Transfigured Excerpt: Our Gender-full God
The Transfigured devotional is marching toward launch. I structured it differently from Where True Love Is, in that topics are intermixed rather than delivered in chunks. But since studying by topic area can be useful, I included a guide for those who prefer to move through the book that way.
Here's the introduction to the Our Gender-Full God content area.
Fathers and doctors of the church like Origen and Augustine recognized that language is too limited to adequately describe God. There are no words which can capture the being that loved so much that it exploded into energy and matter. But humans are designed to seek understanding, and language creates form for incomprehensible concepts, and so we apply human ideas to a God who is not human.
The scriptures were written by men in eras when the idea of masculinity and power went hand in hand. When reading the Bible, it’s easy to conclude that God is a man. But how can the force that brought all things into being be constrained by gender? Conservative Christians demand that biological sex and gender are one and the same. But God doesn’t have a body. He created biology, but doesn’t inhabit it as we do. So how can God be a man?
The same Christians shout about God not making mistakes, as if God only works in binaries and anything falling outside black and white cannot be from them. But creation is so full of color and variation that it’s incomprehensible why any Christian would want to pare God down to the limited palette of our individual expectations.
In this focus area we look at scriptures which explore the idea of God’s gender, and see that the idea of a cis-Creator is absurd.
Our God is gender-full.
