Not Only a Father

Achtemeier, Elizabeth “Female Language for God: Should the Church Adopt It?” in Donald G. Miller (ed.) The Hermeneutical Quest: essays in honor of James Luther Mays on his sixty-fifth birthday Allison Park: Pickwick, 1986, 97-114 abbreviated as: Achtemeier, Elizabeth “Female Language for God: Should the Church Adopt It?” Transformation 4,2, 1987, 24-30 Achtemeier, Elizabeth “Exchanging God for ‘No Gods’: A discussion of female language for God” in Kimel (1992), 1-16 Achtemeie [...]

Why Change the Habit of Centuries? Why NOT call God “Mother”? The central task of theology, talking about God and discussing the nature of true talk about God, is difficult. How can one express the ineffable? One cannot hold the infinite within human language. Theologians and Pastors have used a number of approaches to their impossible task. One approach, the Via Negativa, proceeds by saying what God is not, which can only ever be part of an answer, because God is obviously more [...]

A Personal God without Icons The God of the Bible is aniconic,1 meaning never to be painted, sculpted or drawn. The second commandment forbids all idols, even images of the true God. In a world of gods and goddesses, both sculpted and drawn, the Bible pictures God with words alone. Yet God is person, not an abstract philosophical concept. The Old Testament reveals God as person at the deepest level, using God’s personal name. Indeed, later tradition, through respect and fear, refused to pr [...]

Imagery in the Old and New Testaments The New Testament is less cautious about depicting God in human language. Father language is common, particularly in Jesus’ speeches in the Gospels, while mother language is rare.7 The New Testament, though it contains 27 books out of 66 in the Bible, is much smaller than the Old. In one English Bible it has 261 pages, while the Old Testament has 890. Within this brief space, the earliest Christian writers had to struggle with the issues raised by thei [...]

God’s Motherly Love The most common biblical word for a woman’s womb is raḥam. The word for God’s love or compassion is raḥamim. This looks like the plural of raḥam. James Barr’s powerful warning against the "etymological fallacy", assuming that the origin of words tells us their meaning, is still valid,22 so we must not exaggerate the connection between these words. However, Phyllis Trible notices two stories suggesting deeper than etymological connections between raḥam and rah [...]

The Old Testament uses both father and mother-language to speak about God, but it uses each of these images only rarely. Language such as shepherd, kinsman-redeemer, king, rock, lion and other pictures are preferred, perhaps because they are less likely to require that God had a partner. A father can only be a father if someone else is a mother, and the reverse. For this reason both father and mother language presented a greater danger than did many other verbal images of a descent into polythei [...]

In spite of the biblical usage discussed above, calling God “mother” still seems strange to many. We have become so used to calling God “he” and “father” that we have begun to picture “him” as male. Our image of God is more sophisticated than the child's old-man-in-the-sky-with-a-long-white-beard. Yet, if calling God “mother” seems wrong, somehow or other, we are still thinking of “him” as male. Such a quasi-male God would not have been acceptable to the early Christia [...]

Talk of God as mother is not new. The Bible and great theologians of the Christian church both provide examples. This chapter examines the systematic foundations for such talk under five topics that affect our thinking: The difference between grammatical gender and sexual nature. If people confuse these, thinking concerning God and concerning God as Father or Mother, becomes muddled and unorthodox. The nature of Yahweh, God of the Old Testament. Is Yahweh in some sense masculine? If “he� [...]

The tendency, encouraged by feminist thinkers, to speak of “gender” when talking about distinctions between women and men introduces confusion. Several theologians, who should have known better, fail to notice that grammatical gender and biological or social sexual distinction are not always the same.1 The ambiguous uses of the words “masculine” and “feminine” reinforce this confusion. Sometimes they refer to linguistic gender, and sometimes to sexual characteristics or cultural ster [...]

From the point of view of grammatical gender, the God of the Old Testament, when called by whatever name, is masculine singular. Yet the Old Testament was written in a world where gods were notably sexual, and the Bible fought against Canaanite fertility cults. One must ask whether this grammatical masculinity is accidental or essential to the Old Testament.1 Hebrew has only masculine and feminine with no undefined or neuter option. God has a name, Yahweh. The other common designation, Elohim [...]

The debate about women’s ordination also used the fact that Jesus was male to imply that there is a sense in which God (or at least the second person of the Trinity1) has male characteristics by very essence. And, along with this, people drew attention to the fact that Jesus called God “Father” to say this implies the essentially male character of God. The maleness of the incarnate Christ is not in dispute. But, does this imply something about the nature of God? Because Christ was male [...]