This week I have been thinking a lot about well-loved progressive Christian writer, Rachel Held Evans, who passed away after a brief illness on Saturday, May 4. In honor of her mission of truth-telling in the church, I am returning to my own calling to help others see the feminine images of God in the Bible.
Made in God’s Image
Rachel herself didn’t write much about feminine language for God. However, in 2012, she was slammed for referring to God as She in a blog post. Later, she defended her position. A quote from her:
And as a woman, referring to God as She or as Mother serves as an important, liberating reminder that I am indeed created in the image of God, not as some lesser being who exists in perpetual subordination to men, but as an expression of God’s very self.
Womb of All Creation Flowing
This week, in honor of Rachel, I decided to respond at length to Roger Olson’s recent post titled, “Womb of All Creation Flowing? Progressive Christianity Today?” He reacts to a hymn of that title–Womb of All Creation Flowing–authored by Dr. Jann Aldredge-Clayton. His main concern seems to be that re-imagining God as female leads to a neo-pagan Mother Goddess religion, defined as the belief that “the creator of all, our loving, judging, saving God is a feminine deity who created by giving birth such that the world, creation, is somehow always part of or an extension of God/ess.”
So, in “Mother Goddess religion,” the mother metaphor for God leads to pantheism, which is the belief that God and the creation are one. This is what Dr. Olson sees being described in the hymn, “Womb of All Creation Flowing.”
Having read the hymn several times, I don’t think it has to lead one to pantheism, nor do I believe it was meant to. (I also don’t think we have to refer to Mother Goddess in order to call God Mother).The imagery in the hymn is uncomfortably feminine for some, and the metaphors of birthing too messy, too physical, too, well, female, for others.
But un-Biblical? No. I’d like to explain why. First, check out the song from Aldredge-Clayton’s website. Then read my points below:
A Birthing God
The womb of God is a viable metaphor in the Old Testament. The writer of Job (38:29) puts it in God’s mouth in the first person: “From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost of heaven?” The context is creation, so the link there from the womb of God to creation is validly Biblical, without being pantheistic.
Biblical scholar Dr. Phyllis Trible writes extensively about the “womb-love” of God found in Jeremiah 31 in her essay, “Journey of a Metaphor.” God speaks in the first person as a mother about Ephraim, her son: “Is not my child, Ephraim, dear to me? Is not Ephraim the child in whom I delight?…I think of Ephraim with tenderness. My heart yearns for him…surely I will have mercy on Ephraim, says Yahweh” (31:20). The words “mercy” (recham) and “womb” (rachem) are related in their root (rhm), compassion. Here, the word “heart” means “inner parts” which in several other places in Scripture parallels the word “womb,” writes Trible.
Lastly, the many passages where Yahweh is either referred to as mothering, or speaks as a mother, imply that Yahweh has a metaphorical womb. (See my page, Feminine Images of God in the Bible, for more). In fact, in the New Testament, the term “born again” features centrally for John. Readers today don’t think about the fact that someone who is born must have a mother, who must have a womb.
Of course, all of this is metaphor, as is masculine language for God. But the feminine metaphors are too seldom used, often due to fears such as Dr. Olson’s.
Holy Darkness
Dr. Olson especially objected to the metaphors of darkness and seeds in the second verse, although it seems likely they are gardening metaphors, and not sexual in nature (note “bring our dreams to glorious flower as your grace fills all our needs.”)
Dr. Aldredge-Clayton talks about Holy Darkness being a needed complement to all our images of Light which convey the implication that God is Light and White. I think we usually see The Man Upstairs as The White Man Upstairs, certainly not a Man of Color or Darkness. I also like the darkness metaphor for God because often our growth does take place when we feel most alone, like a seed hidden away in the soil, away from light.
One of the things that The Mother God Experiment has helped me with is un-doing queasiness about physical metaphors. If El Shaddai can grant “blessings of the womb and of the breasts” (Gen. 49:25), then we could possibly talk about seeds in a reproductive context, too. Dr. Olson said he felt “icky” about this verse especially with men singing the verse on the video. However, New Testament writers talk about “Abraham’s seed” (Gal. 3:29); “imperishable seed” (I Pet. 1:23) and “God’s seed” (1 John 3:9).
Again, however, the context of the verse is clearly about seeds used in gardening, and perhaps the darkness of the womb, but with an emphasis on turning the word “darkness” around so we can see it positively.
Loving Womb in Mother Jesus
The last verse of Aldredge-Clayton’s hymn addresses God directly as Loving Womb. I find this a beautiful way to speak of God, because it centers us “babies” directly in Jesus, who is, as Julian of Norwich wrote, “our true mother.”
There is a history among the church fathers of writing of God and Jesus as mother, starting with Clement of Alexandria in the second century. Clement’s first chapter, in his book The Teacher, is full of messy, milky, bloody talk of motherly nurture, as he loves the breast-feeding metaphor that he draws from I Peter 2:2. He writes,
Thus to Christ the fulfilling of His Father’s will was food; and to us infants who drink the milk of the word of the heavens, Christ Himself is food. Hence seeking is called sucking; for to those babes that seek the Word, the Father’s breasts of love supply milk.
If Clement of Alexandria were set loose to write a hymn today, it might be as offensive to some as Jann Aldredge-Clanton’s. Here’s a hymn Clement did write, and let it remind us that it’s good and right to include feminine metaphors among the masculine, the immanent aspects of God as well as the transcendent. We’ve forgotten Scripture and history, not as much through ignorance as through seeing through an inflexibly masculine lens, and so we find offense where there doesn’t have to be.
Here’s St. Clement’s hymn:
Bridle of untamed colts, Wing of unwandering birds,
Ship’s sure helm, Shepherd of royal lambs…
Christ Jesus, heavenly milk
from the sweet breasts of the bride of grace,
squeezed from your wisdom.
The childlike, with tender mouths,
are cherished, filled with the dewy spirit
of the Word’s breasts, sing together simple praises,
true hymns to Christ the King….”
–“Hymn to the Tutor (Christ)”, 2nd century
She is Our Mother
If Rachel Held Evans had known about the history of Jesus as Mother (assuming she didn’t), or the hidden birthing God in even the New Testament, maybe she would have continued to boldly call God She sometimes.
Whatever the case, I know she’d be calling you and me to keep telling the freeing truth about the feminine aspects of God in the Bible, and to create new songs, paintings and posts based on them.