Here are some excerpts:

Different imagery is needed in order to express Christian transformation in different times. There is a basic point here that needs stressing. Images of God do not describe God but express ways, experiences, of relating to God. We must use what is familiar to talk about the unfamiliar; so we turn to events, objects, relationships from ordinary, contemporary life in order to say something about what we do not know how to talk about — the love of God. This is what biblical language about God is as well: It was contemporary to its time, relevant and secular — God as shepherd, vinekeeper, father, king, judge and so forth.

How should we image God and the world in an ecological, nuclear age? If not in the monarchical model –God as king and the world as his realm — what other possibilities are there?

Needless to say, there are many, for no metaphor or set of metaphors can exhaust the varied experiences of relating to God. But I would like to suggest very briefly an alternative to the picture of the world as the king’s realm: let us consider the world as God’s “body.” While that notion may seem a bit shocking, it is a very old one with roots in Stoicism; it tantalized many early Christian theologians, including Tertullian and Irenaeus: it surfaces in a sacramental understanding of creation — the world charged with the glory of God, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it. Moreover, remember that a metaphor is not a description. To say that the world is God’s body is to use the same kind of language we use in saying the world is the king’s realm. Both phrases are pictures, both are imaginative constructions, both offer ways of thinking about God and the world.

And later:

What this experiment regarding the world as God’s body comes to, finally, is an awareness, both chilling and breathtaking, that we, as worldly, bodily beings, are in God’s presence. We do not have to go to some special place –a church, for instance –or to another world to find God for God is with us here and now. This view provides the basis for a revived sacramentalism – that is, a perception of the divine as visible and palpably present. But it is a kind of sacramentalism that is painfully conscious of the world’s vulnerability. The beauty of the world and its ability to sustain a vast multitude of species cannot be taken for granted. The world is a body that must be carefully tended, guided, loved and befriended both as valuable in itself — for like us, it is an expression of God — and as necessary to the continuation of life.

Needless to say, were this metaphor to enter our consciousness as thoroughly as the royal, triumphalist one has, we would live differently. We could no longer see God as worldless or the world as godless. Nor could we expect God to take care of everything, either through domination or through benevolence.

Some food for thought, eh? The above was just a snack. For the full meal you can use the links below.

“The World as God’s Body” by Sallie McFague

Sallie McFague’s Faculty Page

The following insights inform our woman-affirming spirituality:

We have come to believe that the ultimate truth, wisdom, and mystery of the Universe is far deeper, higher, wider, and richer than any name or image we use to refer to it. We know now that every name and image has its limitations and must be held loosely. Mystery cannot be confined within a language.

We have come to believe that elevating only one image of the divine is idolatry. It limits the vast potential of our imaginations. We have looked squarely at the wounding of women as a result of the dominance of male God language. As we have begun to glimpse a God who looks like us, our healing has deepened. We are now free to choose which aspects of the God of our religious past we will weave into our unfolding spirituality. God the father has become one among many potentially healing images.

I’ve let this passage simmer in my mind for a few days. I love most of the ideas, especially the part about mystery being greater than any label. I also like calling an elevation of an image idolatry. However, if “elevating only one image of the divine” is idolatry, how is a movement to multiple images not idolatry, too? This is the problem I have with any gendered — any anthropomorphic — image. If the use of multiple images is not idolatry, it is at least misleading, in my opinion.

I should be clear at this point that I’m not trying to wrest anyone’s personal, meaningful metaphors away. It’s when we are attempting to educate, to advocate and stimulate growth, and to encourage maturation that I think we should lobby for moving beyond gender language. To say that the sacred may, at some time, FEEL like a mother or father or whatever, is one thing. To
teach that the divine actually possesses any anthropomorphic attribute is to encourage the latching-on to that attribute. Which is precisely what Patricia Lynn Reilly eloquently argues against when she writes that our images “must be held loosely.”

There is a fine line here that is easy to cross, and I’ve been lamenting the following for YEARS. See if this scenario sounds familiar: Someone is speaking about some theological and/or spiritual topic. They are questioned about the particular words they are using. They respond with something like, “Of course I don’t literally MEAN [such and such], but you know what I mean.” Well, piffle! (as my grandmother used to say) Why don’t you (we) just go ahead and USE THE WORDS THAT MEAN WHAT YOU’RE SAYING???

For a long time the Church has been teaching things, especially to children, that parents or the church have to reteach later saying, “Well, no, that wasn’t literally true.” Progressive Christianity will not ever be truly progressive as long as this happens.

I realize that I’m on dangerous ground when I call into question the exclusively male language and imagery for the divine that permeate our religious and cultural life. For many the male God of traditional religion has been a rich and meaningful concept. And the roots of these God-words reach deep into the Hebrew and Christian traditions.

However, these traditions also teach that God is beyond human naming and imagination. Thus I carry out this questioning not as a heretic but in compatibility with the original teachings of traditional religion. It is my work among women that gives me the courage to call for an examination of the images and words for God that we heard in our childhoods and continue to hear today. It is these words and images that have shaped our sense of ourselves. Women have been excluded from the divine.

“A God Who Looks Like Me: Discovering a Woman-Affirming Spirituality” was first published in 1995. That the quote above could be current proves that patriarchy is still strong and influential. Not that most readers of this blog would doubt that, of course. But who knows, maybe someone will stumble across this post and others and something new will happen. Or perhaps reading something you already know to be true can encourage you to stay the course. Blessings.

Patricia Lynn Reilly’s site “Imagine a Woman Internationsl”

In my early 20s, I began having a certain kind of experience that was so intense, remarkable and strange—call them mystical encounters or whatever other label you’d prefer—that I found myself calling into question what was, by that point, a long-held and deeply entrenched atheism.

What was true then remains true for me now: my understanding and relationship with the Divine is completely inextricable from my experience of the Divine. This, philosophically, puts me in the camp known as “phenomenology”—I don’t believe we can talk about God without talking about our own personal experiences of God. Otherwise, what are we talking about? What are we trying to say?

And yet, of course, we need to understand how limiting each of our experiences of God are. An experience of some aspect of the Divine, filtered through

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

Even Judaism’s greatest prophet experiences the Divine with a hand over his eyes, protected from a blinding light he was not capable of understanding, let alone surviving. He can hope to perceive, at most, traces of God’s presence, the imprints of the effulgence left behind, lingering in the air, before disappearing. That’s all any of us have, really. Not the opportunity to behold God’s glory in its full splendor, but rather just the chance to catch a few traces, the moment that they began to vanish.

My experiences of God have taken many different forms over the years-and, as such, my understandings have, as well. Of course we all make sense of the traces we’ve been lucky enough to glimpse; we try to derive from them what we can, even if we receive contradictory information from them, even if we have difficulty squaring them with our faculties of reason. There’s no pithy quote, no single story, that can succinctly summarize the One who is, necessarily, greater and more expansive than the human attempting to understand. How do we describe that which transcends language? And yet, who would we be if we experienced moments in which the veil was, however briefly, lifted for us and we didn’t try to learn from them?

As such, I want to suggest that it’s an important, even laudable thing to talk of a theology rife with contradictions. Those who want to tie God up in a neat, coherent package — and who believe that their package, by virtue of being consistent, is also true – are, in my opinion, overreaching. I speak of God in terms that are contradictory and complex, messy and unclear. I embrace the fact that not everything might add up by our reckoning. I believe this messiness is a fair and even possibly quite good thing.

So how does this impact our language choices? Many feminists over the last 30 or 40 years have had much to say about the androcentric — even phallocentric — terms in which Judaism traditionally describes God, and in many cases they’ve suggested alternative language or terms that might provide a breath of fresh air. They’ve envisioned an alternative to a Judaism in which God is an angry male figure paralleling oppressive male authority. We’ve seen the rise of the Shechinah, considered generally to be the feminine aspect of the Divine; we’ve seen feminine language used in blessings; we’ve seen a bounty of new rituals spring up; and feminist-flavored renditions of existing rituals. We’ve seen critiques of the hierarchy in traditional Judaism and a renewed insistence that God is not necessarily “other.” All this, of course, also opened the door for queer and transgender theologies and totally reworked the existing playing field of theological inquiry.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this was a necessary process, one that enabled women and feminists of all genders to reclaim Judaism on our terms, to refashion it into something that addressed our needs, our lives, our ways of thinking. This new approach allowed many people to see the Divine in a new way, and to bring many people into Judaism and Jewish life who had previously been marginalized, or even shunted off the margins entirely.

And yet, I’d like to suggest that the time has come to stop thinking about language and God. I’d like to suggest that the last forty years of work have been a valuable and necessary detoxification process, and that it’s time to stop worrying about our metaphors for God, lest we become so tangled up in them that they become our experience of God entirely.

Do Names Matter?

In religion, symbology is inescapable. The Divine, and the human relationship with the Divine, is vast, complex, and beyond language. There’s no way to explain God in direct words. Rather, as a way of pointing at and expanding our notion of ultimate existence, linguistic symbols create a kind of shorthand. Jewish theologian Neil Gillman puts it thusly: “We borrow aspects of familiar human experience to express a complex set of truths about a reality that transcends everyday experience.” How could it be any other way? We use what we have.

This, of course, explains why there’s so much anthropomorphism in our sacred texts and liturgy to begin with. Jewish rabbinic texts tell us that “the Torah speaks in the language of humans.” In other words, language is a tool to help us access the One that defies human description. That’s all language is — a tool. Our job, is to not get too hung up on the words themselves.

When, during the High Holiday prayers, we beseech “Avinu Malkeinu,” “Our Father, our King,” to whom are we calling? Do we really believe God is our parent (stern, loving, or both)? Do we truly relate to God as a king (benevolent, exacting, or both)? Certainly, the phrase can evoke the sort of patriarchal domination that sends many feminists reeling. But it can also evoke the feeling of a small child looking to a parent for comfort and safety; a feeling of submission to a greater force and liberation from self-importance; or a yearning for justice in the world. How these symbols and myths manage to be so powerful and lasting is that they both name something just outside the grasp of articulation, and that they are porous enough to name several things at once. Maimonides is adamant that anyone who takes literally either the emotional or physical description of God in the liturgy is committing idolatry. The words of the liturgy are not literal but meant to name something just outside the grasp of articulation—the perfect unity, the transcendent power, the infinite expansiveness—that reflects our own feelings of smallness in comparison. Kabbalists might say that God’s true nature contains both aspects of lovingkindness and justice—so these metaphors of father and king express something fundamental to the Divine nature. More rationalist theologians might say that God’s nature transcends even those categories, but that this familiar metaphor helps to articulate our relationship to this mighty expansiveness, that it helps us situate ourselves in prayer and thus find God.

Of course, some may ask, why do we have to accept that God is father and king and not also (or, instead,) mother and queen? Why, if language does not matter, should we use the old tropes rather than finding new ones that feel more relevant to us, today? First of all, I think that by focusing too much on the metaphors and the gender of said metaphors is missing the point. The words are merely a starting point, the place we’re meant to transcend in a hurry. The traditional metaphors are usable, and newer metaphors are also usable — we can open ourselves up to find depth and meaning in all of them, to be sure. But by working too hard in our attempts to measure the precise nature of the false clothes in which we dress the Divine, we lose the goal beyond the horizon.

I think that we’re ready to develop a feminist understanding of the traditional liturgy that begins and ends with the presumption that the words are, in a way, incidental, that focuses on finding new ways to understand the treasures that we already possess. It’s not that I don’t think that there’s room to introduce changes—I certainly prefer to dispense with the blessing to God for having not made (the male petitioner) a woman, or the one that praises the Divine for having not made me a gentile. And when I serve as shaliach tzibbur, when I lead the congregation in prayer, I make sure to add the names of Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel alongside those of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But I understand this addition as a purely symbolic gesture, a way of signaling to myself, to God, and to all those gathered, that women are part of the story. For me, these words are useful, but dangerous if we get too caught up in them as the starting or ending point in any conversation with or about God. Some argue that our metaphors for the Divine are necessarily tied to our experience of God, that the one creates the other. This may certainly be true to some extent; for me, however, the question is, do we allow those metaphors to bind us to a certain way of encountering God, or do we allow for the messy complexity of the human encounter with the Holy One? Do we allow room for contradiction, for the possibility that our experiences of the Divine might include new information that challenges the easy, comfortable assumptions we used when we created these metaphors in the first place? A theology of contradiction doesn’t presume the experiences we have when we enter into conversation with God; worrying too much about language and metaphors can keep us from being open to surprises that belie whatever we thought we might be setting up. God should surprise us. Who are we to think that we know everything? God should challenge us, and challenge us again, cause us to rethink and rework our assumptions about life, other people, the world, ourselves and God Godself. If we’re so tied to the idea that God is, necessarily, a compassionate, loving mother-figure or a peacemaker or some other thing, we’re going to miss vital information that God sends us that might contradict our neat little labels. We have to learn to become less attached to our metaphors, so we can meet the God who dwells outside of them. The magic often happens when we allow the porousnsess of texts we find challenging to open themselves to us. When we embrace their complexity, when we make room for contradiction, we may find ourselves able to hold more than we thought, able to embrace an understanding of the Divine that doesn’t line up as conveniently as we might hope.

Because I believe that rituals operate simultaneously on innumerable planes, and that they may serve our needs in different ways now than they have in the past, and because religious practice is a form of Divine service–for all these reasons, if I come across some aspect of my religious tradition that I don’t like, I tend to begin with curiosity. What is this ritual (or rule, or snippet of liturgy) about? What did it do, how did it function, originally? What are some of the core ideas underlying it? How did it get to its current incarnation? How have people understood it in different times and places? The prayer praising God for the resurrection of the dead may have been written as a literal description of the Messianic era, but its underlying message about the cyclical nature of life and death is powerful and porous enough to hold both the ancient notion and my own musings about the cycles of existence. The language of the liturgy reveals a truth big enough to hold thousands of years of prayer, and has survived precisely because its wisdom transcends the particulars of time and place.

After the righteous work of naming what’s problematic with the traditional gendering of God and Judaism, perhaps we can begin to let go of so much discussion about God’s gender and to give God the space to contradict everything we once thought true. And as we learn to do this with God, as we learn to embrace the porous messiness of the transcendent Divine, we may find our own ideas about the gender of people on the ground become less fixed as well, that who we are, one with the other, becomes more open to holy contradiction and sweet, sweet surprise.

The rabbinic aphorisms of Pirke Avot remind us that with Torah, we must “turn it, and turn it over again, for everything is in it.” Metaphors are prisms that we can turn and turn and turn again, and the light and the color refracts and reflects, brightly, into our hearts, each time a different color.

But God is bigger than our metaphors, and we desecrate the Divine Name when we forget that.

Thanks again to Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg for allowing me to repost her article. Use the link to learn more about and/or contact her. On her page, click on the “media” link for some really great insights in a few short videos.

——–

David’s comment: I’m pretty sure Rabbi Ruttenberg and I would agree on many, many things. One thing I disagree with, though, is when she writes: “I’d like to suggest that the time has come to stop thinking about language and God.” Actually, my response is more of a “Yes, but…”

As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe there can be (and most times should be) a difference in how we use language in private and in public. I agree that our language is a starting point and that we should hold our metaphors lightly, but in public speech I think we should go ahead and worry about language for the sake of others. In our personal spiritual work, I think we should wrestle, experiment and try out different ways of thinking and speaking. I whole-heartedly agree that “When we embrace their complexity, when we make room for contradiction, we may find ourselves able to hold more than we thought, able to embrace an understanding of the Divine that doesn’t line up as conveniently as we might hope.” But I still advocate the use of non-gendered references to the Sacred in public settings, so that we don’t risk someone taking literally what we strive to transcend.

Indeed the references didn’t matter to him. He knew and felt and lived the fact that the Infinite is beyond our thoughts, ideas, concepts and words. I enjoyed those revealing moments and they helped me grow in my own work with the failure of language.

I believe that a person can grow past the state where language distracts from the ideas being discussed. But I also believe that great care must be taken not to assume that others around us have arrived at that place, too. Sometimes we must guard our language to avoid distracting those for whom labels still carry much weight. This is especially true with labels that limit and/or obscure.

I hesitate to use the word “maturity” because of the way that idea can be belittling, as in, “When you are more mature, you’ll understand.” (meaning: “When you’re more like ME.”) If growth is considered a progression, however, it’s difficult to avoid noticing where we are along the path compared to others. Those who are farther along the path have responsibilities to those who have barely begun their journey, and one responsibility is to postpone lessons for which some travelers are not prepared.

I believe this is what Paul was talking about when he wrote of food sacrificed to idols. Found in I Corinthians 8:1-13, the idea is that some people thought they were defiled when they ate such food. Others had grown enough that they knew it was just food, that’s all. But the advice given to the mature was to abstain, for the sake of their brothers and sisters. Verse 13: “Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat [sacrificed to idols] again, so that I will not cause them to fall.”

The principle, related to God-language, is this: Some people can hear God spoken of as male or female and “translate” that to themselves, knowing the Sacred is beyond gender. Others may take it literally.

Most of my career has been spent working in churches and I’ve put together many worship services and experiences. Once I grasped this concept, I always advocated the use of language with the first-time visitor in mind. They may have grown up in a church, they may have no church background. They may have been spiritually abused by a church. They may be seeking something that they cannot name. Our personal, private language of devotion can take whatever form works for us, but I think the use of genderless references to the Divine is definitely the way to go in public settings.

To a person farther along the path this may seem silly. They might say, “Since God is beyond language anyway, let’s not worry about it, but focus on our encounter with the Sacred and what can be learned. Surely it’s time we get past worrying about it.” In my next post I’ll quote a rabbi and link to her article that makes this very point. And she makes some great points about metaphor along the way.

“These words just mean that in a given context, we who are finite, experience God through our awareness of one of those qualities.”

Read the whole article: God and Gender: Missing the Divine for the Sign

About Shais Taub

Here’s a link to an article I found a while back about arguments among Germans regarding God and gender. I’m posting this as a way to work up to a discussion about inclusive language at Christmas. Too bad there’s not a blanket of snow to smooth the ride. [grin]

The article: “For God’s Sake: Minister Crucified for Suggesting Gender-Neutral Almighty”

Quote: “Just in time for Christmas, Germany’s conservative Family Minister Kristina Schröder has sparked a contentious debate about the word most central to the Christian faith: God.”

and: “The CSU’s party whip in the federal parliament, Stefan Müller, also expressed irritation over the idea. ‘Independent of the fact that it’s Christmastime, I find it improper and am a bit astonished,’ he said.”

It takes so little to get some folks worked up, eh? Stay tuned for more summer Christmas fun!

So the idea for this article has been stirring in me for a while. Its title was inspired by the work of Jeanette Blonigan Clancy, a Catholic lay theologian who writes a blog called “God Is Not Three Guys In The Sky,” and David Marks, a former Presbyterian music minister whose blog is called “God Is Not a Guy.”

Just when I thought we’d about eliminated the so-called “generic” use of “man” because it really is exclusive, up pops “you guys” almost everywhere. Women and girls seem to use “you guys” as much as men and boys do. So why do females think they’re included in “you guys”? These same women usually protest loudly when they are referred to as “men” or “man,” as the King James and other older versions of the Bible do and as many churches still do. So why do they think it’s okay to be called by the male word “guys”?

Jann Aldredge-Clanton

You may be thinking that I’m just being picky, that there are many more serious problems in the world and even in the world of patriarchal language. But exclusively male language, even the seemingly innocuous “you guys,” devalues women and girls through this exclusion, contributing to a culture in which violence and discrimination against women and girls are still all too prevalent.

Kendra Weddle Irons writes in Christian Feminism Today’s FemFaith blog that many people dismiss as unimportant critiques of the usage of such phrases as “chairmen” for women as well as men. “Yet, we begin to uncover the depths of our sexism if we substitute ‘women’ for ‘men’ in these cases.” We would not refer to a man as “chairwoman,” so why is it okay to refer to a woman as “chairman”?

The same goes for “you guys.” We would not refer to a group that included men as “you gals.” And we would not call an individual girl or woman a “guy,” so why would we call a group that includes women “you guys”? In the English-speaking world, it finally became clear that a group that includes women cannot be referred to as “man” or “mankind” because an individual woman cannot be called “man.” So the “generic” use of “man” left the grammar books in the 1980s.

But now “you guys” sneaks in all over the place! It is insidious the ways in which our male-dominant culture continues to perpetuate itself. Letha Dawson Scanzoni writes in FemFaith: “In our culture, woman is considered to be subsumed under the category called man, the male being considered the default model or generic representative of what a human being is. Woman, the womb-man, is seen in relation to man.”

Calling girls and women “guys” makes femaleness invisible. It says that males are still the measure of all things. Novelist Alice Walker, in this short video clip, gives a powerful commentary on the “dangerous and revealing” use of “guys” to refer to women–dangerous because it “erases” women. [Alice Walker on YouTube]

Likewise, it is dangerous for God to be named and imaged exclusively as a “guy.” This exclusively masculine Deity persists in almost all religions and cultures. Making the Ultimate Power of the universe male gives the strongest support imaginable to the dominance of men and the devaluation of women and transgender people. I have written extensively about the suffering that comes to all people and all creation from male-dominated theology that has at its foundation an exclusively masculine naming of Deity, and about the healing, peace, and justice that come from gender-balanced names and images of Deity.

Sometimes I’ve noticed that churches where I and others have advocated for inclusive language will increase references to Jesus in worship services to avoid gender-balanced language. Hymns, readings, and prayers continue to be filled with “he,” “him,” “his,” and the church feels fine because everybody knows that Jesus was male. Never mind that these churches also teach that all believers of all genders are the body of Christ and that the resurrected Jesus lives in all believers of all genders and that scripture and church tradition link Jesus and feminine “Wisdom” (Sophia in the Greek language of the Christian Scriptures).

Just as people think they can avoid exclusive language for divinity by increasing references to Jesus, many people think they’re avoiding exclusive language for humanity by increasing references to “you guys.” Somehow they have convinced themselves that “you guys,” like “Jesus-He,” is inclusive. After all, they’ve given up “man” and “mankind” for mixed-gendered groups, and some have even given up references to God as “He.”

Some women who understand that “you guys” excludes them say they don’t challenge it because they just don’t have the energy to challenge all the sexist language and practices that they experience. And being called “you guys” seems rather harmless compared to much of the other sexism they experience. I certainly understand. I must admit that I don’t always challenge being referred to as a “guy,” and I often let other sexist language slide by in order to be heard instead of dismissed as just “too sensitive” or as a “single issue” person. And sometimes I also get tired of challenging sexist language and practice.

But “you guys” is really easy to avoid. There are plenty of good substitutes. Many people, including women, tell me they don’t like “gals” so they don’t want to say “you guys and gals,” also because this phrase excludes and erases transgender people. It’s easy to avoid “guys” and “gals” altogether and to choose a truly inclusive term like “you all,” still only two little words like “you guys,” or if you’re from the South, as I am, you can simply say, “y’all.” Another inclusive choice is “you folks” or “you people,” or just “you.” The word “you” can be singular or plural, and it is inclusive of all genders. So instead of greeting a group of people with “It’s good to see you guys today,” say, “It’s good to see you today,” or “It’s good to see you all today.”

This simple change, just like calling God “She” as well as “He,” can make a big difference in the lives of children and adults, helping us all to truly believe that people of all genders are created equally in the divine image.

So I will keep on writing and preaching and saying, “God is not a guy, and neither am I!”

Copyright 2013 by Jann Aldredge-Clanton and EEWC-Christian Feminism Today. All rights reserved. Originally published on the Christian Feminism Today website. Reposted with permission.

Our images of God should challenge oppressive power structures, rather than simply providing a mirror for them to gaze into. Those images of God should free us to speak and to serve and to love, not simply entangle us further in the chains that society has already placed upon us.

When our images of God simply become a way of making God look just like oppressive men and husbands and fathers and kings and popes and pastors and white people, and, in turn, making those people look an awful lot like God, maybe we need to repent of our idolatry.

sarahoverthemoon.com

Looks like Sara is blogging at Patheos now.

While officially it is rightly and consistently said that God is spirit and so beyond identification with either male or female sex, yet the daily language of preaching, worship, catechesis, and instruction conveys a different message: God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman, or at least more fittingly addressed as male than as female. Upon examination it becomes clear that this exclusive speech about God serves in manifold ways to support an imaginative and structural world that excludes and subordinates women. Wittingly or not, it undermines women’s human dignity as equally created in the image of God.

She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse