Phil Vischer says that anyone who believes God is "a male (or female) of a gendered species" has left Christian orthodoxy. He posted it during the argument over whether God is "nonbinary." Jessica Hooten Wilson answers from the other side: unless God is "both male and female," women are "other" to God and cannot become like him. They seem to be on opposite sides, but they make the same mistake. Both treat the names Father and Son as claims about sex. Vischer concludes the names are negotiable. Hooten Wilson concludes God must have both sexes. The Reformed tradition rejected that shared premise. It held that God has no sex, that "Father" and "Son" are nonetheless proper names that cannot be traded, and that a woman's likeness to God was never a matter of sex.
Start with what Vischer gets right. Thomas Watson, answering the Anthropomorphites, wrote that "it is contrary to the Nature of a Spirit to have a Corporeal Substance," and that "Bodily Members are ascribed to God, not properly, but metaphorically, and in a borrowed sence."1 No confessional Protestant thinks the Father is a biological male, and Vischer is welcome to the point. But his tweet answers a position the tradition never held. The live question is whether "Father" belongs with God's "hands" and "eyes," a borrowed figure that could be swapped for another. William Perkins said it does not, and he said why. God "is a Father properly and principally," and "earthly parentes ... are but certaine images or resemblances of our heavenly father, having this blessing that they are fathers from him."2 The figure runs downward. Human fathers are the copy and God is the original. "Father" is not a human role projected onto God. Human fatherhood is a dim reflection of something in him.
Perkins also says what that something is. When the name Father is given to the first person, it is "because he is a father by nature to the seconde person begetting him of his owne substance before all worldes."3 And the begetting has nothing to do with sex. The Son is begotten "not by any fluxe ... nor by propagation ... but by an unspeakeable communication of the whole essence or Godhead from the father to the sonne."4 That is why the names cannot be traded. Robert Dabney: "the persons are not convertible the one into the other, nor the properties of the one predicable of another. ... The property of the Father is to be unbegotten; of the Son, generation."5 Paternity and filiation are the eternal relations by which the persons are distinguished. They are not facts about anatomy. Call the first person "Parent," or call God "nonbinary," and you have not made the doctrine more precise. You have erased the very property by which the Father is the Father. On Vischer's own terms, that is where orthodoxy is actually lost.
Hooten Wilson's error runs the other way, and it is worse. She assumes that becoming like God depends on sharing his sex, so God must contain the female or women are shut out. The tradition located the image of God elsewhere, and it did so against the very error she is repeating. Andrew Willet, on Genesis 1:26, says the image "was shewed before to be in the graces of the soule, and not in the body, against the heresie of the Anthropomorphites, who imagined God to be of a humane shape like unto man."6 Zacharias Ursinus lists what the image includes: "the spiritual and immortal substance of the soul, together with the power of knowing and willing," and above all "righteousness and true holiness."7 There is no sex in that list, because there is no sex in God. To say that God must be "both male and female" for women to resemble him is the anthropomorphite heresy twice over. It makes sex a divine attribute, which is the very thing Vischer rightly calls a departure from orthodoxy.
Her second claim is that women cannot become like God unless God is female. The tradition answered that becoming like God happens in Christ, and that every believer is in Christ on the same terms. Luther, on Galatians 3:28, keeps both truths in view. In the world, "if the woman would be the man, if the sonne would be the father ... there should be nothing else but a confusion of all states." But "in Christe there is no lawe, no difference of persons ... We haue the same Christ, I, thou and all the Faithfull, which Peter, Paule, and all the Sainctes had."8 Women do not reach God through a female side of the Godhead. They reach him through the Son, as sons and heirs. And the Son's own humanity was taken from a woman. Thomas Watson, preaching on "Our Father," says that because Christ took our nature, "Naturam nostram nobilitavit," he "hath enobled and honoured it above the Angelical," so that those "who have God for their Father, are in some sense superiour to the Angels."9 A woman who calls God Father outranks the seraphim. That is the opposite of being "other" to God.
Each of them has something real to point to. Scripture does use maternal figures for God, and the Puritans preached them without embarrassment. Cotton Mather devoted a whole sermon to Isaiah 66:13. God "has used Similitudes" for his love, Mather says, and among them "He also gives us this Assurance, As a Mother Comforteth her Children, so will I Comfort them."10 Notice what Mather calls them. They are similitudes, not names. Mather preached on God's maternal comfort, and he still prayed "Our Father," because one is a comparison God uses and the other is the name God gave. Hooten Wilson is also right that the tradition sometimes spoke carelessly about women and the image. Peter Martyr Vermigli, following Augustine on 1 Corinthians 11, says that compared with the man in the affairs of this life, the woman "is not the image of God." But in the same breath he grants the point that matters: "If it be vnderstood of man and woman, in respect that they be indued with mind and reason, it is méet that they should be according vnto the image of God."11 Even the tradition's hardest passage puts the image in the mind and gives it to both sexes. Hooten Wilson's cure would make God less like himself and give women nothing they do not already have in Christ.
Once the sources are on the table, the two posts come to the same thing. Vischer removes sex from God and treats the names as removable along with it. Hooten Wilson adds sex to God so that she can rename him. The tradition did neither. God has no body, the Father begets the Son without sex, and the names hold because they name eternal relations, not anatomy. Women share the image as fully as men and share the Son's inheritance as sons. Christ taught his disciples to pray "Our Father." That was not a lapse into patriarchal metaphor. It was the name God gave himself.
Notes
- Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity (1692), p. 24. Read ↩
- William Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbol or Creed of the Apostles (1595), p. 31. Read ↩
- Perkins, Exposition of the Creed, p. 31. Read ↩
- Perkins, Exposition of the Creed, p. 136. Read ↩
- Robert Dabney, Systematic Theology (1878), passage 272137. Read ↩
- Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Genesin (1633), on Gen. 1:26, p. 16. Read ↩
- Zacharias Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, passage 322494. Read ↩
- Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians (1575 English), on 3:28, passage 590453. Read ↩
- Thomas Watson, The Lord's Prayer (1692), p. 428. Read ↩
- Cotton Mather, Maternal Consolations (1714), p. 3. Read ↩
- Peter Martyr Vermigli, Common Places (1583), p. 124. Read ↩