Spirited Discourse about God Language in the New Testament (this is an expanded form of a recent article that I did for BAR).
In John 4, in his discussion with the Samaritan woman, Jesus has some profound things to say about the nature of worship, and indeed about the nature of God, and the connection between the two. Here are the words attributed to Jesus himself: “the hour is coming and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (vss. 23-24).
Let us start with Jesus’ observation about God— God in the divine essence is by definition spirit, not flesh, not a material being. And yet in the same breath Jesus is perfectly happy to call God Father. In our over-sexed and gender language sensitive culture, it is understandable that the juxtaposition of ‘God is spirit’ with ‘God is Father’ might seem like an oxymoron. Doesn’t father imply male, and doesn’t maleness require flesh and gender? In fact, as the NT shows, the answer to this question when it comes to God is no. God is not male, God in the divine essence does not have a gendered identity, and yet God is the Father of Jesus and by extension the Father of all his adopted children as well. How so?
In this same Fourth Gospel we hear about Jesus being the only-begotten Son of God (John 3.16). This is meant to convey the notion that while the rest of us, by God’s grace, may become the adopted children of God (see John 1. 12-13), the relationship between Jesus and the Father is one of direct kinship. Jesus and the Father are one, such that those who have seen the Son, have seen the Father, according to the Fourth Gospel.
We should not conclude from this that the Son was literally begotten by the Father, we should conclude that they had a unique, distinctive, even exclusive family relationship to one another. The language of Father and Son implies intimacy, deep kinship, sharing of a nature, in this case a divine nature, and the like. It is relational language, but not gender language in this case just as calling believers sons and daughters of God is not gender language either, as we have not been begotten in any literal sense by God. The new birth doesn’t involve sex, or intercourse, or for that matter gender.
Thus the attempt to treat the ‘Father’ language used of God as either on one end of the spectrum a bad manifestation of a male-dominated patriarchal culture or a clue to the actual ‘masculinity’ of God is wrong on both counts. It also ignores history. One reason Jesus did not call God mother is not just because God is never prayed to or directly addressed that way in the Bible, but because Jesus in fact had a human mother whom he did not wish to dishonor by using language appropriate only of his relationship with her, of the one he called Abba.
One suspects that part of the reason for many mis-readings of the NT’s God language ironically is because English is not a genderized language unlike Hebrew and Greek, and so when we see male or female pronouns or nouns we assume they must imply or entail gender. This is in fact false. The Greek word for wisdom, for example, is Sophia and in Hebrew Hokmah. They are both nouns in the feminine gender. In neither case are they used to say something specific or exclusive about women. The connection between gendered language and ontological gender identity is not assumed or made in such cases. It is our cultural biases that have led to the overly sexualized reading of the God language of the Bible.
Let’s return for a moment in closing to the other thing Jesus does in these verses—connecting the ontological character of God as spirit to the nature and character of worship. Jesus is talking about something eschatological. He is saying that the worship that is tied to a particular sacred spot or zone is something that is becoming passé with the coming of the Kingdom on earth. The implication is that we should stop trying to tie God down to human categories of space (as if God could be confined in a box called the Holy of Holies), or human categories of overly genderized language. God is bigger than that, God is better than that, and worship should reflect the truth about God. God relates to his Son as a loving Father, and he relates to all of his adopted human children that way as well.
Jesus in the end is telling the Samaritan woman something profound. We should stop trying to re-create God in our gendered image and in terms of our narrow thinking about sacred spaces, and instead worship bigger, think bigger about God, since the Kingdom is coming. It is fair to say that even today very few persons have taken the measure of this radical notion of the character of God and the worship of God.
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