God is Not a Man

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Over the past few days, there’s been a good amount of controversy swirling around a comment from Texas politician and Presbyterian seminary student James Talarico. During a speech several years ago, Talarico said something that quickly went viral again this week: “God is nonbinary.” Critics pounced. Commentators circulated the clip as evidence that progressive Christians have abandoned traditional faith. But Talarico later said he was making a theological point that shouldn’t really be controversial—the idea that God is beyond human gender categories. Which brings us to today’s myth: the myth that God is a man… because apparently some people think that’s true. And if you think about it for even a moment, that idea doesn’t make much sense. Christians believe God created the entire universe—space, time, matter, life itself. God is the source and ground of all being, the ultimate divine reality that exists beyond the limits of human biology. If God is the creator of gender, then God cannot be confined to a single gender. But here’s the thing: many people really do imagine God as literally male. I remember leading a Bible study early in my ministry, when I was still a brand-new priest. At one point in the discussion, an older woman in the group said something that genuinely surprised me. She told us that she believed God really was an old man with a long white beard—basically the same image you see in Renaissance paintings. And she didn’t mean that symbolically. She meant it quite literally. Now, to be clear, scripture often uses masculine language for God. Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father.” But the reality is the Bible also uses feminine imagery for God—comparing God to a mother eagle protecting her young, a woman searching for a lost coin, or a mother comforting her child. The point is not that God is male or female. The point is that every human metaphor eventually falls short. In fact, the very first chapter of the Bible pushes us in this direction. In Genesis we are told that human beings are created in the image of God: “male and female he created them.” Notice what that implies. The fullness of humanity reflects the divine image. No single gender contains it all. And that insight has something important to say for how Christians think about gender today. If all people bear the image of God, then transgender and nonbinary people are not mistakes. They are not outside of God’s creative intention. They, too, reflect the divine image in the world. In fact, that might be a particular gift the trans community offers the rest of us. Because their lives challenge the assumption that gender must fit neatly into simple binary categories, they remind us of something theology has always known: God transcends the boxes we try to place around reality. And so why would we be surprised when humans do the same? In that way, the existence and witness of trans and nonbinary people can help reveal something profound about the mystery of God, about the reality of gender not being one or the other but a multitude of diversity. When Genesis described God looking at creation, Genesis said God declared it “very good.” That blessing extends to the full diversity of humanity—including those whose lives challenge categories we once assumed were fixed. And this is something the great mystics of the Christian tradition understood very well. They taught that the deepest path into the heart of God is what theologians call the apophatic way—the path of realizing that God ultimately surpasses every concept, every category, every image we try to use. The closer we get to God, the more we discover that the divine mystery is always larger than our assumptions. And when we learn to live in that mystery, something beautiful happens: our theology becomes humbler, our compassion becomes wider, and we begin to recognize the image of God shining in people we might once have overlooked. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.