Cindy K

The other consideration that I take to heart in some sense is the “analogy of being.” An artist or an inventor cannot create something beyond themselves or greater than themselves. Anything that I make with my hands or conceive of in my mind cannot be beyond my understanding. If I create a sculpture of myself, the sculpture can never become greater than me and cannot be greater than me (lest a force greater than I am comes and adds to my creation and changes it so that it no longer my own).

For God to have created both male and female, He would have had to be transcendent over gender (greater than and pass beyond the limits of gender). And there MUST be something in God that defines the perfect standard of gender, though this need not mean that God has gender. Gender may be a metaphor and an allegory that God designed to reveal aspects of His character to us, and He Himself may have absolutely no gender at all. In some sense, to say that God IS male is to anthropomorphize Him.

Gender has to be contained in God, as there can never be more of something in the creation than there is in the Creator. We are told that we are no greater than our masters or our creator. His ways and purposes transcend us, though He does give us sure truth to know Him, though some things are kept mysterious. (And that it not any kind of advocacy of “holy other.” but more of Van Til’s idea that we are like children that have the tendency to crawl up on God’s lap to slap Him in the face with our arrogance of limiting Him, telling Him who and what He is. That is not “holy other,” or claiming the “mysterium” as I have been thus accused by a disgruntled complementarian online a few months ago.) How can the finite possibly understand the infinite in fullness? Again, we only know what we have been taught. Within God, there is the ideal of both masculine and feminine. That might mean that there is no aspect of God that is literally male or female, or maybe there is an aspect of God that is the perfect male and perfect female. God is limited by neither. But what I think that we should be careful of is restricting God to our finite understanding of that which the Word has told us is, to some extent, a mystery.