I have changed the order of your post to improve my writing’s flow. Some bits might be dense and make more sense to educated Christians; introductory articles on the philosophy of the trinity are available in the
IEP and
SEP. My grammatical comments have my childhood anglistics lessons in mind; you can seek the Syntax Swami for his wisdom if you will.
Pallid Planetoid wrote: ↑2023-08-19, 23:17
Does using "He" for the Christian God really intend to imply "masculinity" and as such would there then necessarily need to be factored in a counter part such as "femininity"?
No. In English, as in German and Latin, all nouns possess grammatical gender: the masculine, feminine or neuter.
God,
Jehovah,
Jesus and so on are grammatically masculine. A proper noun’s gender will usually mirror its referent’s natural sex, as in
Jesus, and indeed, this holds for most nouns in English, but this is not universal:
Hungary is feminine. While English tends to apply this same rule even to common nouns, there are again disparities:
child and
lion are neuter. Indeed, English employs the generic masculine in constructions where a participant’s natural sex is indifferent:
whoever enters should wipe his feet. One should avoid lay
Whorfianism: a word’s grammatical gender entails nothing about its referent’s natural sex, even if the converse might inform.
God, being incorporeal (up to the hypostatic union), has no natural sex. God exists always and necessarily in three ontological modes (hypostases, personae,
Seinsweisen) by two relations to himself; this is the doctrine of the trinity which underlies all orthodox Christian thought. One of these modes yields both others and, as their begetter and processor, is naturally spoken of as Father, and due to details in these relations, another can be known as the Son. Attempts to suggest ‘God the Mother’ usually identify this with the Holy Ghost, but this distorts the facts of God’s nature (the Spirit is only the object in intra-divine relations) and is therefore heretical.
※While this is close to your mention of
procreation, it is vital to understand that all three persons have always existed. The Nicaean Creed stresses that the Son is begotten, not made, to avoid other heretical misunderstandings like Arianism.
Just curios - why is it that so many people refer to the Christian God as "He" -- considering that a reference to the word "he" in general implies "gender"?
Our preference for Father and Son over Mother and Daughter or Parent and Child follows from orthodoxy’s demands. For the Son, this is simple enough: God has (by the aforementioned hypostatic union) come incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, who is biologically male and motivates the masculine beyond its generic usage. Moreover, God is (
pace Social Trinitarians) a single, self-conscious being, even if he relates to himself in complex ways and exists in three ways at once; these ontological modes are not simply manifestations in the way that Hindus see their gods as deriving from Brahma (this would approach the Sabellian heresy), but innate to Jehovah’s being. Hence, though maleness is strictly a property of the body belonging to only one of the hypostases, masculinity is accepted as transferring to the other persons. Anticipating his future incarnation, God has spoken of himself as Father to Moses and the prophets, that this usage pervades the scripture and was well established centuries before Christ’s coming.
One should also note another reason which could variously be considered cultural or historical. The early Jews were surrounded by idolaters, and among the chief cults in the Near East was that of the
Mother Goddess, most familiar to the layman through the prolific Ishtar. For Jehovah to have described himself as a divine mother would have lent itself to identifying him and her. For the first thousand years of her existence, Jewry was ever prone to worshipping false gods, Ashtaroth (the Phoenician version of Ishtar) among them; encouraging this confusion would have been obscurantist.
…both references that are used in terms of "convenience" and therefore not intended to connote "gender" of any kind at all to the God of Christianity…"procreation" specific to "God the Father" we could consider one of the paramount characteristics that is for the most part unique to the God of Christianity. And that would be in terms of the all so very important attribute "creator" specific to this discussion that is believed by all Christians to intrinsically pertain to the God of Christianity - and that, in a matter of speaking, this vital term "creator" could arguably be loosely considered synonymous with the term "procreation".
I advise caution here. On one interpretation, this is speaking of the same things as I have described in another way, but in another, the wording lends itself to the same Sabellian heresy I have mentioned. That grammatical gender implies nothing in itself has already been noted, but describing God as Father is more than convenience, tradition or
façon de parler; it embeds facts about the Godhead’s nature, also sketched above. In particular, reading ‘Father’ as ‘Creator’ has, both historically and anecdotally, confused many into inferring that ‘God the Father’ is merely God acting as creator in any capacity; orthodoxy affirms that the Son and Holy Ghost are the uncreated God, and that the Father created the universe through the Son by the Spirit. These are intrinsic to how God is, and would have been so even if he had never made the world and hence never incarnated; this understanding distinguishes belief in the Trinity from the other monotheistic faiths. You seem to avoid stumbling here, but one might.
