Who is she,
neither male nor female,
maker of all things
only glimpsed or hinted,
source of life and gender?
She is God,
mother, sister, lover:
in her love we wake,
move and grow, are daunted,
triumph and surrender.
So begins a recent hymn written from a feminist perspective. Two lines from a Jewish feminist doxology read:
Blessed is She who in the beginning gave birth …
Blessed is She whose womb covers the earth.
For most Christians, the impact of feminism is doubtless less extreme than these two examples. There are few of us, however, who have not heard the Lord’s Prayer begun, “Our Father/Mother, who is in heaven,” or have not noticed a “Timeless One” in place of “Father” in pastoral prayers.
Inclusive language and feminist theology: What is behind it, and where might it lead? Increasingly, our churches will be confronted by the issue. Is it possible to think about it and not simply be buffeted between the poles of convention and trend? Perhaps a look at the wider context of the issue will help.
Below And Above
In the last 50 years it has been customary in academic circles to do theology “from below.” From below means that we begin to speak of God from where we are rather than beginning “from above” with such things as the attributes of God or the Trinity, which can be known only by revelation. From below is primarily a method. It has enabled theologians to break away from older approaches, often rooted in rationalism, and freed them to discuss theology from contemporary perspectives, which today are largely social and ethical.
As a method, from below is both justifiable and desirable. Calvin began his Institutes by discussing how we can know God, Luther launched the Reformation because of his deep struggle to find a merciful God, and Augustine discovered grace only after despairing over his sinfulness. Jesus’ parables and Paul’s wrestling with sin and law (as recorded in Romans 7) began from below, too. This is proper, for the meaning of the Incarnation is that God meets us where we are.
A problem arises, however, when from below is not only a point of departure but determines all that comes after it. When that happens, we are told we may speak properly of God or the Bible only when such statements agree with human experience.
Take the understanding of Christ as an example. Recent biblical scholarship has concentrated on the human side of Jesus—his identification with sinners, his involvement in the process of liberation, or his death as an example of suffering love. But contemporary scholarship has been reticent about discussing his divine nature—including the performance of miracles and atonement for sin.
On the positive side, understanding Christ from below has helped us not to overemphasize his divine nature at the expense of his humanness, and hence his radical identification with sinners. It has helped us accept that Jesus “pitched his tent among us,” to render the Greek of John 1:14 literally.
A Christology done only from below, however, has the negative effect of limiting Christ to less than the complete biblical report about him. It is like a ham operator who limits his reception to those radio frequencies which he has discovered on his own. If he were more trusting of his manual he could learn other frequencies, which would enlarge his reception from the transmitter.
Promethean Aims
Feminist theology, likewise, starts from below. In doing so it offers promise in providing a new and needed “radio frequency” from Scripture. But it is also dangerous—if Scripture and theology are judged by that “frequency” alone.
Feminist theology concerns itself with woman’s role in Creation, redemption, and the church. Such questions are intensified by the fact that, in two millenia of church history, women have rarely been allowed to tell their own story. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, half the human race has been spoken for (or to), but essentially deprived of a voice in behalf of its own image, faith, and community.
Feminist theology, however, has gone beyond its origins in women’s suffrage and civil rights. With Promethean intimations it is clamoring for a resymbolization of Christianity, based on categories of feminism. Such theology, to quote Elizabeth Achtemeier of Union Theological Seminary (Va.), is “in the process of laying the foundations for a new faith and a new church that are, at best, only loosely related to apostolic Christianity.” Feminists who desire to change the names of God from Father, King, and Lord, to “Womb of Being,” “Immanent Mother,” “Life Force,” “Divine Generatrix,” or “Ground of Being” are not merely switching labels on a product. They are advocating a shift from a transcendent God to a creation-centered deity. God is no longer our father in heaven, but a “womb covering the earth.”
Tackling The Issue
Donald Bloesch tackles the issue of feminist resymbolizations in a recent book, The Battle for the Trinity (Servant, 1985). Following his earlier Is the Bible Sexist? (Crossway, 1982), Bloesch, who considers himself pro-woman, sees the Achilles’ heel (should we say “Penelope’s loom”?) of radical feminism as determined by and limited to thinking from below (although he does not use that expression). “For nearly all feminists, the final court of appeal is human experience, particularly feminine experience,” he writes. “The Bible … is treated not as an inspired witness to a unique and definitive revelation of God in the history of the people of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ, but as an illuminating record of the struggles of the people of Israel for liberation from political and economic enslavement.…”
Bloesch argues that such resymbolizations of God are, intentionally or not, moving in one of two directions. They lead to making God an abstraction (as opposed to a person) and light-years removed in transcendence. Or, with their insistence on an androgynous Godhead (“God/dess,” “Creator/Creatrix,” “Father/Mother”), they augur a return to fertility worship.
To quote Elizabeth Achtemeier again, “I am sure that much of feminist theology is a return to Baalism.… Many women, in their dedication to the feminist movement, are being slowly wooed into a new form of religion, widely at variance with the Christian faith. Most such women have no desire to desert their Christian roots, any more than many German Christians had when they accepted National Socialism’s resymbolization of the faith in Nazi Germany.”
The crucial question arises when from below conflicts with from above, when our isms differ from God’s Word. Consider this question from Katharine Sakenfeld in Feminist Interpretion of the Bible: “How can feminists use the Bible, if at all?” The structure of the question determines that the Bible is a lesser authority than feminism. But surely this cannot be the proper question. The Bible is not a tool to be used by a special-interest group. What if we rephrased the question, “How can Madison Avenue use the Bible?” or “How can the Ku Klux Klan use the Bible?” Then the Bible would depend on the means and ends of free-enterprise economics or racism.
To be biblically proper we must reverse the question. God does not bear our image; we bear his. It is God’s Word, Jesus Christ, who tells us who we are and what we may become. If the Bible is the record of God’s redemption of estranged and disobedient creation, then all life—and all life’s institutions, philosophies, isms, and ideologies—stand under God’s judgment and grace. In the light of revelation we are revealed for the sinners and idolaters that we are, and in its light we are promised transformation according to the image of Jesus Christ.
The Bible is the story of God’s judgment on all human prospects and institutions, and also of his transformation of them by grace in Christ. It judges all forms of pride and serves none. No endeavors—in this case feminism—stand apart from God’s judgment.
The Relevance Of Barmen
This was precisely what the confessing church intrepidly declared at Barmen in 1934 against the rising tide of the German Christianity. The Barmen Declaration rejected the “false doctrine” that there was a source of the church’s proclamation other than the Word of God, that some areas of life might not belong to Jesus Christ, or that the church might change its message to appease current ideologies (see Articles 1, 2, and 3).
What radical feminists are proposing—and what the church must reject—is that biblical language (and hence thought) about God are simply products of human experience and may vary as conceptions of human experience vary. To this the church must say, with the clarity of Barmen, that it cannot place “the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrary chosen desires, purposes, and plans” (Article 6).
When, for example, Jesus called God “Father” he was not merely following convention. True, Jewish society of his day was patriarchal (though less so than its neighbors), but this does not account for Jesus’ use of “Father.” Prof. Joachim Jeremias undertook a massive study of the Aramaic behind the Greek patér (“father”). Two of his conclusions belong to the assured results of New Testament scholarship—whether liberal or conservative. First, no evidence has yet been found in the literature of Palestine of “my Father” being used by an individual as an address to God—a remarkable fact considering the Jewish Talmud extends nearly to the length of the Encyclopedia Britannica!
It was the custom in postexilic Judaism to avoid out of reverence the name of God whenever possible. Sometimes, for example, the passive voice was used; or “Adonai” was substituted for the ineffable “Yahweh”; or “blessed be he” was repeated when God’s name could not be avoided. In startling contrast, Jesus not only called God “Father,” but “Abba” (Mark 14:36), an Aramaic diminutive equivalent to “papa” or “daddy.” Not just on certain occasions did Jesus call God Abba, but on every occasion.
This is Jeremias’s second conclusion. The Jews of Jesus’ day would have been scandalized to presume such familiarity with the Almighty and Holy One. Jesus, however, not only addressed God with the warmth and security of a child addressing its father, but he taught his disciples to do the same (Gal. 4:6). Most important for our purposes, the fatherhood of God was determinative for Jesus’ self-understanding—and for that of his disciples. In his study The Teaching of Jesus, T. W. Manson puts it succinctly: “For [Jesus] the Father was the supreme reality in the world and in his own life; and his teaching would make the Father have the same place and power in the life of his disciples, that they too may be heirs, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ.”
“Abba-theology” calls into question a purely transcendent God-concept (“Eternal or Divine Spirit,” “Ineffable Force,” “Omnipotent One,” and so on) as well as an impersonal God-concept, such as “Parent” (with Jesus as corresponding “Offspring”). “Parent” may do for functional objectivity, but “Father” or “Abba” involves the speaker in a relationship of intimacy and trust, as Jesus both exemplified and taught his followers.
Why Not Mother-God?
Some ask, “Why not then a Mother-God concept?” Motherhood, after all, avoids exclusive transcendence and impersonality (perhaps better than fatherhood). Several metaphors in the Bible speak of God in feminine imagery: Wisdom in Proverbs 8, love in Isaiah 49 and 66, or Jesus’ likening himself to a mother hen (Matt. 23:37), or God to a woman cleaning house (Luke 15:8–10). The question is whether or not these occasional images are to be understood as normative teaching about God. While recognizing their partial validity, they are not the norm in Scripture. They are not the preferred speech of the Pentateuch, Prophets, Jesus, or apostolic church. The Hebrew language does not even have a word for “goddess.”
A Mother-God concept is further imperiled because the Judeo-Christian tradition knows nothing of an androgynous Godhead; that is, God does not need a female counterpart to complete his identity. When a female counterpart is present, fertility worship, or neo-Baalism, lurks beneath. Elaine Pagels notes, “Unlike many of his contemporaries among the deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shares his power with no female divinity, nor is he the divine Husband or Lover of any. He scarcely can be characterized by any but masculine epithets: King, Lord, Master, Judge, and Father.”
Today the Unification Church, for example, teaches a bisexual Godhead: “Just as for physical birth, for spiritual birth to occur there must be not only a True Father, but also a True Mother. Consequently, after the crucifixion, God gave Jesus the Holy Spirit as a mother spirit, or feminine spirit, to work with the risen Christ in Eve’s place” (The Unification News, Nov. 1985).
The Kingdom Of God
“Abba” is not the only important theme in Jesus’ language. More significant is the theme of the kingdom of God. The kingdom—or better, the active reign of God—is the dominant theme of the Gospels, the single reality for which Jesus lives, teaches, and dies. God’s reign means kingly rule as well as faithfulness to the covenantal relationship with Israel and the church.
Although the idea of God as king is present in the Old Testament, oddly enough, the expression “kingdom of God” occurs neither in the Old Testament nor Apocrypha. In the speech of Jesus, however, it is a necessity—occurring 51 times in Matthew’s gospel alone.
In Is the Bible Sexist? Donald Bloesch asserts, “The debate over sexist language is ultimately a debate concerning the nature of God.” What God’s nature is in itself, the Bible does not say. Presumably God’s nature is beyond gender. Nevertheless, according to the biblical tradition, God chooses to relate to creation in a masculine way, as Abba and King.
This is supported not only by Jesus’ use of “Abba” and “kingdom of God,” but especially by the use of “Lord” in the Bible, a term of sovereign freedom and authority that occurs nearly twice as often as a reference to God does than the word “God” itself. As Creator, God is sovereign initiator; as Sustainer, kingly ruler; and as Redeemer, he is self-sacrificer in Christ—and ultimately Consummator. Paul makes it clear there can be no doubt that God’s initiative and power alone effect salvation (see Rom. 3:23–25 and 5:8–10). To shift this emphasis from a sovereign theocentrism to creation-centrism—whether feminist or otherwise—is no longer innovation but error.
Objections To The Masculine
Feminists reject masculine nomenclature for God, as I see it, generally for one of two reasons. Some see masculine images and nomenclature used by men to exclude women from ministry and (worse yet) from bearing God’s likeness. Whenever men do this they tacitly claim that they are more like God than women. This, of course, is heresy—indeed the oldest of heresies, attempting to make God in our image. Women bear God’s image equally with men (Gen. 1:27), and biblical scholarship increasingly is revealing the important role women played in salvation history and must regain in the life of the church. But to reject masculine imagery of God for this reason is to take a right step in the wrong direction, so to speak. The error lies in the misuse of truth, not with the truth.
To say that God relates to creation in a masculine way does not mean that men are superior to women. The Bible characteristically speaks of God’s covenant relationship with his people with three paired images: husband/wife, father/child, king/subjects. But note that the latter halves of these pairs include both male and female.
In the first image, both Israel and the church are feminine in relation to God. The chief metaphor of the prophets to castigate Israel’s apostasy, for example, was that of “adultery,” and in the New Testament, the church can be referred to in the imagery of a bride. The father/child image stems from the Exodus when Yahweh first called Israel his son (Exod. 4:23; Hos. 11). Because of Israel’s failure to live in filial obedience to God, Israel’s redemption would come, not surprisingly, from an obedient Son who would call God “Abba” and teach his disciples likewise.
The final image has a long history in the Bible. In early Israel, Yahweh alone was king (Judg. 8:23). During the monarchy, the king ideally was Yahweh’s vice-regent (Pss. 2, 72), and in Jesus, as we have seen, God’s kingly rule is present in the person of his Son. In each image, Israel and the church (again, including both men and women) are responsive, filial, and obeisant to God.
The idea of subordination may lead to a second reason why feminists reject masculine imagery for God. This reason is not unique to feminists: some process thinkers and liberation theologians reject subordination with different names and reasons. The rejection is especially prevalent in thinkers committed to democratic or egalitarian ideals, for whom the idea of “lordship” is seen with reserve or repugnance. Underlying this attitude is the belief that man (especially the individual) is the cosmic fulcrum upon which reality balances. The chief end of man has become himself.
I think of it as a revolt from below because it subordinates all other realities, including God, to human experience and self. The result, as Elizabeth Achtemeier rightly sees, is a different faith and church.
Ultimately, the question of feminist resymbolization of God—or any resymbolization—depends on one’s view of revelation. If one believes the biblical story to be primarily a record of an evolving consciousness of God, or that the revelation, if it has occurred, was determined by patriarchal norms, then the proposed resymbolization is permissible and perhaps demanded. If, however, one believes that Jesus Christ is the self-disclosure of God within the fullness of time, then this once-for-all historical act is itself the norm for all human experience.
We begin from below with all life’s questions and possibilities, for this is the meaning of the Incarnation—God become man, God meeting us in human experience. But we need not remain below; indeed, we cannot remain below. To paraphrase Jesus’ words to Nicodemus, we are invited to receive from above that which chastens and completes our existence.
