She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse

by Elizabeth A. Johnson

Against the background of the history of human injustice and human suffering, the suffering God is a very fertile and critical symbol, because it cannot be expressed without people hearing the call to solidarity and hope. . . . But it is only valid if it is accompanied by the struggle to change living conditions in the direction of a new heaven and a new earth.92

While officially it is rightly and consistently said that God is spirit and so beyond identification with either male or female sex, the daily language of preaching, worship, catechesis, and instruction conveys a different message: God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman, or at least more fittingly addressed as male than as female.

For me the goal of feminist religious discourse pivots in its fullness around the flourishing of poor women of color in violent situations.

Wherever human beings are violated, diminished, or have their life drained away, God’s glory is dimmed and dishonored. Wherever human beings are quickened to fuller and richer life, God’s glory is enhanced.

Whether consciously or not, sexist God language undermines the human equality of women made in the divine image and likeness. The result is broken community, human beings shaped by patterns of dominance and subordination with attendant violence and suffering. Idolatrous: insofar as male-dominant language is honored as the only or the supremely fitting way of speaking about God, it absolutizes a single set of metaphors and obscures the height and depth and length and breadth of divine mystery. Thus it does damage to the very truth of God that theology is supposed to cherish and promote.

Although architect and governor of the world, it is essential to God’s deity that “he” (the theistic God is always referred to in male terms) be essentially unrelated to this world and unaffected by

what happens in it so as to remain independent from it. This view therefore excels at stressing divine transcendence, although divine immanence tends to slip from view.

The perfections of the theistic God are developed in contrast to the finitude of creatures, leading to speech about God the creator who is “infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent,” in the descriptive list drawn up by H.P. Owen.3 The theistic God is modeled on the pattern of an eart...

Classical theism emphasizes in a one-sided way the absolute transcendence of God over the world, God’s untouchability by human history and suffering, and the all-pervasiveness of God’s dominating power to which human beings owe submission and awe. Is this idea of God not the reflection of patriarchal imagination, which prizes nothing more than unopposed power-over and unquestioned loyalty? Is not the transcendent, omnipotent, impassibie symbol of God the quintessential embodiment of the solitary ruling male ego, above the fray, perfectly

happy in himself, filled with power in the face of the obstreperousness of others? Is this not “man” according to the patriarchal ideal? Feminist thought sees a more intrinsic connection between those characteristics of the theistic God found problematic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century critiques and the fundamental sexism of the symbol of this God than is usually realized.

According to United Nations statistics, while forming more than one-half of the world’s population, women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, own one-tenth of the world’s wealth and one-hundredth of the world’s land, and form two-thirds of the world’s illiterate people. Over three-fourths of starving people are women with their dependent children.21 To make a dark picture even bleaker, women are bodily and sexually exploited, physically abused, raped, battered, and murdered. The indisputable fact is that men do this to women in a way that women do not do to men. Sexism is rampant on a global scale.

They are called to honor a male savior sent by a male God whose legitimate representatives can only be male, all of which places their persons precisely as female in a peripheral role.

The fundamental sin is exploitation, whether it be expressed in the domination of male over female, white over black, rich over poor, strong over weak, armed military over unarmed civilians, human beings over nature. These analogously abusive patterns interlock because they rest on the same base: a structure where an elite insists on its superiority and claims the right to exercise dominative power over all others considered subordinate, for its own benefit.

feminist theology engages in at least three interrelated tasks: it critically analyzes inherited oppressions, searches for alternative wisdom and suppressed history, and risks new interpretations of the tradition in conversation with women’s lives.

The critical principle of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies,

diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive. Theologically speaking, whatever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an authentic relation to the divine, or reflect the authentic nature of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption.

This negative principle also implies the positive principle: what does promote the full humanity of women is of the Holy, it does reflect true relation to the divine, it is the true nature of things, the authentic mes...

The goal of feminist theology, in other words, is not to make women equal partners in an oppressive system. It is to transform the system.

Patriarchal God symbolism functions to legitimate and reinforce patriarchal social structures in family, society, and church. Language about the father in heaven who rules over the world justifies and even necessitates an order whereby the male religious leader rules over his flock, the civil ruler has domination over his subjects, the husband exercises headship over his wife.

what results when the human reality used to point to God is always and everywhere male? The sacred character of maleness is revealed, while femaleness is relegated to the unholy darkness without.

Psychologically, exclusive, patriarchal imagery for the divine functions as a tool of symbolic violence against the full self-identity of female persons, blocking their identity as images of God and curtailing their access to divine power.

What needs to be shattered according to feminist theological critique is the stranglehold on religious language of God-He.

it is idolatrous to make males more “like God” than females. It is blasphemous to use the image and name of the Holy to justify patriarchal domination. . . . The image of God as predominant male is fundamentally idolatrous.

exclusive, literal patriarchal speech about God is both oppressive and idolatrous. It functions to justify social structures of dominance/subordination and an androcentric world view inimical to the genuine and equal human dignity of women, while it simultaneously restricts the mystery of God.

How can you bring yourself to say “God” time after time? . . . What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear the highest called “God,” it sometimes seems almost blasphemous.

As Rosemary Ruether astutely formulates the fundamental question: Is it not the case that the very concept of the “feminine” is a patriarchal invention, an ideal projected onto women by men and vigorously defended because it functions so well to keep men in positions of power and women in positions of service to them?20

There is real danger that simply identifying the Spirit with “feminine” reality leaves the overall symbol of God fundamentally unreformed and boxes actual women into a stereotypical ideal.

The woman with the coin image, while not frequently portrayed in Christian art due largely to the androcentric nature of the traditioning process, is essentially as legitimate a reference to God as is the shepherd with his sheep.

If pride be the primary block on the path to God, then indeed decentering the rapacious self is the work of grace. But the situation is quite different when this language is applied to persons already relegated to the margins of significance and excluded from the exercise of self-definition. For such persons, language of conversion as loss of self, turning from amor sui, functions in an ideological way to rob them of power, maintaining them in a subordinate position to the benefit of those who rule.

The traditional patriarchal notion of the divine follows closely the dualistic view of the self. Both the being of God, which stands over against the world, and the classical attributes of the divine with their implicit stress on solitariness, superiority, and dominating power-over, speak about holy mystery in an essentially unrelated way on the model of the male self typically constructed over against others. We have already seen that such an idea of God is deeply rooted in the ideal of ruling men within patriarchy, the ideal of being untouched by contingency and its pain, and able to best all comers.

If, however, moral autonomy is grounded on relationship, if mutuality is a moral excellence, then language emerges that sees holy mystery as at once essentially free and richly related, the two being not opposites but correlatives. God’s activity is discerned in divine, free, mutual relation rather than in divine distance, rule, and the search for submission. Changing the human ethical ideal has far-reaching ramifications for speech about God.

the Yahwist author of Genesis 2 constructs the narrative in such a way that the “earth creature” does not become sexually differentiated until the divine act radically alters adam to create woman and man together as one flesh. “Their creation is simultaneous, not sequential.”

To make of the maleness of Jesus Christ a christological principle is to deny the universality of salvation.

is most emphatically not salvific to diminish the image of God in women, to designate them as symbols of temptation and

evil, to relegate them to the margins of significance, to suppress the memory of their suffering and creative power, and to legitimate their subordination. For the sake of our salvation: on the wings of this principle feminist hermeneutics lifts off from imprisoning discourse and flies around the Scriptures seeking what has been lost, to practical and critical effect.

Taken as a whole, the gospel tradition demonstrates variety and plurality in Jesus’ speech about God rather than the exclusive centrality of speech about God as father. To select this one metaphor and grant it sole rights does not follow the pattern of Jesus’ speech but is governed by other considerations, most likely a subtle endorsement of the priority of the father in social arrangements.

Jesus’ Abba signifies a compassionate, liberating God who is grossly distorted when made into a symbol and supporter of patriarchal rule.

The Hebrew word for spirit, ruah, is of grammatically feminine gender. This point in itself is inconclusive, for a word’s grammatical gender does not necessarily indicate the maleness or femaleness of its object. Furthermore, the biblical Greek term for spirit, pneuma, is grammatically neuter, while the long-used Latin term, spiritus, is grammatically masculine. Noting these linguistic circumstances, the biblical translator and theologian Jerome figured they signified that God transcends all categories of sexuality and is indeed Spirit.13

What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (3:5–6). God’s Spirit is here likened to a woman bringing forth new life through childbirth, so that those who believe are truly “born of God.” Unfortunately, as Sandra Schneiders comments, “the theological tradition which has controlled the reading of Scripture has insisted on its own male understanding of God to the extent that it has virtually obliterated from the religious imagination this clearly feminine presentation of God the Spirit as mother.”

Given the immediate religious context of the wisdom texts, namely, Jewish monotheism not amenable to the idea of more than one God, the idea that Sophia is Israel’s God in female imagery is most reasonable.

Accordingly, the Wisdom of God in Jewish thought is simply God, revealing and known.

As the trajectory of wisdom Christology shows, Jesus was so closely associated with Sophia that by the end of the first century he is presented not only as a wisdom teacher, not only as a child and envoy of Sophia, but ultimately even as an embodiment of Sophia herself.

James Dunn, too, judges that “Jesus is the exhaustive embodiment of divine wisdom”;

As von Rad has pointed out, having Jesus speak of Sophia’s yoke as “my yoke” is not an instance of casual borrowing; it is a paradigmatic Christian statement crafted by Matthew and meaning that Jesus is the fulfillment of Torah, is even himself Sophia-Torah.

The point is, however, that Christian reflection before John had not found it difficult to associate Jesus Christ with Sophia, including not only the risen and exalted Christ but even the historical Jesus of the ministry. Insofar as the gender of Sophia was a factor in her replacement by the Logos in the Prologue, it was coherent with the broader shift in the Christian community toward

more patriarchal ecclesial structures and the blocking of women from ministries in which they had earlier participated. In other words, the suppression of Sophia is a function of the growth of sexism in the Christian communities.

To link the human being Jesus, however implicitly, with divine Sophia, God’s gracious nearness and activity in the world, moves thought to

see that Jesus is not simply a human being inspired by God but must be related in a special way to God. “Herein we see the origin of the doctrine of incarnation,”49 writes Dunn, with consequent development in the Christian doctrine of God’s Trinity.

What does it mean that one of the key origins of the doctrines of incarnation and Trinity lies in the identification of the crucified and risen Jesus with a female gestalt of God? Since Jesus the Christ is depicted as divine Sophia, then it is not unthinkable—it is not even unbiblical—to...

The experience of women today provides a powerful catalyst for reclaiming this classic wisdom as an ally in emancipating speech about God. Feminist critique of patriarchal discourse is surfacing the false assumptions that underlie insistence on exclusively male symbols and thereby propelling new discovery of holy mystery which we call God. Made in the image and likeness of God, women participate in the fire of divine being and signify the excellence of the Creator in a creaturely way.