As a Christian with a high view of Scripture, I believe in the full equality of women and men.

I fully support women’s ordination. I think that the idea that men have some kind of inherent moral authority over women is not only wrong but dangerously wrong. (For those of you who think that these views don’t align with Scripture or with my asserted high view of the latter, take a look at this site.) I also do not believe that God has an inherent gender: he is neither inherently male, nor is she inherently female. The biblical portrayal of God as male is primarily due to the necessities and norms of the cultures within which the Bible was composed, not to some actual divine gender quality. Men and women equally bear the image of God (Genesis 1.27).

As a Christian with a high view of Scripture, I also believe in the second coming of the divine Jesus Christ, an event referenced throughout the New Testament. (Incidentally, the modern American idea of a ‘rapture’ is, in my opinion, a theological absurdity based on a serious misreading of the one single biblical text with any hint of the idea.) The second coming of Christ has been a key belief throughout the history of Christianity.

Believing then that men and women are equal, that God has no gender,  and that the divine Jesus will return, a question naturally arises.

What if Christ returned as a woman?

Just asking this question would shock a heckuva lot of people. In fact, some of you may already be branding me a heretic, or at least a misguided wannabe theologian with too much time on his hands. But I believe that if we take the Bible seriously, this question must be asked.

I brought up this idea to my cousin Mike, an actual theology student (at Yale), to see if he could think of any biblical objections to the idea. Nothing. He found the possibility intriguing. He had, as usual, an interesting insight: Christ returning as a woman would catch many Christians totally off guard, just like Christ’s original coming, as a humble carpenter and itinerant preacher, caught many of the Jews totally off guard, since most expected a liberating warrior-messiah-king. To expand on Mike’s thought: Maybe, like the Jews before the Incarnation, we’re reading the biblical descriptions in a way that totally leaves out what could actually happen. There’s a nice symmetry there, and it’s consistent with the way God works in the world (ie, in upside-down, least-expected ways) to think that Jesus could show up as a woman.

The return of Christ to Earth is often spoken of as a surprising event, unlooked-for, ‘like a thief in the night’ (1 Thess. 5.9). What better way to surprise the world than for God to appear in female form?