God the Mother
Throughout my life, I have heard my mom say this same interesting phrase numerous times. When something unexpectedly positive happens, she will occasionally say, “There is a God and she is merciful.” The italics represent her own emphasis when she said this. I’m not entirely sure if she said this to make a point from feminist theology or just because she wanted to watch the men who heard it squirm. A worthy goal either way. Of course, there are some who hold fairly traditional views of God who would genuinely be offended by this statement. Because we use Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to describe the Holy Trinity, some people think God is simply a man. Of course, to say that God is a human male is obviously wrong. God is spirit. God created all of humankind in God’s image, not just the men (Genesis 1:27). But does it really make sense to speak of God as a “she,” or is this breaking some theological rule?
Isaiah 66:10-14 sees God using a lot of feminine language for Jerusalem. Jerusalem is mother to the people. She nurses the people and carries them close to herself. We get imagery of breastfeeding and intimate, loving care. It’s a beautiful image of a very special kind of love, but then there is an interesting turn in verse 13. God self-describes as a mother. All this mothering imagery leads up to the point at which God compares Godself to a mother, which makes a careful reader double back and wonder. Could all of this intimate care language actually be pointing to God?
There is a long history of us rejecting this idea, and with fairly good reason. Goddess worship was a major danger to the ancient Israelites. At certain times in their history, the people of Israel would turn away from following the LORD and turn to whatever pantheon of gods the people of the land they were in worshiped. Generally, this is portrayed as simply foolish and faithless throughout the Bible, but scholars think the actual historical situation was more complicated than that.
Some of the earliest portrayals of the LORD are similar to how other cultures portrayed a warrior god. God defeated the gods and political authority of Egypt. God defeated Pharaoh at the Red Sea. God led the Israelites to conquer Canaan. Throughout the Old Testament, God is seen as a warrior, defending the people and attacking their enemies. This sort of deity was familiar and unstandable to a people who were embedded into polytheistic cultures. The problem is that with polytheism so common, they wouldn’t turn to a warrior god when it came time to pray for rain, in much the same way that we don’t ask an Army Ranger to develop a pesticide or a Navy Seal to design a building. We would ask a chemist or an architect. There are other people to do those jobs. They believed there was another god who could send rain. Why trouble the glorious conqueror with something that wasn’t his job to begin with?
The people turned to goddess worship or sacrificed to Baal because they didn’t believe the LORD was the right god for the job when it came to farming and rain. Anyone who has studied the Old Testament can tell you what happened next. God wasn’t too happy about this betrayal. And the reason for that is something that we take for granted now, but it wasn’t so clear back then. While it is true that the LORD, the God of Hosts, was a great warrior god, God was, and is, also much more. God is a fertility god as well. God fills the role of the divine warrior and the nurturing mother. This would have been hard to grasp for a polytheistic people, and in some ways it remains difficult to grasp now.
Sometimes, we become obsessed with fitting God into a specific role. We are afraid to acknowledge the mother-imagery applied to the LORD because we want to continue imagining God as a fierce fighter, a mighty bearded warrior clad in shining armor with lightning flashing forth from his eyes. We want to see God as a powerful man, and sometimes we are so afraid of God not being a powerful fighter, that we dread to see God as a mother. But the truth is, God fulfills both of those roles. God fights and defends, attacks injustice, wages war to liberate the oppressed, and God comforts and nurtures, embraces us lovingly and provides life-giving nourishment.
At this point, it may seem like the point of this blog post is that God is equally a man and a woman, but it actually goes deeper than that. This isn’t just about the problem of focusing too much on the gender identity of God. This is about the danger of positive attribution in the first place. This isn’t true in all cases, but sometimes when we assign something to a category, we are necessarily excluding it from other categories. While a person can be a football player and a father, these aren’t mutually exclusive, a person cannot be a married man and a bachelor. It is a contradiction to say that a person is simultaneously imprisoned and free unless you are being really creative with definitions. When we say something is true about a person, we are saying other things must be false.
There is a long tradition in Christianity and other religions of something called apophatic or negative theology. This practice seeks to define God by what God is not. The statements of negative theology seek to separate God from the limits of human language, understanding that God cannot be ultimately grasped or understood in human terms. This is something that is a little unfamiliar to protestants who tend to focus on God being revealed in the Word and believe that the Gospel proclamation can be sufficiently carried in any human language. Of course, both of these things can be true. We can understand enough of God to come to faith because God provides the faith we need to believe. However, God cannot be fully contained by our words. God is above and beyond anything we can say. To answer the question we began with, with apophatic theology, referring to God with feminine pronouns isn’t any more or less of a mistake than referring to God with masculine pronouns. While it is reasonable to use feminine language to challenge the preference for masculine words, the root of the mistake is assuming that God fits into human gender categories in the first place.
Apophatic theology deconstructs positive attributions. While it isn’t necessarily wrong to refer to God as a divine warrior or a divine mother, both are limiting, and we need to be able to let go. As much as we may want God to look like us or look like the hero we imagine, sometimes we need to search beyond our comfort zones to see God appearing as the opposite of what we think. Perhaps even more frightening, sometimes God appears as nothing we would recognize at all, neither our expectation nor the opposite, but something wholly other, entirely different, unexplainable, unspeakably holy and too perfect for words.
