Child of God

When +Jane and I were preparing the liturgy for the Lindisfarne Community we were very conscious of exclusionary language. We had long concluded that women had been shut out from many areas of the church’s life. Male language reinforced the exclusion each time the liturgy was said or sung. At the highest level of Christianity (the understanding of the Holy Trinity) women were absent. Popular Catholicism had reduced the problem by exalting Mary to a virtual fourth place in the Godhead. A holy family (God, Mary, Jesus) was in the popular imagination as important as the theological Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).

Yet, our understanding was not Catholic and we had no Mary tradition to militate against the maleness of Protestantism.

God is neither male nor female. For many years we have called God the Father-Mother and have alternated the personal pronoun, sometimes calling God he and now more often she, as a counterbalance to centuries of exclusion. Some years ago we were challenged to refer to God solely in the feminine for three months. The reason, we were told, is that no matter how much we protested that “When we call God Father, we do not mean a male,” our imagery of God has been in male terms. It was quite a challenge to see God outside of the male box!

We changed the traditional motif of Trinity from “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” to “Father-Mother, Child and Holy Spirit.” Why “child” and not “son”? Firstly, for the obvious inclusive language issue. Secondly, for a more nuanced theological reason. There are two schools of thought that say Jesus was a male human being for good reasons. Males are more suited than females to be leaders. Males are more suited than females to be priests. Jesus is both the archetypal leader and the archetypal priest. As Jesus was male it is clear that only males can be leaders and and only males can be priests. However, it seemed to us that the maleness of Jesus was not the issue. The humanity of Jesus was the point. If you understand the notion of conditions, Jesus' humanity was an essential condition of his mission, but Jesus’ maleness was only a sufficient condition. Jesus’ femaleness would also have been sufficient. (Jesus as a transgendered person would also have been sufficient, though that understanding is new to us and would not have been available to folk in the first century.)

The point of the Christ event is that in incarnation—the heart of sacramental theology—the divine is found fully expressed in the human; the human is taken up into the divine. Maleness and femaleness is irrelevant for this foundational theological understanding. Jesus is both child of humanity and Child of God. As the “forerunner” as Hebrews suggests, Jesus is the one who leads all people to that telos. In Christ, all of us are children of God, female and male.

Further, in the liturgy we are concerned not so much with the historical Jesus (though that is part of the Eucharistic prayer) but with the risen Christ, the post-Easter Christ of faith. Theologically, this Christ is no longer bound by a temporal maleness or femaleness, but freed from those material restrictions. The risen Christ is neither male nor female as the father-Mother is neither male nor female.

Language is always problematical. All we can say about God is ever only analogy, “It is a bit like this.” Meister Eckhart had the profound sense that there is Godhead beyond God. That is, essentially God is truly beyond our language, or imagery or understanding. Yet, language is important and for us, there is a great need to remove unnecessary exclusions.

+Ab. Andy