Female Christ and the Shifting Zeitgeist

Photo by Raphael Lovaski on Unsplash

Much work was completed in theological circles propelled by “third wave feminists” in the mid-late 1990’s around gender, women's roles, and dominant power structures at work in defining and limiting the aforementioned. Christian sects however have either been too slow to adopt the findings or have been altogether unaware of these findings and are therefore falling far behind the shifting zeitgeist. For Christians, the Bible is saturated with images of God as a male warrior fighting against the armies of evil both in the cosmos and on earth. One is hard-pressed to locate the divine in an ontologically feminine figure in Judeo-Christianity. The notions of divine identity within many branches of Protestantism is overwhelmingly static in its androcentricity. The customs, rituals and traditions passed on through the centuries have lauded and idealized the supreme being as wholly masculine in implicit and more alarmingly explicit ways. The hypostases of the triune God expressed from pulpit to pulpit in these communities are each depicted as male. When this masculine normativity is used to substantiate and perpetuate notions of a wholly masculine God (not in theory but certainly in practice), it disregards passages that depict God in decidedly feminine terms and with vividly feminine imagery. Christ’s life is the embodiment of two fundamentally feminine tropes from Scripture: the ezer- kenegdo, or “helpmeet,” to Adam, and Woman Wisdom or Sofia. There appears to be only two biblical characters to which the term ezer applies, the first woman, and the Divine. Jesus uses feminine imagery to describe himself. We see this most prevalently in Jesus’ description of himself as a mother hen in both Matthew and Luke’s gospels (Matthew 23:37-39; Luke 13:24-25). The picture that Jesus uses was common in the Old Testament. The Psalms especially refer to God’s protection using phrases like “shelter in the shadow of your wings’ (Ps 17:8; 36:7; 57:1; 61:4; 63:7; 91:4). Jesus expresses the picture more fully. When Christ uses these images, he is not borrowing from humanity as if an alien unfamiliar with human nature. Christ, in whose image the feminine inherits its design, is the source of the analogy. He knows better that any woman what is meant by the imagery as every woman would find their origin in him. He is the ideal feminine.

Visit my Academia Page for a more robust discussion of this topic.