God as She

 

God as She

January 30, 2022

 

Today the Rev. Patty Ebner, a pastor of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, of Bellevue, Washington, gave a wonderful sermon on the importance of our using female language for God. She reminded me that in the summer of 1998 I took a Christology course from the great Roman Catholic feminist theologian (yes, there really are such people) Elizabeth A. Johnson, who was a visiting scholar that summer at Seattle University, where I was in seminary. She goes by Beth not Elizabeth, and ten years later she wrote a very flattering endorsement of my first book, Liberating Christianity. One of Beth’s major themes is that what became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth was the feminine manifestation of God Sophia who appears in Proverbs in in books that are Apocryphal in the Protestant tradition but canonical in the Catholic tradition like Sirach and The Wisdom of Solomon. By New Testament times a sexist culture had changed the feminine noun Sophia into the masculine noun Logos, the Word, although the early Roman Christians did name the great cathedral church in Constantinople Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. In her great book She Who Is (if you haven’t read it, please do), Beth says repeatedly that “the image of God functions.” She means, quite correctly, that the way we think of God influences every aspect of our lives. She also says that the image of God as feminine works as well, and as poorly, as the image of God as masculine. She taught me that changing our words for God from masculine to an impersonal neuter is better than nothing, but it’s not enough. Calling God Creator is better than calling God Father, but if we are ever to get beyond our faith tradition’s androcentrism and even misogyny we must start calling God she and Mother.

It is undeniable that the Judeo-Christian tradition has given us a male God. Oh sure. We all say we know that God isn’t male, but look at the language we use. We call God Father not Mother. We call the second person of the Trinity the Son. We worship a male human being who we say is God Incarnate, not a female one. Our tradition calls him Lord, definitely a male term. We begin the prayer we say he taught us, “Our Father” not “Our Mother.” In my particular tradition we sometimes change that second word to Creator, but we rarely if ever change it to Mother. How did we get here, and what are we going to do about it?

The simple answer to how we got here is that our Christian faith has roots in and grew out of ancient Judaism. Scholars tell us that the stories in the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) go back at least to 1200 BCE and probably much farther back than that. Ancient Judaism differed from the other religions of the ancient world, though not in the way most people think it did. Except for Judaism, all of the religions of the ancient world were polytheistic. They worshipped multiple gods. Many if not all of them also worshipped goddesses. The religion of the people the Bible tells us occupied what would become Israel, the Canaanites, had as their main god the very masculine god Baal, but Baal wasn’t the only deity in that tradition. Baal had a divine female consort named Ashera. Around the time of Jesus a cult developed in the Mediterranean world around the Egyptian goddess Isis. You may well have heard of ancient Greek goddesses like Athena. The ancient world was full of female images of the divine.

Israel wasn’t. Hebrew faith differed from other ancient faiths, but not for a long time because it was monotheistic. Until the mid-6^th century BCE it wasn’t monotheistic. It was what we call henotheistic. Israel’s henotheism did not deny the reality of other people’s gods and goddesses the way monotheism does. It said only that the Hebrew people were to worship only one god. That god’s name was YHVH. Hebrew was spelled without vowels, which is why there are none in that name. The name is usually transliterated into English as Yahweh (w not v because we use the German transliteration. Don’t ask me why) though some still transliterate it as Jehovah. The Old Testament of ten refers to Yahweh as “your” or “our” God. Yahweh was at first and for a long time the people’s war god, and he was definitely male. For an ancient Bible verse that sees Yahweh as a war god see Exodus 15:20-21, where the prophetess Miriam leads the women of the tribe that has just escaped from Egypt in singing praises to Yahweh, who, she says, has just defeated the Egyptian army for them. (Your English translation may say Lord here not Yahweh, with Lord typed in what are called small caps. In the Old Testament, when you see the word Lord printed that way you know that the Hebrew word being rendered into English is YHVH. And by the way, Lord typed that way in the Old Testament never means Jesus.) Ancient Israel had no god but Yahweh, and Yahweh was aggressively male. War gods usually are. In the mid-sixth century BCE, during the Babylonian exile, an Israeli prophet developed true monotheism for the first time in human history. For an example of a biblical text that expresses that monotheism see Isaiah 45:1-7. The “Cyrus” the text refers to is Cyrus the Great, King of Persia. Yet that one and only God was still Yahweh, and in the Jewish tradition Yahweh never ceased to be male. The Israelites referred to Yahweh using only masculine language. They always called God he. They certainly never called God she.

The earliest Christians may not have called God Yahweh, but they inherited the Jewish conception of God as male nonetheless. Search the New Testament for a reference to God as female. You won’t find it. It isn’t there. Many of the earliest Christians believed that God, expressed as the masculine noun Word, became incarnate in the male human being Jesus of Nazareth. The earliest New Testament documents are the authentic letters of Paul. Paul called God Father never Mother. All of the New Testament documents were writen in and for a Greek-speaking culture that was patriarchal and androcentric if not downright misogynist. None of the New Testament authors saw any reason not to call God he. That, after all, is what their mother faith of Judaism called God. Also, when the New Testament refers to scripture it means the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that retained the Hebrew Bible’s exclusively masculine language for God. Except for a few lonely voices like Beth Johnson that cry out for us to use female images for God, Christian language for God has been almost exclusively male ever since.

So. Is God male? Of course not. God transcends all human characteristics including gender. Most Christians today will acknowledge the truth of that statement. Yet we relate to God using terms that come from our lived human experience as human beings that are almost exclusively male. But if God transcends us absolutely, and God does, and we relate to God using human terms, why can’t we use feminine terms to refer to God? The answers is, there is no reason whatsoever that we can’t. We can. As Beth Johnson says, female terms for God work as well, and as poorly, as male ones do.

Some Christians today get it. The feminist theologians both Protestant and Catholic do. My favorite modern hymn does too. The second verse of the hymn “Bring Many Names” by Brian Wren goes”

 

Strong mother God, working night and day,

planning all the wonders of creation,

setting each equation, genius at play.

Hail and Hosanna! Strong mother God!

 

Not only does Wren call God mother, he turns our usual gender stereotypes upside down. His next verse is about “warm father God, hugging every child,” for which we should all give him our most sincere thanks.

So what are we doing to do about it? Let me suggest something as a way to begin. Try thinking of God as Mother not Father. Start the Lord’s Prayer “Our Mother,” not “Our Father.” Try thinking of God as Mother of all creation. Call God she not he. I’ll tell you that when I do that I feel very differently about God. Yes, it’s hard to get beyond our gender stereotypes the way Brian Wren does, but what images does thinking of God as feminine bring to mind? Certainly not vengeful anger, judgment, and eternal damnation, things our tradition has so frequently (and so wrongly) attributed to God. When I call God Mother or she I think first of all of maternal love. I know that not all people are lucky enough to have human mothers like this, but when I think of God as Mother I think first of all of maternal love. Unconditional love that never gives up on anyone and is always more than happy to welcome her children home. I think of a hospitable God always happy to have us drop in for a visit. I think of birth, of all creation being born from God. I do get a very different sense of God indeed than I get when I think of God as male. I know that thinking of God as feminine isn’t easy for most of us. We’ve all been thoroughly conditioned by our tradition to think of God as male even when we say we know that God isn’t male. But give it a try. You may find that doing so opens up a whole new and wonderful way of relating to God for you. May it be so.