human beings become fathers, but you know what I mean?

why your answer to this initial question is just, no, this isn't a category that makes sense to apply to God. When we come back to the downstairs, like you talked about earlier, part of the question, this kid is asking, there's kind of two things that could be going on here. One that you've already sort of referenced is, okay, Jesus is a man. So maybe, and we have father and son language. So maybe I just attribute masculinity or maleness, or whatever word, none of these are words the kid would have used, but I attribute something about being a man to God.

But the other part of the question, like you already said, is a kid is, we've talked about this a bunch on the show, kids and adults are looking around at the world, and this is the experience we have of the world. And then we're trying to figure out how these categories that we learn in the world apply to God. So can you talk about that downstairs? level of boy and girl? What does that mean?

And why is this a question that we might be asking? Because kids ask this. I mean, I've had adults ask me this all the time too. Kids ask this, and I don't think it's just because Jesus is a man, et cetera. I think it's because this feels like a very important category for understanding the world.

And so I want to know what that means when it comes to God.

And that's like almost a direct quotation. Theologians I really admire and think are good, but really drop the ball on this stuff. So the temptation here is always to say, let's look around and see what do most boys do or what do most girls do? And let's sort of like, shoot that up to God and make God exactly like our favorite stereotypes about boys and girls. And the sort of danger here, that's, the danger that's always lurking within theology's idolatry, is that we are instead of receiving God and God's word and adopting a posture where we are receptive, where we are humble, where we're sitting under God's word.

Instead, we are looking to mold and shape God and God's word to our own sort of preferences and our own sort of biases too. And so the worry there is that we can't just project our own favorite ideals into God and expect God not to challenge us. If we're reading our Bible, I tell my students this all the time, if we're reading our Bible, especially about gender, and the Bible no longer surprises us, challenges us, corrects us, humbles us, then chances are we've allowed idolatry to slip in in a big way. Okay, but we're downstairs. What is a boy and what is a girl?

I do theology in conversation with my daughter, basically. She came home one day and she was two years old. And she came home, she got a shirt from her grandparents. It went to the NASA, it was from Florida, I think. And it has a shirt with a rocket ship on it.

She was stoked. And she wore it to school. She comes home and she says, Dad, I don't ever want to wear this shirt again. And I'm like, why? What's going to happen?

She goes, the kids in my school, and she was two years old, mind you. The kids in my school told me that when I wear this shirt, I look like a boy and they made fun of me. It was a blue T-shirt, a blue T-shirt, yeah. And so whatever answers we give about this downstairs, questions have to sort of make sense for little kids who are getting made fun of for the T-shirts that they wear, and more, right, and more.

So one of the first things to notice is that we don't get to decide when.

we start thinking about being a boy and being a girl. If it's not on our minds already, that's because those categories are usually not too problematic for us. But for those for whom it has been problematic for a long time, like my daughter, she found out that day that being a girl is hard. She can't wear blue T-shirts with rocket ships on them without getting made fun of.

Gender is this thing that we don't build up from the ground up and these sort of context-free lists of rules. And it hits us when we are walking down the aisles at Target or scrolling through Instagram. I don't know how young children should not scroll through Instagram.

It's not this kind of thing that we have to construct from the ground up. It's something that we must first listen to and ask ourselves, what's going on? How is our world describing these sorts of practices of wearing clothing, of eating food, and so on? And then we have to ask ourselves, what is my responsibility as a Christian about how to relate well to these, it means a big word, social goods, to this stuff in the world?

If I'm walking down the aisles of Target in October, I'm going to see Halloween costumes for men and women, boys and girls. I have to make sense of that social world and organize it well in order to get a good answer to what does it mean to be a boy or a girl. If that answer doesn't help my daughter, if it doesn't help me walk through the aisles of Target, then it's not going to do us very much good. And I worry that a lot of Christian answers have sort of remained at this 10,000-foot level where we might get a really neat answer, but it's not going to help us actually live our lives.

Yeah, I so appreciate how you said that. It's come up in a couple other episodes as well, the sense that we discover these kinds of theological questions in the world. You just kind of happen upon them, and it both happens because you read the Bible or you interact with certain ideas and you have these questions, but especially when it comes to questions about what it means to be human, we're never just sitting down apart from any context or background or story and coming up with ideas. We're always coming from a certain place and having certain experiences.

How would you, not necessarily to this little child, we'll get to that later, but to just the average person in the church, who maybe, I love to imagine with all these questions, right? A kid asks a question in church and there's adults listening and they suddenly turn to the pastor or the Sunday school teacher and they're like, what do you think? And imagine that this kid asks this question and maybe you can have a simple like, well, God's not a boy or a girl. And then the people around you kind of go like, yeah, not only am I curious about that, part of what I have heard people say, sometimes out of, sometimes scholars, but sometimes just people in church, they have said, God is not a human man, but God is masculine, or God is like men in some ways. And I'm asking this partially because this gets to this question of like, what is a boy or a girl?

Because this kid is not asking about body parts, right? So that could be part of the question hypothetically, but I think for the most part, that's an easy part to answer. This kid is asking like, I might be learning about different body parts, but also I'm learning about what you were just saying. I'm learning about the clothes that we wear. and I'm learning about the assumptions that in my Sunday school class, we have about what kind of games we play and who enjoys what kinds of things.

And they're asking that about God. Like, is God a boy or a girl in not just a physical way? And I'm imagining some adults in church looking at you and going, what about all of that?

Okay, so we talked about the problem of projection. I think there's a regular thing that's going on there where we take our own assumptions about masculinity and femininity, shoot them up to God, let's not do that. Okay, so we've taken that off the table. There's an important sense where it's actually really hard. I start out when I teach gender in my classes, I start out by asking my students, I say, does Jesus answer the gender question for us?

Does Jesus actually help us think about gender? And these good evangelical students all want to say yes, but they don't know how to say yes. Because there's a lot of ways where Jesus is just totally different. He said Jesus was never married, Jesus never had children, Jesus never was an old man, Jesus was never a woman.

And so the question that becomes, is Jesus actually helpful here? And you can sort of ask that further out to people like Paul or to whomever. And I think the quickest way to get at an answer towards how Jesus is helpful for us is that Jesus doesn't teach us what to be when it comes to gender, Jesus teaches us how to be when it comes to being gender. Not what to be, but how to be. Jesus landed in the world at a particular time, in a particular place, and encountered a whole variety of social goods that he had to know how to engage in ways reflective of God's intended design.

He had to figure out what are the sorts of expectations for me as a man in this particular time and place, and how can I live that out in ways that are conducive to the flourishing of God's people? And I think that's what Paul does as well when he's giving examples and exhortations. It's not a what question, but it's a how. And what the Church can do today is not necessarily extract timeless principles from Scripture to define manhood and womanhood for all times and all places, but rather it's a matter of practical reasoning rather than theoretical reasoning. It's a matter more of how we live in a world wisely, in a way that reflects God, in a way that reflects a love of neighbor and a love of enemy, rather than the sort of answer that we get when we ask questions like 2 plus 2 equals 4..

And so that's one side of things, is that, in one way, I want to make sure that we know that being a boy and being a girl is a very earthy, on-the-ground, living-our-daily-lives sort of question, which the Bible helps us with a whole lot, but not by giving us timeless principles, but rather by showing us here's how a disciple of Jesus Christ ought to behave in the world. And so Jesus, Paul, but we can also talk about the Virgin Mary, they all help us, not as people who are going to give us blueprints for being boys and girls, but rather like how did they think about their clothing? How did they think about the ways that they bought stuff? And I think that's a better way.

that's being actually kind of honored there. It's not being subverted the way these other things are. So I guess my first question is just like, is that an example of the kind of thing you're talking about? And are there other places that you would have us go in scripture to think about that?

And I think kids do this really, really well already. You know, like they know, that if they see a movie and they see a superhero that they're super into, or a sports figure or an artist or somebody that they're just like, that person's awesome. They know how to sort of cultivate their lives around those sorts of figures and mold those, those virtues or those character traits to their own context. Right. I remember when I was a little kid, I was super into Spider-Man and I was like, I'm going to be Spider-Man.

So I climbed a fence and I jumped off and broke my arm. And I quickly learned, I quickly learned that I'm not Spider-Man. But the idea there is that we all know how to sort of read stories and take in stories and, and read stuff so that we can emulate it or copy it. And, and I think this is maybe a really good place where we can learn from kids. And to say that like, yeah, maybe Hagar is going to be a good guide for us in our particular time and place.

Maybe, you know, Jesus and his interaction with the Samaritan woman is going to be a really good, helpful place for us. Maybe Paul's pastoral ministry, when he's looking to sort of work out all kinds of gendered complexities in Corinth, maybe that will be, you know. And so I think, looking to scripture as a source of wisdom rather than abstract sort of, you know, we just dissect the context, strip away the context and just sort of plug it into our context. But rather read it as, read it as a place to find virtue. I think it would be really helpful.

I love in my Sunday school class, you know, we, we do godly play. They ask questions at the end of it. And then there's sometimes when it's like, oh, it's not just the question. It's like the insight, how you read this story was so different than I would. in a way that's really helpful and good.

With that in mind, imagine that there is this, this little girl in front of you at church and she's been told you're the guy to ask about these kinds of things. And she says, all right, tell it to me straight. Is God a boy or a girl? How would you respond to a child who asks this question?

But the good news is that he has showed up for us and made himself known. And the way he did. that means that both boys and girls get to find their hold in God and get to be, find God's fingerprints as their creator, in who they are and how they've been made. But there is no sort of privileging of men or women in God. I wouldn't use the word privileging with a kid, though.

That was great. I slipped there into seminary mode. Prof mode. But yeah, God is neither. He's your creator.

God is creator. God is not just bigger and stronger and better than us. God is so wholly different that we struggle to use words that get us close to who God is. And yet God also came near to us, became like us, moved into our neighborhood, as Eugene Peterson says. And that doesn't just matter for men, because Jesus became a man.

It matters for men and women and for all of creation, because God did not make us and then abandon us to our own sin and destruction. If we think that the point of the incarnation is that men are better than women, we are trading the most beautiful, amazing, good news that has ever been given for something boring and petty. The Bible, as Dr. Duvall taught us, does have something to say about gender and how we live as gendered beings in a world full of ideas about gender. But if we think that the best news we, as the church, have to offer is a list of rules about how to be a man or a woman, we're selling the gospel horrifyingly short.

Let's remember what the best news we have to offer really is.

Curiously, Caitlyn is a production of Holy Post Media, produced by Mike Strelow, editing by Seth Corvette, theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus cute kids and never any butt news.