Reader Question- God Gendered?

At a church I was visiting the person speaking (who was a visiting academic, which thrilled my little grad school soul) intentionally flipped between pronouns when referring to God. So...what's the deal with God being a "he"? Is there a reason for it other than "because the culture at the time much more strongly valued masculinity and it was different from Pagan goddesses?" Do the pronouns we use for the Divine matter?

-Curious

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Oooh, fun question. Thanks for writing in, Curious!

As anyone who has been tortured with a high school foreign language class can probably attest, English is a rare language that does not explicitly gender nouns. So, when translating many languages, (including Biblical Greek and Hebrew) the pronouns are the only way we have to convey the gender that comes built into some of the words we are translating. A lot of those words (though not all) are male, and so the speaker MAY have just been going for felicity to the text, but in all honesty, was probably just flip flopping randomly. 

So why gender God, outside of a linguistic imperative to gender everything?

Well, for starters, in the scripture God is not simply a gendered noun. God is repeatedly referred to as a parent in the Bible. sometimes in the language of a Father, other times as a mother. These are usually analogies, attempts to explain attitudes and behavior, to make the unknowable a bit easier to relate to.

I'll get the elephant in the room out of the way, first. There is not a Great Divine Penis up in the sky. God is not limited to one gender, but has attributes that are often understood AS gendered. The point of the gendered language was not to make the Hebrew God distinct from pagan goddesses (the pagan gods the Hebrews interacted with were as likely to be male as female, if not more so) but to help people understand the motivations of a being beyond basic comprehension.

The eternal creator of the universe caring about mortal life was hard to swallow... but a Father caring for his children? That got across. A timeless being of light and love providing sustenance was a bit too abstract... but a mother suckling her children? Easy. 

Do the pronouns we use matter? Yeah. Using "He" or "She" provide a friendliness and familiarity that we are encouraged to use that cannot be reached through "it." But beyond that, the specific choices matter as well. Because when we use exclusively male language, important aspects of the character of God get lost. Father/male  language has its place, and it is an important place, but Mother/female language is equally important.

All the more so because of who WE are. When humanity is first created, according the book of Genesis, God created humanity in his own image, "Male AND Female, she created them." We are made in the image of God, male and female both. So if we exclude the female, then we lose a part of that.

So, there's your answer. The proclivity we have shown towards a wholly male understanding of God is most certainly a product of male dominated society, but the origins of male language are not. Properly combined with female images, we actually get a better understanding of God.