One of my rather liberal and SJW friends said God can be a mother because he is God and has no gender. I responded saying that God is our Father and not a mother because he reveals himself as Father in scripture, and when God came to Earth he was a man. It is also against tradition to call God "mother". Am I wrong? Please feel free to pitch in your two cents on this matter.
Hi Dallas, sorry to do this to you. Article I. Of Faith in the Holy Trinity There is but one living and true God, ever-lasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The bit I wanted to underline for you is without body, parts or passions. It is inadequate to speak of God as gender constrained, and really that is what the thirty nine articles say. This is, as we would all expect, in complete conformity with Holy Scripture. Genesis 1:26-27 Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. So in creation we see that the image of God is carried Male and Female. Each of us in completeness carries the image of God, yet in order to bear the image and the likeness we have been created male and female. In a sense this is in itself a reflection of the mystery of relationship bound in the Holy Trinity. The convention (Holy Tradition) accepted for a long time is the refer to God as Father (and so we speak of the monarchical integrity of the Father) and indeed Jesus taught us to pray Our Father ... so the general convention of Church language is expressed as such. Nonetheless there have been Holy people in history who have challenged us beyond this narrow confine, and in our own tradition Blessed Mother Julian of Norwich springs most readily to mind. Perhaps in recent time the hymn writer Brian Wren has most successfully turned our attention to it in his hymn Bring Many Names which I like as a hymn, however you have to sing all the verses as a whole, and if you only sing verse 2 you will twist the intent and corrupt the meaning. In the long run I think we are called to have a big view of God, and if that is where someone wants to go I can be happy, HOWEVER there is also a trendy movement that see this as a projection of feminist politics into theology, and that is an area to tread with care. Let our faith inform our politics, and not our politics inform our faith.
Please Dallas, it is a conversation, not a correction. You asked for two cents worth, and that is what you got, though some may think that is an inflated estimate of their worth!
I'm 100% with you, God is Father... To try to call him any other names would be to adopt the heresy of transgenderism, denying the natural order of the world and the natural order of the genders... Your interlocutor may try to argue that since God is transcendent he cannot have a human gender. While that's true on the surface it is a facile effort: God cannot be angry either, right? Yet he is clearly said to be angry. And he is also said to be a he! Theologians have answered how God can have a gender..: natural language cannot describe God as he actually is. The only thing natural language can do is describe God analogically.. This was a very helpful article to me on this, from the eighteenth century apparently: http://www.anglican.net/works/william-king-sermon-predestination-consistent-with-free-will/ There it is argued that we can be said to be predestined, and to have free will, at the same time, because God's attributes such as being omniscient and omnipotent are analogical If God's attributes are analogical, then it is appropriate to describe Him as Father, because he is the author and progenitor of the human race (according to Biblical anthropology man comes first, and from him comes woman). God is our teacher, which according to Scripture is the province of the Father of the family. And certainly not less than anything else is the fact that he's simply described as a He, and a Father, in Sacred Scripture, which is God's own word...!
In the words of Cyprian of Carthage, “you cannot have God for your Father unless you have the church for your Mother.” God is Father, Christ is the Bridgegroom, and the Holy Spirit is making us (the Church) His bride. Christ is the New Adam and through God's grace we the Church shall be the New Eve.