Contemporary Theology II: ST507 From Theology of Hope to ......medieval cabalistic writings,...

Contemporary Theology II:

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 11 of 24ST507

John’s Feminist Theology, Part 1

Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism

This is lecture 11 for the course Contemporary Theology II. At the end of our last lecture, we were looking at some of the resources for gleaning female images and metaphors for speaking about God. Specifically we were looking at the resources available in Scripture. And I want to continue with what Elizabeth Johnson as to say about that. But we want to begin first of all with a word of prayer.

Father, we thank you again for the privilege of studying and especially studying theologies that are not ones that we typically come in contact with. Lord, we do admit that traditionally it has been our habit to reflect upon you in terms of male images and symbols. And we realize that there are appropriate female symbols and metaphors as well that point toward you. We pray then, Lord, that as we continue to study this might broaden our horizons and broaden our perspective on yourself. Help us then as we continue to look at this theological system and approach to liberation theology, for it’s in Christ’s name we pray it. Amen.

We were looking, at the end of our last lesson, at scriptural themes that are specifically significant for God talk, God talk that incorporates female metaphors and female symbols. And we had noted that there were three major symbols that Johnson wanted to discuss. The first one was Spirit Shekinah. By the end of the last lecture, we had looked at what she says about Spirit. But I want to turn for a moment to take a look about what she says about shekinah. Shekinah is a term that refers to the presence of the Lord, the tabernacling, the dwelling presence of the Lord especially as we see it portrayed in the Old Testament. Johnson says that in the Jewish trajectory that developed after the close of the biblical canon, the Spirit of God typically came to be spoken of in the female symbol of the shekinah. And to understand why she thinks this is a female symbol, let me read from page 85 and you’ll get a feel for this. She says,

John S. Feinberg, PhD University of Chicago, MA and PhD

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, ThMTalbot Theological Seminary, MDiv

University of California, BA

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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This female grammatical term, that is Shekinah, derived from the Hebrew verb shakan, to dwell, which is used in numerous texts that speak of God’s dwelling among the people (Exodus 25:8, 29:45–46) quite literally means the dwelling or the one who dwells. It is used in the Targums and rabbinic writings as a synonym for Divine presence among the people. Rather than saying directly that God or God’s Spirit descended on the holy of holies for example, the rabbis say that the Shekinah descended with the same meaning intended. Rather than saying that God is present among those who are attentive to the divine Word, they say, “If two sit together and the words of the Law are spoken between them, the Shekinah rests between them.” When the rabbis read Israel’s history using this expression [Johnson says] God’s illusive, powerful presence comes to light in the form of female presence. The Shekinah is manifest in the symbols of cloud, fire, or radiant light that descend, overshadow, or lead the people. The form which comes to be associated most clearly with her is divine glory or kavod, the weighty radiance that flashes out in unexpected ways in the midst of the broken world. Most significant is her work of accompaniment. For wherever the righteous go, the Shekinah goes with them. No place is too hostile. She accompanies the people through the post-slavery wilderness and hundreds of years later into exile again through all the byways of rough times. Come and see how beloved are the Israelites before God. For whithersoever they journeyed in their captivity, the Shekinah journeyed with them. In other words, God’s indwelling Spirit was with them and her accompaniment gave rise to hope and encouragement in the darkness, a sense of divine fidelity to the promise of shalom. Insofar as Shekinah is a circumlocution for divine involvement with the tragic state of the world, it also points to divine compassion. When the people are brought low, then the Shekinah lies in the dust, anguished by human suffering. To quote an example from the Mishnah referring to capital punishment by hanging, when a human being suffers, what does the Shekinah say? My head is too heavy for me. My arm is too heavy for me; and if God is so grieved over the blood of the wicked that is shed, how much more so over the blood of the righteous? Made familiar [Johnson says] by long use throughout medieval cabalistic writings, Shekinah is a term with female resonance that carries forward the biblical understanding of God’s Spirit. It signifies no mere feminine dimension of



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God but God as she who dwells within, divine presence and compassionate engagement with the conflictual world, source of vitality, and consolation in the struggle.

So Spirit and shekinah then become an initial major symbol that Scripture gives us, a symbol that is female in nature and which will allow us to speak accurately of God. The second major symbol that Johnson turns to is a symbol that really becomes the main theme and symbol for the rest of the book. It is the symbol of wisdom or Sophia (the Greek word from which is rendered the English term “wisdom”). About this symbol, Johnson writes as follows, and I quote her from pages 86 through 87. She says:

This is the most developed personification of God’s presence and activity in the Hebrew Scriptures, much more acutely lined than Spirit, Torah, or Word. The term itself is a feminine grammatical gender: chokhmah in Hebrew, sophia in Greek, sapientia in Latin. While this does not in itself determine anything, the biblical depiction of wisdom is itself consistently female casting her as sister, mother, female, beloved, chef, and hostess, preacher, judge, liberator, establisher of justice, and a myriad of other female roles wherein she symbolizes transcendent power ordering and delighting in the world.

In order to convince us, if we had any doubts that this in fact is a biblical symbol, Johnson notes the many texts in wisdom literature like the book of Job and Proverbs where wisdom is in fact personified. And if you look at it, wisdom is personified as a female person. Johnson then claims that there are five different solutions to Sophia’s theological significance that have credibly been argued. And I’d like to run through those five very briefly and let you see which one of the five (it’s the last one, I’ll tell you in advance) that Johnson thinks is the correct one. Here I read from the bottom of page 90 through the top of page 91. She says:

At least five solutions to the puzzle of her [that is, Sophia’s] theological significance have been credibly argued. Some view [and this is the first] Sophia as the personification of cosmic order, that is of the meaning that God has implanted in creation. Second one, others



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see her as the personification of the wisdom sought and learned in Israel’s schools. A third option, still others take the symbol to stand for a divine attribute, namely God’s discerning intelligence. A fourth option opts for the view that Sophia is a quasi-independent, divine hypostasis who mediates between the world and the utterly transcendent God of Jewish monotheism. While adequate in the light of certain wisdom texts, each of these ably-argued positions runs aground if the breadth of Sophia’s activity in the wisdom literature is taken stringently into account. There her actions and creation and salvation are obviously divine ones. This lends credence to yet a fifth option which holds that Sophia is the female personification of God’s own being in creative and saving involvement with the world. The chief reason for arriving at this interpretation is the functional equivalence between the deeds of Sophia and those of the biblical God. What she does is already portrayed elsewhere in the Scriptures as the field of action of Israel’s God under the revered, unpronounceable name YHWH. She fashions all that exists and pervades it with her pure and people-loving spirit. She is all-knowing, all-powerful, and present everywhere renewing all things. Active in creation, she also works in history to save her chosen people, guiding and protecting them through the vicissitudes of liberating struggle. Her powerful words have the mark of divine address making the huge claim that listening to them will bring salvation while disobedience will bring destruction. She sends her servants to proclaim her invitation to communion. By her light, kings govern justly, and the unjust meet their punishment. She is involved in the relationships of loving, seeking, and finding with human beings. Whoever loves her receives what in other scriptural texts is given by God alone.

So it seems then, as Johnson concludes, given the immediate religious context of the wisdom texts, namely, Jewish monotheism, not amenable to the idea of more than one God, the idea that Sophia is Israel’s God in in female imagery is most reasonable. Because what you see God doing, you see Sophia doing. If this is such a powerful symbol in Scripture, what in the world happened to it in Christian theology? Johnson says that Christianity’s teaching about the Spirit is as a matter of fact akin to this understanding of Sophia. In addition, Jesus portrayed as Logos



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is really the Christian adoption of Sophia theology, although it puts a male guise on it because the Logos as Jesus is obviously a male human being. Johnson then notes as well that in the Jewish thinker Philo’s works, the relationship between Sophia and Logos is a complicated affair. But it ends with Sophia being disparaged basically because of her female character. And then Johnson goes on to explain how this negative attitude toward Sophia fundamentally influenced Christian thinking, and consequently we don’t see too much talk in Christianity today about Sophia as God or even in its relationship to Christ. Let me share with you what she says about Philo and the negative influence here.

The thought of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo is also considered to have had a major influence insofar as he affected the milieu in which late first century theological reflection took place. In his work, the relationship of Sophia to Logos is a complicated affair but ends with Sophia being disparaged because of her female character. Adopting the dualistic pattern of Greek thinking, Philo held that the symbol of the female signified whatever was evil, tied to the world of the senses, irrational, or passive. By contrast, the symbol of the male represented the good, the world of the Spirit, rationality an active initiative. Within this framework, it would be inconceivable that divine Sophia could remain female. Thus Philo argues [and she quotes from him], “For preeminence always pertains to the masculine. And the feminine always comes short of it and is lesser than it. Let us then pay no heed to the discrepancy in the gender of the words and say that the daughter of God, even Sophia, is not only masculine but father, sowing and begetting in soul’s aptness to learn, discipline, knowledge, sound sense, and laudable actions.” [Then Johnson says,] It is a short step from this attitude to the substitution of the male symbol for the female one. And a number of contemporary authors do adduce wisdom’s female character as a reason for what Joan Chamberlain Engelsman calls “the repression of Sophia and her replacement by the Logos in John’s prologue. Edward Schweitzer proposes that it was in fact necessary for Christian thought to substitute the masculine designation for the feminine Sophia because of the gender of Jesus. F. Braun argues that the masculine gender of Logos is better adapted to the person of Jesus while W. Knox comments that the fact that Logos is masculine made it a convenient substitute for “the awkward feminine figure.” The point



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is however that Christian reflection before John had not found it difficult to associate Jesus Christ with Sophia including not only the risen and exalted Christ but even the historical Jesus of the ministry. Insofar as the gender of Sophia was a factor in her replacement by the Logos in the prologue, it was coherent with the broader shift in the Christian community toward more patriarchal, ecclesial structures, and the blocking of women from the ministries in which they had earlier participated. In other words, the suppression of Sophia is a function of the growth of sexism in the Christian community. So that’s why we don’t hear an awful lot about Sophia, and we don’t use it much as a symbol for God in Christian theology. But nonetheless, it is surely there in the Bible, and we ought to use it, according to Johnson.

The final biblical symbol for God that is female in nature is the symbol of God as mother. And here one can imagine the various biblical passages that speak about God in terms of language of female mothering where there is the concern for individuals, for creation, for nurturing, for sustaining, all of these things that would be associated with female mothering. So that’s what we can get from Scripture then. We’ve also seen the resources for this God talk which incorporates female metaphors that you can get from women’s interpretive experience. But there is a third resource for this kind of God talk, and it is classical theology. Now there’s a lot that one could take from classical theology, I suppose. But Johnson chooses to focus on three main items. The first is divine incomprehensibility. And that’s the one that gets the most attention from her. The second is the notion of analogical speech about God. And the third is the need for many names of God.

As I just mentioned, most of the emphasis is on the first item, namely, divine incomprehensibility. But the way that Johnson states the doctrine, it is not just that God is ultimately incomprehensible in essence or that we can know a lot about God but not know everything. That’s not her point. Rather her point is that God is totally unlike us and thus is a mystery. Now this sounds like rather strong language. But there is within classical Christian theology a tradition that has said fundamentally this sort of thing: that no matter what you say about God it’s going to be inadequate. He is shrouded in incomprehensibility, in mystery, and so Johnson is picking this up.



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So that you can see that in fact she is saying this about God, let me quote a little bit from what she says. She says, “The doctrine of divine incomprehensibility or hiddenness is a corollary of this divine transcendence.” And she’s just said that God as ground support and goal of all is illimitable mystery who, while imminently present, cannot be measured, manipulated, or controlled. In essence, she then says, “God’s unlikeness to the corporal and spiritual finite world is total unlikeness. Hence human beings simply cannot understand God. No human concept, word, or image all of which originate in experience of created reality can circumscribe divine reality, nor can any human construct express with any measure of adequacy the mystery of God who is ineffable.” That is a very strong statement, and it is typical of what you find from her on this topic. That means that there is absolutely nothing that any of us could say that expresses with any measure of adequacy the mystery of God, who is ineffable. At that point, one is inclined to say then we better be silent about God. All of our talk is utterly useless. On page 105, she cites Augustine as fundamentally falling into the same approach. And I think what she quotes him as saying is significant for us to see. She says,

Rather it is proper to God as God to transcend all similarity to creatures and thus never to be known comprehensively or essentially as God. In Augustine’s unforgettable echo of the insight of earlier Greek theologians si comprehendis non est Deus. If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God. This sense of an unfathomable depth of mystery, of a vastness of God’s glory too great for the human mind to grasp undergirds the religious significance of speech about God. Such speech never definitely possesses or masters its subject but leads the speakers ever more profoundly into attitudes of awe and adoration.

But we might add, not according to what she said earlier [about] attitudes of actually knowing what God is like. Someone might say, How can you say that God is so totally incomprehensible if you believe that Jesus Christ is the fullest revelation of God? Johnson has a word on that as well. Listen to what she says about this issue as it relates to divine incomprehensibility. She says:



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The idea of divine incomprehensibility in Scripture is not watered down with the advent of God in Jesus Christ. Rather, the mystery of the covenanting God remains the horizon within which early Christian believers interpret the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The God who raised Jesus from the dead cannot be captured in silver, gold, stone, or any representation of the human imagination (Acts 17:29). God dwells in unapproachable light whom no human being has ever seen or can see [and her citation is from 1 Timothy 6:16 and John 1:18]. God’s knowledge is deep. Divine judgments are unsearchable. Divine ways are inscrutable according to Romans 11:33–36. While present in the Spirit, God is greater than our hearts according to 1 John 3:20. Even in Christ, our knowledge is imperfect so that we see now as though in a mirror dimly and know only in part (1 Corinthians 13:9–12). Indeed there is a sense in which the mysteriousness of God is brought to a more intense pitch in the experience of divine saving love poured out in Jesus Christ. The mystery of divine incomprehensibility burns more brightly here than anywhere. Thus while the Scriptures are the inspired, literary precipitate of communities involved in knowing and loving the one true God, biblical tradition itself bears witness to the strong and consistent belief that God cannot be exhaustively known but even in revelation remains the mystery surrounding the world.

You get the picture of this view on God as incomprehensible. One more passage where she again invokes Augustine on this thought. On page 108 she says:

In the West this consciousness is expressed cogently throughout the influential work of Augustine. All speaking of God he insists must be born out of silence and ignorance and return there, for God is ineffable. We give God many names, but ultimately God is nameless, no name being able to express the divine nature. Since created perfections are a reflection of God, it is possible to predicate them of God but none are said worthily. God is more truly than can be uttered and exists more truly than can be thought. In the end, it is easier to say what God is not than what God is.



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Again she quotes from Augustine. “If you have understood, then this is not God. If you were able to understand, then you understood something else instead of God. If you were able to understand even partially, then you have deceived yourself with your own thoughts.”

Those are very, very strong statements about how likely it is that we are going to know anything about God. Given such a view of divine incomprehensibility then, as she suggests we get from Augustine, the only way to speak of God according to people who hold this view was by what’s known as the via negativa, the negative way. That is, that you say what God is by saying what God is not. He’s not this. He’s not that, He’s not the other. And then after you’ve piled up all the negatives, hopefully you will see that He’s something beyond all of these negative ideas. And you’ll get some kind of idea of what God is like.

How does all of this apply to feminist theology? Johnson connects it for us on page 112. And I think this is worth taking a careful look at. What we read here is this.

It is abundantly clear in classical theology and its contemporary retrievals that human words, images, and concepts with their inevitable relationship to the finite are not capable of comprehending God who by very nature is illimitable and unobjectifiable. Absolutizing any particular expression as if it were adequate to divine reality is tantamount to a diminishment of truth about God [I think you can see where this is headed]. The first Vatican Council, so clear about the intelligibility of divine truths in order to counteract fideism, was just as clear against rationalism about their perduring depths. [And then she quotes from them.] Divine mysteries of their very nature so excel the created intellect that even when they have been given in revelation and accepted in faith, that very faith still keeps them veiled in a sort of obscurity as long as we are exiled from the Lord in this mortal life, for we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:6–7).

Johnson then says:

Anyone who would claim a knowledge of God greater than this on the grounds of “revelation” is ignoring the situation



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of being created and forgetting this deep wisdom of the tradition. We are dealing here with mystery that goes beyond all thematizing. Well then, what does this mean for talk of God in terms of female metaphors and images? The experience of women today provides a powerful catalyst for reclaiming this classic wisdom as an ally in emancipating speech about God. Feminist critique of patriarchal discourse is surfacing the false assumptions that underlie insistence on exclusively male symbol and thereby propelling new discovery of holy mystery which we call God. Made in the image and likeness of God, women participate in the fire of divine being and signify the excellence of the Creator in a creaturely way. Correlatively God can be pointed to in symbols shaped by women’s reality as well as in imagery taken from the world of nature and of men. Not doing so has allowed one set of images to become a block to remembrance of the incomprehensible mystery of God. Doing so on the other hand has the immediate effect of bringing to light the true nature of language about divine mystery in male terms, namely that it is as legitimate and inadequate as female and cosmic term to express what is ultimately inexpressible. In the scope of the height and depth, the length and breadth of the incomprehensible God, language can be set free.

So you see the application. If no language is adequate to show us what God is like, then why should we limit our language to only language that incorporates male symbols and metaphors? If in fact God is beyond all language, then the more language we can pile up that might be suggestive of what God is like, the better. And if you’re going to go that route, then why not include language, image, metaphor that incorporates feminine ideas as well as masculine and as well as cosmic? Now if all of our speech is inadequate in regards to God, we can surely never speak univocally of God. That means when we say of God—that, for example, God is love—the term “love” cannot mean in regard to God exactly what it means in regard to us. But on the other hand, we don’t want to say that our language when used of God is totally equivocal. That means that it has nothing in common when it’s predicated of God with what it means when it’s predicated of us. Rather, as Aquinas has taught us, Johnson says, “Language about God must be analogical.” If that’s the case, then what does this mean for feminist theology? Let me share with you what she makes as an



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application from this point of analogical language. She says:

The understanding that all speech about God is analogical, assumes a strongly critical function when the androcentric character of traditional speech is faced with the question of naming toward God arising from women’s experience today. Introducing female symbols makes it acutely clear that analogy still has a job to do in purifying God talk of its direct, even if unintentional, masculine literalism. Now it becomes clear that we have not yet sufficiently articulated that the critical negation of analogy must be stringently applied to male images and conceptualizations of God no less than to other aspects of divine predication. The designation He is subject to all the limitations found in any other positive naming of God and in the end does not really tell us anything about the divine. Even in the case of the symbol of God the Father as if must be understood in every instance. Negations, revolts, oppositions, all the mind’s refusals insofar as they are well-founded, de Lubac observes, are explained by the demands of affirmation and adherence. Women’s refusal of the exclusive claim of the white male symbol of the divine arises from the well-founded demand to adhere to the holy mystery of God, source of the blessing of their own existence and to affirm their own intrinsic worth. Analogy functions as a wheel on which they can spin out emancipatory language in fidelity to the mystery of God and their own good mystery which participates in that fire.

So what she’s saying is that from this idea that language about God is analogical, those who take male terms and metaphors to be literally predicating male concepts of God should see that that’s wrong. Beyond that, if all language is analogical in regard to God and if women are the image of God just as much as men are the image of God, why not make use of words that are analogous to God from female themes and female symbols? So the point then is really twofold: not to think that our male language when applied to God is to be taken literally, and secondly, that we should realize it’s appropriate to use female analogies, female symbols and metaphors of God.

A further outgrowth of divine incomprehensibility and mystery is that there must be a wide number of ways then, she says, to name



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and think of God. And that’s really what we find when we look at various religions. It’s at this point that she takes a quick look, for example, at various theological systems and religions in Africa and points to a whole host of different names there that are used for God. Then she comes back after having shown that there are many names for God, and she applies this to feminist theology. She says:

Indeed Western language of recent centuries appears thin and paltry when brought into contact with this polyphony resulting from the human search for appropriate names for God. Western language has focused on male symbols to the virtual exclusion of female and cosmic ones and has further restricted even male naming to the work of ruling men and the patriarchal relation of Father, remembering the Christian and indeed the world tradition of the many names for God opens up space for the renewal of God language showing that such pluriform speech is not only legitimate but religiously necessary for proper discourse about the mystery of God. So that should show us that we can use female symbols and images as well to name God.

The remainder of Johnson’s book then offers her understanding of theology as understood in a feminist mode using feminine symbols to speak of God taken from these different resources that she’s talked about. All of it though, as I suggested a few moments ago, is cast in the model of God ultimately as Sophia, and then the concept of Sophia is linked to each member of the Godhead. You might expect then that Johnson would begin by talking about Sophia God in the sense of the first member of the Trinity, but she doesn’t. Johnson begins with a discussion instead of spirit Sophia because she says “spirit is the most immanent of the members of the Godhead.” And Johnson thinks theology should begin from below, not from above. You may be familiar with those terms. Rather than starting our reflections on God by escaping this world, we should begin to look within this world to see what we know about God and then move in an ever more transcendent direction. If we’re going to begin from below, Johnson says let’s begin with the member of the Godhead who is closest to us. And that’s the Spirit. Now initially it’s important to see how Johnson understands the basic meaning and identity of the Spirit. And she tells us that very early in her discussion of spirit Sophia. Here’s what she says:



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At the root of all religious imagery and its doctrinal elaboration lies an experience of the mystery of God. Since what people call God is not one being among other beings, not even a discrete supreme being but mystery which transcends and unfolds all that is like the horizon and yet circling all horizons, this human encounter with the presence and absence of the living God occurs through the mediation of history itself in its whole vast range of happening. To this movement of the living God that can be traced in and through experience of the world, Christian speech traditionally gives the name Spirit. If we ask more precisely which moments or events mediate God’s Spirit, the answer can only be potentially all experience, the whole world. There is no exclusive zone, no special realm which alone may be called religious. Rather, since Spirit is the Creator and giver of life, life itself with all its complexities, abundance, threat, misery, and joy becomes a primary mediation of the dialectic of presence and absence of divine mystery. The historical world becomes a sacrament of divine presence and activity even if only as a fragile possibility. The complexities of the experience of Spirit therefore are co-given in and through the world’s history, negative, positive, and ambiguous, orderly, and chaotic, solitary and communal, successful and disastrous, personal and political, dark and luminous, ordinary and extraordinary, cosmic, social, and individual.

That is surely not a definition of Spirit as traditionally we have heard it in Christian theology, but that’s how Johnson understands Spirit. She then claims that we can see in at least three historical mediations the activity of the Spirit drawing near and passing by. And here let me just name these for you. The first historical mediation is the natural world. She says that the natural world mediates the presence and absence of the Spirit. But not only do we find that in the natural world, but she says in addition, personal and interpersonal experience likewise mediates the presence and absence of God of Spirit to human life. As the Bible’s love songs show, the love of God for the world is revealed through the depths of love human beings can feel for one another, and she goes on with that. Then the third mediation historically is as follows. She says:



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On the level of the macro-systems that structure human beings as group, profoundly affecting consciousness and patterns of relationship, experience of the Spirit is also mediated. Whenever a human community resists its own destruction or works for its own renewal, when structural changes serve the liberation of oppressed peoples, when loss averts sexism, racism, poverty, and militarism, when swords are beaten into plowshares or bombs into food for the starving, when the sores of old injustices are healed, when enemies are reconciled once violence and domination have ceased, whenever the lies and the raping and the killing stop, wherever diversity is sustained in koinonia, wherever justice and peace and freedom gain a transformative foothold, there the living presence of powerful, blessing mystery amid the brokenness of the world is mediated.

In other words, in those instances, there you find Spirit being mediated. In light of these diverse experiences which mediate the Spirit, language about the Spirit cannot be neatly codified or kept in one single metaphor. Here’s what she says about this. She says:

Given the diverse experiences that mediate the mystery of the ever-coming God, language about the Spirit consistently breaks the boundaries of neat codification for one single metaphor. In the course of her visionary work on Christian doctrine, the medieval theologian Hildegard of Bingen spun out a plethora of images that brings this home in a vivid way. The Spirit, she writes, is the life of the life of all creatures, the way in which everything is penetrated with connectedness and relatedness, a burning fire whose sparks ignites in flames kindle hearts, a guide in the fog, a balm for the wounds, a shining serenity, an overflowing fountain that spreads to all sides. She is life, movement, color, radiance, restorative stillness in the din. Her power makes all withered sticks and souls green again with the juice of life. She purifies, absolves, strengthens, heals, gathers the perplexed, seeks the lost. She pours the juice of contrition into hardened hearts. She plays music in the soul being herself the melody of praise and joy. She awakens mighty hope blowing everywhere the winds of renewal and creation. And this is the mystery of God in whom we live and move and have our being.



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In spite of the significance of the Spirit, Johnson tells us that theological articulation about the Spirit has traditionally lagged behind reflection of the other two members of the Godhead. And she tells us that she thinks there are some specific reasons as to why this has been so historically. But then she offers another reason as to why she thinks the Spirit has been overlooked. And here let me share with you what she says.

More recently yet another reason has been proposed for neglect of the Spirit. While Scripture considers the Spirit more of an impersonal than a personal power, the resonances of some ancient language and symbols indicate that it is appropriate to speak of Spirit in metaphors of female resonance. Such is the case as we saw in chapter 5 with at least three terms: Spirit indwelling, and wisdom or ruach, Shekinah, and chokma, sophia. So powerful is the association of Spirit with the meaning evoked by these female images that in recent years, the theory has grown that one of the key, if unarticulated, reasons for the tradition’s forgetfulness of the Spirit lies precisely here. In the alliance between the idea of Spirit and the roles and persons of actual women marginalized in church and in society. There is a point to this I think when we realize that in the Bible the Spirit’s work includes bringing forth and nurturing life, holding all things together, and constantly renewing what the ravages of time and sin break down. This is surely analogous to traditional “women’s work” which goes on continuously in home, church, and countless social groupings holding all things together, cleaning what has been messed up while seldom if ever noticed and hence anonymous. Neglect of the Spirit and the marginalizing of women have a symbolic affinity and may well go hand in hand.

So that she thinks is a major reason. In thinking about the human analog to the activities of the Spirit, some thinkers, like Sallie McFague, have argued that rather than referring to God the Spirit, we should use the model of God as friend to designate the relationship with God that is traditionally spoken of in language about the Spirit. Johnson thinks it’s possible to maintain the term “Spirit” but to speak of the Spirit’s activities in female metaphor. She then demonstrates this point by turning to the Spirit’s actions and noting the likeness of such language with feminist values highlighting as it does freely moving, life-giving, nonviolent power that connects, renews, and blesses, according to her. Now

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John’s Feminist Theology, Part 1Lesson 11 of 24

in particular, she notes several of the Spirit’s activities. And let me just list them for you. First she notes the Spirit’s activity of vivifying or giving life to things. Second, the Spirit’s activity of renewing and empowering those who are weak, those who are dispossessed etcetera, and then also her activity of gracing.

Now in light of all of this, how then should we speak of the Spirit? Johnson first turns to metaphors from classical theology. And here the key metaphors are the Spirit as mutual love and gift. Johnson makes the application of this to feminist thought but then explains why she thinks this metaphor is not entirely the best way to speak of the Spirit. It tends to involve too much a sacrificing of women and of their significance as people. Johnson then turns to feminist metaphors for the Spirit. And the first one that she considers is the Spirit as friend. The second metaphor she appeals to is the maternity of the Spirit. But then she gives what I think is a key summary of all of this reflection on page 146, and let me, if I may, then read this to you.

Spirit Sophia friend, sister, mother, and grandmother of the world builds relationships of solidarity, not antithesis, between God and human beings and among human beings with each other and the earth. Held in her affection, human beings are called to be genuine companions of all creatures advocating justice and partnering life while not being diminished or overpowered by a dominating will. As with love and with gifts, these summary metaphors point to the Spirit of God dialectically present and active in the world galvanizing human praxis in alliance with their purpose of flourishing for all.

Contemporary Theology II: ST507 From Theology of Hope to ......medieval cabalistic writings,...

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