Why do people argue over whether God is a man or a woman?
If you believe that God is in any way, shape or form HUMAN, then you're already way off base.
Don't you know your catechism, folks? God is a SPIRIT, infinite, eternal and unchanging in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.
God is nothing that you can understand or know. You can apply nothing that you know about humans to him. When you argue male or female, you're debasing what God is.
Yes, there are times in Scripture when God, in trying to explain himself to us, used human terms. When he revealed himself to us, he had to do so in a way that we could even minutely grasp. When the Bible uses words like "Father" and "He", those are just words that we can understand to mean someone who protects us, loves us, disciplines us. We get a certain stereotype in our minds when we hear "Father". Think of it as an analogy for what God is to us. Scripture could have said "Mother" and "She", but for some reason God didn't choose to identify himself that way.
But don't get tripped up that those terms mean God is ACTUALLY a male.
God is not knowable? Someone alert Mr. Packer to return all those royalties. And better scratch this passage out, along with many others.
ReplyDeleteAnd understandable? Not only, but that we should boast about it.
We can know God, but we can't understand or know WHAT he is. Not that it matters WHAT he is, but people argue it all the time as if it mattered.
ReplyDeleteNow you're equivocating. Your original post had one link, directly to the question "WHAT is God?" Seems to me that the question had answers, a la "God is...". Now you're saying it doesn't. Make up your mind.
ReplyDeleteRight, I'm saying we can't know WHAT God is. What is God? A Spirit, not a man or a woman, or anything else that we can know or understand. We can understand "man" and "woman".
ReplyDeleteWe can "know" him and still not understand WHAT he is.
Then how can we be commanded to worship him "in spirit"? Do we not believe in the perspicuity of all scripture?
ReplyDeleteIf the Bible tells us WHAT he is, then we cannot know him unless we know WHAT he is. "...so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature."
Difference in the knowledge of his NATURE and the knowledge of his BEING. I'm talking about the knowledge of his physical/metaphysical being, not of his nature or his spirit.
ReplyDeleteSo exactly what part of "we shall see him as he is" do you have a problem with?
ReplyDeleteAre we seeing his physical being or his nature? Have you ever seen God's physical being?
ReplyDeleteJust because he's not physical, does not mean that we can not know WHAT he is. The 4th question of the WSC answers WHAT he is. And that WHAT is both something we can "see" and "know".
ReplyDeleteIt sounds as though you're proposing that humans can only know and understand physicality.
The Bible claims God is invisible. Can you know and understand that?
Casper the friendly ghost is invisible. So does God look like Casper? Is God a ghost? I don't know, he's a spirit. What exactly is a spirit? And is God as a spirit the same as our humanly definition of a spirit?
ReplyDeleteI am not answering the question of WHAT God is, personally. I am only stating the the Bible claims to answer the question, "WHAT is God?" And as you've pointed out, the Westminster Divines accumulated all the answers in their formulation.
ReplyDeleteSo if we have all those answers, and the Bible claims that God is knowable and understandable, what bearing does lack of gender carry on the issue?
We can both know and understand WHAT God is. Sure, like every other teaching of scripture, we can get it wrong. Humans while fallible, are still sanctifyable (word?!).
Or are you claiming that God put words in the Bible (spirit) that he intended no one to fully understand?