Ok so this is probably a very odd post, but, is it weird I don't feel comfortable labeling God as a "He" ?
Like, in my mind, God is this all knowing all seeing force that is bodiless and genderless and is the "Father" in the sense that God created all, but not in the sense of being male. I know the Bible says He like 25324643575225 times but that is also the human interpretation of it. In my religion classes we kind of HAVE to address God as male in our papers (for the sake of the papers we write, it only makes sense to) but when in a faith-based, not academic-based situation, I feel compelled to never use pronouns for God. Is this like weird? haha
Perhaps the tension is arising from a (mistaken) identification of gender and sex. As C.S. Lewis explained, the masculinity of a man (the gender of his sex) is not merely a physical accident. As he draws it out in one of his fiction novels, a married woman has trouble with accepting men. In short, she doesn't like what she perceives as their maleness. Throughout the story (it is really just a sort of subplot) she begins to come to grips with this:
"But she had been conceiving this [supernatural] world as 'spiritual' in the negative sense--as some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken away. Now the suspicion dawned upon her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent. How if this invasion of her own being in marriage from which she had recoiled, often in the very teeth of instinct, were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest, the first, and the easiest form of some shocking contact with reality which would have to be repeated--but in ever larger and more disturbing modes--on the highest levels of all?
'Yes,' said the Director. 'There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, He would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make a yet deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing--the gold lion, the bearded bull--which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with your adversary quickly.'"
(That Hideous Strength 312-313)
Perhaps, then, you feel odd using masculine pronouns for God because you see the essence of a man as being summed up in his biological features. But if Lewis is right that this is just the physical manifestation which God has chosen to portray something deeper (or higher up) then I don't see any problem.
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