MOTHER - Towards a More Egalitarian Understanding of God

Mother kissing her child with the word mother on it.
Some of the most powerful images of God in scripture are found in the book of Isaiah. Here God is described as a mother birthing, nursing, and caring for her children.
Despite this powerful image, the idea of God as father has dominated Christianity. The main reason for this is because God is almost exclusively referred to as male in scripture; but there are two things that we need to understand about this to frame it in its proper context. First, the bible was written from within a patriarchal society (one where the male is at the top of the chain). The bible was not written in a vacuum, we do not believe that God dictated the words to the writers, but that the writers were inspired by the holy spirit; this still means that scripture was written within a specific context, and this includes patriarchy. So it makes sense that God, the person at the top of the chain, would be referred to as male.
The second thing is that all references to God are really anthropomorphism's, in other words, it is us humans, using terms from within our human context to describe something that is not human; and God is not human (I do believe that Jesus is both God and human, and was also physically a male, but this does not necessarily mean that God is human or male). God encompasses both male and female but also transcends both of them, any label that we put on God is but a shadow of the truth.
Therefore, now that we are moving (hopefully) toward an egalitarian society, it makes sense to refer to God as both male and female, father and mother.
So may we break down barriers of patriarchy, may we learn to see God in more of her splendor, and may we learn to see God as mother.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the fact
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in acco
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich comes f
Keep reading