Woman-God.

Gender in the Imago Dei

A woman at a corporate social gathering approaches the buffet table to snag some shrimp cocktail; she was hungry and searching for something to eat. When she gazed up and down the buffet table, she realized that all that was left of the thousand dollar spread were remnants. All of the good, whole pieces of nourishment were taken. Peering discreetly around the room, the nameless woman realized that all of her male colleagues were busy picking at full plates. The minority of her peers, the women, were virtually food-less.

It seems to be a silly example, but it serves as a slight metaphor for the traditional Christian church. Because of gender-biased language, traditions, and teachings, women experience an exclusion from the church, the place that is supposed to give them nourishment. For the majority of the church body, God is presented as male, yet believers claim that God is beyond understanding and genderless. This discrepancy in orthodoxy and orthopraxis have deeply wounded its’ believers, male and female. God has been presented as a woman, but has been ignored for a more “correct” image of God as male. This serves a purpose; to perpetuate patriarchy and keep men in their “comfort zone,” which is leading and serving over women, not next to women. If we, as a believing community, embraced both genders as accurate images of God, we would have a more complete picture of faith.

Jonathan F. Bassett and John E. Williams from the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University conducted an experiment entitled “Protestants’ Images of Self, God, and Satan as Seen in Adjective Check List Descriptions.” In this experiment, the directors asked 102 Protestant students from an urban university to describe their images of God, Satan, and Self with a questionnaire/check list. “Participants described God as gender neutral, favorable, and strong, but not active, and high on the nurturing parent ego state (Protestants 1).” This study was consistent with previous studies which showed

[t]hat although people use masculine images such as father when talking about God they view him (her) as androgynous, possessing both masculine and feminine characteristics. . . . [A]verage participants possessed a New Testament image of God as nurturing and loving and not an Old Testament image of God as vindictive and punishing (Protestants’ 10).

These typical Protestant students showed that they believe that God is both masculine and feminine. But when they were asked to describe God in adjectives, the majority of the students chose masculine imagery. The directors of this study referenced another study (Lee and Early, 2000) in which 97.9% of respondents chose God as father over mother, when they were asked to choose between the two (Protestants’ 12). This study shows the discrepancy between Christian beliefs and actions. As a whole, we believe the God is not a specific gender, yet we label and refer to God solely as “He,” neglecting the feminine aspects of God.

Some would say that the use of a single-gendered language is simply a model for reflection. Christians innately know that God transcends gender issues; using “man” as the example for God is simply time saving and meant to include everyone. The church would say that it certainly isn’t their intention to exclude women; God is all-inclusive. Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., a retired professor of theology at Xavier University, wrote an essay for Theological Studies in which he discussed the images of God. “[M]odels are neither literal pictures nor useful fictions but limited and inadequate ways of imagining what is not observable. They make tentative ontological claims that there are entities in the world something like those postulated in the models (Theological 2).” Bracken illustrates the fact that models, like using exclusive “He” images to refer to God, are understandable ways of trying to picture God, but that does not mean that they are correct of even helpful. God is indescribable, simply because of His/Her nature. As humans, who wish to know and worship this God, we need some sort of image…something to hold onto, that we can relate with. Very rarely (if ever) will a single image be relatable and liberating for all people, of all lands, and all genders.

When we view God as solely male or female, we invariably bring into discussion the sexuality of God, and not simply His/Her gender. Does the fact that male and female were created in God’s image “imply that God has a sexual nature and that sexuality itself discloses the divine image (Interpretation 8)?” Perhaps sexuality is a separate blessing, used to create “dominion” over the Earth (as we were told to procreate). Professor Emeritus of Biblical Interpretation W. Sibley Towner explains:

If we see the image of the divine in the maleness and femaleness of humankind, it is not their sexual conjunction per se. That comes as a separate divine authorization of what would in any case be necessary for survival, multiplication, and dominion. ‘Image’ is manifested in their very plurality and consequent fellowship (Interpretation 9).

As Towner suggests, the true image of God is seen in the union of both genders, not explicitly in the sexuality of each individual one. By focusing on the male gender as a metaphor for God, the church has excluded the other half…the female divinity. By doing so, we are only experiencing half of the image of God. If we were to join up both images, the Christian church would have a more complete image of God. By ignoring one side, the church has made a devastating mistake by not only excluding half of the population, but also by limiting its’ view of God.

It is not even that the church has been ignorant of the image of God the Mother; it’s that the church explicitly ignored God the Mother. There are specific instances in the Old and New Testaments where the writers refer to God in feminine metaphors. The Gnostic Gospels spoke explicitly of God the Mother, but they have all been shunned and ignored. For instance, Isaiah 42:14 says that God “will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant.” Isaiah 46:3-4 says that God has borne the house of Israel, and was carried in God’s womb; “I will carry and I will save.” God will also comfort as a mother comforts her child (Isaiah 66: 13) and never forget her child (Hosea 11:3-4; Isaiah 49:15). As Elizabeth A. Johnson points out in her book She Who Is, there are also pictures of the protective side of a mother. As Hosea 13:8 shows, God is like a “bear robbed of her cubs; I will tear open their breast.” There are numerous verses in the Scriptures showing God as a mother; we were even born of God (John 1:13). Somehow, we forget our Mother, as Deuteronomy 32:18 explains; “You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.” The Scriptures are as explicit as they could possibly be, given the limitations of the culture and time, to say that God has feminine qualities as well as masculine ones. As Johnson points out, “The Jewish and Christian Scriptures recognize the importance of the mother-child relationship when they use the metaphors of pregnancy and birth, suckling and feeding, carrying and training, the anger of the mother bear and the protective wing of the mother hen to refer to God’s creative relationship with the world (She 171).” It’s not the holy texts that lack references to God as a woman or mother, but the patriarchal church that has ignored them.

Before we know why they have been ignored, it is essential to know how they have been ignored. A specific example of the ignorance of the church is the translation of the name for God, El Shaddai. As Sue Monk Kidd examines her experience with the in her book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter:

I was especially intrigued with the phrase El Shaddai, in an interesting name for God that occurs forty-eight times in the Bible. It has been traditionally translated “the almighty” or, more exactly “God of the mountain.” But shad is also a Hebrew word for breast. The ending ai is an old feminine ending, therefore a probably ancient meaning of El Shaddai was “the breasted one.” God, the breasted one (146).

A common name for God has been commonly translated by the church to mean a male characteristic. “The almighty” suggests a deity that is all powerful and mighty; brave, courageous and commanding. The other translation, a very feminine imagery of “God, the breasted one,” has been completely disregarded for the former, male imagery. This was a great opportunity for the church to embrace the divine feminine, to embrace the gestating, birthing, and nurturing aspects of our God. Unfortunately, the church chose simply to embrace the more comfortable position of a powerful, almighty King, and wounded all of its followers in the process.

The other, more obvious element of harmful male language is seen in the Trinity. Christians believe that their God is three-in-one; three beings in one deity. These beings are God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God the Father is commonly imagined as exactly that; the God that we picture in our minds when we pray and worship. God the Son is God’s son, Jesus, who came to Earth to save our souls. These two images can be easily mixed and clumped together as one being. The Holy Spirit is one third of the Trinity that is less understood than the other two. We don’t have a mental image of the Holy Spirit, except as possibly an androgynous being; an opaque ghost-like wind. And, if that imagery isn’t suitable, the church falls back onto male personification for the Hoy Spirit. It’s interesting that it isn’t simply God who is referred to as a man, but at least two thirds of the Trinity is referred to as male. Why is there no female imagery?

At one point, there was. “[T]he [Hebrew] term for the spirit of God or Holy Spirit is a feminine term,” writes Kidd.

It is the word ruah, and it occurs 378 times. Many times ruah is used to refer to the life of God of the essence through which the Divine acts. It is this transcendent spirit of God that eventually came to be known as Wisdom, referred to in Old Testament scripture by the feminine term, hokhmah. But the fascinating thing is that hokhmah or Wisdom is not merely a concept but is personified as a woman (147-48).

The Holy Spirit has feminine roots in the biblical language and tradition. Wisdom is God’s self reflection, an extension of God. Wisdom has been given deity-like characteristics, and is exalted as good. The Holy Spirit may have been the female counterpart in the Trinity, but has been played down to a base level; Christians today have a very sparse understanding of this third of the Trinity, let alone recognition of the divine feminineness.

Christians are taught to pray to God the Father. We are taught that our worth is given to us because we were created by God the Father. Our status is recognized in relation to me; are we a good wife? A good mother? (Of course, this is judged by male standards). Women’s experience of conceiving, growing, birthing, and nourishing a child is all but shunned in the biblical creation story. The world was borne of a male God, and ruled by the same deity. We are taught that God is a good man, kind and just and loving…but a man nonetheless. What if women were raised being able to crawl into the divine feminine lap and cry and heal…instead of approaching a “just” authoritarian Father? How would this change the experience of all Christians?

We have seen a harmful discrepancy between the Christian belief of God and expression of God. We say that God is gender-neutral, encompassing all, yet we refer to God solely as male. Partially because of Joseph A. Bracken’s work, we now realize that a model is inadequate at describing beings that we cannot see. God is also not seen as a gender, but in the union of both genders. The divine feminine has been ignored in Christian language and experience, despite the fact that she has been present in the beginnings of the Church.

It is incredibly unfortunate that the nourishing buffet presented by a loving God has been dominated and gobbled up by men. “There’s plenty left over,” some would say. “My faith is adequate for everyone.” This simply isn’t true, and because the struggle for liberation by the feminine minority in Christianity has been ignored, devalued, and ridiculed, our faith as a whole is starving. This is not a woman problem…this is a community problem. By refusing to let women taste the divine feminine, but humiliating them if they thirst for such nourishment, patriarchal Christianity is slowly destroying the souls of all of its believers. If we worship one gender, we have half of a faith. If we partake in half of a faith, everything we believe has the potential to be false. Not only would a more feminine spirituality let God out of the box that we’ve put Him/Her in, it would allow us as believers to experience God in a brand new way. Feminine love, as Kidd writes, “reunites us with each other, with nature, with the whole (156).” Feminine love…a feminine deity…completes God.