In the Holy Bible, God is recorded as having revealed Himself to humanity across approximately 1,500 years, multiple authors, communities and cultures. I notice that in that last sentence I referred to God with a male pronoun ‘Himself’. I use the male pronouns because that is the tradition of the Jewish and Christian communities that have formed me. Yet, I recognize that God contains within ‘Him’self each and every attribute of both femininity and masculinity.
Christianity in general, and especially Western Christianity has done God and us all, a disservice by focusing only on God as masculine. Now, for sure, God reveals Himself most strongly as ‘Father’ even when revealing Himself to women, so we can be forgiven for using male pronouns and images. Yet, Jewish and many Christian faith communities take on the andro-centric , and misogynistic aspects of the non-Christian culture around them. In turn, the femininity of God has been downplayed, or even silenced and lost. This has resulted in a slanted, unbalanced and ‘thinned out’ understanding God, which I think we would do well to correct. In some places and times, women have even been subjected to prejudice and even harm because of such poor theology. Indeed in liberal Protestant Christian traditions, the redress is underway, yet it doesn’t seem to be often acknowledged in Catholicism, some parts of Anglicanism, conservative Protestantism (I’m looking at you, Southern Baptists) , and many groups inside Oriental and Eastern Orthodoxy. Of course, God has no gender as such, yet when he made us in His image, he made us both male an female. This was surely for humankind’s benefit as we experience intimacy and profound relationship, that illustrates for us, the intimacy and relationship that God invites us (individually and together) to have with Him.
(Side note: It is my habit to capitalize pronouns that refer to God as a matter of respect and tradition, not as a theological necessity.)
So let’s hear from God as ‘He’ reveals Himself to be feminine, often using womanly anthropomorphism and allegories to help us understand Him. Here are just a few examples:
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Psalm 123. 2a Behold, as the eyes of servants, look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maidservant, to the hand of her mistress,…
Psalm 131:2 But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
Deuteronomy 32:18b you forgot the God who gave you birth.
Isaiah 66:13 As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you;
Isaiah 49:15 Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.
Isaiah 42:14 now will I cry like a travailing woman;
In Hosea 11:3-4 God says of Himself: “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I who took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.”
Matthew 23:37 (and Luke 13:34) “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
Luke 15:8-10 “Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
In the book of Proverbs, the Personification of Godly wisdom is often feminine (see Proverbs 1:20, 8:11, 9:1 and of course the Proverbs 31).
Again, God is above and beyond all our gender notions, yet He chooses to reveal Himself with both manly and womanly attributes. God, rightly understood, embraces the sacred feminine ans well as the sacred masculine. When we get this right, much bad pastoral theology vanishes, and good pastoral theology can fully breath. More on this is future posts.