The Shack: God and gender

In The Shack Paul Young does a great job of trying to address the heart issues which many hurting people have with God.

I disagree with many of the answers, though I applaud the attempt. Paul Young obviously knows the Bible well, but his weakness is that he tends to provide his own answers when those he finds there are unpalatable to him.

All the same, The Shack is a great discussion starter, and even the parts where it is off base provide a good opportunity to go back to Scripture for the real answers, which is why we are covering it in our home group.

We discussed the gender issue last night, and the conclusion was that we should allow God to speak for Himself. If he presents Himself as a male, then it is His intent for us to relate to Him as such. If one wants to be politically correct in referring to God, the essence of political correctness after all is that you refer to a person as they wish to be named.

As to why, one might observe that the first attribute God reveals to us in Scripture is that of sovereignty or authority as Creator, that He invested authority in the first man and continued to do so in his male descendants throughout Scripture, and that an instinctive desire to exert authority and leadership exists in the male personality to this day.

In speaking to us as a male then, maybe God is speaking to all of us as our proper authority, or head, in a way which would not be communicated if he presented Himself as female.

But that is speculation.

Aside from that, I personally feel that gender goes beyond biology, that there is a spiritual aspect to it as well which is reflected in our personalities as men and women. In the resurrection we will not marry, but that does not mean that we will be without gender, any more than we will be without personality.

In other words, if we are raised with glorified versions of our bodies then we will be raised up as completed men and women, not as sexless Teletubbies. And if this is so, it is reasonable to assume that after death we will remain in some sense male and female in whatever ethereal state we exist in the interim. So I question the book's statement that God should be regarded as being without gender simply because He does not have a body as we do.

The above is just a personal objection which I can neither prove nor disprove from Scripture. However, I have a more serious issue with how God is portrayed in the book which I will deal with in the next post.