Introduction

"Who is She, neither male nor female, maker of all things, only glimpsed or hinted, source of life and gender?

She is God,
mother, sister, lover: in her love we wake, move, grow; are daunted, triumph and surrender."

Brian Wren

Perhaps the silliest thing I ever read on the subject of sexuality and God comes from a theologian I in other respects admire, Eric Mascall: "Thus, the application of masculine terms to God does not imply that he has male sexual organs or indeed any physical organs at all; although it cannot be ruled out without further argument that the essential significance of some male epithet may be realized, not just metaphorically, but formally and primarily though analogically, in God... Unless we are to reject the biblical revelation altogether, may we not be forced to conclude that, in however analogical a way and with whatever reservations about the modus significandi, the notion of maleness is appropriate to God, in a way that the notion of femaleness is not?"¹

This is, in the strictest sense, nonsense: male spirit, like female spirit, is a contradiction in terms. But the nonsense has a material basis. Inside and outside Scripture, the Christian tradition is much more accustomed to speak of God as male than as female, and this leads even intelligent theologians to suppose that somehow God must really be male.

Elizabeth Johnson argues in principle for speaking of God equivalently in male and female terms, as well as in cosmic and metaphysical terms; but in practice for a strategy of positive discrimination. "Female religious symbols of the divine are underdeveloped, peripheral, considered secondarily if at all in Christian language and the practice it continues to shape, much like women through whose image they point to God. In my judgment, extended theological speaking about God in female images, or long draughts of this new wine, are a condition for the possibility of equivalent imaging of God in religious speech."²

My Church of Scotland colleague, John Munro, in his contribution to this issue, opts for a complementary strategy: seeing our being female-and-male as the way we are made in the image of God.

The discussion, in either case, is not merely academic, as Elizabeth Johnson indicates in speaking of the practice Christian language continues to shape. At stake is not only how Christian men and women are to think of God, but how we are to treat each other: as sisters and brothers, or as subordinated and subordinating. One in Christ, or divided as the world is divided.

It is at least partly true that we create ourselves in the image of our image of God; and correcting that image is a condition of the possibility of women taking their place in the church as equal partners with men.

Páraic Réamonn

Notes