21st
The Gender of God :: A Divine Penis or a Sacred Vagina?
In case you missed it, on Saturday night I tweeted,
I’m fine calling God “he” as long as we can also call her “she.” Let’s just try not to over-identify God with gender pronouns.
A pretty sensible and not unreasonable statement.
When I tweeted that I was sitting in my library with an old friend talking about fundamentalism. I actually tweeted it to prove the point that it doesn’t take much to provoke a spirited response from those who hold extreme positions.
It’s sort of like a conversation I like having little kids, I say, “Hey buddy, you like to argue with me” and they predictably respond, “No I don’t.” Then I say, “Yes you do” and they predictably respond, “No I don’t.” We keep this going until I finally say, “Then why are you arguing with me now?”
The tweet provoked a predictable flurry of facebook responses, nearly 30 status comments in the first 12 hours (nothing like putting the “F-U” in “fundamentalism”) and 53 by this morning.
Anyway, for the record I am fine with the imagery and language of “Father” for God. Fine, insofar as much as it is understood as a metaphor in the same way we understand other biblical metaphors like:
- God as “mighty warrior dressed for battle” doesn’t assume God is running around heaven wearing a green beret or combat helmet, a flack-jacket, Kevlar and an assault riffle hanging off her shoulder.
- Christ as the “lamb of God” doesn’t mean Jesus plays in the NFL for St. Louis, or inspires religious icons of as a Dodge-produced red pickup truck, or means every time I eat a medium rare leg of lamb I am consuming the divine.
- Jesus as the “bread of life” doesn’t mean Christ has literally embodied a dinner roll, slice of bruschetta, a French baguette, an English muffin or even a slice of white Wonder bread (though some may argue he does embody a wee little liturgical communicant wafer on Sundays).
Our human attempts to over-identify (the over-identify part here is the point) God with a gender is actually an attempt to create God in human’s likeness. Not only does it diminish the divine imprint in the feminine and perpetuate the myth of masculine domination in a reality already steeped in harmful patriarchy (btw, patriarchy is the paternal twin of racism), but it also lacks real imagination for the beauty and mystery of the divine.
