Challenging Biblical Patriarchy

A Christian does not follow social fashion blindly but does believe that we have to look for signs of the presence and purpose of the Holy Spirit in the trends of contemporary society. This is what is meant by the World Council of Churches' statement: 'It is the world that must be allowed to provide the agenda for the Churches' (The Church for Others, WCC, 1968). One trend becoming increasingly prominent is the role of women in society and consequently in the Church.

The values of the Western world are more biblically formed than we often realise. And the Bible is both patriarchal and hierarchical. This is certainly true of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Christians' Old Testament) right from its first book and the story of the creation of Adam and Eve. What we have to remember is that this is not an historical account of events but a mythological explanation to convey theological beliefs, written only several hundred years before the Jesus event, when patriarchy and hierarchy were already the social pattern of Jewish life and so it was written in this context.

The effect has been that throughout history till now, women have been submerged in this scriptural tradition and sin has been located and symbolised in women: Eve the temptress.

Yet we read in the Book of Genesis: 'God said: "Now we will make human beings, they will be like us and resemble us" ... God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female He created them' (1:26-27). Obviously an image of God in human form is not a mirror image. We human beings, as indeed the whole of creation, can say that we are the image of God, that we reflect God, in that the whole Universe is pervaded with God's energy. Nothing exists without it.

Throughout the two millennia of Christianity, God has been depicted in art, has been thought of and prayed to as male. By inference, the male image is more God-like than the female. St Augustine, known for his misogyny, held that man alone was the complete image of God and woman only as part of the complementary partnership. He wrote that man was the rational part of the image, while the woman was the bodily part!

The image of God as male has had an immense effect on both the male and female psyche. It has even been argued that God must be male because 'He' was the biological father of Jesus by creating a sperm in Mary's womb. And of course the resultant child, proclaimed as the Son of God, was a male.

Jesus taught his disciples to pray to God as a Father. He himself addressed God as Father in the familiar Aramaic term 'Abba'. This was a new and challenging way of addressing God at a time in Jewish history when God was more remote and majestic than in previous eras. Because the Church has retained the concept of God as 'Our Father' in its worship, we might be led to believe that this revelation about God was the ultimate stage of our spiritual evolution. It was not. It was simply the next stage which was appropriate two thousand years ago.

'The Faith' has frozen Jesus' words for all time and all cultures, forgetting that he was a man of his own time and culture. This was not meant to be the ultimate nor the total expression of Godhead. We have to employ models to enable us to handle mysteries. It is as if Jesus was saying: 'I will give you a model of how to relate to God: as a child does to his/her father'.

Jesus did not reveal all there is to know about God. He did not, for instance, refer to the Motherhood of God as Isaiah had done (42:14, 66:10-14). Indeed, he said at the end of his life: 'I have much more to tell you but now it would be too much for you to bear...' (John 16:12-13).

To get stuck at the level of Father-child relationship to God can become a form of idolatry. We would be transforming what is no more than a model into a reality. It is not even a model that appeals to everyone. For someone who in their childhood suffered abuse from their father or step-father, this model can be a real obstacle.

The Lord's Prayer, the 'Our Father', is not the epitome of the ultimate revelation of the God-humanity relationship. In fact the prayer was only introduced into Christian liturgy in the 3rd century after Tertullian, a theologian from Carthage known as the 'Father of Latin  theology', had made the claim that it was the ultimate revelation of God.

God is beyond gender. All language about God is metaphorical or analogical. It can never be a full expression. In place of those male biblical images - Lord, Judge, King, Almighty - we need to give greater worth to those biblical images of God as Life-giver, Source of vitality, Lover, Wisdom, Truth. When Jesus wept over Jerusalem at its lack of response to his Good News, he spoke of himself as a mother hen: 'How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you refused' (Matthew 23:37).

So long as we continue to think of and pray to God as a male, women will be less valued. This is a very important area of growth for the Church.

Adapted from the author’s book: Tomorrow’s Christian: A New Framework for Christian Living. John Hunt Publishing, Winchester, UK.  2005

Adrian B Smith