This is an interesting question. I'm actually surprised I didn't already have a post on the topic, because it's related to the whole firestorm around gender that our culture has been blowing up for a number of years. What makes it a more interesting question is the context. A friend of mine had been talking with some leaders of a Christian camp, and needed to come up with an answer quickly in a face-to-face setting. Apparently he wasn't completely satisfied with his answer. So he asked me. Here's the interchange.
I was asked a question by some college camp counselors which I feel I failed to give an adequate answer. The question was: Is God a male? My initial response was that God certainly reveals himself as a male (Father/Son/He) but that God is also Spirit above our limited concept of man. That being said, we should always pray and refer to God as male for it is His revelation to us.
I recognize that the danger of denying the maleness of God is feminist theology and can result in damage to the roles God has made for men and women.
What is the better answer?
For the record, I really appreciate the fact that to write a blog post I am never actually engaged in giving the answer on the spur of the moment. In fact, what I manage to write is normally different in some ways than what I can answer when the question first comes up.
The first response we want to give to this is to ask what the questioner means by "male." There's a subtle difference, though our culture has mostly tried to erase it, between "sex" and "gender." Sex is a biological reality and has to do with the physical makeup of the being. It can be identified through objective testing. We also (at least way back in the dark ages when I was growing up) refer to "secondary characteristics." For example, a general secondary characteristic of male humans is the growth of more body hair, especially facial hair, development of a lower-register speaking voice, and greater size and upper body musculature development than that of females. The secondary characteristics don't make one male or female, but they serve as general indicators. Males also have a tendency to patterns of thinking, interests, and priorities which differ to some degree from those of females. But I want to be clear that these are simply tendencies.
The issue of gender is subtly different from the issue of sex. For gender, we traditionally use the grammatical terms which were largely developed in Latin grammatical explanations in antiquity. The terms "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter" are the basic grammatical terms, used initially in terms of a language in which all nouns have a gender associated with them. The gender of the noun is no indicator of maleness or femaleness. Male and female basically have to do with procreation, while masculine, feminine, or neuter do not. For instance, the Latin word for "courage" is feminine, but it doesn't indicate that courage is primarily a trait of females. "Book" in Greek is feminine, but in Latin is masculine. That in no way indicates that Greeks considered books to be the domain of women but Romans considered them to be the domain of men.
Similarly, gender types, or clusters of attributes we generally associate with men or with women, have nothing significant to do with biological maleness or femaleness. At times they have a connection with secondary characteristics, but not always. Men have typically been more inclined to engage in physically difficult tasks such as building buildings, fighting wars, and working at a distance from the home. Those activities may well be related to their relative size and muscles. Women have typically been more inclined to engage in tasks more closely related to the home, such as making cloth, preparing ingredients into food that can be used, and tending to smaller animals. Because they are equipped not only to give birth to children, but also to feed children in their earlier years, women have typically engaged in more of the local protection and nurture of the younger members of society. However, in matters which are not closely tied to secondary sexual characteristics, there are plenty of men and women who are skilled at and engage in mastery of them. Men and women alike work with the arts, literary pursuits, elaborate cooking, and aesthetics, among other things. Those are neither "male" nor "female" domains.
Now, what does this have to do with God? We would confess that in the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit, there is no sex. In fact, the Greek word for "Spirit" is a neuter noun (though it is known to be modified into a masculine noun occasionally to refer to God the Spirit). Terms such as "Father" and "Son" are clearly masculine. And there is an important symbolic reason for references to God in masculine terms. Culturally, the father is responsible for creating and sustaining the household. The father is also, typically, the one recognized as bearing the authority to direct the overall course of the family, at least within Hebraic custom and through the majority of Western civilization. God is described in masculine terms, though only Jesus, God the Son, is described in male terms. The God who is not incarnate is neither male nor female, but God incarnate must be, due to the nature of biology.
Another important factor to be considered shows up in Ephesians chapter five. Here, marriage between husband and wife is compared to the relationship of Christ and the church. The husband plays the role of Christ, while the wife plays the role of the church. The overall concept is that as Christ leads the church, so the husband leads the family. As Christ lays down his life for the good of the church, so the husband lays down his life for the good of the wife (and the rest of the family).
Our current culture has developed a concept of the "male" or the "masculine" as being identical, and, in some ways, departing from the order which the Scripture would give it. Rather than laying down the life for the family, men are considered as dictators over their families, little tyrants, and those who make decisions to serve themselves. That isn't the way the Bible would describe them. Likewise, our culture describes "female" or "feminine" as being an oppressed class which needs to engage in social revolution and force the oppressive dictators to succumb to them. In this view of sex and gender, nobody wins without doing harm to others.
God is described in Scripture as a loving father, who gives of himself so as to care for others. He's the true model of masculinity. He's the one the Christian is to imitate.
Now, how do we boil this down for the leaders of a Christian camp to communicate to others in a couple of minutes? We probably can't. However, the leaders can model the characteristics of godliness, which includes a right understanding and expression of the gender roles in which God has placed them, influenced by the characteristics of their sexual reality.