7 - Gender and the Trinity

Gender and the Trinity
By Rebecca Oxford-Carpenter

O God, Mother and Father to us all, who in love has made us, and through love has kept us, and who by love would make us perfect... (From a corporate Prayer of confession, Riverside Church, New York City, 1983). 1
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God, Mother of us all. (From a benediction, Dumbarton United Methodist Church, Washington, D.C., 1983). 2
The Word is everything to the child, both father and mother, teacher and nurse.... The nutriment is the milk of the Father, and the Word alone supplies us children with the milk of love, and only those who suck at this breast are truly happy. For this reason, seeking is called sucking; to those infants who seek the Word, the Father's loving breasts supply milk. (Clement of Alexandria, ca. 180 A.D.). 3

THESE three statements, two from modern church liturgies and one written by a revered early church theologian, present us with an androgynous image of a loving God who is both Father and Mother. Paradoxes leap from these statements, shatter our mental categories, and startle us out of old patterns. We are reminded that God surpasses all human constructs of gender and cannot be neatly contained in any verbal or pictorial packages. Paradoxes, especially those concerning gender, hint to us that God is (as Alan Paton said of his homeland) wonderful "beyond all the telling of it." 4

Although the Trinity is a central Christian doctrine, it has also been

Rebecca Oxford-Carpenter is a member of the Church of the Saviour in Washington. She holds the doctorate in educational psychology from the University of North Carolina, and is a government research psychologist. This article germinated in a class at the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia.
1 Common prayer of confession, Riverside at Worship (New York: Riverside Church, April 17,1983).
2 Benediction, Dumbarton United Methodist Church, Washington, D.C., quoted in "Nonsexist Language: Churches Look for Inclusive Views of God," Washington Post, May 28, 1983, p. C 14.
3 Clemens Alexandrinus, quoted in E. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 81.
4 A. Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (New York: Scribners, 1961).

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called "the twilight zone of Christianity"5 because of its evolutionary and dialectical aspects. The doctrine of the Trinity evolved through struggle in church councils over many years, and the apostolic age was, in fact, binitarian rather than trinitarian.6 The word "Trinity" is not found in the Bible, and the only trinitarian-like passage is Matthew 28:19, which is more liturgical than theological7 The Holy Spirit, although spoken of in the Bible, was not clearly part of the Trinity until the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. and was accepted as equal to the other two personae of the Trinity only in 381 A.D. at the Council of Constantinople.8 The Trinity is not a formal, logical statement, but a dialectic which, as Tillich noted, "does not affirm the logical nonsense that three is one and one is three; it describes in dialectical terms the inner movement of the divine life as an eternal separation from itself and return to Itself."9

The main twilight-zone aspect is the Trinity's all-masculine image, which became accepted late in the second century A.D., when women lost their roles of authority in the early church. For the previous two centuries, women had enjoyed a great deal of ecclesiastical power, and androgynous images of God flourished.10 Then cultural and political trends led toward the development of an increasingly patriarchal church, and God's image became masculinized. The patriarchal model has dominated since Augustine's era. 11 Since that time, only a few theologians and mystics have had the temerity to challenge the masculine image of God. In the twentieth century a handful of feminist theologians,12 female and male, now advocate breaking the monopoly of the all-masculine divine image. These spiritually "liminal" 13 thinkers, like Jesus, Paul, and Luther before them, are shattering the boundarie

5 L. I. Sweet, New Life in the Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1982), p. 29.
6 Ibid., p. 30.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 31.
9 P. Tillich, Systematic Theology, I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 56.
10 E. Fiorenza, "Women in the Early Christian Movement," in C. P. Christ and J. Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 84-92; E. Moltmann-Wendel, Liberty, Equality, and Sisterhood- Emancipation of Women in Church and Society (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977); L. Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Women (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1979).
11 S. McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), p. 149.
12 For example, Christ and Plaskow; E. Clark and H. Richardson, eds., Women and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); M. Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973), Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978); J. C. Engelsman, The Feminine Dimension of the Divine (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1979); McFague; C. Miller and K. Swift, Words and Women (Garden City: Anchor/ Doubleday,1976); V. R. Mollenkott, The Divine Feminine: Biblical Imagery of God as Female (New York: Crossroad, 1983); "Unlimiting God," The Other Side, 1983, 146, pp. 11-14; Pagels; R. Ruether, Liberation Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1972); R. Ruether, ed., Religion and Sexism(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974); L. M. Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974); P. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978).
13 McFague, p. 154, uses the term "liminal" to denote thinkers whose experience runs counter to tradition and who challenge conventional religious paradigms.

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of conventional religious thought. Despite these stirrings, the masculine divine image remains predominant at this point in Christian history. Christianity is one of only three major world religions (the others being Islam and Judaism) without a feminine deity of some kind.14

The gender-Trinity problem is extremely important because of the significance of religious symbolism for humankind in general and for particular cultures. Religion is an expression of humanity's ultimate concern for meaning, value, and a ground of being. 15 Symbols, dreams, images, and myths express the yearnings-chiefly unconscious--of individuals and society 16 and also have socially motivating effects.17 How the divine is to be symbolized is the-heart and soul of the gender-Trinity issue.18

While some theologians have considered the gender-Trinity issue in fragmentary or general ways, no theologian has yet attempted to describe and analyze all the major categories of responses that individuals and the church body have given to the problem. This article is a systematic description and critique of the six major responses, followed by a solution informed by and partially synthesized from these responses. This is the missing survey, critique, and synthesis so sorely needed for an understanding of the gender-Trinity issue. Even such an ultimately ineffable concept as the Trinity can benefit from systematic exploration.

In the following discussion, each of the three parts of the Trinity is called by the traditional Latin term persona, which originally signified a theatrical mask worn by a player to reveal emotions and other characteristics.19 The common interpretation of persona as "person" (as in "God in three persons, blessed Trinity")20 has greatly confused our understanding of the Trinity, because the stereotypic concept of a person is a physical, spiritual, and emotional being with traits of only one sex.21 The discussion also assumes a distinction between sex and gender. Sex refers

14 Pagels, p. 57.
15 Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-63), Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).
16 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938); S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Modern Library, 1978).
17 C . Geertz, "Religion as a Cultural System," in W. Lessa and E. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparative Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 204-216.
18 The gender-Trinity problem also concerns me personally. Like many other people, I have multiple roles: in my case, research psychologist, lay theologian, writer, wife, family member, church member. I need to be emotionally and spiritually androgynous to fulfill all these roles. As I have awakened to my own androgyny, I have become less able to relate to an all-masculine Trinity. The women's movement and membership in the Church of the Saviour of Washington, D.C., have confirmed my need to unravel or slice through the Gordian knot of divine gender. I appreciate the comments of Marjory Bankson, Art Carpenter, Mary Carol and Alan Dragoo, Sonya Dyer, Liz Emanuel, Murray Gendell, Muriel Lipp, Nancy Marchal, my professor Marianne Micks, Louis Pol, Gale Quist, Elizabeth Vail, the Celebration Circle, and the Seekers Community.
19 T. E. Driver, Christ in a Changing World: Toward an Ethical Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 100-101.
20 "Holy, Holy, Holy," Pilgrim Hymnal (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1980), No. 251.
21 Jungian psychology offers liberation from some of these stereotypes by recognizing the masculine and feminine aspects of each sex, but the stereotypes remain strong in popular culture.

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to biological processes and structures, while gender refers to historical, social, and cultural categorizations. 22 Of course, this paper focuses on the gender of God-images, not on some presumed, literal sex of God (except in the case of the historical Jesus).

The six types of responses to the conundrum of gender and the Trinity are: totally masculinizing the Trinity, focusing on the Goddess, glorifying both masculine and feminine aspects of the Trinity, adding a fourth member, desexing the Trinity, and depersonalizing the Trinity.

I

As noted earlier, total masculinization of the image of God took place around the end of the second century A.D. among "mainline" Christians due to political and cultural changes inside and outside the church. Women were stripped of their social and ecclesiastical powers as patriarchy reasserted itself. The heritage of patriarchal Judaism, with all its negativity about and even fear of women, was revived. It is helpful to remember that Judaic patriarchalism and the masculinity of the Israelite God were partly a reaction to the excesses of worship of fertility goddesses.23 When the second century church fathers (a term used advisedly) banned the feminine and androgynous images of God used in Worship by Gnostics and other Christians, the vehemence of the prohibition echoed the strength of the earlier Jewish ban on worship of fertility goddesses. 24

A central image of God in the Bible is Father (Ps. 68:5; Isa. 64:8; Matt. 5:45, 5:48; Luke 2:49, 11:13; John 12:49). Jesus taught the disciples to pray to "Our Father, who art in heaven" (Matt. 6:9). The patriarchal mode) of God, while biblically based, was misused as part of a wholesale masculinization of the God-image within the Christian church in the first two centuries after Christ. God the Father became an idol. "One started out with the idea of 'Father' and blew it up into divine proportions."25 This idolatry was "a serious perversion of Jesus' understanding of the father model and utterly opposed to the root-metaphor of Christianity, which is against all worldly hierarchies." 26 The Father model, following the laws of "least change" and "maximum expansion," spread and became resistant to alteration; this is the tendency of "dominant metaphors."27 The patriarchal image grew "into patriarchalism, a system fostering male superiority at all levels of personal and public life."28 Mary Daly, an outspoken radical feminist theologian, states, "Since 'God' is male, the male is God. God the father legitimate

22 C. W. Sherif, "Needed Concepts in the Study of Gender Identity," Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1982,6(4), pp. 375-398; also Russell, p. 98.
23 Russell, p. 98.
24 Moltmann-Wendel, Pagels, and Swidler provide realistic pictures of the historical processes involved in the early Christian masculinization of the God-image.
25 K. Stendahl, quoted in Miller and Swift, p. 75.
26 McFague, p. 167.
27 Ibid., p. 147.
28 Ibid., p. 167.

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all earthly God-fathers."29 Elsewhere she notes that "if God in 'his' heaven is a father ruling 'his' people, then it is in the 'nature' of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated." 30

Jesus was, of course, seen as a man due to his historical identity as son of Mary and Joseph (Matt. 1:25, 13:55; Luke 2:7). Masculinity can also be inferred from his theological identity as Son of God (Matt. 14:33, 26:53; Mark 9:7, 14:61; John 1:14, 3:16; Acts 13:33, I John 4:9, 4:15; Gal. 1: 16). Stendahl asserts that the gender of Christ was a "cultural and linguistic accident" about as important to Christians as his eye color. Furthermore, Stendahl states that it is "odd to argue that when the Word became flesh, it was to reinforce male superiority. 31 The church made the mistake of overinterpreting Jesus' physical maleness and failing to make any spiritual distinctions between the historical man of Nazareth and the eternal Christ, who transcends both sex and gender.

Other masculine epithets are applied to both Creator and Christ. The Bible speaks of divine Husband and Bridegroom in Ps. 19:5, Isa. 54:5, Matt. 9:15, Mark 2:19, and Luke 5:34. Many passages speak of God as King or refer to the Kingdom (Dan. 4:3; I Sam. 12:12; Ps. 10:16, 24:7, 44:4; Isa. 43:15; Matt. 3:2; Mark 1: 15; Luke 19:38; John 1:49; and Rev. 19:16). God is also seen as Lord in Gen. 2:4, 6:8; Ex. 15:1; Deut. 6:4; Ps. 1:2, 83:18; Isa. 53:6; Mark 1:3; John 14:5, 20:28; Acts 2:36; and Rev. 19:6. Master is found as a God-image in Eph. 6:9.

The third persona of the Trinity, the Spirit, came to be considered masculine, despite the fact that "Spirit" is a translation of the feminine Hebrew word ruach and the neuter Greek word pneuma, both meaning "wind" or "breath." By the time the Spirit became an accredited, full-fledged, voting member of the Trinity at the time of the Council of Constantinople, this persona was chiefly described in masculine terms.32 In a typical though amazing example of Orwellian "double-think," Bloesch in his new book, Is the Bible Sexist?, ignores the etymology of the word "Spirit" and states that the Spirit "is property designated as masculine" in spite of its admittedly nurturing (feminine) qualities. 33

Joseph Campbell describes the significance of the growth of patriarchalism in terms of myth. The Trinity is, he writes, "a transposition of the symbolism of the Graces Three and Hyperborean Apollo into a mythological order of exclusively masculine masks of God-which

29 M. Daly, "The Qualitative Leap Beyond Patriarchal Religion," Quest (Woman and Spirituality), 1974, 1, p. 21.
30 M. Daly, "After the Death of God the Father," in Christ and Plaskow, p. 54; also Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 13.
31 Stendahl, p. 75.
32 Sweet, p. 31.
33 D. W. Bloesch, Is the Bible Sexist? (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway/Good News, 1982), quoted in J. Dart, "Balancing out the Trinity: The Genders of the Godhead," The Christian Century, Feb. 16-23, 1983, p. 148; reviewed in G. Soley, "Circular Word Games and Myopic Worldviews," Sojourners, March 1983, pp. 41-42.

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accords well enough with the patriarchal spirit of the Old Testament but unbalances radically the symbolic, and therefore spiritual, connotations not only of sex and the sexes, but also of all nature."34

Christian structures and images have contributed "essentially to the subjugation of woman."35 Moore, a modern-day monk, feels that men "have found their male identity, beyond the woman, in God; but they have misunderstood this experience: they have made God male and used him to endorse their dominance over women. This is extraordinarily and by now embarrassingly clear." 36

no- image also had serious psychological ramifications. Ulanov explains in Jungian terms how men lost touch with their anima, the feminine side of their own nature. This caused a dissociation between the conscious (usually seen as masculine) and the unconscious (usually seen as feminine). For women, masculinization of God created subjection to one of the forms of internal animus (masculine) domination. Men and women began to experience less of their inner selves. The patriarchal model suppressed feminine modes of understanding, acting, and spiritualizing. It led to a general decrease in all symbolic perception, to polarization of the sexes, to definition of femininity in terms of masculinity, and to dominance of the values of the conscious mind. 37

The confusion and pain caused by masculinization of the divine are reflected in a recent news article from The Christian Century entitled, "God as Daddy." 38 The article concerns attempts by a United Methodist Church task force to eliminate sexism in Christian images of and language about God. The task force felt that the terms "King" and "Lord" were patently sexist and unacceptable and that some people would be offended by "Father." However, the task force said that "Abba" ("Daddy") might be all right because it carries an intimate feeling different from "Father." According to the task force, Jesus was male and can be referred to with masculine pronouns, although "Jesus the Christ transcends for Christians any sexual identity, becoming Messiah, Savior, Redeemer."39 Strangely enough, the task force appears to be recommending a modified, more intimate masculine image along with some neuter, desexed images (Redeemer, Messiah, Savior) but does not seem to be proposing feminine images as well. The "Daddy" image propounded by the task force is still masculine. Hamilton notes that if God the Father (or God the Daddy) is our only parent, this "in effect makes us deprived children of a one-parent family." 40 The

34 J. Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (New York: Vintage, 1968), p.108.
35 Moltmann-Wendel, p. 7.
36 S. Moore, The Inner Loneliness (New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 58.
37 A. B. Ulanov, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and Christian Theology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. 316 ff.
38 "God as Daddy," The Christian Century, March 9, 1983, p. 209.
39 Ibid.
40 N. Q. Hamilton, quoted in Dart, p. 148.

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dilemma of the task force reflects the level of confusion that now exists because of the total masculinizing of God's image among Christians for many centuries. Other denominations, ecumenical groups, and individual churches are currently struggling with many of the same problems posed by all-masculine images and names of God. 41

Although they have been grossly misused and overinterpreted, masculine images of God have provided positive benefits in various periods and cultures. For example, Cobb reminds us that the image of God as Father may have at one time freed people from fear and broken down the power of hierarchy, whereas at other times the same image served to suppress women and encourage patriarchalism. 42 We need to retain the positive elements of the masculine images of God rather than overthrow those images completely. As Cobb puts it, "The theological task is to criticize images of God insofar as they work against human freedom and Christian maturity and to encourage new ones that carry forward the strengths of the old while avoiding their worst features."43

The first response to the riddle of gender and the Trinity, as we have seen, is total masculinization. Now it is time to examine the second response, which highlights the Goddess.

II

The Goddess is not a direct, feminine parallel to the all-masculine Trinity nor to God the Father. One modern leader of Goddess religion says,

The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; she is the world. Manifest in each of us, she can be known internally by every individual, in all her magnificent diversity. 44

Here we can discuss the current renaissance of interest in the Goddess, worship of whom is said to go back 35,000 years, broken only by the last 5000 years of mainly patriarchal religion.45 Goddess religion is sometimes known as "witchcraft" or "Old Religion." 46 Goddess worshippers are revolutionary in the sense that they reject biblical tradition, but some Goddess worshippers can be viewed as ultratraditional in that they accept ancient, pre-biblical tradition. 47 Worship of the Goddess is close in spirit to Native American spiritualism, Arctic

41 "Nonsexist Language: Churches Look for Inclusive View of God," op. cit., p. C14. The most recent and controversial discussion relates to the National Council of Churches' publication, An Inclusive Language Lectionary (1983).
42 J. B. Cobb, "Theological Brief. God the Father Almighty," in R. A, Evans and T. D. Parker, eds., Christian Theology: A Case Study Approach (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 68.
43 Ibid.
44 Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 9.
45 Ibid., p. 3.
46 Ibid., pp. 3-5.
47 Christ and Plaskow, "Introduction," p. 1O.

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shamanism, and the religion of Faeries, Picts (Pixies), and Druids.48 Magic, defined as the art of changing consciousness at will,49 is a common denominator of all forms of Goddess religion. Other elements are poetry, myth, legend, ritual, and nature worship.

Carol Christ's essay, "Why Women Need the Goddess," 50 emphasizes four necessary aspects of Goddess symbolism. The Goddess affirms female power as opposed to patriarchy; the female body and the life cycle; the female will as ritualized in magic and spellcasting; and women's heritage and the bonding among women.

Goddess religion is rooted in worship of ancient fertility (mother) goddesses of Egypt and the Near East, such as Isis and Ishtar, and Hellenic goddesses, such as Demeter, Aphrodite, Athena, and Artemis. 51 McFague 52 notes that fertility goddesses were worshipped as superior to gods before people knew the contributions of the male in generating life. Likewise, Ruether 53 mentions the deep mysteries of fertility probed in early cults. Worship of the Goddess is entwined with nature, in which fertility and the life cycle play a large role.

Witchcraft takes its teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons.... Mother Goddess is reawakening, and we can begin to recover our primal birthright, the sheer, intoxicating joy of being alive. We can open new eyes and see that there is nothing to be saved from, no struggle of life against the universe, no God outside the world to be feared and obeyed; only the Goddess, the Mother, the turning spiral that whirls us in and out of existence, whose winking eye is the pulse of being-birth, death, rebirth.54

Goddess religion is not an organized, coherent belief system. It is a religion of poetry, not theology, because the basic truths "cannot be told."55 Goddess worshippers form covens, autonomous groups which develop their own rituals or adapt ancient ones. The many different trends within Goddess religion are described by Christ and Plaskow.56

Some Goddess believers call for the Goddess to be superior or ascendant, "while the male principle or God remains secondary, the son or lover, but not the equal of his mother."57 The God, if there is one, often dies in service of the Goddess or life-force.58

The Goddess is the Encircler, the Ground of Being; the God is That-Which-Is-Brought-Forth, her mirror image, her other pole. She is the earth;

48 Starhawk, pp. 2-5.
49 Ibid., p. 18.
50 C. P. Christ, "Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections," in Christ and Plaskow, pp. 273-287.
51 Ruether, Mary-The Feminine Face of the Church (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979), pp. 13-17.
52 McFague, p. 156.
53 Ruether, Mary, pp. 13-14.
54 Starhawk, pp, 2-3, 14.
55 Ibid., p. 7.
56 Christ and Plaskow, pp. 13-15.
57 Ibid., p. 14.
58 Starhawk, p. 98.

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He is the grain. She is the all-encompassing sky; He is the sun, her fireball. She is the Wheel; He is the Traveler. His is the sacrifice of life to death that life may go on. She is Mother and Destroyer; He is all that is born and is destroyed.59

Despite her belief in the ascendancy of the feminine principle, witch Starhawk worships in a community that includes men. 60 Budapest takes feminine ascendancy several steps further by advocating the permanent ascendancy of the feminine principle and worship for women only.61 Other Goddess worshippers such as Christ 62 leave open the question of the ascendancy of the feminine aspect. Still others advocate "a temporary focus on women's spirituality, women's communities, and female symbolism"63 supposedly to be followed someday by more egalitarian religious forms.

The figure of Mary, the mother of Jesus, took over some aspects of the ancient Goddess,64 but few modern Goddess worshippers have turned to Mary as their deity. Mary is not a serious contender for the role of supreme Goddess. The main purpose for glorifying Mary was to increase glorification of her son.65 She emerged for a few centuries as "a powerful figure in her own right... an example of the repressed feminine." 66 For Christians, Mary was temporarily "the person around whom to regroup this theology of feminine experience,"67 although Mary was probably not a believer in Jesus as the Messiah during his lifetime.68 Yet even at the height of her influence, Mary was considered inferior in the divine hierarchy. She was not divine. She was the mother of God, not "God the Mother."69 Mary was the "reed of God," and through her moved not her own power but God's.70 Her influence therefore served not to liberate women but to confirm their inferior position.71 In Protestantism, veneration of Mary was eliminated in the Reformation. Tillich bemoans the fact that "in this purge the female element in the symbolic expression of ultimate concern was largely eliminated."72 Because Mary has not traditionally been seen as divine (except perhaps by some fervent but unorthodox Catholics), the renewed Goddess religion pays scant heed of her. The Goddess, whose believers often consider sex a sacrament, is also more earthy and sensual than Mary, the Holy Virgin.

The renewed interest in Goddess religion is an understandable and

59 Ibid., p. 95.
60 Christ and Plaskow, p. 14.
61 Ibid., pp. 14-15.
62 Ibid., pp. 13 ff.; Christ, pp. 273-287.
63 Christ and Plaskow, p. 15.
64 McFague, pp. 150, 176; Starhawk, p. 5.
65 Engelsman, pp. 121 ff.
66 Ibid., p. 132,
67 Ruether, Mary, p. 48.
68 Ibid., p. 41
69 Pagels, p. 157.
70 C. Houselander, The Reed of God (New York: Arena Lettres, 1978).
71 McFague, p. 176.
72 Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, p, 293.

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even refreshing reaction to worship of the all-masculine divine images of the Christian church, much as the Black Power movement was an expectable backlash against white supremacy. The pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other. However, the radical forms of Goddess religion focusing on feminine exclusiveness and/or supremacy threaten to reverse the existing hierarchy and thus create a new hierarchy. Embodied in the revolutionary spirit of some branches of modern Goddess religion is an unspoken sense of quid pro quo: "We'll give you a taste of your own medicine!" Possible spiritual, psychological, social, and political implications of radical Goddess religion can be inferred from the history of patriarchal religion. Reverse sexism is a present danger in Goddess worship, just as reverse racism can result from Black Power carried to its extreme.

The revived Goddess religion not only could oppress men if the Goddess were the sole or ascendant deity, but the religion could also oppress women due to its stereotyping of feminine qualities. McFague notes that the stereotypical qualities involved in Goddess religion may be a new variant of Freud's edict, "biology is destiny."73

Yet Goddess religion has much to teach us about the importance of the feminine aspect of divinity. It also offers strong links with nature, ritual, feeling, and alternative consciousness. Our creative, non-rational, right-brain, mythopoetic selves can be uncovered by some aspects of Goddess religion. Perhaps these positive contributions can be incorporated into a more balanced alternative which glorifies both feminine and masculine aspects of God. To that alternative we now turn.

III

The third response to the problem of gender and the Trinity is to allow our image of God to have both feminine and masculine attributes. The Hebrew and early Christian traditions provide many images of God as both masculine and feminine. Many biblical images of a masculine God have been presented in the discussion of the first response, masculinizing the Trinity. Here we consider the abundant feminine images of God offered in both Old and New Testaments. Not as many feminine as masculine divine attributes appear in the Bible,74 a situation that makes sense considering the overwhelmingly male authorship of the Bible and the sex of the selectors of the canon. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence of recognition of feminine elements of divinity in the Bible.

Old Testament has particularly rich feminine imagery. The Genesis I creation story describes man and woman being created in the image of God, implying that God encompasses both masculine and feminine elements.75 Israel's experience of God included the loving relationship of mother and child. God conceived Israel, gave birth,

73 McFague, p. 159.
74 Ibid., pp. 169, 172.
75 Trible, pp. 12 ff.; also Pagels, p. 67.

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suckled, fed, comforted, and provided necessary goods. 76 For Israel God was a mother whose comfort never ceased (Isa. 66:13) and who quieted the child at its mother's breast (Ps. 131:2). God's womb carried the people of Israel (Isa. 46:3) and gave birth to them (Deut. 32:18). Throughout the Psalms God is often shown as a mother bird sheltering her young and protecting them (Ps. 17:8, 36:7, 57:1, 91:1,4). The same image is used in Deut. 32:11-12 and Isa. 31:5.77 These maternal, Old Testament images of God are reflected in the writings of Tillich. Although he states that God must be both Lord and Father,78 Tillich elsewhere says that God as the Ground of Being symbolizes "the mother quality of giving birth, carrying, and embracing, and at the same time, of calling back, resisting independence of the created, and swallowing it." 79

The New Testament's feminine imagery is not as plentiful as that of the Old Testament,80 but many divine feminine elements can be found there, particularly in the parables of Jesus. The parables describe the housewife looking for her lost coin (Luke 15:8-10), the shepherd rejoicing at the finding of the lost sheep (Luke 15:4-7), and the father waiting for a lost child (Luke 15:11-24).81 While males may ostensibly be subjects of these parables, the images are either stereotypically feminine in quality or at least deviate dramatically from the traditional male role in family and society.82

The parables of Jesus are full of examples of how normal male behavior is violated by unreasonable, unheard-of, unjust-seeming behavior. Jesus' God-image is a challenge because of its emphasis on the female method of being and behavior... Female and male behavior are integrated in Jesus' God-image.83

Moving further into Jesus' own life, we see that Jesus himself had a number of female disciples and treated women as valued and trusted friends, to the chagrin of many of his male disciples. Following the model of Jesus Christ as the Second Adam, some early Christians may have felt that baptism "brought forth a new and androgynous person in the initiated believer."84 Certainly Paul's admonition in Gal. 3:28 that in Christ there is neither male nor female was in large part a reflection of the teachings and personality of Jesus.

In an androcentric world, a world of achievement, legalism, action, and success, Jesus proclaimed a God who is not satisfied by achievement, negotiation, action, but rather liberates the senses and frees a new emotionality. 85

76 McFague, p. 169.
77 Russell, p. 100.
78 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, p. 287.
79 Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, p. 294.
80 Russell, p. 101.
81 Sweet, p. 41.
82 Moltmann-Wendel, p. 20.
83 Ibid.
84 Dart, p. 147.
85 Moltmann-Wendel, p. 21.

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The Holy Spirit, which as we have seen is feminine in Hebrew and neuter in Greek, is often associated with feminine functions such as nurturance, consolation, eschatological groaning in childbirth, emotional warmth, and inspiration.86 Taylor says there is more Dionysus than Apollo in the Spirit, which contains elements of irrationality, ecstasy, dreams, emotions, and even bisexuality. Unlike Apollo, the Spirit does not bind or eliminate chaos or the unconscious; instead it opens and releases chaos and the unconscious within us for a new creativity.87 Sweet warns against envisioning the Spirit as totally feminine, because that vision is without consistent biblical foundation. He also cautions against imaging the Spirit as the only feminine persona in the Trinity, as that imagery would make the Trinity two-thirds masculine and further reinforce the inferior position of women in Christianity.88 For Sweet, the Spirit (like the other personae of the Trinity) is best understood as having both feminine and masculine aspects.

Gnostics worshipped both masculine and feminine images of God. Dart 89 and Pagels 90 call for a rethinking of our conceptions of heresy and orthodoxy in light of the historical and spiritual richness of Gnostic imagery for God. One Gnostic vision of the Trinity, contained in the Apocryphon of John, includes the Father, the Mother, and the Son as a holy, trinitarian family. In the Gospel to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus refers to his divine Mother as the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel of Philip, the Holy Spirit is a virgin who comes to earth as consort to the Father, and the virgin birth is therefore based on union of two aspects of divinity.

The Gnostics' feminine image of the Holy Spirit was closely related to the Greek and Judaic tradition of Wisdom (Sophia), a feminine personification of God. Wisdom may have been associated with the Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Greek goddesses.91 However, Pagels points out that Gnostic language was specifically Judaeo-Christian and so any influence of archaic goddess worship was indirect. 92 For pre-Christian Jews, "there can be no doubt that [Wisdom] revealed the power of Yahweh."93 Later her power was broken, and she was superseded by Philo's masculine Logos among the Hellenistic Jews and then Jesus/ Logos among the early Christians.94 Wisdom remained a main theme in Eastern Orthodoxy and among Gnostics. Wisdom was sometimes seen by Gnostics as the Mother or the first Creator. Some Gnostics, not

86 Russell, pp. 101- 102.
87 J. V. Taylor, The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission (New York: Oxford University Press, 197 2), pp. 50-51.
88 Sweet, pp. 40-41.
89 Dart, pp. 148-150.
90 Pagels, pp. 57 ff.
91 Ruether, Mary, p. 25; Engelsman, p. II 9.
92 Pagels, p. 58.
93 Engelsman, p. 119.
94 Ibid., p. 120.

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referring to the Holy Spirit or Wisdom at all, considered that there was a divine Mother as part of the original couple. 95

Despite the fact that the masculofeminine view of God was banned from the mainstream of Christianity and that Gnosticism was termed a heresy, certain medieval mystics continued to think of God in both feminine and masculine terms. For example, Julian of Norwich says, "We owe our being to him, and this is the essence of motherhood."96 In the words of medieval mystic Mechthild of Hackeborn, God is "Father in creation, Mother in salvation, Brother in dividing up the kingdom, and Sister in sweet companionship."97 Other mystics whose God-image was androgynous included Christina of Markgate, Saint Birgitta of Sweden, Anselm of Canterbury, Meister Eckhart, and Bernard of Clairvaux.

Similarly androgynous images of the divine were used by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist. 98 Her God was a Mother-Father. The twentieth-century monk Sebastian Moore carries on the imagery: "Jesus: in his ministry, the awakener and focus of the desire of God; in death, the bringer of the desire to the other side; beyond death, the consummation of the desire in the Holy Spirit of the eternal Father/Mother."99

McFague emphasizes that if God is experienced as giver and renewer of life, then we need maternal imagery to express the dimensions of such experience.100 It is not merely for the sake of convenience (despite Greeley's words to the contrary) 101 that biblical writers, Gnostics, mystics, and modern theologians have felt called to use androgynous images of God. The underlying assumption of these thinkers is that God's fullness cannot be captured by images of one gender. God is not just our Father, King, and Lord; God is also our Mother, Queen, and Lady. Each element of the Trinity can be viewed as having both masculine and feminine qualities, as the Bible attests. Rather than seeing God as all-masculine or all-feminine, or making the Trinity two-thirds masculine by attributing femininity only to the Spirit, it is possible to allow our image of each persona to have feminine and masculine aspects. In fact, our own wholeness and health are enhanced when we glorify the astounding richness of the divine in its masculinity and femininity.

We will now examine a different vision of androgynous divinity: the attempt to add a fourth member to the Trinity. This vision is yet another response to the conundrum of gender and the Trinity.

95 Pagels, p. 59.
96 McFague, p. 175.
97 Ibid., p. 174.
98 Daly, "After the Death," p. 59.
99 Moore, p. II 5.
100 McFague, p. 174.
101 A. M. Greeley, The Mary Myth: On the Femininity of God (New York: Seabury, 1977), pp. 54-55.

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IV

The fourth response to the gender-Trinity issue is to add another member, thus making the Trinity a "quaternity." The originator of the idea is the psychologist Jung, who during his lifetime provided a powerful argument for the unity of religion and psychology,102 for the concept that the conscious represents but a small part of reality, and for the need to use myths and symbols to express deep wellsprings of the unconscious.103 He also recognized that traditional images of God lacked elements of femininity and evil. Unfortunately, the quaternity concept was one of his less brilliant thoughts.

Jung felt that the unconscious mind is capable of transforming the Trinity into a quaternity. The fourth element has always existed in our religious representations but has been separated from God. The unconscious tries to unite the separated parts. The identity of the fourth persona varies in Jung's writings. Sometimes it is the devil, sometimes the Virgin Mary, and sometimes a combination of the two--a merger of femininity and evil.104 Following Jung, Engelsman states that the unconscious, symbolic connection between evil and femininity cannot be avoided; the two are inseparable. 105 This is, of course, a rather startling assertion to come from a feminist theologian.

Sweet states that the Jungian concept of quaternity is "an idea whose time will never come."106 Several difficulties exist in the formulation. First, even if Jung's description of an unconscious transformation from three to four were totally convincing, a quaternity with only one feminine element is inherently sexist, Three masculines to one feminine comprise what we might call the "seventy-five percent solution," in which the feminine is implicitly inferior. Second, it is also extraordinarily sexist to consider that femininity and evil are united in the fourth persona, while the other three are, as Engelsman states, "light, clear, positive, and masculine."107 Even apart from the quaternity issue, Jung's description of the feminine and the masculine elements of personality have been seen by at least one theologian as codifying and stereotyping sexual
imagery.108

Jung's three-quarters masculine quaternity is unlikely to become a household word, although it may reflect our culture's both latent and manifest denigration of women. Jung was right in pointing out the need to recognize the feminine aspect of the divine (and of both sexes of humankind) and in stressing the human urge to identify the power-source of evil in the universe. However, his concept of quaternity does

102 Jung, Psychology and Religion.
103 C. G. Jung and M. L. von-Franz, eds., Man and His Symbols (New York: Doubleday, 1964); also Christ and Plaskow, p. 2.
104 Jung and von-Franz, p. 225.
105 Engelsman, p. 154.
106 Sweet, p. 41.
107 Engelsman, p. 150.
108 N. R. Goldenberg, "A Feminist Critique of Jung," Signs, 1976, 2 (2), 443-449, "Feminism and Jungian Theory," Anima, 1977, 3 (2), 14-17.

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not fulfill the promise offered by his many other contributions. The next response to the gender-Trinity issue, that of desexing the Trinity, is radically different from Jung's response.

V

Many theologians and biblical writers have approached the problem of gender and the Trinity by desexing the personae. The images they have used are neither masculine nor feminine: Friend, Comforter, Redeemer, Savior, Liberator, Lover, Teacher, Sustainer, Comrade, Creator, Messiah, Maker, and Advocate, among others. William Sloane Coffin perceptively speaks of the Spirit as both "comforter" and "discornforter."109

McFague provides a compelling exposition of the metaphor of God as Friend. While emphasizing the need to retain such "root-metaphors" (archetypes) as God the Father, McFague says that masculine and feminine experience is not exhausted bythe state of parenthood. In fact, many people are not parents and dislike their experience being reduced to parental images. By their very nature, parental images establish a hierarchy and cannot express mutuality, maturity, cooperation, responsibility, reciprocity, and other aspects of an "adult" relationship with God. Friendship, on the other hand, expresses an ideal kind of relationship among people of all ages, races, and religions and of both sexes. McFague cites many biblical uses of the image of friendship. However, she cautions that the model of God as Friend has limitations. It can be too individualistic; is unable to express awe, ecstasy, fear, silence. and other states and emotions; needs to be complemented with other models which differentiate the status of the friends; and cannot become a "root-metaphor."110

McFague is probably correct about all the caveats except the last one. The Friend image might indeed be archetypal, because the concept of friend or comrade is so deeply rooted in our psychic and social history. A different problem is that the Friend image does not clearly relate to the Trinity. Which of the three personae-Creator, Christ, or Holy Spirit-is the Friend? One, two, or all three? The historical Jesus and the Holy Spirit are both seen in "friendly" terms in the Bible. Perhaps it is up to the individual worshipper to determine the significance of the Friend image.

Saint Augustine presents thirteen different images of the Trinity in his landmark book on the topic.111 Many of these metaphors are personal in the sense that they have human attributes; however, they have, like McFague's Friend image, been desexed. Some examples are Lover, Loved, Love; Speaker, Hearer, and Sense in Between; and Seer, Seen, and Light in Between.

109 W. S. Coffin, "Eyeball to Eyeball with the Devil," Sermons from Riverside, February 20, 1983, p. 1.
110 McFague, pp. 177-192.
111 Saint Augustine, The Trinity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1963).

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Sweet mentions other desexed but at least quasi-personal images of the Trinity, such as Barth's Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness; and Russell's Creator, Liberator, and Advocate.112

Desexed but personal images of God serve a very good purpose. They prevent us from falling into sexist theological traps, and they transcend our gender-laden categories. Non-sexual images can complement but cannot replace our masculine and feminine divine metaphors, which are archetypal and are part of the flowing stream of our collective unconscious. The next section discusses the final response to the gender-Trinity issue: entirely depersonalizing the Trinity.

VI

The last answer to the gender-Trinity question is depersonalization. This is done in two ways: through nature imagery and through abstraction.

Nature imagery has been used for parts of the Trinity throughout the centuries. The Bible frequently associates the Spirit with a dove (Matt. 3:16, Luke 3:22, John 1:32) and with fire (Matt. 3:11, Luke 3:16). Tertullian, an early patriarch of the church, used nature imagery for all personae of the Trinity: ice, liquid, and steam; and sun, ray, and light.113 Medieval mystics sometimes used pictures from nature to represent God:

Thou art an immense ocean of all sweetness ... lose myself in the flood of thy living love as a drop of sea water ... let me die in the torrent of thy infinite compassion as a burning spark dies in the rushing current of the river. Let the rain of thy boundless love fall round about me.114

We have already seen that Goddess religion employs nature imagery to picture the divine in non-biblical ways. Goddess worshippers associate elements of nature with a feminine deity.

While nature imagery is a powerful and picturesque way to describe the divine, it can be indiscriminately used and can lead to two dangerous heresies: pantheism and animism. In pantheism, God is synonymous with the forces and laws of the natural universe. In animism, spirit or soul is attributed to natural objects. Both pantheism and animism create confusion about the phenomenon of evil in the universe and tend to obfuscate the personal relationship between God and humanity.

The other way to depersonalize God is through abstraction. Many examples exist. The Old Testament name for God, YHWH ("I am that I am"), is a form of abstraction. Tillich's Ground of Being 115 is a well-known case of abstraction. To convey the idea of Be-ing, Daly calls for a view of God as the "Great Verb" or the "Verb of Verbs."116 Sweet cites some trinitarian examples of abstraction: Schleiermacher's God in

112 Sweet, pp. 51-52.
113 Ibid., p. 31.
114 Quoted in McFague, p. 192.
115 Tillich, Systematic Theology, I.
116 Daly, Beyond God the Father; also Christ and Plaskow, p. 13.

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the world, God in Christ, and God in the church; Trueblood's God in creation, God in history, and God in present tense; Read's God everywhere and always, God there and then, and God here and now; Augustine's Memory, Understanding, and Will; and Aquinas' Love Originating, Love Responding, and Love Uniting. 117 Sayers likens the Trinity to Book-as-Thought, Book-as-Written, and Book-as-Read. 118 For Macquarrie, the Trinity consists of the Father as primordial Being (Letting-Be), the Son as expressive Being, and the Spirit as unitive Being.119 Abstraction can express the ineffability and mystery of God beyond the realm of concrete symbolism. However, radical forms of abstraction can appear sterile, detached, and meaningless to some worshippers.

Depersonalizing the Trinity, like desexing it, brings us into new dimensions of the divine and enables us to avoid some of the pain and difficulty of more anthropomorphic, gender-related metaphors. At best, depersonalized images of God can be extremely evocative (for example, mystical nature images or Aquinas' three faces of love). Yet the possibilities of pantheism, animism, and over-abstraction must be avoided when using depersonalized images of God. Depersonalized metaphors enrich our concept of the divine and complement personal images of God.

We have presented a critique of all six main responses to the gender-Trinity problem. We have seen how people have struggled over the centuries to find suitable metaphors for God. We have examined the contributions and dangers of each major approach. Now we move to a suggested solution, which draws upon some responses and rejects others.

VII

The solution is to use multiple metaphors for God: 120 masculine, feminine, non-sexual, and depersonalized. "God has many names." 121 If poet Wallace Stevens could write about "thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird,"122 how many more ways must exist to envision the infinite and eternal God?

This solution is not a sop thrown to the women's movement, nor is it merely a nice option to be considered. It is absolutely essential to spiritual health. Nutrition provides a helpful analogy. If we eat only one kind of food, such as apples, or select from only one food group, for instance fruits, we miss essential nutrients and are very likely to become

117 Sweet, pp. 31-32.
118 D. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), pp.122-123.
119 J. Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (New York: Scribners, 1977), pp.198-201.
120 McFague, pp. 193f.
121 J. Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982).
122 W. Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 20-22.

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physically ill. Likewise, if we use just one symbol for God, such as Father, or focus on a single genre of images, like masculine ones, we do not obtain the spiritual variety we need and may become spiritually malnourished. We need the sustenance of multiple images.

Of the six major responses to the conundrum of gender and the Trinity, three are seriously flawed from the start. Supremacy of either the masculine or the feminine, as in the first two responses, is oppressive and limiting. Jung's "seventy-five percent solution," the three-quarters masculine quaternity with an evil and feminine fourth persona, is just as unbalanced as the masculine or feminine supremacist images.

The other three responses-glorifying both feminine and masculine divine images, desexing the Trinity, and depersonalizing the Trinity--all offer promise. The Bible has bounteous examples of both masculine and feminine metaphors that can expand our understanding of a personal God. Furthermore, the Bible provides strong precedent for viewing each persona of the Trinity in images of both genders. Non-sexual images, such as Friend, Redeemer, Savior, Advocate, Christ, Messiah, and Comforter, break the mold of sex and gender and carry us into a different spiritual dimension. Depersonalized metaphors take us beyond anthropomorphism and into nature and abstraction. Desexed and depersonalized symbols of God do not replace essential, archetypal images such as Mother and Father but add many rich, sparkling facets to our consciousness of divinity.

In using multiple images of God, it is useful to consider the relationships among the personae of the Trinity and the relationships that we have with each persona. These invisible bonds make the Trinity a unity and tie us to God in many different ways. Relationships may involve equality, hierarchy, concern, judgment, love, friendship, compassion. Ruether calls for a new focus on reciprocity, mutuality, and co-creatorship in our relationship with God. 123

One consequence of multiple divine images is the need to reject the tyranny of traditional religious language, which has kept us bound to archaic and constricting thought patterns. Much work remains in making the English language capable of accommodating the concept of God as both masculine and feminine-or neither, as in depersonalized or desexed images. Hymns, liturgies, lectionaries, prayers, and sermons must be reviewed in light of the need to include many different, expansive interpretations of God and of ourselves as God's followers and co-creators. Our language must begin to reflect a God of multiple aspect, a magnificent, shocking, wonderful, loving God. The time has come to reform both our thinking and our language about God.

"If the map and the terrain differ, follow the terrain," says an old motto of the Swedish Army. We must all be liminal thinkers, not bound by constricting, imprecise, and inappropriate maps or images of the divine. We must also realize that no matter how good a map may be,

123 Ruether, Mary, pp. 77-80.

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"the map is not the territory."124 Our images, symbols, metaphors, and names are not the same as that to which they point. They only direct us toward God and are by definition inadequate to capture the reality of the divine. In fact, if we become hooked on our own symbols and forget that God exists beyond all human categories, we might, as Levine warns, "trade off reality for the shadow it casts," 125

To escape our confining linguistic symbols for God, scientist-theologian Rustum Roy sometimes uses a tiny, densely packed, randomly formed pattern of black dots in place of the word "God" in his writings. 126 Each person can read his or her own interpretation into the little black dots. Of course, even a pattern of dots can be an abstract symbol. Most of us still need images of God that are more concrete and personal than black dots, but the dots are helpful in reminding us of the finitude of our expressions of the divine.

God is indeed wonderful beyond all the telling of it, yet we need to tell of God. Multiple metaphors help us express the inexpressible and break the bondage of one-sided imagery. By recognizing many aspects of the divine through use of masculine, feminine, non-sexual, and depersonalized metaphors, we come closer to solving the riddle of gender and the Trinity. As we let God be seen a's whole, we ourselves become whole, and one of the major aims of religion is fulfilled.

124 Attributed to Polish semanticist Korzibski; personal communication, A. Carpenter, May 30,1983.
125 S . Levine, Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying (Garden City: Anchor, 1982), p. 31.
126 R. Roy, Experimenting with Truth: The Fusion of Religion with Technology Needed for Humanity's Survival (The Hibbert Lectures, 1979) (Elmsford, New York: Pergamon, 1981),pp.59-62.