Should a god who is neither male nor female be referred to by a masculine pronoun? Translator Jost Zetzsche raises this question in his essay, Is God Male? The Divine Chinese Pronoun. This problem, inevitable in English, was solved in 1930, Zetzsche tells us, by a Chinese translator who devised a new divine pronoun to supplement the run-of-the-mill set already available: masculine, feminine, and neuter. This divine pronoun is gender free, or more precisely, the portion of the character that specifies gender “signif[ies] something spiritual” and so the Bible reader now knows that “God has no gender aside from being God.”
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