Ken Paxton Insists God Is Male. The Bible Says Not Quite
Ken Paxton and James Talarico are making headlines in unexpected ways in Texas as part of the two political opponents’ campaigns. The political direction of the state is on the line, but a millennia-old theological debate has taken center stage: What is God’s gender?
It’s bold of Paxton to double down on the theologically contentious premise that God is male, a response to Talarico’s declaration on the Texas House floor that “God is nonbinary.” But Talarico is right—God is not exclusively defined as male in scripture.
Let’s start at the beginning, with Genesis 1:27: “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” As we see here, it’s true that the Bible often uses male pronouns to refer to God, but the point of this verse is that God’s image is reflected in different genders. The verse uses what’s called a “merism,” a figure of speech combining two contrasting parts to express totality or completeness. In this case, Genesis describes how humans are all created in God’s image, meaning all genders represent the imago dei.
That’s not the only place in the Hebrew Bible where God shows up as something beyond a distinctly male entity. As God led the Israelites away from Egypt after Pharaoh finally agreed to let them go, “the Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night.” (Exodus 13:21) It’s important to note both the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire are gender-neutral forms that God chose for leading God’s people to safety and the use of the word “Lord” in the same verse. It indicates that, at least as far as the Israelites of this time were concerned, their image of God was not an old, bearded man in the sky, but a guiding spirit with no distinct gender.
As Rabbi Arthur Green notes in “Judaism’s Ten Best Ideas” the term “Y-H-W-H”—a representation of God’s name that many Jewish people consider to be taboo to speak—was later substituted in scripture with the term adonay, meaning “my lord,” about two thousand years ago. This act of pious submission was good in its intent of showing love and reverence to God, but it led people to begin conflating God with images of elderly noblemen. Green describes this conflation as religion sliding into idolatry. The Jewish Publication Society recently published “The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition”, a translation of the Hebrew Bible that begins to address some of these discrepancies.
Rev. Chloe Specht notes that the writers of scripture we are able to identify today were largely men with immense privilege, writing with a hyper-patriarchal cultural lens. “Since the Bible is a tool of God’s self-revelation, it’s important to consider all the ways that God is described in scripture and avoid focusing solely on the masculine pronouns ascribed to God,” Specht wrote. God also refers to Godself with feminine metaphors throughout scripture, including the image of God as a mother bear defending her cubs (Hosea 13:8) and as a mother comforting her child (Isaiah 66:13).
The gender of the Holy Spirit is also ambiguous, with many feminine and genderless representations in scripture. The terms used for “spirit” in the Hebrew Bible are grammatically feminine, though scholars are still debating the contextual gender of God in those instances. In any case, it’s clear that the writers of the Hebrew Bible did not feel the need to stress the masculine gender of God in all forms, opting for a more complex gender representation of the divine. And in Greek, the term used for the Holy Spirit is the gender-neutral, pneuma hagion.
While Jesus was a man, it makes sense that when God chose to enter human life, God picked the gender that would allow Jesus to be taken seriously as a leader in the patriarchal society of the Roman era. But as we’ve seen, the other two members of the trinity have no body and are portrayed with a complex and diverse array of gender.
Given all this, it seems far more likely that God, as a spirit, is at once genderfluid and agender, instead of entirely male from the beginning of time to the present day.
Paxton might insist that God in all forms is male, but those who are steeped in scriptural context and original biblical languages know that to call God entirely male is unbiblical and just fundamentally incorrect. It’s also an unimaginative way to ascribe human traits to a God who we can never know in God’s entirety during our human lifetimes.
Paxton’s claims serve only to reinforce modern conservative conceptualizations of gender while preserving the identity politics of those who align with him. In doing so, he erases the experiences of those who are facing oppression because of their gender instead of seeing and siding with the oppressed, as Jesus calls Christians to do.
Paxton can insist that God is a man all he likes, but he can’t change the teaching of the Bible or the experience of the people he claims to want to represent if elected to the U.S. Senate. To lead well in representing the full range of people who would be his constituents, Paxton would need to take a more Godly approach: embracing all of their genders.
Heather Brady is the audience engagement manager at Sojourners.
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