Feminized Christianity, anyone?

That's worse than the "Jesus is my boyfriend" praise songs that I have to suffer through in my oh so contemperary non-denominational seeker friendly church. If I can't tell whether the person we are singing about is the Logos through whom all was created or the cover model on a dimestore Harlequin then Houston we have a problem.

Compared to 3 millenia of patriarchy, a little feminzaiton will not bring down Christ's church. Yes, as sigaliris says, Jesus had a penis. But if the incarnation was to save what the Logos took on in flesh, and if both Male and Female who are baptized into Christ are saved by that incarnation, then it cannot be Jesus' maleness that saves us, but the union of his divinity and humanity.

All that said, this hymn is a little inane, but not because I'm scared of femininity.

No, men don't project their own image and traits onto God, He has done so to men.

"this hymn is a little inane."

Ya think?

Rod, you and your family will be receiving my possibly heterodox but heartfelt prayers.

In addition to the complaints about the heterodoxy of this hymn, it's just plain terrible writing! Like virtually every single hymn composed since 1960, it has utterly devoid of any literary merit. It is, I suspect, an act of mercy that we have not been given the tune to it.

My personal opinion (following the Pontificator) is that all songs written since 1960 should be banned outright. It's true that there have been a few good ones, and such a ban ought only to be temporary (100 years or so), but right now our clergy & music ministers are utterly incapable of discerning what is sacred music and what should never be sung.

But God has not revealed Himself as white, or black, or gay. So if indeed there are people who make such bizarre claims, they are founded only in their own imaginations.

Through Jesus Christ, however, God HAS revealed Himself as Father.

Rod, I'm a consider myself conservative evangelical in my theology. I do believe it is God's self-revelation that is the initiation of our religion, and I believe it was an event in history (the Logos incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth) and in that man he prayer to "The Father". I agree this is an important part of our the preaching of the church, but can we do that without using exclusively male terms for every and all discussion of who God is? The preaching of the church should witness to this historical event, but it should also witness to the fact that the God in whose image both male and female were created has been dominated by patriarchal cultural language often to the marginalization of women.

"Through Jesus Christ, however, God HAS revealed Himself as Father"...
of course, that also could be regarded as a "bizarre claim"...
ancient Myths don't have any advantage over modern Myths...
Jesus was most likely a real mortal man...
but the Christ Myth was invented by superstitious ancient men...
and were "founded only in their own imaginations"...

the spiritual value of this modern Mothering God Myth versus the spiritual value of the ancient Christ Myth is just a matter of personal preference...
since it's very unlikely that either Myth is a good match with Reality...

faith hope love joy peace to all...

I think the revelation of God as primarily male is related more to the role of fathers in the ancient world. The men were responsible for their families and off spring in a very profound way. Everything depended on his goodness or lack there of. If a woman was a poor mother, the family had hope of blessings and redemption through the goodness of their father. However, if the father was a poor father, a good mother could do very little to elevate her family past her husband's failures. So a good father was revered in the ancient world.
However, I find the idea that God revealed himself as male through Jesus ridiculous in the extreme. Jesus had to be one or the other, for heaven's sake! His existance on earth in a male body made things easier, but should hardly be viewed as an endorsement or elevation of one sex over the other.
And the fact is that there are places in scriptures where God identifies with mothers. They are far less frequent than father identifications, but they are certainly there and no irrelevant, I think.
However, as a practical matter singing praises to God as mother is problematic when it comes to the balance of men and women in church and how each experiences their faith. Religion has been carried on the backs of women from the very ealiest days. One of the things which made Christianity so radical in its earliest days was the fact that there were more female converts among the rich, so many rich Christian women married men of far lower social status than themselves. But men are important to the faith, and as equals in creation are as in need of God's saving grace as women. It seems unwise to do things which uneccesarily alienate men (not for any chauvanist reasons, just because a full grown man probably has had enough of mothering without having God join in) and do almost nothing for the women. I think it is good for us to be taught to consider the feminine, mothering aspects of God (after all both men and women are created in His image), but singing praises in the trite way found in the song above seems like overkill. However, to be perfectly honest, as a conservative bible beater, I'm having a hard time thinking of a legitimate argument for why the song is theologically incorrect. I just think it's unnecessary and unhelpful.

Rod:

No wonder you posted so much today :-( Thoughts and prayers to you and your family.

One of my biggest objections to fundamentalism in general is the idea that unerrant word of G-d has, oh by the way, been written down and then translated over and over again BY IMPERFECT MEN AND WOMEN, **NOT** A PERFECT G-D, from ancient Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to Latin to Old and Middle English to Modern English. (At least.) Not to mention the dozens of different translations in Middle to Modern English used today.

Any chance some subtleties, or not-so-subtleties, could have been lost (or gained) along the way? Ya think?

That, and what Elizabeth noted about the patriarchal nature of society in the Israel of the Old and New Testaments, makes me question the truly revelatory nature of G-d being male. (Let's not even get into how this justifies the Catholic male priesthood ...)

Then again, I'm progressive, not traditionalist, in general. So make of that what you will.

Not that I think G-d is female, either; I think G-d is G-d. Which means we have SOME common ground:

I think the hymn is stupid, too.

Sig, I was looking this morning for an excellent essay I read years ago explaining how the entire Christian "set-up," for lack of a better term, fails to work if we cease to think of God as Father (and follow the other traditional, patriarchal forms handed down to us in Holy Scripture). I thought maybe I'd read it in First Things, but I guess I'm wrong. I did, however, find an essay in First Things from a Jewish perspective that considers the same question, and answers it in a way that orthodox Christians can pretty much accept. Here is that essay. And here is a key excerpt -- sorry about the length, but I won't be able to come back to the blog till later today:
---
From Matthew Berke, "God and Gender in Judaism" (First Things, 1996):

The idea behind gender sensitivity is that religious teaching and liturgy should reflect the religious equality of women-as full partners in the covenant and as creatures equally made b’tselem elohim, "in the image of God." Many women say they feel excluded by a theological and liturgical vocabulary that is overwhelmingly masculine: they can neither relate to nor find any self-reflection in the awesome, patriarchal God-figure who relies so heavily on power, fear, rules, and hierarchy. To include women in the religious life of the Jewish community, they argue, God must be re-imaged in a way that incorporates the feminine aspects of the divine nature.

Liturgical reformers contend that such reimaging is easily accommodated within a traditional Jewish framework. After all, it is argued, the sages insisted that God has no body and is beyond the categories of male and female, incorporating both but limited by neither. The ancient rabbis were aware that God is eyn sof-unknowable, unfathomable, indescribable-and they regarded all God-language as approximate and figurative. Even in the Bible itself, as well as in mystical texts and other writings, feminine imagery is occasionally employed to describe God. The dominant imagery is masculine, the revisers claim, only because women have been powerless and marginalized throughout Jewish history; their voices have been silenced by men who have had all the power and who, idolatrously, projected onto God their own male image. This male- centered social construction of God has been a perennial instrument of oppression against women, and serves, even today, to define women as inferior and radically "other"-religiously, culturally, and politically. If Judaism is to survive and flourish, it cannot afford to alienate half of its members with outdated sexist language and conceptualizations.
The question arises, then: Is there any reason, in the face of such potent challenges, to insist on the continued pervasiveness of masculine God imagery? In fact, there is good reason for both women and men to refrain from embracing the new feminized liturgies. God-language is loaded (to borrow Marx’s famous phrase about commodities) with "metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" such that seemingly innocent revisions change the religious substance of Judaism in unexpected and undesired ways.

One may readily concede that all God-language is in some sense figurative, that human language and understanding are unable to grasp the Ultimate. However, it does not follow that all figurative language is therefore equal in approximating the mystery of the divine. Though we never penetrate to the inner reality of God, we do encounter Him in certain relationships that are humanly describable, however imperfectly. To address God as Father or Lord or King does not identify the sex or describe the essential being of God so much as it defines certain relationships between Him and us. While the God we pray to is beyond male or female, He has chosen to disclose Himself in distinctly masculine ways that are structured into the meanings of the Torah and the prayerbook, and cannot therefore simply be altered at will.

For God’s divine parenthood, neither mother nor father is an entirely satisfactory metaphor. Children have a genetic link to their natural mothers and fathers, whereas God’s parenthood involves no genetic connection and no role for sex or procreation. Nevertheless, parenthood is a necessary metaphor for God’s relation to humankind: it expresses the sense of personal care and solicitude that the words Creator and Maker fail to capture. Because generic parenthood is a meaningless concept-we have no sense or experience of a generic parent-we are stuck with the alternatives of mother and father.
There can be little doubt that, for Judaism, divine parenthood is better symbolized by fatherhood than motherhood, or at least that fatherhood is far less problematic than motherhood. In Genesis, God-like a father- generates outside of Himself. In the creation myth of feminine deities, however, everything emerges from the womb of the Mother God, conveying a sense that the world is an emanation or extension of the divine, and therefore divinized, as in pantheism. But at the very center of Jewish monotheism is the denial of a divinized nature: Nature is good, because God has made it so, but nature is not divine, and human beings are not made of godstuff.

The moral and theological implications of the Mother God and "birth metaphor" have been cogently described by Rabbi Paula Reimers in her essay "Feminism, Judaism, and God the Mother" (Conservative Judaism, Fall 1993). If "the universe and its processes are ’birthed’ by the deity," Rabbi Reimers argues, then nature and its cycles are "held to be an expression of the divine will." In such a cosmology, good and evil lose all meaning, everything being good in its proper time. Suffering and death no less than flourishing and life are to be regarded as "necessary stations on the great wheel of existence." In a "birthed" universe, moreover, "human beings are not qualitatively different from anything else that exists. They share in the divine essence, as children of the goddess, but only to the same extent that everything else does. Human life objectively is no more or less significant than the life of animals or plants. . . . Human free will is dissolved in the face of the determinism of nature." Human beings need follow no moral standard other than to accept and submit "to the divine rhythm of existence, of which they are a part."

Rabbi Reimers contrasts the "inherent pantheism of goddess religion, rooted in the birth metaphor," with Jewish monotheism, which "is rooted in the creation metaphor of Genesis." In Judaism, nature and humanity emerge not as part of an undifferentiated birth of the universe, but through discrete acts of creation in which all things are appointed a place in the hierarchy of the world. Good and evil, right and wrong, are known not by reference to nature’s processes, impulses, and vitalities, but through the words and commandments of a transcendent God. Because God is not identified with the cycles of natural recurrence but with unique revelations and mighty acts-especially the Covenant-time is given meaning by progressive development, and history is imbued with direction and purpose. Human beings are not permitted to view themselves or their impulses as divine; they are to understand themselves, rather, as creatures made "in the image and likeness of God," with a dignity and worth above the rest of nature, and with free will to act according to transcendent laws concerning good and evil.

The Father-God metaphor, then, while revealing certain limits and imperfections of human language and understanding, provides a better symbolization than motherhood of the sense of distance in the divine- human relationship and is less likely therefore to invite a pantheistic cosmology. As Rabbi Reimers explains, "Those who want to use God/She language want to affirm womanhood and the feminine aspect of the deity. They do this by emphasizing that which most clearly distinguishes the female experience from the male. A male or female deity can create through speech or through action, but the metaphor for creation which is uniquely feminine is birth. Once God is called female, then, the metaphor of birth and the identification of the deity with nature and its processes become inevitable." Her last point is not a matter of mere conjecture or speculation: in ancient times female deities were in fact seen as having given birth to the world, with nature-worship following almost invariably. Today, too, feminist theology regularly falls back upon the birth metaphor, and, not surprisingly, often lapses into a pantheistic worldview as well (often under the guise of "deep ecology").

In sum, according to Rabbi Reimers, "the composers and compilers of those [biblical and rabbinic] texts knew that the deity could be understood as female; many of the peoples among whom they lived worshipped goddesses" (and, she might have added, their societies were male-dominated all the same). "Our ancient teachers" used masculine language for God not so much as an expression of chauvinism as a means to prevent the "introduction of alien theological ideas into the heart of monotheistic religion."

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how the entire Christian "set-up," for lack of a better term, fails to work if we cease to think of God as Father (and follow the other traditional, patriarchal forms handed down to us in Holy Scripture).
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Only if you insist on reading the Judeo/Christian mythos as True History.

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While the God we pray to is beyond male or female, He has chosen to disclose Himself in distinctly masculine ways that are structured into the meanings of the Torah and the prayerbook, and cannot therefore simply be altered at will.
>>>

Following Larry Parker's comments, I'll point out that the writers of the Torah chose to represent God in distinctly masucline ways.

Okay, let's get this off the table right away--the hymn is stoopid. End of story. However, we all know that's not why Rod chose it. There's an infinite variety of really stoopid hymns out there using more conventional language. Rod picked this one for opprobrium because it hails God as Mother.

Rod says this: (and I'm talking about rather than to him only because it seems he's not around today) The orthodox believes God has revealed to us His nature, and how He wants us to relate to Him; the progressive believes that religion is primarily a human construct, and therefore relatively -- to some, infinitely -- mutable.

Yes, God has revealed to us some aspects of "his" nature, through human minds using human language. There is no such thing as pure revelation. We wouldn't understand it if could see it. There's no denying that our humanity, time-bound and limited as it is, has shaped every single thing we think we know about God. You really cannot escape the understanding that religion is humanly constructed.

So the question is not whether religion is mutable. That is a given. To use phrases crunchy cons like, change is "in the nature of things." It is "part of the human condition." In fact, change is the only Permanent Thing! Humans change, and as they change, their religion changes with them. We will never really know exactly what religion was like for a Roman pagan, for a Palestinian peasant in 100 BC, for Paul, for Aquinas. Even though we have their words, we can no longer inhabit those words as they did.

Religion is mutable, like everything else that pertains to humans. Pretending it's not is living in a self-willed state of delusion. Christianity has changed, is changing, will change again. However, like other forms of tradition, religion is one of the important ways that humans sustain continuity over time and ensure that important understandings and social agreeements are not lost. Tradittion helps regulate the nature and speed of inevitable change. As such, it should be treated with respect and care.

But if you say that religious tradition is or should be immutable, because it is revealed once and for all, you are missing the fact that Jesus himself changed his tradition radically and uncompromisingly. He offended and alarmed the religious teachers of his time. They called him a blasphemer. You are making the same argument that killed Jesus.

It all depends upon how seriously the church/community takes scriptural revelation, whether it has any concept of inspiration or inerrancy, etc. This thread shows that. Without a common framework or authoritative interpretive tradition, you can do whatever you damn well want with it.

Now, the leadership of The Episcopal Church has, where it is coherent, a uniformly low view of the authority and inspiration the Bible. Effectively, they have shrugged it off in favor of continuing revelation and being "led by the Spirit." Meaning, they'll sing what they like. But Lord--would it kill them to give Bernie Taupin a retainer? This makes Marty Haugen look like Charles Wesley.

BTW, all the female references to God in Hebrew and Jewish scriptures are either similes or are part of a parable. When addressing God, it is invariably done as "He." And for Christians, the fatherhood dimension emphasized by Jesus Christ is normative, the stray commentary of Bl. Julian notwithstanding.

Sig, what an excellent post.

I can only add that God as mother is not new imagery in either the Old Testament or the New. We can look at the Book of Wisdom and see lots of feminine imagery there. Jesus uses feminine imagery in several of the parables about the kingdom of God.
We can read Julian of Norwich, canonized by the RC Church, so obviously not controversial in that time.

We humans want to keep putting God and Jesus in boxes that fit the limits of our understanding, But I think coming to know God has to mean finding God in the unexpected, the places where we don't think He (aha! tried to avoid pronouns but have given up :-) would be.

"When it’s just me talking, you can say “Oh, that crazy Sig. She has a bee in her bonnet about this, and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about!”

Oh, good grief--AGAIN, Sig. First prancing mice in *ssless chaps, now Divine prostate milking. How are we ever gonna corral the children and horses running terrified through the streets now?

Fortunately, "if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for the children of Texas" so I can point this out to you. ;-)

And she looks nothing like you.

Sig, I can normally respect where you're coming from even if I don't agree, but I find myself unable to do so here. I can respect the clear effort you've put into the argument, however, and would agree that it deserves a response made with the same effort. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to do that right now, but I'll comment on one point:

Where in the world do you get the idea that the Virgin Mary, in her obedience, is a role model only for women? Or even the only role model for women? Or even the idea that she's the only woman you'd ever see depicted? St. Theckla the Protomartyr, Equal to the Apostles was just commemorated three days ago (feast day 24 Sept). Give that some thought--"Equal to the Apostles."

Richard

"I can only add that God as mother is not new imagery in either the Old Testament or the New. We can look at the Book of Wisdom and see lots of feminine imagery there. Jesus uses feminine imagery in several of the parables about the kingdom of God."

AND

"I think there are good practically reasons, based on human phsycology and such for prefering father God over mother God, but to raise those reasons to the level of theological imperative is an error, IMO."

There is motherly imagery concerning God in the Scriptures, but nowhere is God addressed as 'Mother.' That's because these images are metaphors. God's fatherhood, however, is not metaphorical but real, as He is the father of the divine Son from all eternity. Hence, the idea of God as Father is rooted in the very life of the Holy Trinity and thus is theologically imperative. If God is not eternally 'Father' then Jesus is not eternally 'Son,' and then what you have is no longer Christianity, as it denies the Creed.

Why Rob, let's not get carried away. You seem to be setting up the strawman that permitting one's mind to see God the Father as God the Mother is tantamount to Arianism (denying the eternal always was/always will be relationship between God the Father and Jesus).

Because you and I both do not seem to be Arians, we both agree that Jesus as God the Son has been God the Son eternally, and in that way, we understand Mary to be "Mother of God" only in sense that she gave birth to Jesus when he was made incarnate. So far so good?

Are you therefore asserting that God the Father is male? I do not believe orthodox Christianity requires us to believe that only human men are made in God's image (I acknowledge many biblical fundamentalists insist on this point, but hopefully we are staying within the realm of RC Catholicism and/or orthodox Christianity).
If one accepts the mystery of the Trinity and accepts that women are made in God's image and accepts that our humanity makes it impossible for us to fully understand the Trinity (mystery, remember?), I don't see why it requires that much of a stretch to understand God the Father as "Parent" and, being beyond gender or human conception, to be as much "Mother" as "Father" ?

Jim

Sig, I posted a response that's been held for moderation (probably because of links). Watch this space.

Richard

sorry...missed my name...I said the above...guess I was SO excited!...

The idea that if God is not eternally a literal father and Jesus not eternally a literal son, then Christianity is invalidated is a complete logical fallacy! The one in no way leads to the other.

John E.:

How can we know that? Are you a scholar of ancient Hebrew? Do you have access to the original scribes?

And, even if you did and you're right, does that change the fact that the writers would naturally be biased, being men (with one or two exceptions) in a patriarchal society?

"Because generic parenthood is a meaningless concept-we have no sense or experience of a generic parent-we are stuck with the alternatives of mother and father. There can be little doubt that, for Judaism, divine parenthood is better symbolized by fatherhood than motherhood, or at least that fatherhood is far less problematic than motherhood. In Genesis, God-like a father- generates outside of Himself. In the creation myth of feminine deities, however, everything emerges from the womb of the Mother God, conveying a sense that the world is an emanation or extension of the divine, and therefore divinized, as in pantheism. But at the very center of Jewish monotheism is the denial of a divinized nature: Nature is good, because God has made it so, but nature is not divine, and human beings are not made of godstuff."

Sorry, Rod, I don't buy it. AT ALL.

Strikes me as rationalizing psychobabble (curiously New Agey, at that) meant to justify male superiority over women, using the invocation of G-d to wield the sledgehammer.

After that rough language (sigh -- but you want us to say what we really think in the comboxes, right?) ... I hope Lucas and your family are well.

Sig and others who might wish to know more of Julian of Norwich, this 30-day meditation book based on her writings was my introduction. (It was a gift from my mom :-)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Will-Well-Great-Spiritual-Teacher/dp/0877935637

"Strikes me as rationalizing psychobabble (curiously New Agey, at that) meant to justify male superiority over women, using the invocation of G-d to wield the sledgehammer."

New Agey? Nope -- there's nothing new about it. It has a long and accepted pedigree in Christian theology. Much has been written on this subject, but one of the best summaries, IMO, is here:

http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=13-06-022-f

Rob:

The WRITING was New Agey.

The underlying theory, clearly, is anything but.

This hymn is not my cup o' tea, but, for starters, it doesn't even address God as "Mother," it describes god as "mothering" which is surely a permissible way of describing one aspect of God's work. Jesus compared himself to a mother hen and there was a tradition in the early church of comparing Jesus to a mother pelican. And, as others have pointed out, many saints and mystics have used feminine imagery for God and it's not completely foreign to the Bible itself.