The Female Image of God

 

Today is Mother’s Day, and with cards and flowers, candies and jewelry, motherhood is being celebrated. My own mother is somewhere in the Atlantic on a cruise ship, thus saving me the cost of a card, flowers, and a meal, although I admit she has been much on my mind the last couple of days. It turns out Mother’s Day without one’s mother feels like an outsider event, no doubt experienced more acutely through death than vacation.

 

In many pulpits today, preachers will extol the virtues of women, cautious not to exclude those who have difficult relationships with their mothers, as well as those who have opted not to choose motherhood themselves. Leaving aside the “let’s make everyone happy” dishonesty involved in carefully crafted sermons and/or celebrations of the feminine, the one thing no one but the most “fundamentalist” sort of preacher will discuss is what it means to be a woman and, specifically, what it means to be a mother. The tragedy of that is these “fundamentalist” types are the last people we want to explain the meaning of womanhood to a jaded and skeptical world. Still, peer pressure forbid, let none of the rest of us offer any alternative, lest we be accused of bordering on apostasy in a politically correct world of rational deference to emotive preference and comfort. In contrast to the humility to which all Christians are called, deferential is not a descriptive frequently applied to me by either friend or foe (and I do have several of those), so I pray tolerance as I tread into dangerous waters.

 

Of all the imaginable possibilities the form of creation might have taken, God chose to create two sexes – male and female – and created both in His Image. In the last sixty years or so, we have done our best to blur the distinction between male and female, but in spite of the pretense to the contrary, we all know that men and women are not alike. We have confused, I think, equality with sameness. To be equal is to hold a position of equivalent respectability and value, but equality does not – indeed cannot – require sameness. For example, every company vice president does not get to be the vice president of finance; someone has to be the vice president of marketing or human resources or whatever. All vice presidents are equal, at least in office, but they are not the same. This is the sort of distinction I want to make regarding the difference between male and female, and I want to use a distinction within the Holy Trinity as a means of thinking about difference and equality.

 

The old theological categories of the transcendence and immanence of God do not seem particularly relevant but are immediately obvious when we think about them. God transcends all that is. He is eternal, infinite, unchanging, omnipotent, omniscient, and on and on. In every way, God transcends the finite, mortal world in which we live. Yet, God is also immanent, most obviously so in Jesus Christ. The Incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus Christ is this transcendent God coming into an immanent, intimate, indivisible, relationship with His creation, and most especially, with His Image, male and female. Then again, God is poured out into His creature through His Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life. God is utterly transcendent and unreachable, and He is inseparably immanent in the God-Man Jesus Christ and in His in-dwelling Spirit within us.

 

There is a great line in the 1991 movie “City Slickers.” One woman ends up on cattle drive with a bunch of men. At the end of one day, the men were sitting around discussing baseball players when the woman asked if sports were all they talked about. The men thought a moment and replied that, ‘yes, pretty much that is all they talk about.’ One man then asked the woman what women talk about, to which she responded, ‘oh, husbands or boyfriends, friends, well, relationships and stuff.’ Another man looked at her as if she’d sprouted a second head, and observed, ‘if that were interesting, they’d print it on cards and sell it in packages with bubble gum.’

 

The reason I mention this story is because it reveals the point I want to make: women are inherently relational in ways that men are not. Women reflect the immanence of God, the closeness and intimacy of God, the God Who loves passionately and relentlessly seeks a relationship with every human being He has ever created in His Image. Of course, that necessarily implies that I think men must in some sense reflect the transcendence of God, but that is a Father’s Day sort of topic. Suffice it to say that neither male nor female truly reflect God as He is, but we do reflect equal yet different aspects of God. Moreover, it should not be necessary, but I suspect it is: both sexes possess some measure of the different aspects of God, as in, women can in fact transcend situations, and men can be deeply immanent with others. Perhaps more important to understand is that all Three Persons of the Trinity have both transcendent and immanent aspects. Generally speaking, however, the female is the immanent Image of God – the God Who races to love and focuses on individuals – the highly personal and intimate relational aspect of God.

 

When we confuse male and female in our misguided search for equality, we lose the beauty and wonder of the intimacy of God. Worse, I think, may be the feminine demand that we sacrifice the transcendence of God in our desire to establish the value of the feminine. The feminine has value specifically because it is the unique expression of God, distinct from the masculine. God does not divide Himself into a superior and inferior aspect, and neither is it accurate to suppose that the feminine and relational, the immanence of God, is somehow less valuable and necessary than the transcendence of God, in spite of the undeniable and shameful oppression and suppression of women in the Church’s history.

 

So much more could be written, and many nuances need to be explored. But we need to begin to think again about what it means to be made in the Image of God, “male and female He created them.” There are intrinsic wonder and beauty in the feminine Image of God, something we seem afraid to mention but that would be horrible to lose. Christians are called to live in the truth, not in a worldly ideal of psychological preference. The truth, we must remember, will set us free, not enslave us.

 

Motherhood is noble. Women are the especially immanent aspect of God. The measure of the feminine is what is revealed of God in it, not by failed mothers, history, or misogyny, and not by the emasculation of men. It is time for us to once again to explore God-given differences between men and women, not only that we would be whole, but also that God would be revealed and glorified.

 

Happy Mother’s Day!

 

In Christ –

© 2011 Servants’ Feast Ministry