Feminist Views of God

Feminist Views of God

Colin Brown

The following notes are based on selections of readings on God as Mother in Robin Gill,ed., Readings in Modern Theology: Britain and America, Nashville: Abingdon, 1995, 69-97; andissues raised by Sallie McFagues Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age,Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.

1. Sallie McFague

Sallie McFague (1933-) was educated at Smith College, and holds three graduate degreesfrom Yale. She is Carpenter Professor of Theology and former Dean at Vanderbilt DivinitySchool, Nashville, Tennessee. Her other Fortress Press books include Metaphorical Theology:Models of God in Religious Language (1982), The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (1993), andSuper, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature (1997).1

1.1. The Postmodern Situation. McFagues feminism differs from the post Christianfeminism of Mary Daly and the critical hermeneutic of Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza.2 Herprimary concern is not with classic feminist goals, such as achieving autonomy,freedom, and self-determination. She is more concerned with the underlyingphilosophy, and in particular with theological language in the context of the presentecological situation and the threat of nuclear annihilation.3

If the Enlightenment was the first watershed, thrusting us into the modernworld, then the contemporary era must be called the second watershed, forits assumptions differ from those of the Enlightenment that created themodern world. Any listing of these assumptions will vary but will probablyinclude some of the following: a greater appreciation of nature, linked witha chastened admiration for technology; the recognition of the importance oflanguage (and hence interpretation and construction) in human existence;the acceptance of the challenge that other religious options present to theJudeo-Christian tradition; a sense of the displacement of the white, Westernmale and the rise of those dispossessed because of gender, race, or class; anapocalyptic sensibility, fueled in part by the awareness that we exist betweentwo holocausts, the Jewish and the nuclear, and perhaps most significant, agrowing appreciation of the thoroughgoing, radical interdependence of life

1 For background see Livingston and Fiorenza, eds., Modern Christian Thought 2: 428-32.2 Livingston and Fiorenza, eds., Modern Christian Thought 2: 419-28.3 Models of God, Part 1, chs. 1-3, see esp. 14-21.

Theological Method: Feminist Theology 2

at all levels and in every imaginable way. These assumptions, I believe, formthe context for theology if it is to be theology for our time.4

1.2. The Postmodern Need for New Metaphors, Concepts, and Models. Not onlydoes postmodern theology need to pay attention to the new world-context, it also needs toaddress the question of language, in particular the metaphors and concepts that we use. It isnot only a matter of description, but also the way our metaphors and concepts construereality and so provide forms of life.

On of the serious deficiencies in contemporary theology is that though ourtheologians have attempted to interpret the faith in new conceptsappropriate to our time, the basic metaphors and models have remainedrelatively constant: they are triumphalist, monarchical, patriarchal. Muchdeconstruction of the traditional imagery has taken place, but little construction.If, however, metaphor and concept are, as I believe, inextricably andsymbiotically related in theology, there is no way to do theology for our timewith outmoded or oppressive metaphors and models. . . . In this situation,one thing that is neededand which I attempt in these pagesis aremythologizing of the relationship between God and the world. I willexperiment with the models of God as mother, lover, and friend of theworld, and with the image of the world as Gods body. I will try to showthat these metaphors are credible candidates for theology today from both aChristian and a postmodern perspective.5

A metaphor is a word or phrase used inappropriately. It belongs properly inone context but is being used in another: the arm of a chair, war as a chessgame, God the Father. From Aristotle until recently, metaphor has beenseen mainly as a poetic device to embellish or decorate. The idea was that inmetaphor one used a word or phrase inappropriately but one need not haveto: whatever was being expressed could be said directly without themetaphor. Increasingly, however, the idea of metaphor as unsubstitutable iswinning acceptance: what a metaphor expresses cannot be said directly orapart from it, for it could be, one would have said it directly. Here metaphoris a strategy of desperation, not decoration; it is an attempt to say somethingabout the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, an attempt to speak aboutwhat we do not know in terms of what we know.6

4 Models of God, x.5 Models of God, xi.6 Models of God, 33. Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; thetransference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, on ongrounds of analogy (Aristotle, Poetics, 1457b, 7-9; Complete Works 2:2332). Metaphor s, moreover, give styleclearness, charm, and distinction as nothing else can: and it is not a thing that can be taught by one man toanother (Rhetoric Book 3, 1405a, 7-10; Complete Works 2:2240).


Metaphor always has the character of is and is not: an assertion is madebut as a likely account rather than a definition. That is, to say, God ismother, is not to define God as mother, not to assert an identity betweenthe terms God and mother, but to suggest that we consider what we donot know how to talk aboutrelating to Godthrough the metaphor ofmother. . . . To speak of God as mother is to invite us to consider somequalities associated with mothering as one partial but perhaps illuminatingway of speaking of certain aspects of Gods relationship with us.7

The difference between a metaphor and a model can for our purpose besimply stated: a model is a metaphor with staying power. A model is ametaphor that has gained sufficient stability and scope so as to present apattern for relatively comprehensive and coherent explanation. Themetaphor of God the Father is an excellent example of this. In becoming amodel, it has permitted an understanding of many things. If God is seen asfather, human beings become children, sin can be understood as rebelliousbehavior, and redemption can be thought of as a restoration to the status offavored offspring.8

McFague appears to treat the notion of concept somewhat obliquely.9 She refers to theconcepts of God, the world, and human being, and to the ways in which Tillich andKaufman have sought to distinguish between our concept of God and the reality of Godsself.10 Thus, Tillich draws a distinction between the symbol of God and God as Being-itself,and Kaufman contrast the available God of our constructs, and the real God. McFaguecomments:

But a metaphorical, constructive theology has a distinctive emphasis: it willbe more experimental, imagistic, and pluralistic than most theologies thatfall into the constructive category.11

7 Models of God, 33-34.8 Models of God, 34.9 A concept would seem to be a construct based on a series of metaphors. As such it would seem to have aregulative status and could be used as an organizing principle.10 Models of God, 37.11 Models of God, 37. Another example of the attempt to conceptualize is John Macquarries claim that Godsessence is Being, and Being, in turn, is letting-be. So it is of the essence of God to let be. . . . What constitutesBeing as God, as holy Being that gives itself and demands our allegiance, is precisely that it does not gatheritself together as pure immutable Being but that it goes out into the openness of a world of beings, a world ofchange and multiplicity and possibility (Principles of Christian Theology [London: S.C.M. Press, 1966], 183).Another example is the dipolar theism of Process Theology.


1.3. Metaphorical Theology. At this point McFague introduces Derrida into thediscussion. If metaphor, which is mimesis trying its chance, mimesis at risk, may always failto attain truth, this is beccause it has to reckon with a definite absence.12 Metaphor liessomewhere between nonsense and truth. Since theology is based on metaphor, it willalways run this risk. Metaphorical theology is necessarily a heuristic venture.

A metaphorical theology is, therefore, destabilizing: since no language aboutGod is adequate and all of it is improper, new metaphors are not necessarilyless adequate or improper than old ones. All are in the same situation and noauthoritynot scriptural status, liturgical longevity, nor ecclesiasticalfiatcan decree that some types of language, or some images refer literallyto God while others do not.13

Hence, McFague recommends heuristic theology, a theology, which experiments and testsin an as-if fashion in the hope of finding out.14 Tillich distinguishes between the symbolgod and God as Being-itself. Gordon Kaufman offers the contrast between the availableGod of our constructs and the real God. But a metaphorical, constructive theology has adistinctive emphasis: it will be more experimental, imagistic, and pluralistic than mosttheologies that fall into the constructive category.15 Metaphorical theology is the onlyanswer to the charges of idolatry and irrelevance.16

1.4. Father Language and Male Metaphors. McFague devotes the final chapter ofMetaphorical Theology to a critical assessment of the notion of God as father. It has servedthe Christian traditon for centuries. Unlike feminists who dismiss it altogether, McFagueregards it as a good model gone astray.17 She distances herself from Mary Dalys embracingof goddess worship in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1979).

Dalys extreme position suggests two significant problems withcontemporary Goddess religion in general: its embrace of stereotypicalfeminine virtues, which becomes a new form of biology destiny, and itslack of a critical dimension in its elevation of women as savior of self andworld.18

12 Models of God, 34, citing White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy, New Literary History 6(974): 42.13 Models of God, 35.14 Models of God, 36.15 Models of God, 37. Livingston and Schssler Fiorenza see Kaufman as preeminent among her theologicalheroes (430; cf. 495-500). Others in her pantheon of theological heroes are Kant, Schleiermacher, and Tillich.16 Metaphorical Theology, 13.17 Metaphorical Theology,145.18 Metaphorical Theology, 159.


Male metaphors suggest images of God in terms of domination and control, rather thansharing in the activity of co-creation.19

1.5. McFagues Key Metaphors: Body of God, Mother, Lover, Friend. McFaguesuggest that we might think of the world as Gods body.

We are letting the metaphor of the world as Gods body try its chance. Weare experimenting with a bit of nonsense to see if it can make a truth claim.What if, we are asking, the resurrection of the body were not seen as theresurrection of particular bodies that ascend, beginning with Jesus ofNazareth, into another world, but as Gods promise to be with us always inGods body in our world? What if Gods promise of permanent presence toall space and time were imagine as a worldly reality, a palpable bodilypresence? . . . What if we imagined Gods presence in us and in all others,including the last and the least?20

But the main thrust of the book is to develop the models of mother, lover, and friend. InPart Two she has a chapter on each. The following is a key passage on God as mother.

[L]et us return to the base of the model, in the physical act of giving birth. Itis from this base that the model derives its power, for here it joins thereservoir of the great symbols of life and of lifes continuity: blood, water,breath, sex, and food. In the acts of conception, gestation, and birth all areinvolved, and it is therefore no great surprise that these symbols became thecenter of most religions, including Christianity, for they have the power toexpress the renewal and transformation of lifethe secondbirthbecause they are the basis of our first birth. And yet, at least inChristianity, our first birth has been strangely neglected; another way ofsaying that creation, the birth of the world and its being s. has not beenpermitted the imagery that this tradition uses so freely for thetransformation and fulfillment of creation. Why is this the case? One reasonis surely that Christianity, alienated as it always has been from femalesexuality, has been will to image the second, spiritual, renewal of existencein the birth metaphor, but not the first, physical, coming into existence.21

19 Models of God, 16-18.20 Models of God, 69-70.21 Models of God, 105.


The adoption of the maternal model is not merely sentimental. The maternal involves theethic of justice and an ethic of care.22 McFague sees herself not ruling out the fathermodel, but destabilizing male stereotypes of power and oppression. Thus ch. 4 on God asMother focuses on three issues: Gods love as Agape, the activity of creating, and the ethicof God as Mother, i.e. justice.23

Ch. 5 on God as Lover likewise has three parallel sections: Gods love as Eros, his lovingactivity as saving, and Gods ethic as healing.24

Ch. 6 on God as Friend also has three sectiuons: Gods love as Philia, Gods activity assustaining, Gods ethic as companionship.25

2. Rosemary Radford Ruether

Ruethers Models of God: Exploding the Foundations is a reprint of a book review.26

2.1. The New Human Situation. Here Ruether gives her own analysis of the situation,which strikes me as more radical than McFagues. She identifies several factors which donot seem to feature in McFagues work, but which serve as Ruethers basis for a moresweeping critique.

First is the rise of others in Western society who are gaining their own voice, becomeself-defining subjects, no longer willing to be defined as others (69). They includewomen, ethic groups, and the poor. Then there is the rise of religious pluralism:pluralisms of religion, of cultures, of ethnicity, of gender and sexual orientation, of socio-economic class, who have dethroned the normative status of the Christian, white ruling-class male (69).

Ruether then mentions nuclear knowledge: for the first time human beings have thecapacity to destroy not only the human race but also life on the planet. Whereas previous

22 Models of God, 118, 119.23 Models of God, 97-124.24 Models of God, 125-56.25 Models of God, 157-80.26 Religion and Intellectual Life 5 (1988): 19-23; reprinted in Gill, Readings in Modern Theology, 69-73.


wars were carried out on the assumption that life and property would eventually bereplenished, the very capacity for reproduction of life is threatened.

2.2. A New Sensibility. The new sensibility calls into question dualistic, patriarchal, andhierarchical conceptions of life. It is at this point that Ruether begins to address McFagueswork. Language has the capacity to generate reality (70). Linguistic worlds remaintentative and experimental, not absolute and final. But, also, language does not so muchmirror the reality around us as generate relationships to it (70-71).

McFague rejects the radical deconstructionist view of language as a self-enclosed game(71).

Language generates various relationships to reality. This means there is areality to which we relate ourselves in various ways through linguisticsymbol systems. McFague also seems to assume that there is some ontologyof right relationships of beings to one another. Right relationships ofmutuality, care, and justice generate peace, harmony, a prospering of lifeenergies. Wrong relationships create violence, destruction, alienation,impoverishment of life energies. We seek language systems that put us inright relationship, rather than wrong relationship, to the interconnection ofthings. This suggests that there is an ontological basis of ethics (71).

2.3. New Symbols of God. This brings us to the heart of McFagues project. What iswrong with the old symbols of God as patriarchal Father and Monarch of the Universe?They are not simply pass, for we could think of God as Boss (white or black), SupremeLeader, head of Central Intelligence. One could even conceive that such symbols mighteventually establish themselves religiously.

No, they key to what is wrong with patriarchal, monarchical God-talk isthat it generates wrong relationships among living beings: dominating,impoverishing, destructive relationships, not life-giving relationships. God-talk based on relationships of domiantion and servitude generates bad ehtics.Today it threatens to destroy us all (71).

2.4. Coming Clean. The problem with McFague is that like most liberal relativists, [she]seems to straddle the fence (72). If male language for God is wrong now, Wasnt it alwayswrong? Hasnt patriarchal God-language always been a countersign to the Christian claim ofredemptive community, a sanction of evil, not a critique and liberation from evil? (72).Male language can no longer be tolerated!


If this is the case, and I believe it is, then the blasphemous and idolatrouscharacter of patriarchal, monarchical God-language is much more scandalousthat McFague tends to suggest. Or rather the new God-language she suggestsstands in much more radical judgment upon the tradition of Christiantheology than she admits (72).

The Goddess, or post-Christian spiritualities that have arisen, precisely inresponse to the new sensibility of the danger of ecological, nuclearholocaust, are clearer about the radical scandalousness of patriarch God-language. Yet, their desire to retreat to the world of preconscious naturalharmonies prevents them from having an adequate ethical language for theradical evilness of patriarchy to which they testify (72-73).

If the Bible and the classical theological traditions are sedimentations ofinterpreted experience and these sedimentations have, so to speak, beenbuilt on false foundations, then we are indeed not just redesigning the dcoror even reconstructing the arrangements of the rooms in the house, buexploding the foundations (73).

We are constructing, not simply a new theology, but a new spirituality uponwhich a new theology can be built. Without some real taste and experienceof that new spirituality, new metaphors can easily slip back into being justcovers for the same old relationships of domination and deadness (73).

3. Gordon D. Kaufman

Gordon Kaufman (1925-) taught at Harvard Divinity School from 1963 to 1995. Histheology is theocentric, historiscist, and public. He was taught by H. Richard Niebuhr atYale where he obtained his B.D. and Ph.D. degrees. Like Tillich he argues that it isidolatrous to hypostasize or assume as essential and final, any human theologicalconstruction.27 All ideas of God are culturally constructed, and subject to critique in termsof shifting contexts. Kaufmans Models of God: Is Metaphor Enough? first appeared as areview.28

27 For background see Livingston and Fiorenza, eds., Modern Christian Thought 2: 495-500.28 Theology Today 45 (1988), reprinted in Gill, Readings in Modern Theology, 74-81.


3.1. A New Construction. The opening section is essentially a summary of McFaguesproject which Kaufman calls an exciting and illuminating book (74). At first he wasinclined to believe that her female language would tend to sentimentality. But he is nowconvince that the patriarchal and monarchical metaphors with their vision of the human(and God) as essentially dominating will, the powerful individual ego, the great I AM areat the root of many of our theological problems (75). McFagues work clears theground for addressing the problems of our ecological, nuclear age. In what followsKaufman attempts to give some idea of the way in which her approach opens up newperspectives.

3.2. The Model and the Metaphors. The idea of the world as Gods body is ancient,though in modern times it has been appropriated by the Whiteheadians. Kaufman does notfind it persuasive or illuminating, since it involves an exceedingly anthropomorphic way ofconceiving both God and the world (75). However, McFagues insistence that it is ametaphor puts the question in a new light, especially when she compares it with themetaphor of king.

Is it better to accept an imaginative picture of God as the distant rulercontrolling his realm through external and benevolent power or one of Godso intimately related to the world that the world can be imagined as Godsbody? . . . Is it better in terms of our and the worlds preservation andfulfillment? (76).29

Kaufman notes the McFague stresses our deep ignorance about who or what God is (xii,61, 97), and that our claims are fictions (xi, 182). Nevertheless, McFagues preferredmetaphors help us to reorient our thinking (77). They are based not on the social or politicalorders, but on the basic conditions of life itself. The images of mother, lover and friendcontinue to be powerful because images arising from the most basic level of physicalexistencethe level of our tenuous hold on existence and what is needed to keep itgoingare images of life and death.30 Traditional Protestantism stresses the individual, butJohn 3:16 stresses that God love the world. It is not individuals who are loved by God asmother, lover, and friend but the world.31 With our model of the world as Gods body,we avoid the dualism, individualism, and other-worldliness of traditions use of the lovermodel.32

29 Models of God, 70. Acts 17:28a (In him we live and move and have our being), which is attributed toEpimenides, seems to lend some support. But it is modified by the next citation from Aratus Phaenomena(We are indeed his offspring), and Pauls further comments.30 Models of God, 80. 31 Models of God, 86.32 Models of God, 129.


3.3. The Methodological and the Material Question. Kaufman welcomes McFaguesattempt to transform our sensibilities. But her approach raises important questions.

Does our recognition of the fact that metaphors never give us proper descriptions, meanthat we are free to introduce any metaphors we choose? (78). Is there not a deepcontradiction between the metaphor of the body, and those of mother, lover, and friend.The latter envisages two persons over against each other. Are we supposed to think ofGod, now, as the mother of her own body? What could that mean? (79). But perhaps thatkind of coherence is not requiredor even appropriatein a self-conscious metaphoricaltheology (79).

3.4. Metaphor or Concept. The above consideration raise the further question: Aremetaphors like, mother, lover, and friend in fact complex enough to provide the principalbasis for a contemporary conception of God? (79). Is any image sufficiently complex toperform this function? (80).

If we are serious about developing an adequate conception of God for ourtime, we will need to draw our metaphors from a different conceptual orderas well as from the imagistic order of bodies, mothers, and lovers (80).

Kaufman suggest that a more promising concept would be trinity.

4. David Tracy

Tracys Models of God: Three Observations was also a review.33 He finds himself in basicagreement.

4.1. An Interpretation. McFagues vision of God and humanity is destablizing, inclusive, andnon-hierarchical. These characteristics free her for certain strategic alliances: (1) thedestabilizing relates to deconstruction thought; (2) the inclusivism relates to liberation andpolitical theologies; (3) the non-hierarchical relates to feminism. It could also relate toprocess thought by freeing it to be open to metaphors instead of being preoccupied withconcepts (82-83).

4.2. Heuristics: Creative, Constructive, Responsive? Here Tracy confesses that he isunclear about theology as heuristics as distinct from hermeneutics and constructive.

33 Religion and Intellectual Life 5 (1988): 24-8.


McFague stresses the experimental as if (84). It is unclear what status should be given toher images. What ontological status should be attributed to them? In sum, will heuristicsalong suffice? (85).

4.3. A Thought Experiment: Nature in the Story of Jesus. Tracy suggests thatMcFagues models might be explored in the context of the Gospel narratives and thus bemore securely rooted in Christian tradition. (1) the parables; (2) Jesus table fellowship withoutcasts; (3) the cross; and (4) the appearance narratives of the resurrection in relation tothe resurrected body and cosmic reality.

5. McFagues Response

5.1. To Ruethers Charge about Patriarchal God Talk. McFague admits thatpatriarchal, monarchical, triumphalist models of God have generally been oppressive. Butthe christological king-servant model may have been liberating in other eras (87). She isconcerned about diverting attention from the main aim of her book, which is to persuadepeople to give up the old models in favor of the new. Concern for past history and ideologycould be tyrannical and destructive (88).

5.2. To Kaufman on Divine Relationality. In McFagues model Gods other is theuniverse (88). The idea that God is the mother of her own body coheres with Julian ofNorwich. We owe our being to him and this is the essence of motherhood (89).34 Shecomments: The seeming incoherence here, I think, comes from the fact that our bodies aregiven to us, as are all other aspects of our existence. But as the creator of all that is, God isnecessarily the source, the mother, of her own body (89).

5.3. To Kaufman on Personal Models. McFague agrees with Kaufman that conceptualmodels are necessary (90). But this was not the task that she set for herself. She agrees withKaufmans conceptual model, but adds that, It wont preach. The conceptual needs to becomplemented with the personal.

5.4. To Tracy on Shy Ontological Claims. The as if is the prerequisite to discoveringthe as. My position is epitomized in a statement by Paul Ricoeur: It would seem that theenigma of metaphorical discourse is . . . what it creates, it discovers; and what it finds, itinvents (91).35

34 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ed. Clifton Wolters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 166-67.35 The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1981), 239.


5.5. Pragmatic Criteria. Pragmatic criteria are crucial to the enterprise. Does it meanthat Feuerbach was right in claiming that God language was nothing but a humanprojection? McFague replies: Thus, I would say, a true model of God will be one that is apowerful, persuasive construal of God as being on the side of life and its fulfillment in ourtime. It will be one that is destabilizing, inclusive, and non-hierarchical (92).

6. Ruth Page

Pages review36 argues that McFague blurs the lines between humanity and creation andbetween Creator and creation. McFague overlooks sin and forgiveness (94), treating sin notagainst God but against the world. Mothers, lovers, and friends may forgive, but how doesGods body the world forgive? (94).She criticizes the process idea of the world as Godsbody. She disagrees with salvation as the reunification of the world (95). In McFaguesscheme we are the current potential saviours (95).

7. Ann Loades

Loadess review37 complains that McFague privileges certain human metaphors in anunjustifiable way (96-97). McFague has an unduly restricted understanding of metaphor,which she couples with models. She ignores Soskices work which treats metaphor not asre-description but as naming for the first time. Models, on the other hand, work on theA is a B pattern.

36 JTS 39 (1988): 647-49.37 Journal of Literature and Theology 4 (1990): 141-42.

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Feminist Views of God