One of the biggest religious debates has an answer – according to the Archbishop of Canterbury God is gender-neutral, even though God is often referred to as a ‘he’.
Speaking at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, the reverend Justin Welby said: “All human language about God is inadequate and to some degree metaphorical.
“God is not a father in exactly the same way as a human being is a father. God is not male or female. God is not definable.”
The reverend – who married Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May – spoke of the importance of remembering ‘who god is’.
“It is extraordinarily important as Christians that we remember that the definitive revelation of who God is was not in words, but in the word of God who we call Jesus Christ. We can’t pin God down,” Rev Welby said.
“God is not a father in exactly the same way as a human being is a father. God is not male or female. God is not definable. It is extraordinarily important as Christians that we remember that the definitive revelation of who God is was not in words, but in the word of God who we call Jesus Christ. We can’t pin God down.”
What may come as a shock to some but this isn’t a newly formed concept, in 1992 in a Catechism of the Catholic Church number 239 laid down by Pope John Paul said absolutely that “God is neither man nor woman: he is God.”
Diarmaid MacCulloch, a professor of Christian history told The Times: “The reason God has been seen as male is simply the patriarchal assumptions of those societies.
“They reached for male terms as the people with power in that Greco-Roman world were male, so we use words like lord and king. The world is now different and we have to show that our view of God is wider than that.”
Even with this statement in a YouGov poll it said 36 percent of British Christians view God as a man, but 41 percent believe God does not have a gender.
There are three percent of Brits believe God has a ‘different human gender identity’, while 19 percent say they’re not sure at all.
