Some feminists argue that it is not enough to use feminine images for God; we must also alter names for God. Consider these claims:
• The word play of Genesis 49:25 between El Shaddai (God Almighty) and shaddim (breasts) demonstrates that the Deity should aptly be named “the God with Breasts.”
• The Eucharist is “a drinking at the breast of God the Mother.”
• When we proclaim that people “must be born again,” we are “urging them to experience the womb and birth canal of God the Mother.”
Some feminist theologians even call for a return to goddess religion. Mary Daly writes of “cutting away the Supreme Phallus,” explaining that the son of a divine patriarch (Jesus) is the one who cannot save women from the horrors of patriarchy. Some biblical revisionists call for a return to deistic terms for God such as Creative Process and Divine Eros. Such terminology so depersonalizes God that he no longer can hear personal prayers or respond to supplications.
Daly’s revision is greater than this, though. She claims that there will be no second coming of Christ, but instead a “surge of consciousness” realized in the Second Coming of Women. It is this men have been dreading, for they will be robbed of their power. She demands that we move beyond the patriarchalism that has resulted in what she calls “Christolatry” (worshiping Christ because he is divine).
An old religion in new clothes
The call for goddess worship is no mere corrective to the worship of Yahweh; it is a call to a new religion. More precisely, it is an old religion in new clothes. In it, the goddess dwelt with a male god as his consort. Pantheons of male and female deities were, like humans, sexually active. The fertility of humanity and the earth was thought to depend on the fertility and the eroticism of the gods. In fact, the development of temple prostitution evolved as persons, through their own eroticism, wanted to inspire the behavior of the gods so that they might again bring fecundity to the earth.
This idea of an impregnating male God and a female deity giving birth to the world appears nowhere in Scripture. While it is true that goddess worship was common, even popular, in the religions of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Canaanites, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, it is regarded only in a negative perspective by the Old Testament writers. Israelite religion, while informing us about the maternal characteristics of God, strongly opposed goddess worship.
There are some who argue that the prophets (and later, Jesus) did not speak of God as Mother because hearers would not have been able to grasp this. But the people of Israel were surrounded by peoples who envisioned their gods in just that way. As Elizabeth Achtemeier remarks, “It must puzzle those feminist theologians, who appeal to the prophets’ championship of the oppressed, that the prophets nevertheless never address God as female,” quite sparingly use female images for God’s activity, “and indeed, condemn the worship of all goddesses.” (See Deuteronomy 16:21; 2 Kings 23:4; Isaiah 27:9; Jeremiah 7:18–20; 17:2; 44:17–23; and Micah 5:13–14.)
Disappointment with goddesses
It is also worth noting that goddess worship can work against feminist goals. In no pagan religion was the goddess the Chieftess; rather, she always played a subordinate role. In the pagan religions mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, El is the senior god, the father of humankind. The goddesses Anat, Baal, and Asherat are all given secondary roles.
And goddesses are always interconnected with motherhood and fertility. In biblical times, infertility was the ultimate curse that could befall a woman. At this time, when feminists are attempting to fight against being reduced to “baby factories,” the appeal to a goddess religion as salvation from patriarchy seems contradictory.
In spite of this, some still call for a return, not only to goddess worship, but also to matriarchal societies in which women ruled in peace and harmony. They stress the move away from the judgmental and bloody Yahweh religion of the Old Testament with its concomitant patriarchal oppression.
That female deities make for a more peaceable religious tradition is contestable. Theologian Susanne Heine writes that the Canaanite goddess Anat “acts just like Yahweh, at least when it comes to annihilating her enemies. Why is Yahweh then accused of violence by feminists and not Anat? At any rate, it is a sign of progress that Yahweh does not wade with joy in the blood of his enemies (as Anat does).”
Further, societies that worshiped goddesses were far more oppressive and patriarchal than that of the Old Testament.
The biblical message is clear: there is no multiplicity of divinities; God needs no female partner to perform the sex act with him, thereby giving birth to the earth and its creatures; God is above the condition of human sexuality. When it comes to goddess worship, the whole tenor of the Hebrew Scriptures is open hostility.
The rejection of goddess worship ultimately comes from understanding that Creator and created are separate. Hebrew society did not reject goddess worship because of its patriarchalism (though it clearly was patriarchal), but because of its awareness of God’s transcendence. God did not create the world as a result of some cosmic sex act, but by a simple verbal command. “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth” (Ps. 33:6). God is not our equal, but our Maker.
By Dale Youngs, associate pastor of Forest Hills Presbyterian Church, Helotes, Texas.
