Language for God

A Lutheran Perspective

Mary J. Streufert

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506473963
• eBook ISBN: 9781506473970
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Konfessionen

Language for God draws readers into the necessity of language and images for God that are expansive and inclusive of all genders. People hunger for scriptural and theological explanations that adequately answer criticisms and support dialogue. Using Lutheran perspectives as a compass, Mary J. Streufert offers scriptural, theological, and historical insights that advance Christianity's ongoing reformation of androcentric images and language for God.

This book is for a variety of people, including those who are unsure of why language and images for God matter; those who need assurance that language and images for God include all genders, including people who identify as queer; and those who want language for God to be faithful to the Scriptures and to the witness of the Christian theological tradition. It is also for people who need convincing that God is Mother as much as Father, pregnant Christ as much as crucified Christ, and Godhead beyond all gendered appellations.

The book is pastoral in that it explores the deeply personal, communal, and social ways language and images influence who we are and how we live. It takes seriously the hunger for more--for God beyond the Father. This book is also intellectual in that it challenges contemporary arguments for Father and Son as exclusive names for the first two persons of the Trinity by exploring historical developments in the ways people define sex, gender, and sexuality. Without a rigorous assessment of how these views affect Christianity, Christian language and images for God will remain androcentric. Insights from the Reformation, most pointedly from Martin Luther and the Lutheran tradition, offer points on a compass toward the reformation of Christian language and images for God in our day.

1

The Church and Language for God

The church is a storehouse of memories and stories, big and small. . . . We cannot be anything but translators and storytellers. That is how we can be the church.

—Mary (Joy) Philip, “The Elusive Lure of the Lotus,” in Transformative Lutheran Theologies

Language and images for God, I am convinced, matter for our deepest longings in faith. You might pause and reflect, When I think about faith, what do I long for? What are my deepest yearnings in my relationship with God? What do I notice when I rest in quiet for a moment?

I’ve heard some of these yearnings of faith. As humans, we live in the tender folds of strength and weakness. Often it seems we do not share the memories and stories of our needs. But we have needy hearts and clamoring minds; our spirits search for the comfort of being truly known and loved. As the psalmist writes, “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps 63:1). We live unsettled and searching. Here are a few of the stories and memories of the church I have heard. Maybe your story of yearning in faith fits here too.

The room was dim so that we could see the slides on the screen. It was one of the first times I shared images of Jesus Christ that were unfamiliar to many North American Christians—Jesus as Asian, Middle Eastern, or American Indian. These were paintings by artists in the twentieth century. In other images, Jesus Christ did not look clearly masculine, and in still others, Jesus appeared to be pregnant or depicted with symbols of nursing. Those were by artists in the eleventh to the sixteenth century.

The lights came on, and people were curious, talkative. I wrapped up the session. From the back of the room, Magdalena shot to the front. We had talked the previous day. But this time she had tears in her eyes. Her body was taut, engaged. “I saw Jesus like me. I didn’t know these images existed!” Like her, meaning seemingly masculine and feminine. Seeing Jesus with a beard but pregnant was new, even though the images are hundreds of years old. “I didn’t know I needed to see this.”

Another time, no one spoke to me, but I saw body language. I was in Oklahoma for a synod assembly, and in a keynote address on a topic not related to language and images for God, I used an image of Jesus Christ as American Indian. When it went on the screen, I could see it affect an older man and a young man in the back row. Their seeing Jesus like them changed me. I am guessing that they had seen images like this before. I am guessing God is not white for them. Yet in a white-identified space, Jesus Christ was shown as American Indian. Their recognition told me again how we yearn in faith.

It kept happening, this yearning unearthed. With tears in his eyes, a Lutheran bishop told me on the last day of a conference that he and his spouse had been skeptical about what images and language for Jesus I would share. Jesus like a woman? And these paintings are how old? In the middle of it, they found themselves fed, surprised, grateful. The symbols of Jesus Christ as the source of the church are sometimes portrayed as Jesus pregnant. One image in an illustrated Bible in the medieval era even shows a church building being birthed from Jesus’s side. These were powerful teaching images in a time when few people could read.

At the same conference, an older couple drifted to my side while we waited for the doors to open for worship. I got a little nervous. It was 2014, and it was not popular to be a feminist Lutheran in church circles. One of them passed me a handwritten note and said how grateful they were to see images of Jesus Christ that disrupted our ideas about gender because they have a transgender child. It seemed they experienced being opened up, affirmed. They felt that their child was loved in a new way. I still have the note.

A year later, a young pastor approached me after a session. His face was flushed. I watched him blink at his tears. “Thank you. I didn’t know what to do with how I felt left out when my wife nursed our baby. But these symbols of Jesus help me, and I feel closer to my child and wife now.” He stopped for a moment but then continued, “I had no idea these were out there! Where can I find them?”

People yearn in faith to be known and loved and fed. Each person I met was surprised by their own responses. As humans, I think we respond to being known. As Christians, I think we respond to the God who is for us in all our human complexities and all our difference and alikeness. Images of Jesus portrayed in many ethnicities and being a mix of genders reached people who did not even expect to have their yearnings in faith met this way. They were caught off guard by God made known to them in unexpected ways. And they were grateful. But I have also heard yearnings that didn’t surprise people. Others were distinctly aware of their yearnings in faith. These are just a few of those stories.

“I decided I’m not going to cry tears of anguish and shame in church anymore,” my friend Tara told me. The nearly total masculine and male-identified language and images for God, she said, were completely interfering with her faith. Worship met none of her faith yearnings. She heard no gospel declared in her language. For years the masculine language in the liturgy made it not worship for her. Anger and sorrow gripped her body, and she would struggle to make sure her tears were discreet. Things changed once she cried openly during a service and was no longer trying to be polite by hiding her pain. The open sorrow of her heart finally allowed her to move away from Lutheran worship to a different Christian church. Full of despair, she sought inclusive language for God and finally made the painful decision with her spouse to transfer their family membership from their church home of over twenty years. That exodus, she told me, remains the most agonizing loss of her adult life. But she shouldn’t have had to leave to be fed.

My friend Jean struggled too. She didn’t just leave the Lutheran tradition; she left Christianity, in part because of language for God. Because others did not yearn for language for God that was not nearly exclusively masculine, she felt alone in the community of faith. No one, it seemed, felt the same yearning to hear God proclaimed as feminine as well as masculine. Was there no one to search with her?

A woman in an online conference last year told me how tired she was of waiting for the church to use feminine language for God. Her simple admission crackled through the internet. She didn’t have to say much for me to feel the ribbons of yearning spooled deep within her. She is still waiting to hear the gospel in language that fully speaks to her.

None of this loss in faith is necessary.

The Problem

The problem is that God is a man in much Christian imagination. Christians use mostly masculine-identified language and stories and images. One word to describe this predominant Christian conception of God is androcentric: it is male identified and male centered.

I am interested in understanding why. History provides clues. As Lutheran church historian Susan McArver says, “History is to an institution what memory is to an individual.”1 History helps us make sense of why we do things and who we are. History reveals a powerful link between how people define bodies and behaviors associated with sex and gender and language and images for God. But what do I mean by sex? Although sexuality is intertwined with sex and gender, sex here refers to bodies, not our physical relationships. For example, in the United States right now, reproductive organs usually define a person’s sex. Gender refers to how we express or identify ourselves or cultural expectations based on sex. Simply put, the history of sex and gender that we have inherited in the United States and in the Lutheran tradition is that men are superior. It is a history likewise intertwined with white supremacy.

If you look at it closely enough, the history of the United States reveals a trail of evidence that female bodies and Black and brown bodies matter far less than male bodies and white bodies.2 When people are perceived and treated as inferior to others, they suffer and often die. For hundreds of years, prophets and scholars have been working to unravel this problem.3 Historical study shows that while distinct, they are intertwined. To talk about language for God that is of all genders, I will explore some of this intersected history, even while I focus on the problems related to gendered language for God.

In this century, some famous people are using their power to point out how religion contributes to problems for women and girls and to cultivate change. Former president Jimmy Carter wrote a book about the connection between religion and violence against women and girls after he gathered global faith leaders to take this connection seriously. Carter wants religious leaders to be part of the effort to care for everyone’s well-being. Grounded in his Baptist faith, Carter urges everyone to take account of the ways religion supports sexism—and then to do something about it.4

In her efforts to stem gender-based poverty, Melinda Gates calls on religious leaders to amplify female-identified voices in faith traditions because from her point of view, the poverty many women experience is deeply connected to the role religion plays in their lives. What religions say about women and girls—that they are inferior to men and boys—seeps into everyone’s consciousness, she argues, whether someone is a girl, a boy, or a queer person. And, she continues, while it is not her job to trace the sources of the problems women and girls experience due to religion, religious people and churches need to trace these issues and respond to them.5 Many people of faith have been trying to do just this for decades.

Protestant church bodies have been shifting language for God in worship, some more recently than others. For instance, beginning in 1973, the United Church of Christ (UCC) was among the first church bodies to discuss and call for decreasing the frequency of masculine language for God.6 The UCC made inclusive-language resources available beginning in 1981.7 In 2018, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church voted to provide gender-neutral options for language for God in three prayers in one order of liturgy.8

Even before the ELCA was formed by joining together separate Lutheran church bodies in the United States, Lutheran churches were trying to shift Lutheran practices.9 Scholars, educators, and others collaborated to encourage Lutherans to know and experience both human and divine identity untethered from androcentrism.

In the 1970s, predecessor bodies of the ELCA acted to create changes in language. Some of the institutional recommendations included advice that continues to be relevant. For example, the Church Council of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) resolved in 1976, “More inclusive symbols and language referring to God are also encouraged so that materials reflect the male/female wholeness of the Christian community and the all-encompassing nature of God.”10 In the 1980s, significant Lutheran scholarship on language for God emerged. For example, Gail Ramshaw offered a clarion call in 1982: “It is time to break the model of God-he. . . . If increasingly in American English ‘he’ denotes male sexuality [sex], it becomes a simple matter of idolatry to refer to God as ‘he.’”11 Men also felt urgencies to challenge androcentric language for God. Five years later, H. Frederick Reisz Jr. wrote, “I urge the pastoral expansion of the language we use for God, retaining in some places and times ‘Father and Son,’ and using other words at other times. . . . Images address God and then are broken by God’s Word. I am humble enough to know that all these words and images are not God, and I do see through a veil darkly.”12

Likewise, scholarship on language influenced the early years of the ELCA. In 1989, the Office of the Secretary and the Commission for Communication created and released the document Guidelines for Inclusive Use of the English Language for Speakers, Writers and Editors. It contains advice not only for humankind but also for God. Human speech about God, the guide stresses, must express God’s mercy. Although the guide acknowledges Jesus’s address to God as Father, the authors clearly encourage people to avoid nearly exclusive masculine language for God because of its effect on faith.13 Instead, the guide advocates for a multiplicity of images. The guide was withdrawn from widespread use after some people protested it. The ELCA’s history related to language for God reveals opposing viewpoints on whether God is masculine or not.

What happened in the ELCA reflects what was happening across Christianity. In the 1990s, discussion about language for God became highly charged. Women collaborated in ecumenical circles to push for female-identified liturgical language and practices. Scholars published books both for and against female-identified language. In some ways, the conversation became shouting matches, with some claiming heresy on one side and patriarchy on the other. But scholars were not the only ones in the debates; congregations, pastors, and bishops entered the fray as well. For some people and communities today, the debate is not over. And therefore, the need continues, and the discussion is not over either.

Lutherans have been working for decades to take account of the interface between religion and sexism not only in the United States but worldwide. The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) has a gender justice policy.14 It emphasizes inclusion and equity as Christian values rooted in Lutheran expressions of faith, and it gives practical suggestions for communities of faith and agencies. Lutherans all over the world use this document, and many leaders and activists collaborate regularly to generate action and coordinate efforts and ideas. Many of these leaders and activists underscore how important it is to live in faith with language and ideas that do not hurt people.

Another important step is the ELCA’s social statement Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action. Social statements from this church rely on the Scriptures and theology to develop a Lutheran ethical vision about an issue. The social statement task force’s responsibility was to study, discuss, and write about the ways sexism hurts women and girls, but what they discovered was that sexism hurts everyone. Through their seven years of collaboration, they came to recognize an extensive history of sexism that continues to influence everything from paychecks to parenting to pulpits.

Through its churchwide assembly in 2019, the ELCA adopted this teaching and policy statement, which declares patriarchy and sexism sinful because they foil God’s desire for abundance and justice. The statement also explains that language for God that is mostly male oriented can hurt faith and hurt people. It hurts faith by narrowing “an understanding of God to the figure of an infinitely powerful man.” It hurts people by giving the message “that men have more in common with God.”15

What I have found is that in a worldview where men are considered superior, God is not “allowed” to be feminine or female identified. As feminist scholar Mary Daly famously said, “If God is male, then male is God.”16 The reasoning is that if God is the best, God cannot be identified with anything female or feminine because they are supposedly not the best. Similarly, in a worldview where white people are superior, God is not “allowed” to be Black or brown. As my colleague Kathryn riffed on Daly, “If God is white, then white is God.” When female and Black and brown bodies are perceived and treated as inferior to male and white bodies, God is portrayed and prayed to as if God were a white man. In other words, androcentric language for God is theologically and pastorally harmful. But the Scriptures and the Lutheran tradition tell us something more complex and more beautiful than this.

As the stories I have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Church and Language for God
• 2. Fathers—Created Better and the Only Creators
• 3. Fathers—Ruling Sex and Ruling Race
• 4. Fathers and Sons, Sex and Empire: Reading Luther through Luther
• 5. Patriarchy and (the) Tradition: A Reformation Compass
• 6. Transformative Theology: God for Us
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Subject Index
• Selected Scripture Index