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Finding a God big enough to be God was a spiritual task of no small proportions. I started over. If God is not God, or is at best only half a god, a male god, then where do we go? The Jewish Apocrypha teaches in reference to the picayune nature of the gods on Olympus, 'If the Greek gods steal, by whom shall their believers swear.' I knew the feeling. When God cannot possibly be God, the soul loses hope that there is any God at all. And the heart goes dry.
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But to confront the heresy of God the Father, I discovered quickly, is to be called a heretic. It is to come face-to-face with the possibility of exclusion, one way or another. We must accept the notion that God excluded femaleness from the Being that is God. Or, we must deal with the possibility that in reclaiming the fullness of what it means to be made 'in the image of God,' we may well be excluded from the community that taught us to believe that in the first place. To belong we must either diminish the very definition of God or demean the spiritual status of femaleness. A woman who is willing to do that mocks the God of creation. Any man who is willing to do that does not really want God at all. He simply wants himself writ large.
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... I began to realize that the God they were giving me to believe in was too small a God to possibly be worth a life. At least, not a woman's life.
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What's more, I found that this God did not lead to God at all. If the God we say we worship, the God of all being, lacks the feminine--rejects the feminine--then this God is not God. This God is lacking in being. And the being of woman lacks something of God.
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It is not easy to find the way back to the essence again once an image is cast in stone. This image of the superior male and a male God had been taught in male institution after male institution for centuries. By this time, it had done an untold amount of damage to the image of women. Worse than that, it had completely blinded us to God.
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But the search for God is the spiritual quest, the eternal journey, the breadth and depth and height of the universe. To find God means to be obliged to search beyond the images of limitation, to the essence, to the mystery, to the spirit. 'God,' Juanita Helphrey wrote, 'is a cloud forming, an eagle soaring, a voice from the wilderness echoing through your ear.' And so I considered my own understandings carefully and wrote,
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God is. God is love. God made woman, too, in God's own image.... Those three sentences have become enough for me. They have become my life. They sustain me; they caution me; and they drive me on. There is not much time left now and these are the ideas that go with me into 'The Valley of Death.' Not the doctrines, not the dogmas; not the so-called 'definitive' statements about the otherness of woman--all of which are just one more example of male attempts to capture the power of God for themselves.This time the God I sought was big enough to be the God of Being. No other spiritual idea has had as major an effect on my life, on my sense of self and of my sense of the real meaning of God as the God, who as well as being Father is also 'God my Mother.'
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5 comments:
As I prepare to go to my first class of the semester on Feminist and Multicultural Theologies in just a few hours, this has me all the more excited about dismantling the "God the Father" heresy. As usual, thank you for sharing this.
While this reading caused me great alarm initially, I now profess a thankfulness to have been spurred to a brief study of the subject. I went to a public domain online and looked up the original text lexicons ( a lexicon being the vocabulary of a language, as well as the total stock of morphemes in that language ) in the Hebrew and the Greek. Using Strong's concordance, I searched all references to "God" and here is a small sampling of what I found...
OT ( Hebrew ) references #9,559 uses of "Adonai", "Yehovah", and "Elohiym" , all of which are in the masculine use of the noun.
NT ( Greek ) likewise references thousands of uses of the word "God", "Theos", etc. in the masculine noun. I found a few hundred neuter noun uses as regards the "Spirit of God", but absolutely no feminine uses in the original texts.
I read portions of Scripture where Jesus addressed God as "Abba Father" and when He prays to His "Father in Heaven". As the Word incarnate, we must trust his literal use of masculine nouns.
I believe God has revealed Himself in His sufficient Word and we tread on dangerous ground when we attempt to remake Him to fit our own personal or cultural preferences. Lovingly submitted :)
Just wanted to share a new favorite spelling of the title/name for the Divine that I came across in doing reading for the class mentioned above: God/ess. The lovely Rosemary Radford Ruether admits that this name is unpronounceable, but I loved it and thought I'd share. May you continue to think these beautiful thoughts.
"Aunt Gail," I certainly don't know you and certainly mean no disrespect in responding to your comment, but I must confess that as I read your response to Kristina's eloquent post, I experienced my own "great alarm."
I cannot even begin to speak for Kristina (as I'm sure you know, she's extremely intelligent, and I can't begin to compete with that!), so I certainly don't want to be the cause of any family strife. I just couldn't help but throw in my own two cents. :-)
Perhaps I should first give a little of my own background. I went to Messiah College (where I met Kristina) to study the Bible and I am now pursuing my Master's degree at the University of Notre Dame, where I am also studying the Bible. This is my fifth semester of studying both ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek, so while I am certainly not a published scholar in either field, I have done enough studies with those who are so as to acquire a fair amount of proficiency in each language.
So, to get to the heart of the matter, I found your use of both languages to "prove" your point a bit troubling. To first address specifics, while "Adonai" is frequently HEARD as a name for God, it is really the orthodox way of pronouncing the holy tetragrammaton, YHWH. (The original Hebrew was written without vowels. A long, long time later, the Masoretes went back and added the vowels and assigned the consonants YHWH the vowels of "Adonai" as a way of reminding readers that this most holy name was to be pronounced "Adonai.") However, despite the many times that one might HEAR "Adonai" used as a name for God, it is far more rare for that to actually be the WRITTEN name for God. Generally, when God is referenced in the Hebrew Bible, God's name is spelled "YHWH," even though an oral reading would pronounce that word "Adonai." So where does "Adonai" appear in the Hebrew Bible? Much more frequently it appears in instances where one person is addressing another person who is of higher status or who is to be respected. (The instance that readily comes to mind since I've just been translating this for class is in Ruth 2:13 where Ruth address Boaz as "Adoni," or "my lord/master.") Thus, that "holy" name is really not so holy after all.
As far as "Elohiym," while you are correct that it is a masculine noun, I would be curious to know whether or not you realized that it was plural? In fact, a literal translation of "Elohiym" is "godS," not "god." Additionally, the root of this word "'el," is the generic name for a god, such as Baal, Marduk, etc., not a specific god. So, the literal name "Elohiym" is actually a plural form (which, if we read it literally as you seem to be suggesting we do, would cause all sorts of problems if we then try to assert the oneness of God as it is expressed in the Shema of Dt. 6) and a generic form that makes it applicable to all the pagan gods whom I would imagine you would feel uncomfortable worshiping.
On to the Greek. You are correct that "theos" [pronounced theh-ahs, not the thee-ohs or thay-ohs that you will sometimes hear. Now you can impress all your relatives around the Thanksgiving table with that new-found knowledge :-)] is a masculine noun. No argument from me there. You are also right that "pneuma" ("spirit") is a neuter noun. Again, no argument.
Here's the thing, though, just because the Hebrew and Greek have these words in the masculine gender does not even begin to imply that the object of that naming belongs to the gender of the word it describes. As an example using modern languages, let's assume that you are correct in asserting that the gender of the word describing some reality describes the gender of that reality. Let's assume that both a French woman and German woman are having a discussion about your kitchen table. (In English, we clearly don't have this gender system, but French, German, Spanish, Latin and a host of other languages maintain this system.) The French woman looks at your table and says, "Ah! La table!" Meanwhile, the German woman, looking at the same table, exclaims "Ah! Der Tisch!" Well, now we have a problem. If we follow your reasoning that the gender of a noun (in this case, the noun used as God's name) reflects the actual gender of the object in reality to which that noun corresponds, we will have a very confused table indeed! According to the French, your table is feminine. According to the German, your table is masculine.
Hopefully this silly example will suffice to illustrate my point. As in these modern languages of French and German, both Greek and Hebrew work within a gender system that does not rely on the actual gender of the reality that it is describing. As an example of this, take the Hebrew word for "first born son." The Hebrew noun "bekhor" is masculine. (Makes sense since we're talking about a son.) However, the second we make that noun plural, "bekhorot," we notice that this masculine noun is getting a feminine ending. (The masculine plural ending is "iym," as we saw in "Elohiym" above.) Thus, there is little rhyme or reason in describing why certain words are one gender and others the other gender.
So, what does all of this mean? Well, basically that you can't construct a valid argument for the gender of God based on the gender of the nouns used to name God. The only thing that masculine nouns tell us is that Hebrew and Greek both used the masculine gender for these words just like they use the feminine gender for other words and, for Greek, neuter gender for still other words.
However, despite all of this, I do agree with you that "we tread on dangerous ground when we attempt to remake Him [sic] to fit our own personal or cultural preferences." I would wholeheartedly agree that the God described in the Bible is one who transcends all cultural, societal and normative boundaries. The God of the Bible is a very big God whose many different characteristics always make that God very difficult to describe. However, just because we might believe in a very big God who should not be "remade," does NOT mean that we have to read the holy text in which we encounter that God in the literal way in which you are suggesting it should be read. In fact, I would be willing to venture that you don't take all of it literally? Do you have a parapet around your roof? Do you refrain from wearing clothing made with two different materials? Do you abstain from eating shellfish? If not, you are not "literally" reading the Bible (and if you are, you aren't following it). Those are only Old Testament examples, you say? Well, when was the last time that you took witnesses with you when you had a dispute with someone and then took the matter before your whole church when the issue wasn't resolved? If you haven't done that, you're not listening to Jesus own words in Matthew 26. Or do you always keep your head covered? No? Well, then you're not "literally" reading Paul's instructions in 1 Corinthians 11. All of this is to say, in the same way that you have probably developed a fair rationale for why you don't follow some the Bible's more obscure teachings, I am suggesting that a similarly fair rationale can be established for why the text does not need to be read in the "literal" way that you are suggesting.
As (I think) Kristina was trying to point out in this entry, we agree on the point that God is a very big God who transcends our personal and cultural desires and expectations. Thus, as such, why can God not transcend our social construction of gender? Why do we free God from our other cultural barriers and yet keep that same God tied to the cultural notion of gender? I think that by imagining a God who transcends gender, we both do ourselves well and pay the ultimate respect and honor to the one to whom we give our ultimate worship.
"Aunt Gail," I look forward to hearing your response.
Lovingly submitted,
Melly.
I miss you both so much it hurts. I think my brain went into shock from all the thinking I just made it do in reading that. I miss stimulating theological conversations. I miss you, Tina and Melly. I love you both.
I love the way Chittister expresses her thoughts and pours them out - so simple and insightful and not at all pushy. Not as an attack, but as a revelation, allowing others to follow as they so choose or to be challenged to think deeper. I hope the same could be said about me - that I challenged others to think and never stand still while always lifting them toward the Divine and creating stronger, loving, trusting relationships.
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