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God as She-He-They

Originally posted at Homebrewed Christianity as “She Who is Not”

Earlier this week I had a post about language and God talk that incorporated C.S. Lewis’ poem “A Footnote on All Prayers”.  Part of what came out of that was an exchange with J.W. about pronouns, the Bible, and Inspiration. I wanted to transfer some of that over here (I have edited it for clarity) in order to open up the conversation to more people.

J.W.: So, what does your god look like? And how is that look any different from Piper’s or Driscoll’s?

Me:
Thanks for asking! Actually there is quite a substantial difference. Let me point out just a couple of things to start:
A) I don’t believe that language about God is univocal (as I have said). SO we begin in humility understanding that all our words, metaphors and concepts are OUR best attempt.
B) I believe that langue (since it is not univocal) functions relationally. When Jesus uses ‘Father’ language, he is talking about the WAY in which relates to a father. Not that God’s ontological being is Father in an exacting and representative way. It is an expressive use of language. That is the nature of language.
C) The way that Scripture is expressed is historic. I believe that the Bible is Inspired by Holy Spirit. That means that Holy Spirit was at work in the authors and ultimately in those who collected and validated the canon. (I confess this by faith). Those authors were historically situated and particularly located. They expressed their thoughts in their best language in their best frameworks. We see that historical locatedness and account for it when we engage their writings.
D) Whether you call it ‘original sin’ (I don’t) or ‘human nature’ or (my favorite) relational brokeness and conflicting biological impulses … humans have a problem. We are not 100% whole. Something is wrong (we don’t even do the good we WANT to do). That means that in every epoch and era there are things in place that are not perfect. Those show up in scripture – since it is a snap shot of its environment. The Bible is fully human (and I believe fully divine in a Process sense) but it is not ABSENT of humanity. It is full of humanity.
So If you take just those 4 things in contrast to Piper and Driscoll, then my God talk is:

  • in Humility not certainty or pushy
  • Relational not static or exacting
  • Historical not trans-historic
  • Human not un-human

Does that help? SO that is my starting point. From there I diverge wildly from the other two.

J.W.
Well, first of all, thanks for a response.
Second, no offense, but you use an awful lot of words to not say too much. Or, to say the same thing over and over while denying that you are saying one thing, yet actually affirming another. Since I don’t have any real idea what you believe Piper and Driscoll believe, I still don’t know that you are painting a different god or not.
You start out saying that all expressions of God are only a best attempt, but then you claim to believe the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So, which is it? Our best attempt, or Holy Spirit inspired? See the problem there. It’s either one or the other, can’t be both.
Certainly the Bible is written situationally. God could have inspired men to write it so it only made sense at one point in the entire course of time, or He could have inspired it so that it meant the same thing from beginning to end, from the beginning of time to the end of time. And written so that ordinary people could figure it out with a little help from His Holy Spirit. Which is what I believe. You seem to believe that only post-modern thought with a lot of help from certain philosophers can figure out this whole humility, relation, human thing. Sorry, way too many creeks have flowed over their banks throughout history for me to believe that only recently have we been smart enough to figure this whole mess out.
God (Holy Spirit) inspired the whole Bible. He could have very easily caused His writers to use words that wouldn’t mean anything to their (at the time, current) readers, but would only matter eons later. IF that is what He intended.
Again, you haven’t showed me anything but dichotomies, and nothing of substance that disproves anything Piper et al believe-which I still don’t know what you believe they believe.

Me:
1) I did use a lot of words, but it was to say quite a bit. Unfortunately it was not what you were looking for so you think I didn’t say much. I assure you that I say quite enough in my 300 words to get in a lot of trouble in many circles!
2) You are 100% wrong that “It’s either one or the other, can’t be both.” Inspiration is not the OVERriding of human intent – it is the filling UP and expanding of human intent. Inspiration does not make something inhuman. You are thinking of something else not inspiration. Then you accuse me of dichotomies? Weird. I am talking about a participatory-relational model that transcends either/or thinking. You must be confused.
3) Here is an example of the difference (which you apparently were not able to pick up on): It is equally a valid to call god She as it is to call god He. Because in the end, god is neither. Those are pronouns that stand in for their antecedent but which do not entirely explain god or contain god’s ontological reality. God did not give Christianity a masculine feel. We did. God is God that is beyond our biological categorizations and anatomical classification. God is not defined by those – we simply conceptualize God and these terms and portray those conceptions in our language.
This is the nature of language. It is symbolic – analogical – and metaphorical.  That does not mean that we are not saying anything when we talk about God. We are. It does not mean that there is no inspiration. There is. Those are not mutually exclusive.
To quote Elizabeth Johnson in She Who Is :

Words about God are cultural creatures, intwined with the mores and adventures of the faith community that uses them. As cultures shift, so too does the specificity of God-talk.

To call God She is just as accurate and as inaccurate as calling God ‘he’.

 

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Women: Images & Identity

Last week I read a fantastic post by Julie Clawson. I wrote a post asking her some questions. She responded and so did Carol Howard Merritt.  Then Rachel Held Evans gave it ‘Conversation of the Week’ in the coveted Sunday Superlatives!   These 3 women great authors and speakers. I feel privilege to have them as dialogue partners! Here are some highlights:

Background: I love going to the movies. As a student, I usually only go the theatre on Summer break (blockbuster action films + air-conditioning = awesome) and on Winter break (tired brain + Christmas money = fantastic).

Last week I saw two movies and was quite intrigued by a pattern that I noticed during the trailers: women being tough guys. The three trailers were for Underworld: Awakening with Kate Beckinsdale, Haywire with Gina Carano (both action films) and The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher.

I have read enough feminist literature to know that there is a principle (which Thatcher made famous) that “In a man’s world …” a women often has to out ‘man’ the guys in order to break into the boys club and be taken seriously.

In a system where we have been socially conditioned to see certain behaviors and attributes as ‘leadership’ or ‘strength’ – or in the church as ‘anointing’ – then women must over-do it in order to overcome the intrinsic biases and gain credibility in a system geared to evaluate by masculine expectations. (people point to Joyce Meyer as a Christian example)

This is a real problem.

THEN I was reading your blog this week and you bring up the Lego Ads making their way around Facebook and tie it into both modesty and obesity. As a youth pastor I have read everything from Reviving Ophelia to Queen Bees and Wannabes ,that explains why girls treat each other the way that they do, and I recognize that there are deep underlying issues. Let’s be honest, these deep issues will not be solved by quoting some Bible verses or ‘going back to the way things were in the Bible’.

So here are my questions: 

1. What do we do with the karate-chopping drop-kicking gun-shooting heroines of violence on the silver screen these days? On one hand, it is nice to women getting these big-deal leading roles in major films… on the other hand, are they real portrayals of women-ness or is it the bad kind of mimicry –  like ‘Girls Gone Wild’ as a picture of sexual liberation or power.

 

2. Are there any resources that you can point me to for Image and Identity? Your blog post on the Lego issue is really sticking with me.

3. As a youth pastor, how would you suggest I navigate the (rapidly) developing sexuality without repression while steering clear of moral permissiveness?  Any thoughts?

Julie Clawson:  Bo brings up some really good questions to which there are no easy cut and dry answers. I ranted/blogged about this general topic a few years ago, but the issues still exist, and perhaps are even intensified. On one hand, I would start by pointing out that just because a woman is an action hero, tough as nails, or possess traditional leadership qualities doesn’t mean she is acting like a man. That could simply be just who she is and she should be given space to be herself without being judged. But at the same time, I agree that it is a widespread cultural issue that women often feel like they must put on the persona of men in order to succeed. Our culture doesn’t know how to handle women who are strong, intelligent, and assertive.  Continue reading “Women: Images & Identity” →

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>Amazed by Mary

>As I go through advent, every year I am amazed again by the faith of Mary. Her confession “may it be unto me as you have said” (Luke 1:38) is breath-taking in its simplicity and profound in it’s content. The place of faith that she must have been coming from astounds me  – and challenges me.

I am especially taken back when I put her within the narrative context of scripture. I don’t know if you have ever thought about, but women don’t fair so well in the Bible on the whole. I’m not even talking about the parts where they are told to  ‘remain silent’ or the ‘submit to your husband’ stuff. I mean the actual characters in the narrative (both in the Hebrew and Christian testaments).

There are a lot of nameless women in the Hebrew Scripture (that’s what we used to call the Old Testament) and it generally does not go too well for them.

There are lots of examples of nameless women: Lots’s wife, Lot’s daughters, Potiphar’s wife, Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11:34), or the concubine of Judges 19, not to mention the “witch” of Endor (in 1 Samuel 28) . If you took just these examples you would get the picture that women are (in no particular order): powerless, short-sighted, faithless, seductive, deceptive, duplicitous, mischievous, and spiritually dangerous.

Even the women that are named are usually not in positions of power  – though they do fare a little better. Tamar, Ruth, Esther, Bathsheba, and Rahab are named and each plays an important part in God’s plan.

  • Tamar is prostituted by her Father-in-law then almost burned for it (this is Genesis 38 – not to be confused with the later Tamar that is raped by her brother and then despised for it in 2 Samuel 13).
  • Ruth is poor and gleaning crops with her mother-in-law from the edges of fields – a type of welfare system set up by God in scripture.
  • Esther wins a primitive (some would say perverse) form of a beauty contest with the grand prize of entering a harem.
  • Bathsheba gets spied on while she is bathing (all the men were suppose to be out of the city), she is brought into adultery, she becomes pregnant, and her husband (Uriah) is assassinated by the man who committed adultery with her (King David).
  • Rahab is an actual prostitute.

Tamar, Ruth, and Rahab all make it into Jesus’ genealogy that appears in the prologue to the Gospel of Matthew!  Unfortunately Bathsheba, for all her troubles, is referenced only as Uriah’s wife (not David’s mistress or by her real name). But that is how it goes for women in the Bible sometimes…

This is what is so amazing to me about Mary. By all accounts she would not have been rich (to say the least), she was young and her situation was scandalous. Poor, young, and disgraced is quite a predicament for a girl. Then she comes out with these amazing declarations of faith!

You have to keep in mind that this happened during a time in history when women’s testimony were not even valid in court!  Which just puts a whole wild spin on the fact that God chose for the women at the tomb to be the witnesses – and to testify to the male disciples (who did not believe right away) about the resurrected Christ!

With that in mind, Mary was asked to be more than a witness! She was to be the container of the uncontainable; the womb of the uncreated. YIKES.

That is why it hits me so hard when I hear her ‘Magnificat’ declaration in Luke 1:46 – 55:

“My soul glorifies the Lord 
 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 
for he has been mindful 
   of the humble state of his servant. 
From now on all generations will call me blessed, 
  for the Mighty One has done great things for me— 
   holy is his name. 
His mercy extends to those who fear him, 
   from generation to generation. 
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; 
   he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. 

 He has brought down rulers from their thrones 
   but has lifted up the humble. 
 He has filled the hungry with good things 
   but has sent the rich away empty. 
He has helped his servant Israel, 
   remembering to be merciful 
to Abraham and his descendants forever, 
   just as he promised our ancestors.”

I hear this and I am stopped in my tracks. What kind of world did Mary think that God wanted to make? What did Mary expect God to do with this kid she was to carry?

Is this what the Hebrew prophet was looking forward to in Isaiah 40 ?

Comfort, comfort my people,

   says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

   and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,

   that her sin has been paid for,

that she has received from the LORD’s hand

   double for all her sins.

 A voice of one calling:

“In the wilderness prepare

   the way for the LORD[a];

make straight in the desert

   a highway for our God.[b]

Every valley shall be raised up, 

   every mountain and hill made low; 

the rough ground shall become level, 

   the rugged places a plain. 

And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,

   and all people will see it together.

            For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

Is this what Jesus meant when he said “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” in John 10:10 ?

Is this what the Letter writer was saying with passages like 1 John 3:8 ” The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work”?

I am also struck by two things that weigh me down:

  1. If some poet or prophet or preacher was to put this out now, it would most likely be disregarded as a John Lennon style “Imagine” daydream, or dismissed as socialist utopian propaganda or even disparaged as a Liberal agenda.  When you think about the relationship that Jesus had with the priests of his day and the relationship that those priests had with the poor, the immigrant and the outsider – and compare that to the relationship that Jesus had with that same crowd… you can clearly see the he was Mary’s boy!!
  2. I listen to the Religious Media that is so powerfully broadcast on Christian radio and preached on TV by preachers at big churches with big followings and I am haunted by the suspicion that what calls itself Christianity in capitalistic and consumeristic North America is not quite what Mary’s song pointed toward. I am dismayed so often by the conservative Christianity I encounter. It is almost as if Jesus never came.   Even in a ‘Christian Nation’,  Priest, politics, and power …  well , let’s just say it this way:  I would love to hear the kind of things that Mary said coming through the radio and from the pulpit.

This is why Mary mesmerizes me. She ‘got’ something – she knew something – she saw something that allowed her to say something that radically changes the way we look at Jesus and continues to impact the vision of  people who are suppose to speak for Jesus.

Mary challenges us. She inspires us. Her vision projects a world that has yet to materialize fully. Her words frame our expectation.

I think about her words.  I pray that I may see what she called for. I thank God for her and the standard that she sets.  I call her ‘blessed’.

Merry Christmas everyone – today is truly the day of the Lord’s visitation.
The Lord is among us!

to listen to Podcast click [HERE]

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>Is God a Man?

>God as She – Some people get upset if others refer to God as ‘she’ when they are talking.

and I kind of see why, as I think I use to be one of the one that would twinge, but in the end I just chalked it up to the person either wanting be novel and cutting edge, or irreverent and challenging.

But there are two things that that come out of the Bible that have made me reconsider this
(and a third thing out of church history that almost convinced me).

The first thing to notice is that God is bigger than gender definitions or human parameters that we have. In the beginning, it says, he made them male and female, he made them in his image: both male and female are in God’s image. If we were to draw a Venn Diagram (those overlapping circles) and put “male” in one circle (yellow) and “female” in the blue, we would notice two things right away: first, there is an overlapping section (let’s call it ‘green’) of share traits between the genders and this is shared humanity. In my opinion, this green section is very large as I think that males and females have more in common as human than they do that is distinct to their gender.
But it is the next thing that really makes you think. Not only would you have these three categories of Human, Male and Female but you would also have a fourth category called ‘other’ or ‘none of the above’ and that is the area around the two circles. This represents the things that are true about God that are not contained in humanity. Because I think that we could all agree that God is bigger than God’s creation and that saying ‘God’ is not just saying ‘human’ loudly. God is not just the collection of all our best hopes projected onto the heavens. So while God made them – male and female – in the image of God , God is not entirely defined by what they show or reveal about God. While they reveal something about what it is ultimately true, what is ultimately true is not shown in it’s totality in them.

Women are created in the image of God. Men are created in the image of God. Humans show some of what God is like, but God is not only or entirely found in or defined by what we see in humans.

The second thing to notice in the Bible is that the authors used masculine pronouns when talking about God and even where the original language might gender neutral the translators into English went ahead and used the masculine ‘He’. Now some people let it rest there and say ‘Jesus called God “father” and that is enough for me’ as there capstone. Cased closed. Period.

It is also interesting to notice what else the Bible calls God. More than 40 times the Bible says that God is a rock. It is interesting because we would not say that God is a cold inanimate object. We don’t think that God is actually a rock! We know that is metaphor, it is a word picture, a language device – some call it ‘Theo-poetics’ or the way we talk about God. The Bible also says clearly that ‘God is light’ (1 John 1:5) but we don’t think that the Sun is God. We don’t flip the light switch on and say ‘oh God is in the room’. It is a metaphor – a word picture. It’s how we talk about God. It is not revealing the totality of what is true about God. Other places in scripture talk about God having wings (5 times in the Psalms alone) but we don’t think that God is a bird. We don’t have hearing about what kind of feathers God’s wings are adorned with. There are not denominations that insist on pictures of God being in flight and others that prefer the flightless picture of the penguin version of God. Come on -that would be silly. It is a word picture – it is metaphor – it is the way that we talk about God. So we understand these as cultural expressions of different conceptions of God in their language. Yes God is Father , just like God is a rock. But God is not actually a rock! and that Rock is not God. It is Theo-poetics. Yes, God is light – but God is not actually defined in totality by light. It is a world picture. I could add tons of more examples and I’m not trying to get ridiculous, but if we hold too tightly to these, we have a picture of the Rock Father flying with his wings at the speed of light – or something.

We all know, at some level, that this is the gift of language. It allows us to use comparatives (whether metaphors or parables) to say ‘I will use this thing that you know to tell you something that you don’t know.’ That is the message.

Bottom Line : God is bigger than our conception of God and it not totally defined by our ability to conceptualize or communicate it.

Some people are going to object. They are going to say
A)the Bible reveals God as male and
B)B) when Jesus came, he came as a man. (a big ole’ hairy man)

But I would just like to point out that A) the Bible is the expression of a culture and time. It is a story and not everything in that story is good. Sometimes God’s people do things that God is not sanctioning or validating. It is simply telling us what people in that time and place thought. It was a very patriarchal society and some of the views express that. We need to be careful we don’t make women second class citizens in our churches and families BECAUSE they were when the Bible was written. If we do that, we might be missing the entire trajectory of the story: that redemption…and restoration… and reconciliation had come to earth and that after the veil was torn in two (the first symbol of what was to come) and then the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. and the people of God were dispersed (Diaspora) – they were not to import the old order but to initiate a new order. That would even outgrow that Apostles writings (the Epistles) as this message crossed rivers and into new lands it was to invite the Kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. Unfortunately – it got co-opted by actual Kings and brought into the kind of hierarchy and authority structures that earthly Kingdoms are defined by and built upon.

But that is a story for a different day.

B) As far as Jesus coming as a man… well – that is really something worth considering!
Stop and think about why that might be so important.
Is it because God is a man? No – we know that everything that is feminine is also found in God.

Is it simply cultural? No, I think that is too simple and misses that point entirely.

Could it be that Jesus came as a man to give us new model for masculine?
An invitation to a different way to be a man?
The possibility for a new picture of humanity?

I think that it is noteworthy that if Jesus came as a women and did the sort of things that he did in the culture to which he came, two things would have happened. A lot of people would not have even noticed. Women were expected to serve and take care of the hurting and be compassionate. Most people would not even have marked how remarkable it was that God had come as a parable – to use something we know in order to show us something that we did not know.
Some people would have confused the message and would have focused on the fact that God was female and would certainly elevated Female to god and began to worship the feminine. Missing that that too was a metaphor and would have thought that it was the message. This was a common conception the cultures all around Israel- Babylon to the East, Egypt to the South West and Greece & Rome to the North West. This was actually a real danger in that region in ancient times.


I think that it is significant to note two things about Jesus in this regard:
1) The gospels record at least 4 significant interactions with women. In all four of these cases, Jesus challenged or broke the cultural expectations, boundaries and barriers. He clearly was not that interested in reinforcing, maintaining or even abiding by the gender categories of his culture. (see John 4, Luke 10, Luke 7, John 12 – Mark 14- Matt 26)

2) Jesus’ radical non-violence, his heart for service (I came not to be served but to serve Mark 10:45, Matthew 20:28) his use of mother hen imagery “Oh Jerusalem Jerusalem how I longed to gather your children like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” Matthew 23:37) borrowed from the prophets, and so many other examples portray Jesus as a different sort of man. It is actually a portrayal that gets some people quite riled up. I have actually heard two different pastors – both nationally famous – say recently that this portrayal of Jesus bothers them. One said that if Jesus had come as a women and did the sorts of things that he is reported to have done, most people would not have thought much of it. That is what we, generally speaking, expect from women : self sacrifice, service, etc. I don’t think that he meant it in a bad way. The other guy however… said that he hates the modern portrayal of Jesus as an effeminate and the bottom line is that he can not worship someone that he could beat up.

Here is the thing. This isn’t the 1600’s anymore. You just can’t pine for the old days and claim that you are being faithful to traditions of the faith. The core of this religion we call Christianity is this thing called the Incarnation. It is a manifestation of God in a given place in a specific time. We have to manifest that message in this place at this time… and Jesus modeled for us how to do that. He not only showed us what God is like, told us what God values but he released us to do the same in our context in our community.

Having said all of that, I close with this. Women are made in the image of God. They show something amazing about God. They are not second class citizens.
God values women just as much as a man. Sure, our physiology is different. Biologically there is uniqueness. We have different parts. We play different roles sometimes… but in the end – with generalities aside – every human contains, reflects or portrays the Image of God (choose you language). God created them , male and female, in God’s image. Yes, the Bible may use the masculine pronoun in reference to God. and we can debate if that was cultural or if that was simply limitation of language. But in that debate – to say that God is Father is no more of less true than saying that God is a rock or that God is light or that God has wings or that God is love or – if someone were so inclined – saying that the Great I Am is not the great unknown but is instead – She who Is… That the I am who I am and the Un-namable Ground of All Being is one and the same with ______ . Whatever language you choose… is no more true of false than saying that “Jesus lives in my heart” or that “God is on the throne” or whatever else you want to say.
In the end this is Theo-poetics (at some level).
This is metaphor and parable and word picture.
These are not exact formulations or legal expression of definitions in their totality.

God is a much a Mother as He is a Father. My mother is as good a picture for me of what God is like as my father is. My wife is far more like God than I am – and anyone who knows me will know that that is true.

We are missing something about God because of the way we think about God.

Our communities are missing something because of the way we talk about God.

Our world is missing something that it desperately needs because of the way that we think and talk about God.

So in summary :
God is bigger than God’s creation.

God is bigger than our conception of God.

God is not defined by or contained in our ability to talk about God.

I look forward to hearing from you on this. I welcome you posts, emails and comments.

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