personal language for the Patriarchy and our father
Yesterday was our first Christmas without my father. My mother is being refreshingly open about him with us her children and grandchildren, and she has been since he passed on earlier in the year. In the final days of their lives together, the final months, the final years even, their relationship was increasingly sweeter and — may I even characterize it as — more and more egalitarian. We all saw how he stopped referring to her as his “helpmeet” and started calling her his best friend and God’s greatest gift to him and his soul-mate. “But he was not always easy to live with,” my mother recalls. She encourages me, her son, to be a husband, a father. My mother has been studying such words more. As presents this week, she gave me a book on the names of God (for Christmas) and a Bible translated in a way that makes explicit the names of God (for my birthday, a day some months away now, which will in the new year mark the anniversary of my father ‘s death). When my mother led our family in prayer before the Christmas dinner she cooked us all, our mother began “Our Father.”
I’ve been thinking carefully and considerably about our personal language. (My mother and my father were Southern Baptist Christian missionaries for many many years. As you read here, this may be an important if personal detail.) Our personal language is not so unrelated to language for the Patriarchy, to language for God, to language even from the Bible. Whether the Bible includes the New Testament or not is not important in this consideration. One might rightly argue that the Western and Eastern, the ancient Greek and the ancient Jewish notions overlap and influence our personal notions and language substantially.
For example, many of us in the blog and facebook worlds have been reading the Septuagint’s Isaiah and have come across words such as ὀρφανοῖς and χηρῶν for the Hebrew יתום and אלמנה, for the concepts of fatherlessness and husbandlessness in the very first verses. Not far into the same book is the notion of πατρὸς and of אב and of father. Looking ahead, we come to the calling upon God by name, in chapter 64, to the very personal familial and fatherly language: κύριε πατὴρ ἡμῶν σύ for יהוה אבינו אתה, which many English translations have as “O LORD, you are our Father.”
This is the language of the gospels as also put into the mouth of Jesus (aka Joshua, aka Yeshua) as he starts our “Lord’s Prayer” – Πάτερ ἡμῶν, “Our Father.” What are we to do with such? Well, I wanted to share in this post a couple of longer quotations from discussions of God language, of theology.
The first quotation is one that seems to be endorsed by student of theology and blogger, Kait Dugan. The second is one that is spoken and then written by a theologian, the late James B. Torrance. (Both happen to be discussing Christian language for the Trinitarian concept of God; but I’m mostly interested here in how they view the language put in the mouth of Jesus as he addresses God as Father). Without further ado, here are the quotations. But I would love to hear and to read your thoughts on these too!
Our language of God (theo-logy) is forged in the wake of the Word made flesh in Mary’s womb and shares in his endeavor to foster wholeness and newness in world where action is shaped by language. Jesus spoke of his Father in his own, distinctive human voice — the voice of a Jewish man raised on the Jewish scriptures with the love of a Jewish mother in a Jewish community on whose lips and in whose hearts were placed love of and faithfulness to a God they knew as Father. The tenor of Jesus’s voice was one of affection, adoration, and willing, loving submission as he addressed God as ‘Father’. His own father was Joseph who trusted the angel’s word in a dream and who risked his own good name to marry a woman who was pregnant not by him, and raised Jesus as his own son. ‘Father’ in Jesus’s community and ‘father’ in Jesus’s family never carried the tenor of fear in Jesus’s voice. The Word made flesh spoke that word as he had always known it: intimately, trustingly, lovingly. Our own voice revocalizes Jesus’s words, the phrases he used in order that we too might know God intimately, trustingly, lovingly — the ‘we’ not born from the bosom of the Father. That not all of us can do so to the same personal effect is precisely why we have Jesus at all. Our language of God is meant to cultivate in us the love of God that Jesus knows as the son of God. Our language of God is also to do for our neighbors what Jesus’s language did for his neighbors — heal, challenge, strengthen, encourage, in short: love. That we orient ourselves towards God in Jesus at all puts us in contact with Jesus’s heart and before the eyes of Jesus’s Father. As we speak, we seek to conform to Jesus not only in our language but also in our own voice’s tenor, having its own particular history of speech and soundings. For the women in my class, they were doing just that–addressing God [as Our Mother] in their own voices from their own histories. Whether we find we can use the language of ‘Father’ for God or not, we can acknowledge that Jesus used such language and that the language we use and its resonance in our bodies is to set our lives in the trajectory of his life, both in how we know and love ourselves and in how we know and love one another.
-mwMel – That might be the single best comment I’ve ever gotten on a blog [here after the post “The Trinity and Gender Inclusive Language“].
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What did Athenasius understand the task of theology to be? In Matthew 23:8, Jesus is recorded as saying to the disciples, “Do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven…. The greatest among you will be your servant.” What is our Lord saying? He is recognizing that the word “father” is a patriarchal, sexist one in a culture where men dominate women and often use them simply as servants or sex objects. Jesus is saying that God is not like that! He is evacuating the word of all male, sexist, patriarchal connotations in calling God “Father.” He says elsewhere: “Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father.” “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27). Jesus alone truly knows the Father, and his mission from the Father is to make the Father known. He does so by taking the form of a servant and by living a life of loving obedience, going to the cross. Fatherhood is then defined for us by Jesus on the cross,. We are not thrown back on ourselves to project our biological, sexist images of “father” onto God — to “mythologize.” The Christian church has never simply called God “Father,” but Father from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name” (Eph 3:14ff). In [Christian, Trinitarian] theology our knowledge of God as Father is derived from his self-revelation in Jesus Christ. [from “Gender, Sexuality, & the Trinity” – from pages 99 – 100 – in Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace by Torrance]
BLT 
As you suggest, I think that Christianity faces a special challenge in thinking of a god that transcends gender. The central story of the conception of Jesus in a human mother portrays the first person as biologically male (and that is stressed in the New Testament when Jesus calls out “Abba”; the second person, Jesus, of course is also biologically male. The third person of the Godhead represents a greater opportunity for thinking about a feminine being (in the way, perhaps, that Judaism considers the Shechina to be feminine) that creates a pretty weird dynamic (portraying the Trinity potentially as a 1950’s style nuclear family).
That being said, I think it is worth the effort to try to break free of the shackles of gender-identity in thinking about the godhead, to escape the trap of anthropomorphism.
Theophrastus, Thanks for your comment.
And let’s suggest as clearly that Judaism’s challenge in thinking of a god that transcends gender is nearly as special. The trinitarian conceptions (whether hierarchical in a patriarchal way or more Athenasian) cannot discount the issues that the explicit image of God as Father in the Hebrew scriptures have caused. There aren’t just a few – Psalm 68:5; Psalm 89:26; Isaiah 63:16; Isaiah 64:8; Jeremiah 3:19; and Malachi 2:10. Granted that the Jewish feminist voices seem to have been more silenced and more marginalized in various context than the voices of Christian feminists have.
Thus, a Rita M. Gross, writing toward the “Female God Language in a Jewish Context,” will acknowledge but work well beyond a Mary Daly.and her Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’ s Liberation. Nonetheless, some of Judaism’s families have unfortunately unique contexts that require theologizing that recovers language for God that is not gendered as “Father”; for instance, Melissa Raphael finds herself needing to write of “A Mother/God in Auschwitz” in her book The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust. Not a few Jewish writers have theologized God in gendered terms against the singular patriarchal notion of “Father.” For instance, Paula Reimers writes a much quoted essay “Feminism, Judaism, and God the Mother”; Bonna Devora Haberman grapples with “Difficult Texts”; Susannah Heschel writes On Being a Jewish Feminist; Judith Plaskow writes of Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective; and Rachel Adler, “calling for women’s full participation [in] transform[ing] Jewish law, prayer, sexuality, and marriage,” writes Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Matthew Berke in “God and Gender in Judaism” announces how the “new [1996] High Holy Day prayerbook, Gates of Repentance” reworks the “Avinu Malkeinu prayer” as Avinu Imeinu and in some places “Avinu (Our Father) gives way in translation to ‘Source,’ ‘Our Maker,’ ‘Our Creator,’ or ‘Our Parent’.” He notes that “an alternative prayer is offered to the Shekhinah, the divine spirit, which is traditionally regarded as feminine…. [and that there’s] outright feminization: the Shekhinahis invoked as a “Mothering Presence” and “Mother present in all”; [and] a blessing begins, Barucha At . . . Blessed are you (feminine) instead of the traditional Baruch Atah (masculine).” And, as we’ve discussed here at this blog, there are various feminist and woman and feminine language Haggadot.
As my post suggests, this is not just a blogger’s or a theologian’s or a clergy person’s or a rabbi’s concern. The language of God in the Bible, in the religious traditions of Judaism and of Christianity, affects how people in families live. The familial language of God, especially of Father, can be taken different ways. Granted academia and here in the blogosphere is where we can sometimes more freely and sometimes even more safely discuss the issues. I’m grateful for essays and books such as “God’s Gender: A Traditionalist View” and The Voice of Sarah: Feminine Spirituality and Traditional Judaism by Tamar Frankiel, now the Provost and a Professor of Comparative Religion at the Academy for Jewish Religion, in LA. She researches, teaches, and writes as a married mother of five children. Such personal contexts can be very important.
Please let me stress the last point I was trying to make (and perhaps was the primary intention of my post here in the first place). Families are affected by gendered language for God and all of its myriad alternatives.
For blogger / Christian theology student, this is important. In a recent post, she’s written:
And for theologian James Torrance this is also important. This husband and father, in the lecture/ chapter I quoted from above, writes:
There is a pervasive and governing image in the Bible of God as husband, and of Israel as bride. Rashi is clearly aware of it in his interpretation of the lilies (see the Song and Psalm inscriptions) as students of Torah. Father and son, like husband, are clearly metaphorical. It’s a double wedding: Father marries Israel, Son marries Church. But both are clearly one since it is Zion, the holy city, Jerusalem, that carries the image of bride. Father does not marry son; father loves son and gives all things into his hands. That love is expressed as Spirit. God is Spirit. Worship is in spirit and in truth. Truth is painful – bloody per the image of Zippora as Moses wife. Israel is married to Torah – and released and remarried through the death of Torah incarnate (Romans 7). That God seeks such to worship him is a placing of Spirit in time. This is itself incarnation.
Under all this is the theme of obedience – the obedience of faith (Habakkuk, Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews). He is your Lord (Psalm 45). In some sense that is paradoxical since such obedience is neither slavery nor a submission to a domineering power. It is instead a release into dialogue and interaction, an interaction that sees God learning. Who is this that comes up from the desert, leaning on her beloved? (8:4) Who is this, looking forth as dawn, beautiful as the moon, pure as the sun, terrible as those of great intensity? (6:10).
Who do people say that I am? may reflect these questions. Do the people fast when the bridegroom is with them?
Given the sin of humanity, the second Adam, who is actually primal – for the one who comes after was before), the second Adam completes the betrothal. Who is it that is complete? The answer – extensive and endlessly generative of further questions – is in the story of the Psalter of which I have written in my own intense way these past 7 years. (E.g. Psalm 7, the invitation to be judged ‘for the completeness that is in me’, Psalm 15:2 הֹולֵךְ תָּמִים, a phrase expanded on in Psalm 18:20-37, the first time that complete is used as a frame in the Psalms). Note how ‘Torah is complete’ (Ps 19:8) and it’s mirrored use in 19:14 – then ‘I will be complete’. Note the completeness of Psalm 26 reflecting Psalm 1, the lament of Psalm 38 – framed by lack of completeness and so on.
So Kurk – much as I concur with the egalitarian view, there is, through this imagery, a serious set of problematic paradoxes. But the imagery will stand a great deal of tension and intensity. These images reveal and capture and include all our gendered being. They will not support coercion without tenderness, or self-seeking without self-giving, or violence without also absorbing the same. They are all demanding yet all submitting. All powers eventually bow the knee (another metaphor) in adoration (the image of the Magi). Metaphor carries reality and is itself incarnated in the one who receives its tenor. (I always knew there was possibility in being a tenor).
All joy for those who are the complete of the way (Psalm 119:1).
long comments are tough – insert opening parenthesis somewhere. change it’s to its!
Thanks for your comments, Bob, the long and the short.
You are right that “husband” metaphors for God can be very difficult. You seem to have read Victoria’s post here – “The Bride of Christ: a feminist reading” – and I know you’ve read at least a few paragraphs of Sister Carolyn Osiek’s article – “The Bride of Christ : a problematic wedding – Ephesians 5:22-33” – where she gets at the difficulties (because you commented so long ago on a post I wrote so long ago in which I provide some quotations from her article: http://speakeristic.blogspot.com/2011/03/tap-that-sexy-power.html ) Dr. Osiek, at the end of her essay, writes this:
Similarly, James B. Torrance, in the lecture/ chapter I quote from above also says this:
What is interesting to me is how Torrance and how Kait Dugan’s blogger friend “Mel” get theologizers using the “Father” image of God to look to Jesus’s own conception. The latter says –
“Whether we find we can use the language of ‘Father’ for God or not, we can acknowledge that Jesus used such language and that the language we use and its resonance in our bodies is to set our lives in the trajectory of his life, both in how we know and love ourselves and in how we know and love one another.”
The “our Father” that the gospel writers have Yeshua appropriating from the Psalmist and the Prophets is quite particularly “in the heavens.” In the metaphorical sense, He lifts his children “on the earth” up. And, in Jesus’s parables, the sort of earthbound father they often depict (as in the prodigal son) is quite human anyway, if counter to the patriarchical sexist abusive sorts of dads some of us here have had.
Yes Kurk, I have read in this area of human reasoning about itself. I am opposed to any demeaning of a human based on any policy, religious or historical. I have been raised as a white Anglo-Saxon male, and have therefore not escaped being raised with prejudice, and worse – those unstated assumptions that prevent seeing one’s prejudice. But God, who is rich in mercy, knows how to enable repentance, how to expose assumption, and how to usurp authority. No descriptive words can in fact do what God does with that creating and usurping word that never goes forth without returning fruitful. What is this humanity that such a visitation is effected! (Psalms 8 and 144)