From Where I Stand: Limiting God?
Language is important. The way we think and talk about people and ideas affects our perception and understanding of them. When my daughter was a baby, she didn't have much hair. Joy and I would take her out somewhere, and people would come up to see the beautiful new baby (she was and is beautiful). It didn't matter that she was dressed in a frilly pink dress with a pink bow on her head. People regularly referred to her as a good looking young boy. The perception of who they thought our daughter was didn't change who she was, but it did limit their vision and their ability to see her. That is one of the ways that we limit God. Our language about God is often gendered. I think most people would agree that God is neither male nor female, but calling God "he" all of the time overtly and covertly limits our vision of who God really is. If God is primarily male, then God is only secondarily female. If we persist in that line of thinking, it is easy to see how we might become mired in patterns of sexist thought. The same types of problems arise when we think of God as being of a particular ethnicity, color, or any purely human attribute. If God is more like one kind of people (usually with whom we identify), then God is less like another kind of people. The way we think and speak about God doesn't really limit God, but it limits our ability to see God in all of their fullness. There's another limiting factor that we place on God--the ability for God to call whomever God chooses to do God’s work. In the United Methodist Church, a recent ruling was passed denying members of the