God Beyond Gender

An iconic interpretation of the concept of the triune God

by Heather Thiessen

The Women’s Center advocates gender inclusive and expansive language as part of its mission. For us, then, this month’s decision by the United Churches of Christ to substitute “triune God” for “Heavenly Father” as part of a constitutional change was encouraging, despite the discouraging controversy it engendered. (See Peter Smith’s 7/16 Courier-Journal article.) We agree with Professor Amy Plantinga Pauw’s comment on the matter, that “there has to be real pastoral sensitivity around this issue” of language for God. As she notes, our language for God is the language of prayer, which is the language through which people intelligibly relate themselves to God. These God-words are theo-logy of the most fundamental kind.

That theology, or language, says much more about us than it says about God. What it says about us may not be easy or pleasant to recognize or accept. One of the functions of that needed pastoral sensitivity is to help people come face to face with the pervasive, unarticulated gender bias that is one of the deep wellsprings of resistance to expansive language for God, and to realize that it is permissible and desirable to challenge it.

Despite our determination not to make graven images of God, we tend to fall back on familiar clusters of meaning in our heads and hearts in our public and private rituals. While these meaning clusters are supported by Biblical language, their content comes largely from the world around us. It includes everything we know about various kinds of people — fathers, mothers, children, servants and so on — and their various relationships. It includes everything we know about which kinds of people can say or do what, to whom, when and where, and what all of that means — what conveys strength, e.g., or kindness, and whether the quality conveyed is positive or negative, good, bad, or indifferent.

Those clusters of meaning are awash with gender. It is commonplace for discussions about gendered language for God to appeal to God’s Spiritual genderlessness: God is famously “beyond gender.” But the human beings who make this claim are not. Whenever English-speaking people think of a personal, as opposed to an impersonal, reality, they are always already thinking of a gendered reality: him, or her. Thus, while we can honestly claim to believe in a God who is beyond gender, our ritual practice — particularly to the extent it invokes God as a personalistic reality — cannot support that belief articulately. We are driven over and over again to use gendered language, because it is the language we have available to us.

Because we do use gendered language, and have for millennia, we find that the challenge facing a person of faith in using new terms of reference for God is sharpened by the way gender plays a part in their clusters of meaning. To what extent can the new terms articulate or support the familiar understanding of God, the “same God,” that has been worshipped until now in other words? Or, if these new terms promote a change in the understanding of God, to what extent is that change experienced as a positive expansion of the possibilities attributable to God, or to what extent is it experienced as a denial or diminution in God’s positive attributes? It is at this point that we are liable to come face to face with one or more widespread, pervasive, normally unarticulated strands in our web of beliefs that have to do with gender.

Anyone can try this thought experiment:
First think of a familiar prayer that uses masculine-gendered language for God (e.g., “Our Father, who art in Heaven . . .) Then, try praying that prayer using feminine-gendered language for God (e.g., “Our Mother, who art in Heaven . . .) Pay attention to how this address to God feels. If it feels comfortable, try to put words to that comfort; “it feels good, because . . .” If it feels uncomfortable, try to put words to that discomfort; “it doesn’t feel right because . . . ” Finally: what does the feeling have to do with everything you know about the difference in meaning between the masculine term and the feminine term? That is: what does this experiment reveal about your own background assumptions about gender?

Very often, reasons for discomfort with this exercise take one or both of these forms: (1) I don’t feel I am addressing the same God when I use feminine language; or (2) I feel I am addressing God improperly — the word I am using doesn’t fit the God I am addressing, in a way that seems to take something away from God. Those feelings, in turn, give us clues about our understandings of these gendered terms. If I feel I am addressing a different God altogether, I may begin to realize the extent to which the image of God I cherish is, in fact, a distinctly masculine or patriarchal one, which cannot be supported by feminine language. If I find that I feel a feminine term is improper for God, that it takes something away from God, I may have to face the extent to which my own background assumptions about women include some form of inferiority, that makes those terms feel less than fully adequate to figure the divine. Either way, an exercise like this can face us with the extent to which we continue to hold a patriarchal understanding of God, which is held in place by our continued use of patriarchal language. As long as we never question our language practices, we can make statements like “My God is beyond gender,” fully believing them, while in practice worshipping and relating to a God we understand in distinctly masculine ways. Only when we begin to pay attention to our practices around language for God does this subtle form of idolatry come to awareness, and with it the limitation that imposes on our openness to encounter with the living God.

Once again, it is important to recognize that this exercise doesn’t pretend to tell us much about God, but about our own, usually implicit and unthinking, accepted and taken for granted, assumptions about gender. We can get at those assumptions by paying attention to the way we use and respond to language — its denotations and connotations, its emotional resonances — because language is our tool for communicating meaning. That’s also why the words we use for God shape and contain what we mean about God and what God means to us and for us.

For some, the problem with changed language for God is that the new language will not support an understanding of God that supports arrangements of power and privilege from which those people benefit. But for most, the even more profound challenge is that it opens up an avenue for fresh encounter with God, beyond accustomed and comfortable language and understanding. That opening is profoundly uncomfortable, and the intimation of an imminent uncomfort it announces ultimately has little to do with gender. It is rather the unsettling, frightening and yet fascinating awareness that the God we might really encounter is One who exceeds our categories and transcends our settled understandings so radically that no knowledge we already possess or imagine to be satisfactory is going to withstand that revelation.

Bracing the community of faith for that transformative encounter will really call for pastoral sensitivity.

updated 07/26/11

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Who is the King of Glory?

House of Lords, 1808

Struggles over language in one context sensitize us to uses of language in other contexts.

So, I could not help noticing that the beautiful little girls who read from their new Bibles yesterday morning for the 3rd Sunday of Advent, up in front of the congregation in their neat outfits and smooth-brushed hair, their shy voices trying to form the big scriptural words, each read a verse that named God “Lord.” They all read together at the end: “Who is this glorious king? He is our LORD, the All-Powerful!” (Ps. 24:10, CEV)

Is this what our daughters need to learn about God?

Especially when the word that is being translated “Lord” in that most wonderful of psalms is not a word that means “lord” in the English language we use and understand. No, it is the tetragammaton, the holy, unpronounceable, ineffable Name, the incomprehensible concession to our need to designate the one for whom an image cannot be made.

Calling this All-Holy, constantly surprising, recurrently unexpected refuser of graven images Lord-Lord incessantly, as we do, has us dragging along the steamer-trunk crammed with everything “lord” has meant to us down through the ages, the baggage of noblemen and peers, the higher churchmen, the knights and their castles, the feudal landowners and their various rights, and all that, including (according to my dictionary) “Formerly, husband; now a humorous term,” as if association with all that riffraff did some honor to the Holy One.

Our practice is not far from graven image making. Because whether the image is out in front of us, like a statue, or is in our head, like a fixed idea, it is the gravenness — the depth, the ineffacibility, the unalterability, the permanence — of the image that makes it such a problem.

We get to thinking that we know God. We forget to keep alert for the ongoing revelation of God the inexhaustible mystery behind being itself . . .

[Ironically, perhaps, this was one of the points of the day's sermon . . .]

The Bible is full of images for God. The “King of Glory” is one of the more breathtaking ones. (“Glorious king” maybe not so much.) The Bible is full of images for a reason: because not one of those images is adequate. The more we use one of those images to the exclusion of all the others, the less adequate and the more idolatrous that one becomes.

When will we see this, and begin teaching our daughters something besides Lord, Lord?

[Image source: website Parliament and the British Slave Trade, 1600-1807]

 

On Inclusive Language

There have been some comments circulating on e-mail here recently, concerning the language showing up in worship for people, and more importantly, for God. The comments suggest that we have collectively been relaxing our due diligence about the use of inclusive and expansive language. They have provoked some familiar responses, along the lines of “sheesh, when will this end?”

Well . . .

The language issue itself is a long-standing and challenging one. The PC(USA) has been addressing it long enough to have developed guidelines and definitions for inclusive language along with summary publications like Well Chosen Words produced by the Office for Women’s Advocacy of the PC(USA).

The Presbyterians are not the only ones who deal with this issue, of course, as a cursory review of the Internet reveals. (In a search for “inclusive language” and “expansive language” I found, among other things:

- a lengthy discussion from an Episcopal church committee on the status of women which included this paragraph on inclusive language:

We continue to stress the power of language as it is used in liturgy and worship and in educational materials in the church. All people are created in the image of God and are entitled to see themselves in the language and images that the church employs in its worship, education, and other printed materials. To leave out a group is to dis-empower them and to over-entitle others. This is especially true when it comes to language relating to gender inclusion. A resolution calling for Baptismal Parity was passed at the 74th General Convention without funding. We met with staff at the Church Center and reminded them of the intent of this resolution which we now offer again for funding. A paper was prepared for that Convention on the power of language to shape, empower, or limit people.

;

- a very nice resource on inclusive and expansive language by Julie Aageson of the ELCA, available from WITNESS;

and

- the UCC’s resources on inclusive and expansive language in worship, which in places are substantially identical to the PC(USA)’s Well Chosen Words, but which include a particularly clear and uncompromising introductory statement: “Inclusive language is far more than an aesthetic matter of male and female imagery; it is a fundamental issue of social justice.”

I also found notes on the use of inclusive and expansive language from That All May Freely Serve, and a syllabus for Johanna Bos’s J-Term 2008 To Know the Heart of the Stranger class — in other words, this has long been an issue close to the heart of the Women’s Center at LPTS as well.

The Women’s Center’s policy, when it comes to worship designed or sponsored by us, is not to use masculine pronouns for God (including any of the 3 persons of the Trinity), or the teminology “Lord,” and to use inclusive and expansive language. Executing this policy is always challenging. [I confess -- for me, too.] The challenges themselves attest to the pervasiveness of our habitual references to God as a kind of heavenly patriarch — which, in turn, attest to our habitual unthinking about God Godself as a kind of heavenly patriarch.

We’re not alone in facing these challenges, either — I ran across these rueful remarks by a British Anglican on the ongoing struggle to keep inclusive (or expansive) language in the life of worship, and the ceaseless, sometimes tiresome effort it demands.

The challenges have something to do with the nature of language itself: everywhere, all the time, alive and indwelling, with us and in our hearts and minds always, already, actively shaping the images and ideas by which we understand the world. None of us can remember a time before we knew ourselves and the world as named and nameable in our language. The recognition that language is powerful fuels the conviction that inclusive and expansive language is far from a trivial matter, that it is one of those “leavening” issues that affects everything. The tiresome chore of paying attention to language, insisting and insisting and continuing to insist on inclusivity and expansivity in the language we actually use, is one of the things we reap from the long, ubiquitous sowing of the Church’s naming and relating to God as well-nigh-exclusively masculine.

So: the work demanded by this “fundamental issue of social justice” turns out to be no less than that demanded by all the other such issues.

And, if we believe that as a fundamental matter of social justice every human being deserves to know, fully and vividly, that she herself, or he himself, is included in that humankind that is made in the image of God, then we will not shirk it, any more than we would shirk any other call from the direction of the realm of God’s justice and peace.