QUESTION:

Why isn’t there a God’s Daughter?

Answer:

A fair enough question! First of all, God is not a sexual being. God is neither male nor female. Although the male is commonly used in addressing God, this should never be taken to infer that God has physically male sexual characteristics. This can be said for God as the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is not a gendered being. If you do a search of God’s qualities, you will find that female sounding traits are often used. When God came to the earth in the form of a human being, it was fairly natural that he would come as a physically male person as a female messiah would not have gotten a public hearing in the Near East at that time. Jesus contained qualities we would ascribe to male or female. He said to Jerusalem: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… How I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” (Matthew 23:37).

It would not have made sense for God to come in human flesh twice–a second time as a female Messiah. Theologically, this would make no sense. Like it says in Hebrews, he died once for all. I do not propose that the church starts addressing Jesus as God’s daughter or using she to describe Jesus. However, the fact that Jesus came in a physically male form should have relatively little effect on how we view God’s one and only.

John Oakes