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by Elizabeth A. Johnson
from She Who Is. The Mystery of God in Feminist
Theological Discourse, Crossroad, 1997, chapter 3, pp.42-57.
Copyright © 1992 by Elizabeth A. Johnson. All rights reserved.
Here republished with permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York,
and the author.
Elizabeth A. Johnson, C.S.J., is professor of theology at Fordham
University and the author of many books, such as:
*
Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology (1992);
* Women,
Earth and Creator Spirit (1993);
* She Who Is: The Mystery of God in
Feminist Theological Discourse (1993);
* How to Paint Miniatures
(1994);
* Pauline Theology: Looking Back, Pressing On (Editor,
1997);
* Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of
the Coounity of Saints (1998).
I walked along the railroad tracks, smelling the rain coming in the wind.
The rain came, falling heavily all along the land to my left, a sheet of rain
which stopped precisely at the trestle embankment. It never crossed the rails.
I walked the edge of the rain, a straight Iine between rainfall and no
rainfall.... The gift was precise, measured. I told Grandpa about this. He
said:“Everything has a place where it ends." I told Memaw. She said: "That
was the edge of the rim." —Meinrad Craighead(1)
Why the Word God?
A
certain liability attends the very word God, given the history of its use in
androcentric theology. Insofar as it almost invariably refers to a deity imaged
and conceptualized in male form, this word is judged by some feminist thinkers
to be a generically masculine form of naming divine reality, and thus not
capable of expressing the fullness of feminist insight. In one creative
solution, Rosemary Radford Ruether uses the experimental form of reference
“God/ess.” This is “a written symbol intended to combine both
the masculine and feminine forms of the word for the divine while preserving
the Judeo-Christian affirmation that divinity is one."(2) The difficulty with
this coinage comes, however, when one turns to oral speech. While indeed
pointing in its written form toward a truly inclusive understanding of the
divine, the term according to Ruether’s own description is unpronounceable
and hence not usable as language for worship, preaching, or teaching. Rebecca
Chopp’s robust use of the term “Word,” so central to the
Reformation tradition, limns yet another option.(3) In classical theology the
Word indeed denotes deity, and does so in its English translation without any
immediately obvious connection to gender. This expression furthermore has the
advantage of connoting the power to speak, which women are claiming and
celebrating in the emancipatory discourses of feminist theology. In certain
contexts speech about the Word will continue to be a fruitful usage. As soon as
one introduces classic theological reflection on God’s Trinity, however,
or the christological questions entailed in the association of the historical
man Jesus with the Word, this term too reaches a limit.
Appreciating the insights that are unleashed when the traditional mold is thus
broken, my option here is for yet another path. Given the long history of the
term God in Christian theology, and especially given its continued and public
use virtually everywhere from the most heartfelt worship to secular swearing,
the word is not so easily dropped. In this book it continues to be used, but is
pointed in new directions through association with metaphors and values arising
from women’s experience. Keeping the term may well be an interim strategy,
useful until that time when a new word emerges for the as yet unnameable
understanding of holy mystery that includes the reality of women as well as all
creation. On the way to that day, language of God/She is aimed at generating
new content for references to deity in the hopes that this discourse will help
to heal imaginations and liberate people for new forms of community.
The
dilemma of the word God itself, however, is a real one and not easily resolved.
Its effective history has been brutal as well as blessed. This is poignantly
crystallized in Martin Buber’s report of a passionate exchange he once had
while a house guest of an old philosopher. One morning Buber arose before the
sun to proof-read galleys of a piece he had written about faith. His host, also
an early riser, asked him to read the piece aloud. To Buber’s chagrin, his
old host reacted vehemently:
How can you bring yourself to say “God” time after time?...What word
of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the
innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the
injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear
the highest called “God,” it sometimes seems almost blasphemous.(4)
The
old philosopher spoke more truly than he knew. The innocent blood of women shed
for this word, the burning of thousands of wise and independent women called
witches, for example, and the continuing injustice of subordination done to
women in God’s name is only now coming to light, and it is grave. Perhaps
we should have done with the word God altogether.
Buber’s response has always interested me. Rather than offering a rebuttal
he agrees with the old philosopher’s critique, seeing however a different
option:
Yes, it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled,
so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it.... The races of man
with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces.... Certainly, they
draw caricatures and write “God” underneath; they murder one another
and say "in God’s name." But when all madness and delusion fall to dust,
when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say
“He, He” but rather sigh “Thou,” shout “Thou,”
all of them the one word, and when they then add “God,” is it not the
real God whom they implore, the One Living God?. . .we must esteem those who
interdict it because they rebel against the injustice and wrong which are so
readily referred to “God” for authorization. But we may not give it
up.... We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole;
but defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it
over an hour of great care.(5)
Buber
did not see that in the light of dominant androcentric discourse about God a
problem remains even when people turn from “He” to “Thou,”
for it is still a male personage who is subliminally envisioned, still a
“Thou” in the image of “He.” Nevertheless, his basic hunch,
that the term God covered with the dirt of past offenses may yet be redeemed if
it connects with an hour of great care, may serve as a program. Acknowledging
the poverty and idolatry connected with the term, it may yet be transformed in
a different semantic context generated by women’s experience. Ultimately
this strategy may be superseded, for old wineskins cannot forever hold new
wine. But the wager I am making is that at this point in time pouring the new
wine of women’s hope of flourishing into the old word God may enable it to
serve in new ways. Using “God” in a new semantic field may restore
the word to a sense more in line with its Greek etymology, which, according to
ancient interpreters, meant to take care of and cherish all things, burning all
malice like a consuming fire.(6)
Why Female Symbols of God?
Normative speech about God in metaphors that are exclusively, literally, and
patriarchally male is the real life context for this study. As a remedy some
scholars and liturgists today take the option of always addressing God simply
as “God.” This has the positive result of relieving the hard
androcentrism of ruling male images and pronouns for the divine. Nevertheless,
this practice, if it is the only corrective engaged in, is not ultimately
satisfactory. Besides employing uncritically a term long associated with the
patriarchal ordering of the world, its consistent use causes the personal or
transpersonal character of holy mystery to recede. It prevents the insight into
holy mystery that might occur were female symbols set free to give rise to
thought. Most serious of all, it papers over the problem of the implied
inadequacy of women’s reality to represent God.(7)
The
holy mystery of God is beyond all imagining. In his own epistemological
categories Aquinas’s words still sound with the ring of truth in this
regard:
Since our mind is not proportionate to the divine substance, that which is the
substance of God remains beyond our intellect and so is unknown to us. Hence
the supreme knowledge which we have of God is to know that we do not know God,
insofar as we know that what God is surpasses all that we can under stand of
him [the “him,” so easily assumed, being the problem that this book
is addressing].(8)
The
incomprehensibility of God makes it entirely appropriate, at times even
preferable, to speak about God in nonpersonal or supra personal terms. Symbols
such as the ground of being (Paul Tillich), matrix surrounding and sustaining
all life (Rosemary Ruether), power of the future (Wolfhart Pannenberg), holy
mystery (Karl Rahner), all point to divine reality that cannot be captured in
concepts or images. At the same time God is not less than personal, and many of
the most prized characteristics of God’s relationship to the world, such
as fidelity, compassion, and liberating love, belong to the human rather than
the nonhuman world. Thus it is also appropriate, at times even preferable, to
speak about God in personal symbols.
Here
is where the question of gender arises. Given the powerful ways the ruling male
metaphor has expanded to become an entire metaphysical world view, and the way
it perdures in imagination even when gender neutral God-language is used,
correction of androcentric speech on the level of the concept alone is not
sufficient. Since, as Marcia Fall notes, “Dead metaphors make strong
idols,”(9) other images must be introduced which shatter the exclusivity
of the male metaphor, subvert its dominance, and set free a greater sense of
the mystery of God.
One
effective way to stretch language and expand our repertoire of images is by
uttering female symbols into speech about divine mystery. It is a complex
exercise, not necessarily leading to emancipatory speech.(10) An old danger
that accompanies this change is that such language may be taken literally; a
new danger lies in the potential for stereotyping women’s reality by
characterizing God simply as nurturing, caring, and so forth. The benefits,
however, in my judgment, outweigh the dangers. Reorienting the imagination at a
basic level, this usage challenges the idolatry of maleness in classic language
about God, thereby making possible the rediscovery of divine mystery, and
points to recovery of the dignity of women created in the image of God.
The
importance of the image can hardly be overstated. Far from being peripheral to
human knowing, imaginative constructs mediate the world to us. As is clear from
contemporary science, literature, and philosophy, this is not to be equated
with things being imaginary but with the structure of human knowing, which
essentially depends upon paradigms to assemble data and interpret the way
things are. We think via the path of images; even the most abstract concepts at
root bear traces of the original images which gave them birth. Just as we know
the world only through the mediation of imaginative constructs, the same holds
true for human knowledge of God. Without necessarily adopting Aquinas’s
epistemology, we can hear the truth in his observation:
We can acquire the knowledge of divine things by natural reason only through
the imagination; and the same applies to the knowledge given by grace. As
Dionysius says, “it is impossible for the divine ray to shine upon us
except as screened round about by the many colored sacred
veils.’’(11)
Images of God are not peripheral or dispensable to theological speech, nor as
we have seen, to ecclesial and social praxis. They are crucially important
among the many colored veils through which divine mystery is mediated and by
means of which we express relationship in return.(l2)
The
nature of symbols for divine mystery is rather plastic, a characteristic that
will serve this study well. According to Tillich’s well-known analysis,
symbols point beyond themselves to something else, something moreover in which
they participate. They open up levels of reality which otherwise are closed,
for us, and concomitantly open up depths of our own being, which otherwise
would remain untouched. They cannot be produced intentionally but grow from a
deep level that Tillich identifies as the collective unconscious. Finally, they
grow and die like living beings in relation to their power to bear the presence
of the divine in changing cultural situations.(l3) In the struggle against
sexism for the genuine humanity of women we are today at a crossroads of the
dying and rising of religious symbols. The symbol of the patriarchal idol is
cracking, while a plethora of others emerge. Among these are female symbols for
divine mystery that bear the six characteristics delineated above. Women
realize that they participate in the image of the divine and so their own
concrete reality can point toward this mystery. Use of these symbols discloses
new depths of holy mystery as well as of the community that uses them.
Women’s religious experience is a generating force for these symbols, a
clear instance of how great symbols of the divine always come into being not
simply as a projection of the imagination, but as an awakening from the deep
abyss of human existence in real encounter with divine being.
The
symbol gives rise to thought. With this axiom Paul Ricoeur points to the
dynamism inherent in a true symbol that participates in the reality it
signifies. The symbol gives, and what it gives is an occasion for thinking.
This thought has the character of interpretation, for the possibilities abiding
in a symbol are multivalent. At the same time, through its own inner structure
a symbol guides thought in certain directions and closes off others. It gives
its gift of fullest meaning when a thinker risks critical interpretation in
sympathy with the reality to which it points. So it is when the concrete,
historical reality of women, affirmed as blessed by God, functions as symbol in
speech about the mystery of God. Language is informed by the particularity of
women’s experience carried in the symbol. Women thereby become a new
specific channel for speaking about God, and thought recovers certain
fundamental aspects of the doctrine of God otherwise overlooked. To advance the
truth of God’s mystery and to redress imbalance so that the community of
disciples may move toward a more liberating life, this study engages
imagination to speak in female symbols for divine mystery, testing their
capacity to bear divine presence and power.(l4)
Why Not Feminine Traits or Dimensions of God?
Having opted to use the word God, and to do so in connection with female
symbols, there is yet another decision to be made. At least three distinct
approaches to the renewal of speech about God in the direction of greater
inclusivity can be identified in current theology. One seeks to give
"feminine," qualities to God who is still nevertheless imagined predominantly
as a male person. Another purports to uncover a “feminine” dimension
in God, often finding this realized in the third person of the Trinity, the
Holy Spirit. A third seeks speech about God in which the fullness of female
humanity as well as of male humanity and cosmic reality may serve as divine
symbol, in equivalent ways. Searching the implications of each can show why the
first two options lead into a blind alley and why only equivalent imaging of
God male and female can in the end do greater justice to the dignity of women
and the truth of holy mystery.
Feminine Traits
A
minimal step toward the revision of patriarchal God language is the
introduction of gentle, nurturing traits traditionally associated with the
mothering role of women. The symbol of God the Father in particular benefits
from this move. Too often this predominant symbol has been interpreted in
association with unlovely traits associated with ruling men in a male-oriented
society: aggressiveness, competitiveness, desire for absolute power and
control, and demand for obedience. This certainly is not the Abba to whom Jesus
prayed, and widespread rejection of such a symbol from Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud onward has created a crisis for Christian consciousness. But it is also
possible to see God the Father displaying feminine, so-called maternal features
that temper “his” overwhelmingness. William Visser’t Hooft, for
example, argues that while the fatherhood of God is and must remain the
predominant Christian symbol, it is not a closed or exclusive symbol but is
open to its own correction, enrichment, and completion from other symbols such
as mother.(15) Thus gentleness and compassion, unconditional love, reverence
and care for the weak, sensitivity, and desire not to dominate but to be an
intimate companion and friend are predicated of the Father God and make
“him” more attractive.(l6) A clue to the use of this approach in an
author is almost invariably the word traits: the Bible allows us to
speak of maternal traits in God (Visser’t Hooft); to transform our
overmasculinized culture, we need to relate to the feminine traits of God
(O’Hanlon); although we have forgotten this, the God of revelation has
feminine traits such as tenderness (Congar); God is not simply male but has
maternal traits (Küng).(17) In this way of speaking God remains Father but
in a way tempered by the ideal feminine, so that believers need not fear or
rebel against a crushing paternalism.
While
this approach is appearing in the work of a fair number of men theologians
trying to address the problem of sexism, and while it has the advantage of
moving thought counter to the misogynism that has so afflicted Christian
anthropology and the doctrine of God, women theologians are virtually unanimous
in calling attention to its deficiencies and in precluding it as a long-range
option. The reasons for this are several. Even with the introduction of
presumably feminine features, the androcentric pattern holds. Since God is
still envisioned in the image of the ruling man only now possessing milder
characteristics, the feminine is incorporated in a subordinate way into an
overall symbol that remains masculine. This is clearly seen in statements such
as: God is not exclusively masculine but the “feminine-maternal element
must also be recognized in Him."(18) God persists as "him," but is now spoken
about as a more wholistic male person who has integrated his feminine side. The
patriarchy in this symbol of God is now benevolent, but it is nonetheless still
patriarchy. And while the image of God as ruling male as well as real male
persons made in “his” image may benefit and grow from the development
of nurturing and compassionate qualities in themselves, there is no equivalent
attribution to a female symbol or to actual women of corresponding presumably
masculine qualities of rationality, power, the authority of leadership, and so
forth. Men gain their feminine side, but women do not gain their masculine side
(if such categories are even valid). The feminine is there for the enhancement
of the male, but not vice-versa: there is no mutual gain. Actual women are then
seen as capable of representing only feminine traits of what is still the
male-centered symbol of God, the fullness of which can therefore be represented
only by a male person. The female can never appear as icon of God in all divine
fullness equivalent to the male. Inequality is not redressed but subtly
furthered as the androcentric image of God remains in place, made more
appealing through the subordinate inclusion of feminine traits.
A
critical issue underlying this approach is the legitimacy of the rigid binary
system into which it forces thought about human beings and reality itself.
Enormous diversity is reduced to two relatively opposed absolutes of masculine
and feminine, and this is imposed on the infinite mystery of God. The move also
involves dubious stereotyping of certain human characteristics as predominantly
masculine or feminine. Even as debate waxes over the distinction between sex
and gender, and about whether and to what extent typical characteristics of men
and women exist by nature or cultural conditioning, simple critical observation
reveals that the spectrum of traits is at least as broad among concrete,
historical women as between women and men.(l9) In the light of the gospel, by
what right are compassionate love, reverence, and nurturing predicated as
primordially feminine characteristics, rather than human ones? Why are
strength, sovereignty, and rationality exclusively masculine properties? As
Rosemary Ruether astutely formulates the fundamental question: Is it not the
case that the very concept of the “feminine” is a patriarchal
invention, an ideal projected onto women by men and vigorously defended because
it functions so well to keep men in positions of power and women in positions
of service to them?(20) Masculine and feminine are among the most culturally
stereotyped terms in the language. This is not to say that there are no
differences between women and men, but it is to question the justification of
the present distribution of virtues and attributes and to find it less than
compelling as a description of reality. Such stereotyping serves the genuine
humanity of neither women nor men, and feeds an anthropological dualism almost
impossible to overcome. Adding “feminine” traits to the male-imaged
God furthers the subordination of women by making the patriarchal symbol less
threatening, more attractive. This approach does not, then, serve well for
speech about God in a more inclusive and liberating direction.
A
Feminine Dimension: Holy Spirit
Rather than merely attribute stereotypical feminine qualities to a male- imaged
God, a second approach seeks a more ontological footing for the existence of
the feminine in God. Most frequently that inroad is found in the doctrine of
the Holy Spirit, who in classical trinitarian theology is coequal in nature
with the Father and the Son. In the Hebrew Scriptures the Spirit is allied with
female reality as can be seen not only by the grammatical feminine gender of
the term ruah, which in itself proves nothing, but also by the use of
the female imagery of the mother bird hovering or brooding to bring forth life,
imagery associated with the Spirit of God in creation (Gn 1:2) and at the
conception and baptism of Jesus (Lk 1:35 and 3:22). Semitic and Syrian early
Christians did construe the divine Spirit in female terms, attributing to the
Spirit the motherly character which certain parts of the Scriptures had already
found in Israel’s God.(2l) The Spirit is the creative, maternal God who
brings about the incarnation of Christ, new members of the body of Christ in
the waters of baptism, and the body of Christ through the epiclesis of the
eucharist. In time the custom of speaking about the Spirit in female terms
waned in the West along with the habit of speaking very extensively about the
Spirit at all.
There
have been various attempts in recent years to retrieve the full trinitarian
tradition while overcoming its inherent patriarchy by speaking about the Spirit
as the feminine person of the godhead. When the Spirit is considered the
feminine aspect of the divine, however, a host of difficulties ensues. The
endemic difficulty of Spirit theology in the West insures that this
“person” remains rather unclear and invisible. A deeper theology of
the Holy Spirit, notes Walter Kasper in another connection, stands before the
difficulty that unlike the Father and Son, the Holy Spirit is
“faceless.”(22) While the Son has appeared in human form and while we
can at least make a mental image of the Father, the Spirit is not graphic and
remains theologically the most mysterious of the three divine persons. For all
practical purposes, we end up with two clear masculine images and an amorphous
feminine third. Furthermore, the overarching framework of this approach again
remains androcentric with the male principle still dominant and sovereign. The
Spirit even as God remains the “third” person, easily subordinated to
the other two since she proceeds from them and is sent by them to mediate their
presence and bring to completion what they have initiated. The direction in
which this leads may be seen in Franz Mayr’s attempt to understand the
Holy Spirit as mother on the analogy of family relationships: if we liberate
motherhood from a naturalistic concept and see it in its existential-social
reality, then we can indeed see how the mother comes from the father and the
son, that is, how she receives her existential stamp and identity from them
both within the family.(23) As even a passing feminist analysis makes clear,
while intending to rehabilitate the feminine, Mayr has again accomplished its
subordination in unequal relationships.
The
problem of stereotyping also plagues this approach. More often than not those
who use it associate the feminine with unconscious dreams and fantasies
(Bachiega), or with nature, instinct, and bodiliness (Schrey), or with prime
matter (Mayr), all of which is then predicated of God through the doctrine of
the Holy Spirit.(24) The equation is thus set up: male is to female as
transcendence is to immanence, with the feminine Spirit restricted to the role
of bearing the presence of God to our inferiority. This stereotyping appears
even in a creative attempt by process theologian John B. Cobb to come to grips
with the charge of idolatry of the male in worship and thought. While
acknowledging that currently the received polarity of feminine and masculine is
subject to redescription, he goes on to identify the Logos, the masculine
aspect of God, with order, novelty, demand, agency, transformation; and the
Spirit, the feminine aspect of God, with receptivity, empathy, suffering,
preservation. The lines are drawn: the Logos provides ever-new initial aims and
lures us always forward, while the feminine aspect of God responds tenderly to
our failures and successes, assures us that whatever happens we are loved, and
achieves in her totality a harmonious wholeness of all that is.(25) There is
real danger that simply identifying the Spirit with “feminine”
reality leaves the overall symbol of God fundamentally unreformed and boxes
actual women into a stereotypical ideal.
Recent Catholic theologies of the Spirit on three continents bear this out. In
Europe Yves Congar has synthesized the learning of a lifetime in his trilogy on
the Holy Spirit which gives an excellent comprehensive overview of the history
of the doctrine of the Spirit and its ecumenical thorniness in relation to
Orthodox churches. With a view toward contemporary concerns, he also adduces
historical precedent for casting the Spirit in a feminine mold, calling the
Spirit the feminine person in God, or again, God’s femininity. In
developing this idea Congar warns against locking women into the
“harem” of preconceived roles of charm and passivity, and seeks to
avoid this pitfall by concentrating on the maternal functions of the Spirit,
which are interpreted as substantive and active. Accordingly, he describes ways
in which the Spirit brings forth, loves, and educates as a mother does, by
daily presence and communication that operates more on an affective than
intellectual level.(26) However, while acknowledging that women want to emerge
from preconceived notions to be simply and authentically persons, this author
effectively reduces women’s identity to the one role of mothering, an
utterly important one to be sure, but just as certainly not the only role women
exercise in the course of a lifetime. Nor is its execution devoid of the
exercise of intellect.
In
his essay on Mary as the maternal face of God, Latin American theologian
Leonardo Boff holds that the Holy Spirit is the person in the Trinity who
appropriates the feminine in a unique way and who can be said to have feminine,
especially maternal, traits. What the feminine consists of is described
philosophically and theologically under the primary rubric of the Jungian
anima. Maternity, which Boff sees as constitutive of the personhood of
women, accords primarily with love and self-giving, which are classical names
for the Spirit. What is unique about this discussion is the novel hypothesis
according to which the feminine dimension of the Spirit is worked out in
affinity with the person of the Virgin Mary. In analogy with the incarnation of
the Word in Jesus, the Spirit divinizes the feminine in the person of Mary, who
in turn is to be regarded as hypostatically united to the third person of the
blessed Trinity, for the benefit of all womankind:
The Spirit, the eternal feminine, is united to the created feminine in order
that the latter may be totally and fully what it can be—virgin and mother.
Mary as Christian piety has always intuited, is the eschatological realization
of the feminine in all of its dimensions.(27)
The
simplest feminist analysis makes clear that in the case of actual women in all
their historical concreteness, the categories of virgin and mother come nowhere
near summing up the totality of what is possible for women’s
self-realization. Furthermore, even Boff’s analysis of the feminine in
relation to the Virgin Mary runs aground, finally, on the rocks of
inconsistency. His moving depiction of Mary as a prophetic woman of liberation
announcing God’s justice in her Magnificat runs counter to his
other descriptions of her participating in salvation “silently and
unassumingly” according to the norm of the feminine.(28)
In
developing his thesis Boff is self-critically aware that his is a male view of
femininity, and he issues warnings against the male tendency either to consider
women infantile characters or to overidealize them. He is trying to give women
direct access to the divine, as Christian men have always enjoyed with their
physical similarity to Jesus. In spite of this, however, his option for
uncritical Jungian ground where the feminine is equated with darkness, death,
depth, and receptivity and the masculine with light, transcendence,
outgoingness, and reason, even while allowing that neither set of qualities is
limited to men or women alone, coupled with his limitation of this feminine
dimension to the Spirit alone within the godhead, insures an outcome that is
not liberating for women.
Working out of a primarily Lonerganian context liberally salted with North
American philosophy, Donald Gelpi develops a foundational pneumatology by
constructing a theology of “Holy Breath” from the perspective of
human religious experience.(29) In the effort to find a suitably personal
iconography for the divine Breath, usually portrayed as a bird or fire, he taps
into the feminine image rooted in Scripture as developed by Jungian personality
theory. Well aware of the objections to the sexist connotations of archetypal
imagery and writing passionately against sexism, he shows how a transvalued
archetype of the feminine, that is, one divested of its shadow side, may
appropriately organize feminine images of the Holy Breath and her functions of
birth, enlightenment, and the transformation of life.
Once
again, however, a difficulty ensues with this correlation between the Spirit,
the feminine archetype, and the situation of women. Jungian archetypes are open
to the charge of sexism not necessarily in the sense of being misogynist, which
notion Gelpi seeks to allay, but insofar as they shrink the identity of the
vast range of concrete and different women into preset characteristics and
limit their options to historically predetermined roles. These roles are
culturally conditioned by the society in which Jung lived, and do not include
intellectual, artistic, or public leadership. Furthermore, Gelpi’s effort
to remove the shadow side of the feminine in order to find suitable metaphor
for God debilitates one powerful source of female energy. In the conflictual,
suffering world, actual women need to tap into their own pride and anger as
sources of empowerment rather than be stripped of these so-called shadows.
In a
church rigorously structured by patriarchal hierarchy, a Dominican, a
Franciscan, and a Jesuit have tried to alleviate the sexism of the central
symbol for God by imaging the Holy Spirit as feminine. I for one appreciate
their efforts even as I criticize their results. The goodwill of these men is
palpable and their intent is positive. Yet their methodological options insure
that they do not listen to women’s own self-definitions but develop a
one-sided view of “the feminine” structurally conducive to the public
power and private well-being of men. Besides the very real question of whether
nature or culture shapes these descriptions of "feminine" roles, their effect
on the being and function of concrete, historical women is deleterious and
restrictive. Nurturing and tenderness simply do not exhaust the capacities of
women; nor do bodiliness and instinct define women’s nature; nor is
intelligence and creative transformative agency beyond the scope of
women’s power; nor can the feminine be equated exclusively with mothering,
affectivity, darkness, virginity, the Virgin Mary, or the positive feminine
archetype without suffocating women’s potential. Rosemary Ruether’s
question returns again in force, as to whether the very concept of the
“feminine” used to define the essence of actual historical women is
not a creature of patriarchy, useful insofar as it relegates women to the realm
of the private and the role of succoring the male. When used to describe the
Holy Spirit as the feminine dimension of God, the result is not a view of God
that may liberate, empower, or develop women as imago Dei in all their
complex female dimensions.
Unexamined presuppositions about the doctrine of God itself raise a further
theological question about this approach. In what sense can it be claimed that
God has “dimensions,” let alone the dualistically conceived
dimensions of masculine and feminine? Such an idea extends human divisions to
the godhead itself. It actually ontologizes sex in God making sexuality a
dimension of divine being, rather than respecting the symbolic nature of
religious language.
We
must be very clear about this. Speech about God in female metaphors does not
mean that God has a feminine dimension, revealed by Mary or other women. Nor
does the use of male metaphors mean that God has a masculine dimension,
revealed by Jesus or other men; or an animal dimension, revealed by lions or
great mother birds, or a mineral dimension, which corresponds with naming God a
rock. Images and names of God do not aim to identify merely “part” of
the divine mystery, were that even possible. Rather, they intend to evoke the
whole. Female imagery by itself points to God as such and has the capacity to
represent God not only as nurturing, although certainly that, but as powerful,
initiating, creating-redeeming-saving, and victorious over the powers of this
world. If women are created in the image of God, then God can be spoken of in
female metaphors in as full and as limited a way as God is imaged in male ones,
without talk of feminine dimensions reducing the impact of this imagery.
Understanding the Holy Spirit as the feminine dimension of the divine within a
patriarchal framework is no solution. Even at its best, it does not liberate.
Equivalent Images of God Male and Female
While
both the “traits” and the “dimensions” approach are
inadequate for language about God inasmuch as in both an androcentric focus
remains dominant, a third strategy speaks about the divine in images taken
equivalently from the experience of women, men, and the world of nature. This
approach shares with the other two the fundamental assumption that language
about God as personal has a special approriateness. Behaviorism
notwithstanding, human persons are the most mysterious and attractive reality
that we experience and the only creatures who bear self-reflective
consciousness. God is not personal like anyone else we know, but the language
of person points in a unique way to the mysterious depths and freedom of action
long associated with the divine.
Predicating personality of God, however, immediately involves us in questions
of sex and gender, for all the persons we know are either male or female. The
mystery of God is properly understood as neither male nor female but transcends
both in an unimaginable way. But insofar as God creates both male and female in
the divine image and is the source of the perfections of both, either can
equally well be used as metaphor to point to divine mystery. Both in fact are
needed for less inadequate speech about God, in whose image the human race is
created. This “clue”(30) for speaking of God in the image of male and
female has the advantage of making clear at the outset that women enjoy the
dignity of being made in God’s image and are therefore capable as women of
representing God. Simultaneously, it relativizes undue emphasis on any one
image, since pressing the multiplicity of imagery shows the partiality of
images of one sex alone. The incomprehensible mystery of God is brought to
light and deepened in our consciousness through imaging of male and female,
beyond any person we know.(3l)
Although drawing their predominant speech about God from the pool of male
images, the biblical, early theological, and medieval mystical traditions also
use female images of the divine without embarrassment or explanation. The
images and personifications are not considered feminine aspects or features of
the divine, to be interpreted in dualistic tension with masculine dimensions or
traits, but rather they are representations of the fullness of God in creating,
redeeming, and calling the world to eschatological shalom.
Ancient religions that spoke of deity in both male and female symbols may also
be helpful in clarifying the thrust of this third approach. As evidenced in
psalms and prayers, male and female deities were not stereotyped according to
later ideas of what was properly masculine and feminine, but each represented a
diversity of divine activities and attributes. In them “gender division is
not yet the primary metaphor for imaging the dialectics of human
existence,”(32) nor is the idea of gender complementarily present in the
ancient myths. Rather, male and female enjoy broad and equivalent powers. A
goddess such as Ishtar, for example, is addressed by devotees as a source of
divine power and sovereignty embodied in female form, and praised as a deity
who performs the divine works of dividing heaven from earth, setting captives
free, waging war, establishing peace, administering justice, exercising
judgment, and enlightening human beings with truth, along with presiding over
birth, healing the sick, and nurturing the little ones.(33) When a god such as
Horus is addressed, he is credited with similar functions. Both male and female
are powerful in the private and public spheres.
The
point for our interest is that the female deity is not the expression of the
feminine dimension of the divine, but the expression of the fullness of divine
power and care shown in a female image. A striking example of the same
intuition is given in Luke’s Gospel in the parallel parables of the
shepherd looking for his lost sheep and the homemaker looking for her lost coin
(15:4-10). In both stories someone vigorously seeks what is lost and rejoices
with others when it is found. Neither story discloses anything about God that
the other hides. Using traditional men’s and women’s work, both
parables orient the hearer to God’s redeeming action in images that are
equivalently male and female. The woman with the coin image, while not
frequently portrayed in Christian art due largely to the androcentric nature of
the traditioning process, is essentially as legitimate a reference to God as is
the shepherd with his sheep. Conversely, God spoken of in this way cannot be
used to validate role stereotyping wherein the major redeeming work in the
world is done by men to the exclusion or marginalization of women.
The
mystery of God transcends all images but can be spoken about equally well and
poorly in concepts taken from male or female reality. The approach advocated
here proceeds with the insight that only if God is so named, only if the full
reality of women as well as men enters into the symbolization of God along with
symbols from the natural world, can the idolatrous fixation on one image be
broken and the truth of the mystery of God, in tandem with the liberation of
all human beings and the whole earth, emerge for our time.
Options
The
linguistic options which guide this study, made with the judgment that they are
appropriate and necessary, converge into speech about God using female
metaphors that intend to designate the whole of divine mystery. Theoretically I
endorse the ideal of language for God in male and female terms used
equivalently, as well as the use of cosmic and metaphysical symbols. In actual
fact, however, male and female images simply have not been nor are they even
now equivalent. Female religious symbols of the divine are underdeveloped,
peripheral, considered secondarily if at all in Christian language and the
practice it continues to shape, much like women through whose image they point
to God. In my judgment, extended theological speaking about God in female
images, or long draughts of this new wine, are a condition for the very
possibility of equivalent imaging of God in religious speech. This book’s
choice to use mainly female symbolism for God, let me state clearly, is not
intended as a strategy of subtraction, still less of reversal. Rather, it is an
investigation of a suppressed world directed ultimately toward the design of a
new whole. Shaping this kind of speech is not an end in itself but must be
received as an essential element in reordering an unjust and deficiently
religious situation. Until a strong measure of undervalued female symbolism is
introduced and used with ease, equivalent imaging of God male and female, which
I myself have advocated and still hold to be a goal, remains an abstraction,
expressive of an ideal but unrealizable in actual life.(34)
In
the task of shaping new discourse about God this study draws on a number of key
resources: women’s interpreted experience, and critical retrieval of
elements in Scripture and the classical tradition. Each of these in its own way
contributes building blocks for a liberating naming toward God. To these
resources we now turn.
Notes. Cbapter3 /Basic Linguistic Options: God, Women, Equivalence
1.
Meinrad Craighead, Tbe Mother’s Songs: Images of God tbe Mother
(New York: Paulist, 1986) 15.
2.
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (see chap. 2, n. 33) 46.
3.
Chopp, Tbe Power to Speak (see chap. 1, n. 8).
4.
Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in tbe Relation between Religion and
Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1952) 7.
5.
Ibid., 7-9.
6.
Aquinas, here following Damascene: ST 1, q. 13, a. 8.
7.
This has been well noted by Rita Gross, “Female God Language in a Jewish
Context," in Womanspirit Rising (see chap. 1, n. 19) 167-73.
8.
Aquinas, De Potentia (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1952) q. 7, a. 5.
9.
Marcia Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings," in Weaving tbe Visions
(see chap. 1, n. 19) 167-73.
10.
As Caroline Walker Bynum points out, “Gender-related symbols, in their
full complexity, may refer to gender in ways that affirm or reverse it, support
or question it; or they may, in their basic meaning, have little at all to do
with male and female roles (“Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols,"
Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols ed. Caroline Walker
Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon, 1986 )2)
11. ST I,q. 12,a. 13.
12.
The importance of image and the imagination has been an issue in religious
studies for at least two decades, triggered into prominence by Ray Hart’s
insightful Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a
Rhetoric of Revelation (NewYork: Herder & Herder, 1968). The theme
developed in the 1970s through studies such as Amos Wilder’s,
Tbeopoetic and the Religious lmagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976),
and John Bouker’s, The Religious Imagination and tbe Sense of God
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). David Tracy’s analysis of ecumenical
differences in imagination has become a classic in its own right: Tbe
Analogical Imagination: Cbristian Theology and tbe Culture of Pluralism
(New York: Crossroad, 1981). I am indebted to the analysis of both
Gordon Kaufman, The Theological Imagination (see chap. 1, n. 3),
and Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and tbe Religious Imagination
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), two very different approaches but both
enlightening. Margaret Miles’s excellent work Image as Insight: Visual
Understanding in Western Christanity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon,
1985) exposes the power of the image to shape moral values; Nelle Morton shows
a way forward in The Journey is Home (see chap. l, n.23), especially
"How Images Function," 31-39, “Beloved Image,” 122-46, and “The
Goddess as Metaphoric Image," 147-75.
13.
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957)
41-48. An enlightening treatise that further probes the symbolic mediation of
religious knowledge is Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983).
14.
The reader is invited to dwell with the illustrations of God in this book as
examples of the power of the image to move thought and praxis in specific
directions. See Ricoeur Symbolism of Evil (see chap. 1, n. 10) 347-57.
15. W
A. Visser’t Hooft, The Fatherhood of God in an Age of Emancipation
(Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982) 133.
16.
This list of feminine characteristics is taken from Daniel O’Hanlon,
“The Future of Theism," CTSAP 38 (1983) 8.
17.
Visser’t Hooft, TheFatherhood of God, 133; O’Hanlon,
“Future of Theism,” 7-8; Yves Congar, I Believe in theHoly Spirit,
3vols.,trans. David Smith (NewYork: Seabury, 1983) 3: 155-64; Hans
Küng, Does God Exist? (see chap. 2, n. 6) 673.
18.
Küng, Does God Exist? 673.
19.
Carr, Transforming Grace (see chap. 1, n. 15), chap. 4 surveys the
academic study of gender.
20.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Female Nature of God: A Problem in
Contemporary Religious Life,” in God as Father? (see chap. 2, n.
57) 61-66. Much contemporary use of the concept of the feminine is related to
the categories codified by Carl Jung; see Naomi Goldenberg, ‘A Feminist
Critique of Jung," Signs (Winter 1976) 443-49, and “Important
Directions for a Feminist Critique of Religion in the Works of Sigmund Freud
and Carl Jung,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976.
21.
Robert Murray, “The Holy Spirit as Mother,” in Symbols of Church
and Kingdom (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 312-20; P A. De
Boer, Fatherhood and Motherhood in Israelite and Judean Piety (Leiden:
Brill, 1974).
22.
Kasper, God of Jesus Christ (see chap. 2, n. 11) 223.
23.
Franz Mayr, “Trinitätstheologie und theologische Anthropologie,”
Zeitschrift für Tbeologie und Kirche 68 (1971) 474. This is
reminiscent of Basil of Caesarea, who at one point held that the Holy Spirit
was equal in nature but not in rank or dignity with the Father and the Son:
Contra Eunomium 3.2 (PG 29.657c). While he later changed his
position, the incident is illustrative of the tendency to subordinate the Holy
Spirit.
24.
Mario Bachiega, Dio Padre o Dea Madre? (Florence, 1976); H. H. Schrey,
“Ist Gott ein Mann?” Theologische Rundschau 44 (1979) 233;
Mayr, “Trinitätstheologie,” 469.
25.
John B. Cobb, “The Trinity and Sexist Language,” in his Christ in
a PluralisticAge (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975) 264. George Tavard sets
up a similar polarity in Women in Christian Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame, 1973) 195-99, but then questions it on the basis of
the difficulties it presents.
26.
Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, especially “The Motherhood in
God and the Femininity of the Holy Spirit,” 3: 155-64.
27.
Leonardo Boff, The Maternal Face of God: Tbe Feminine and Its Religious
Expressions, trans. Robert Barr and John Diercksmeier (Maryknoll, N.Y:
Orbis, 1987) 101.
28.
Ibid., 188-203 vs. 119 and passim.
29.
Donald Gelpi, The Divine Mother: A Trinitarian Theology of the Holy Spirit
(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984).
30.
Phyllis Trible’s expression, used throughout God and the Rhetoric of
Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978).
31.
Herbert Richardson recounts the following personal recollection. As a child he
was taught to say a bedtime prayer “Father-Mother God, loving me, guard me
while I sleep, guide my little feet up to thee." It was thereby borne in upon
his young mind that if the divine is both Father and Mother, God is different
from any one thing he experienced around him (Women and Religion [see
chap. 2, n. 20] 164-65).
32.
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (see chap. 2, n. 33) 52.
33.
See the prayers in Frederick Grant, Hellenistic Religions: The Age of
Syncretism (New York: Liberal Arts, 1953) 131-33; and historical studies by
scholars such as Judith Ochshorn, Tbe Female Experience and the Nature of
the Divine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). The use of
equivalent imagery did not necessarily mean that these societies were
egalitarian; the feminist liberation hermeneutic introduces something genuinely
new in this regard.
34.
Elizabeth A. Johnson, “The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God
Male and Female,” TS 45 (1984) 441-65. Dorothee Soelle puts the
same idea more graphically: “We do not mean to substitute a dominant
feminist exclusivity, but in a paternalistic culture language has to be turned
on its head before anyone will begin to grasp what the problem is and to
understand that human beings might choose another symbol to identfy with”
(“Mysticism—Liberation—Feminism,” in Tbe Strength of the
Weak [see chap. 2, n. 57] 101).
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