God’s Otherness

The other day, I was asked to sit down with God for a game of Poker. My first inclination was, “NO WAY!” Mainly because of the big three O’s of God’s character: His omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. Then I began to think about His integrity, goodness, and sense of justice… and I reconsidered. After the money had been changed out and the cards dealt, I suddenly deflated into my chair as all hope of winning was sucked out of my hopeful heart.

Why the sudden loss of confidence?

I remembered God’s trump card—His eternal patience and long-suffering. So, I folded, because, Lord knows, patience is a virtue I lack.

I love the image of God hanging out on a Friday night, drinking Stella Artois, and smoking sweet-smelling tobacco from a hand-carved pipe. This picture is not irreverent so much as it is human; it’s an attempt to draw the divine into the realm of the familiar. But alas, I must scuttle this image into the annals of fairyland, because such personalization of “Yahweh” causes all sorts of theological problems. Chief among them is the problem of God’s “otherness.”

In Scripture, God's essence, His ontological nature, is often in tension with the character traits revealed in the narrative of the Old and New Testament. That is, His immutability seems to conflict with His emotionality. What we end up with is a dichotomous projection: an infinite, eternal, creative, self-sufficient being who simultaneously embodies the masculine and feminine characteristics of a finite, relational being.

We can’t deny that God portrays Himself in the personal. God walks with Adam in the garden in the cool of the day.1 He speaks with Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend."2 And in perhaps the most audacious of encounters, God wrestles Jacob to the ground and blesses him with a limp.3 These stories are not trivial; they reveal a God who chooses intimacy and relational engagement over distant abstraction.

This “personal” God is emphasized even more in the New Testament, where Jesus gives us the language of Fatherhood. He prays to “Abba” and tells us to do the same.4 It is not merely paternal language; it is relational, familial, and directive. And yet, in calling God “Father,” we tether divine identity to cultural and gendered constructs that cannot carry the weight of divine mystery. As Frederick Buechner wrote, “We are, all of us, children, no matter how old we are. And so, we call him Father. Not because he is a man, not because he is like our earthly fathers, but because he made us and loves us and watches over us.”5

David, in the Psalms, sings of a God who shelters him, nurtures him, and comforts him with language that is anything but masculine. Isaiah too, writes of God as a mother: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.”6 This maternal imagery is not accidental—it is prophetic. It expands our imagination of who God is and how God loves.

But therein lies the deep pastoral problem. A concrete correlation of God as masculine or feminine is problematic, especially in those with parental abuse in their background.

Many cannot relate to God as Father, because their biological father sexually, physically, or verbally assaulted them. And others who cannot relate to God as a loving and comforting Mother, because their biological mother abandoned them when they were young.

Jordan Peterson points out that the archetype of God the Father is not simply a projection of our fathers, but something far more primal: an image of order, of transcendence, of moral structure. “The idea of God the Father,” he writes, “is not merely a reflection of the biological father, but of the archetype of order itself—the force that confronts chaos, imposes meaning, and demands transformation.”7 This may explain both the reverence and resistance people experience toward divine metaphors; they tap into something beyond memory, something mythic.

It begs the question. What do we do when our metaphor for God is broken by the weight of human failure or wrong theology?

I’ve had to do the hard work of untangling God from my image of a domineering parent, one whose affection was earned by good performance and revoked upon failure. In a heated conversation about one of my career choices, my dad once said, "I can't support you in your decision, therefore I can't love you."

Love was a manipulation and quid pro quo; dependent on approved action, espoused belief, and the performance of a patriarchal posture: one that demanded stoicism, control, and alignment with his version of what it meant to be his son.

This essay was originally written in 2012, just before the birth of my first of four daughters, an experience that began reshaping how I understood God’s nature as both parent and presence. Now, in 2025, as I return to this essay to prepare it for publication, I do so as someone who has been shaped by therapy, EMDR, and a late-in-life diagnosis of ADHD and PTSD; topics I’ve explored more fully in other essays. In the years before my father’s death, I did the slow, honest work of forgiveness. We found a cadence, though tense at times, and I found boundaries helped us navigate our disagreements, and in that rhythm, I found understanding and love. The manipulation and anger I once carried as wounds, I now remember with empathy, as I know his story now, his failures, his unreachable dreams, and his fierce hope for his children. Not to excuse his behavior, but maybe to soften it.

As my own story relates, to identify God as personal, tangible, and finite is always a precarious endeavor, no matter the context or experience of the person.

Making God more personal flattens the divine into a projection of ourselves, and God cannot be contained in our image. G.K. Chesterton once quipped, “When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.”8 This celebration of the invisible, the unknowable, prepares us to encounter a God who does not submit to our categories but instead reveals Himself through action, not essence.

Karl Barth brings clarity here: “The attributes of God describe not His essence but His actions.”9 God is not goodness; God acts good. God is not mercy; God shows mercy. This orientation frees us from being bound to metaphors, while grounding us in relationship. We meet God not in His essence, but in His movement toward us.

With this as our foundation, we are freed to see God our Father in His protection and provision, while recognizing that these qualities are not bound by gender. We are also free to receive God’s affirmation, presence, and care, which often arrive in distinctly maternal ways. The integration of masculine and feminine imagery in our understanding of God is not about collapsing binaries; rather, it is about illuminating the range of emotion within our own experience. This kind of theological imagination may also serve us as we navigate contemporary conversations about gender. Some assert a binary male/female divide; others advocate for a more fluid or linear understanding. I am, biologically, 100% male. But in terms of how I live out my gendered self, I embody traits often labeled feminine—empathy, nurturance, relational sensitivity. My wife, equally and biologically female, embodies what some would describe as more masculine traits—assertiveness, spatial acuity, and direct communication. The nuance is important here, not to undo distinctions, but to resist rigid definitions that fail to capture the complexity of human identity.

This, too, bears witness to the God who creates male and female in His image and yet remains beyond either. And in naming God with both masculine and feminine imagery, we are not defining God, but discovering something about ourselves.

God’s masculine attributes and feminine characteristics do not define Him, but reveal His willingness to be known through the lens of our experience. The mystery is not solved; it is deepened. Rather than seeing God’s immutability in the classical sense, we can speak of steadfastness, that is, a God who is unwavering in love, unshaken in presence, and faithful in pursuit. The God who sees, knows, and saves is not unchanging in the sense of being inert, but in being resolutely for us.

And all of this begins where God begins. The “I Am.” Yahweh. Not a name, but a becoming, an active breath. Not a label, but a mystery unfolding. “I will be what I will be.”10 The God who sees me, the God who knows me, and the God who saves me.

Endnotes

  1. Genesis 3:8 — God walking in the Garden.
  2. Exodus 33:11 — God speaks face to face with Moses, just as a man speaks to a friend.
  3. Genesis 32:24–32 — Jacob wrestles with God.
  4. Matthew 6:9–10 — The Lord’s Prayer.
  5. Frederick Buechner. The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction. HarperOne, 1992.
  6. Isaiah 66:13 — God likened to “a comforting mother.”
    1. Jordan B. Peterson. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Routledge, 1999.
  7. G.K. Chesterton. The Defendant. London: Brimley Johnson and Ince, 1901. Chapter 3, “A Defence of Skeletons.”
  8. Karl Barth. The Epistle to the Romans. Oxford University Press, 1933.
  9. Exodus 3:14 - God responds to Moses' question about His name, "I Am Who I Am."

Some work on the name Yahweh, being the sound of breathing, is also a refreshing image of who God is, in that he is our breath, the rush of wind through our lungs, bringing us life through the constant, in and out of breathing.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner articulates this beautifully: 

“The letters of the Name of God in Hebrew are YOD, HAY, VAV, and HAY… they are all vowels and you cannot pronounce all the vowels at once without risking respiratory injury. This word is the sound of breathing. The holiest Name in the world, the Name of the Creator, is the sound of your own breathing.”  

Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place and I, I Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality, and Ultimate Meaning. Jewish Lights Publishing, 1991.

Similarly, Franciscan friar Richard Rohr reflects on this notion: 

“By our very breathing, we are speaking the name of God and participating in God’s breath. This is our first and our last word as we enter and leave the world.”

Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See. Crossroad Publishing, 2009.