on the maleness of God-talk

Apparently, the presumed maleness of God is not something one can casually comment upon in one's Facebook status updates without causing consternation from unexpected quarters. So, naturally, it seems to me that a blog post is the obvious way to follow up. (Yes, that was sarcastic...in a nice way. I'm making fun of myself, y'all, and my inability to keep my mouth shut, leave well enough alone, etc.)

Actually, I'm not going to say much myself in this post. Instead, I am going to quote extensively from Elizabeth Johnson's Quest for the Living God, because 1) she's awesome and 2) she makes a really nice shield.

Johnson offers three basic ground rules for engaging in God-talk, that is to say, doing theology (whether one does theology professionally, or personally, or in my case, both). 1) remember that "the reality of the living God is an ineffable mystery beyond all telling;" 2) therefore, "no expression for God can be taken literally. None;" 3) Therefore, "from this, Thomas Aquinas argues...we see the necessity of giving to God many names" (Johnson 17-22).

Applying these reminders for our God-talk specifically to the issue of God's presumed maleness, we get this: 1) God is beyond our socio-linguistic categories, including that of gender; 2) no pronoun (male, female or neuter) in reference to God can be taken literally; 3) we need ways to reference God that incorporate every possible category since they all equally apply/do not apply.

Johnson herself observes this regarding the univocal, historical, traditional maleness of Christian God-talk:

"the practice of naming God exclusively in the image of powerful men has had at least three pernicious effects. First, because it offers no alternatives, it gets taken literally. Thereby it reduces the living God to an idol. Exclusively male language leads us to forget the incomprehensibility of holy mystery and instead reduces the living God to the fantasy of the infinitely ruling man...Second, in addition to this theological error, the exclusive use of patriarchal language for God also has powerful social effects...In the name of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, men have assumed the duty to command and control, exercising authority on earth as it is in heaven...Third, by giving rise to the unwarranted idea that maleness has more in common with divinity than femaleness, exclusively male images imply that women are somehow less like unto God...a woman may see herself as created in the image of God only by abstracting herself from her concrete bodiliness...Thus is set up a largely uinconscious dynamic that alienates women from their own spiritual power at the same time that it reinforces dependence on male authorities to act as intermediaries for them with God" (Johnson 98-99).

Johnson goes on to discuss the wealth of biblical imagery of Mother God, only one among many female images of God in the biblical text.

But I want to emphasize her main point, which I will paraphrase thus: insisting that God is male reduces God to the image of man. And God is not a man.

the cyborgs in the Garden

...Seeking a way to articulate an answer to this question, I dare to imitate Haraway’s use of provocative figures to shape an answer that flatly contradicts her assertion that the cyborg does not belong in the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve as cyborg.[1] The Genesis narrative of humanity’s first parents need not be read in the organic, originary, heteronormative, naturalized and universalizing mode that has given us both a problematic original innocence and an even more problematic original sin. As interpreters of this biblical narrative of our cyborg origins, in which Adam is not born of Woman but is manufactured of material elements not unlike those of the flesh of humanity’s monstrous cousin the golem, and in which Eve, too, is manufactured in a strange foreshadowing of our own emergent biotech capabilities, how can we read such a myth as one of Nature, Man, and Woman in perfectly ordered, natural existence? The elements of relationality as definitive for a posthuman ontology are also undeniably present: God marks this creature, the human, as unique in no way other than God’s own choice to relate to it; the human dwells, walks and talks with the nonhuman—God, but also the animals; the human is not left “alone in the world” but created with another human. In the Garden of Eden, all manner of human and nonhuman creatures exist. Embedded within a nexus of strange boundaries of human and nonhuman relationships—human and divine, human and animal, human and human—the cyborg pair in the Garden are what they are because of the construction and contestation of these boundaries. What does it mean to be made a cyborg in the imago dei? Simply to have been made a creature who is simultaneously kin and other: to God, to other humans, and to nonhumans. The boundaries do not disappear in our acknowledgment and negotiation of them—but they become conditions of relationship, and not obstacles preventing it.

            This cyborg reconstruction suggests further that the Fall represents, not a loss of original innocence (which does not exist) nor a loss or deformation of the imago dei (which, as relationship, continues), but a poignant renegotiation of the ontological boundary between the human and the divine. Van Huyssteen suggests that Genesis 3:22 provides a “rather dramatic new dimension to the image or likeness of God,” but a negative dimension, one which stands in tension with God’s intent of divine and human closeness. Yet, further, this new dimension is one which questions the presumed boundary between human and divine: “the ultimate focus on this thin line between the divine and human worlds finally culminates in the breaking down of the necessary boundaries between these two worlds, and results in the symbolic first sinful act that leads to divine punishment.”[2]

Van Huyssteen suggests that nothing in the biblical narrative reconciles the contradiction between the created likeness and the epistemological likeness; yet he himself, in defining the human, makes a postfoundational notion of rationality central. This pair of moves leads us to the question, must we assume that this renegotiation of ontological boundaries is wholly negative? In our cyborg parents’ bid for greater understanding and closeness to the divine, for greater incorporation of the divine into themselves (eating, after all, being a material act), what is there that seems strange, or even necessarily blameworthy? Transgression of categorical boundaries in the living out of material embodied reality is, after all, what cyborgs and (post)humans are all about. Van Huyssteen’s own work on human uniqueness suggests that the very element of our humanness lamented in this text is the means by which we come to know, and relate, to each other and our nonhuman kin, including God. This is not to suggest that this element of our humanness is unproblematic, an entirely “happy fault;” but the cyborg has always been an ambivalent figure, capable of good and evil, and is no less so here...

---

[1] Donna J. Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 151.

[2] J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, The Gifford Lectures (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 123.

communion meditation from Sunday

Clare’s been asking me questions about what it means to be dead lately. I suppose we shouldn’t have been telling her that she shouldn’t run in the street or the parking lot because the cars can squash her dead like a bug. I mean yes, we should tell her not to run in the street, but it seems to me like she’s got the second bit about being squashed dead like a bug without having properly absorbed the “don’t run in the street” bit.

What is being dead, she asks me in the car while we’re driving to the grocery store. Um. Well, the best I could do was tell it’s when you’re body is “broken” and doesn’t work anymore for some reason. Then she wanted to know can you fix it. Yeah, sometimes, and that’s what doctors do. This gave her the impression that it’s part of doctors’ jobs to raise people from the dead by fixing dead bodies. Oops. So, okay, being dead is when your body is broken and can’t be fixed. But what happens when you’re dead, is Clare’s follow-up question. And yikes. So I wrack my brain for something comprehensible in Clare’s world, that I also wouldn’t feel completely hypocritical about saying. And the best I can come up with is, “it’s okay to be dead, because God takes care of the dead people.”

And in all the thinking I’ve done about that conversation and this topic since, that’s still the best I can come up with. Heaven, I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know. But my "I don’t know" is not cynical or despairing. It’s hopeful. Because I don’t know, but I can say, in the midst of my unknowing, that God takes care of the dead people. It’s not that we don’t die, or that death isn’t sad, or even scary. Just that, no matter how sad and scary, we trust that God takes care of us in death just as God takes care of us in life.

This is the story of the resurrection, that moment of Jesus’ life that he asked that we remember in these acts of eating and drinking. To remember his body: not just his teaching, his miracles, his sparkly personality, but his body. To remember his blood: that ancient and powerful symbol of life itself, that animates the body. We read and study and marvel at the ways in which God is with Jesus, or is Jesus, in his life, and at the moment of Jesus’ death, in the midst of Jesus’ own unknowing about what would happen. Even when, as some of the gospel accounts tell us, he feels utterly abandoned, crying out, "why have you forsaken me," other accounts tell us that he ends with the sigh, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”  The resurrection itself, three days later, is the narrative’s conclusion that this trust that God takes care of dead people is not misplaced. And Paul tells us, if God took care of Jesus in this way, we may trust this is God’s intent for the rest of us too. This is a hope that is defined not by what we know, for we don’t know anything about how this is going to work. It’s a hope defined by who we know: a God who created for no reason other than love of creation, a God who redeems for no reason other than love of creation. This God will not sit by and watch creation perish, for no reason other than the same love with which God created and sustains and redeems creation. This is the message of Jesus’ life, and death, and resurrection: that we live because God loves us, and this is true now, and eternally. Amen.

why don't you just leave

Over at Preacher Mike's, once again, this "rhetorical question" is posed by a commenter.


I'm not going to add this post to the "Women in CofC" series officially, because it's a rant. It's my blog, and I started it specifically so that I could rant on it. Most of the time, I don't. But today, I do. If you like rants, read on. If they bug you, skip it.


I can't even begin to tally up how many times I've fielded this question. From professors. From students. From colleagues. From my therapist. From my best friend. In blog comments. In absentia, even, on discussion forums by people who don't even know me. Why don't you just leave.


It's something I've blogged about before. Why don't I just leave? After all, my husband did. And he's a better person and better Christian for it. Unburdened from the constant stress and frustration of seeing a better future for the church from within a church that doesn't want it, he can now preach and teach with an honesty and integrity that was not even welcomed, let alone understood, before. I see it--I'm sure everyone else who knows him does, too. For Brent, leaving was not optional. It was necessary, and too long delayed by his overdeveloped sense of responsibility.


Why don't you just leave. Well, thanks for the suggestion. Believe me, it's occurred to me. And you make it very tempting. Your invitation to leave is nicely bookended by the proclamation on every sign for the Episcopal Church I've seen: "the Episcopal Church welcomes you." You invite me to get out. This other church--this denomination--invites me in. To stay. Hmmm.

Why don't I just leave.

Why don't we all just leave, we dissidents who just stick around to moan and piss and bitch about the things that we don't like about church? We're a drag. And we're like the little boy who cried wolf, we're constantly droning on about something, aren't we, so we just get tuned out. We're ineffective advocates for the change we purport to desire, we whiners. Our yucky whiny voices turn people off, turn them away from the point we think we're making, not toward it.


Sure. That's who we are, we gender justice dissidents. We pillars of the church who give our time and our money, who lead in the ways we can--whether that's leading communion or teaching kids or making casseroles, who patiently accept the baby steps when they happen, who find their community of support online because they can't find it at their church, who wait for the teachable moments and struggle to endure the long stretches in between, who pray for discernment for that moment when "the well-timed complaint" may be heard and who then speak, not in a whiny yucky voice, but with prophetic conviction, and fear and trembling.



Oh wait, am I whining again? Damn.


Remember, it's October: sarcasm month and clergy appreciation month.

how it went

So, I thought I'd do a little blogging on the defense.

One of the best realizations of the day came before we even left the house for Princeton. Some of you knew that I'd decided to knit myself these crazy wonderful lace stockings to wear, and unfortunately, I didn't get them done. I was disappointed about it, since it was a sort of symbolic woman-power thing I'd wanted to do for myself. But then, as I was getting dressed, I realized that I was literally draping myself in clothes and jewelry from all these other wonderful, smart women in my life: Brent's mother Malda supplied both my beautiful woolen suit and the gorgeous vintage shoes, my mom gave me the turquoise earrings for my last birthday, my sister Ally the little leather braided bracelet I wear everyday. It was like a hybrid of getting dressed for a wedding (with something old, something borrowed, something blue) and girding up my loins for battle. And even better, I realized that all along, subconsciously, I'd planned this outfit just for this reason. (This may come across as way more overtly 'feminine' that you're used to hearing from JTB, but one thing the posthuman underscores is--body matters, self-fashioning matters, and it can be empowering, or not.)

Brent's posted some stuff on Facebook (where also a whole helluva lot of people have said congrats and other nice things, which I very much appreciate, so THANK YOU VERY MUCH, people!!!) but from my point of view, the lovely complimentary things Brent recorded in his self-appointed capacity as scribe were things that I heard but didn't quite take in, because I didn't want to be distracted from the kind of focus you need to maintain your verbal quick-wittedness in order to answer real questions. So it's especially nice to have his selectively-edited-for-maximum-complimentariness version of things to go back to in retrospect. Kind of like airbrushing a memory, or something.

The truth is, I totally enjoyed myself. First of all, you spend three years working on some idea, trying to follow all the leads and smooth out all the kinks, and write it down in an organized and compelling way, and during that whole time, if someone asks you what you're working on, you get a 2 minute or 10 minute or at best 30 minute conversation about it before you notice the glazed eyes and automaton responses that tell you once again you've turned into That Chick with the Dissertation Monomania. The defense is the reverse of that--a whole swath of time devoted to really digging into this thing, with people who are actually really interested in it, and have even read it. What is not awesome about that? And, on top of that, the critical questions I got--particularly on the Christology chapter--were really, really helpful. Some things I had thought about while writing it, and some things I just hadn't, but can see a whole new dimension to that chapter that can/should get thought through and written (at some point). Exciting!

And at the end of it all, to have three people you truly respect as scholars and teachers tell you that they think not only have you done a good job, but that what you've been spending your time on is important, and to formalize that with the lovely Latin phrase summa cum laude, and then, hang out and have a beer with you afterwards...well, I could have written a script for the ideal JTB dissertation defense, and it would have gone just so.

I am very happy.

Notice

what's in a (roller derby) name

Lately my sister and I have been having some fun with brainstorming roller derby names. It's made a stressful week--of paradoxical 1) having nothing to do, re dissertation other than avoid overthinking the defense on Monday and 2) having too much to do, as every night this week someone is off doing something, plus a packed weekend--much easier to handle. Sort of like doodling alternative anagrams for "WWJD" in first year Greek (also a fun distraction, still, if you're stuck somewhere in desperate need of mental diversion).

I'm not sure what Em's going to finally decide on, and besides, that is for her to reveal.

But of course it makes for an excellent collaborative blog invite. Post your roller derby name or suggestions and let the wild rumpus start!

I've also been thinking about the many people I know who, for one reason or another, have changed their names as adults, and wondering why I've never made that move myself, despite years of wishing I were not just another of the ubiquitous 1970's Jennifers. I had so many opportunities to do this as a young adult: moving to a new high school, starting college, getting married. Of course, it's a bit difficult to change the name people actually call you all the time. But I know people who have done it. And my middle name, which, though orthographically deviant, I share with my grandmother, is similar enough to "Jennifer" that people could still call me Jen and there wouldn't be too much difficulty with that. So I am seriously pondering it--once again. Brent thinks this is a bit silly. But I am beginning to realize that this is a lot more common than you'd think, and a lot more serious than frivolous. Name-changing when you get married we take for granted in our culture (most of us) and maybe forget that, in the end, it signals something akin to the "ontological change" we talk about in the context of ordination. In marriage, you're not just signing on to live with someone and share the household bills--you're making a decision about who you are, and who you intend to be in the future: an ontological decision about personal identity. It seems appropriate to signal that with a name change. It does not seem appropriate that only women signal that in this way, but that's another discussion. When I got married, I realized that I wanted to signal this ontological change with a symbolic name change--but also, to my surprise, found that I wanted to hold on to who I already was and didn't want to lose my name. At this point in my life I think I just want to recognize the de facto reality that I've never felt quite comfortable as a Jennifer and have always treasured being a Jeanine.

Luddites indeed

seriously?

Stephen Colbert picked up the Conservapedia Bible re-write story. Brilliant. But even better is this, from Conservapedia's entry, "Stephen Colbert":

"After learning about Conservapedia's initiative to remove "liberal bias" from the Bible, Stephen Colbert urged his followers to insert him into the planned conservative rewrite as a Biblical figure. This was followed by mass vandalism by Colbert fans."

Google lists this among results for keywords "conservapedia Colbert": "Oct 12, 2009 ... Stephen Colbert is God, He is the original creator who created the world in six days. He is the God of all beings in this universe."

I'm consistently intrigued by these gimmicks. Re-writing the truthiness of conserviwikiality is such a beautiful statement on epistemology...and here the fusion of hermeneutics and epistemology could not be more ironically or clearly stated.

sci4min public lecture: Ted Peters, "The Lab & The Pew"

Dr. Ted Peters, Professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, will deliver the Science for Ministry Institute's inaugural semi-annual lecture. His talk, "The Lab and the Pew: the Place of Science in Pastoral Ministry," will be held Wednesday, November 4, at 7:30 pm in Stuart 6, and is free and open to the public.

Ted Peters is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and a prolific author on topics in systematic theology, religion and science, the evolution controversy, and bioethics. The Science for Ministry Institute is sponsored by the Erdman Center for Continuing Education and funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. It is a unique program that brings together pastor-scientist pairs from churches and other ministry contexts for educational experiences designed to promote productive theological engagement with the sciences at the local level.