Violence in the Prophets

I'm currently taking an online class at Luther Seminary on the Old Testament prophets, and an ongoing theme has been the "offensive" nature of much of the prophetic texts. This week, in particular, was concerned with violence in the prophets; in particular, some of the most graphic judgment texts in the prophets uses the imagery of sexual violence (i.e., Jeremiah 13:22-27; Ezekiel 16:36-44; Hosea 2:1-23). So what does your average 21st-century evangelical feminist kid  do with these passages? Volumes could be (and have been) written on how to appropriately exegete these texts; I simply want to offer some notes on how one might proceed.

Flannery O'Connor once remarked, on the subject of teaching literature to eighth-graders, "And if the student finds that this [reading the best literature of the past] is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed." I believe that a Christian stands in a similar position with regard to Scripture - although it is not only our "taste" for God being formed by Scripture; we are also being saved by the One by whom it is inspired and to whom it testifies. We stand under these texts, because they alone tell us the truth about our situation. My horror at what their imagery evokes may remain, but I can't simply dismiss the revelatory status of these texts because they offend my sensibilities.

That said, the fact of the matter is that the Bible is an ancient text and its authors are coming from a very different place than we are. (It does not, however, follow from this that the text is ultimately inaccessible, or that we can privilege our own historical moment and dismiss Scriptural texts we dislike because they are no longer "culturally applicable.") And yes, the Bible was written in a patriarchal context: that is, it arose from the ancient Near East, in a patriarchal social order. That order (like any social order) was structured by written and unwritten codes of conduct and language that helped make human life intelligible. While we may not have reached anything like full sexual equality in our culture, we are also a long way from patriarchy, strictly speaking. Quite a bit of the Biblical language carries a force that would be intensely and acutely felt in a patriarchal culture - such as language about "loose" women - and that is felt rather differently in a post-patriarchal liberal-democratic culture like ours.

Now, I'm not a cultural relativist. I think liberal democracy is morally superior to patriarchy for a lot of reasons, not least for the dignity it affords women. But if Christians are going to be able to talk about this ancient Near Eastern text as Scripture (that is, the authoritative testimony to the revealed Word of God), we have to be willing to acknowledge that 1) patriarchal Near Eastern culture is the one that God chose for the revelation of his incarnate Word and the written testimony to Him, and therefore 2) our liberal-democratic culture, while arguably more humane, does not occupy a privileged place within history. In other words, the Christian faith is an incarnate faith, and what we have to learn about God and God's relation to the world is inseparable from the historical time and place in which God chose to reveal it. All of our conclusions about social order and intimate human relationships need to follow from the whole picture of Scripture, and that means that when we read passages that are completely alien in their apparent misogyny, we need to be willing to patiently get inside of them and poke around - while unfailingly proclaiming the whole truth of God's Word, which leaves no room for abuse, violence, or domination of anyone. 

"The Symbol of God functions"

          “The symbol of God,” observes Elizabeth Johnson in the introduction to She Who Is, “functions. Neither abstract in content nor neutral in its effect, speaking about God sums up, unifies, and expresses a faith community’s sense of ultimate mystery, the world view and expectation of order devolving from this, and the concomitant orientation of human life and devotion.” In other words, the words we use about and “towards” God have far-reaching consequences; it is important to get them right. Although the question of how to speak rightly of God is as old as theology itself – is in fact the very task of theology – Johnson wants to raise it anew from a feminist perspective. How, she asks, have we failed to speak rightly of God by describing the divine in almost exclusively masculine terms?

            The question – and hence Johnson’s project – matters for several reasons. In the first place is the issue of theological integrity: is there important truth about the God of our desire and devotion that we have missed in our neglect of feminine imagery? If so, this is a legitimate and pressing avenue for inquiry even apart from feminist conviction. But, as Johnson observes, there is more at stake here than simply retrieving overlooked information about God. “The symbol of God functions”; it is not a static concept waiting to be filled with revealed facts. When a theologian claims feminine images as fully valid descriptions of the divine, she is resisting the appropriation of male experience as universal and therefore most proper for speaking of ultimate reality.  This articulation of the divine functions as an emancipatory practice, claiming the full humanity of women created in the image of God and speaking against social and ecclesial orders that subordinate them to men.

Speech about God shapes, at the deepest levels, our individual and corporate experience of divine reality. As a result, the almost exclusively masculine contours of this speech have distorted and impoverished theological discourse. Theological speech that privileges male metaphors functions to create an idol in the image of men, as well as communities that (intentionally or inadvertently) suppress women’s experience as less than fully expressive of divine reality; in turn, this effaces the fullness of God’s glory in the world (40).

In response to the “idolatrous fixation on one image” present in traditional speech about God, Johnson mines women’s experience, the Scriptural witness, and classical theology to build language that dignifies the full reality of women as equally suitable for describing divine reality (56). However, the feminine images retrieved from women’s experience in the world and from Scripture are not to be understood as simply supplemental to traditional language, as though God has a feminine side or feminine traits that have been overlooked. Such an approach leaves the patriarchal concept of God fundamentally unaltered: stereotypically feminine traits are simply subsumed into male reality, which remains the norm out of which discourse about God proceeds (48-9). Likewise, simply naming one member of the Godhead (typically the Spirit) the feminine dimension within God fails to do justice to women as fully created in the image of the one God (50ff). Feminine imagery must stand alongside traditional masculine langauge as fully equivalent to point to the whole of divine reality, if it is to liberate women to stand with men as equal partners in creation.

Arguing for a “conversion” whereby women turn and embrace themselves and their experience as theo- and christomorphic, the retrieval of biblical images that portray divine reality in feminine terms, and the recovery of analogical language for God that reveals the absurdity of privileging one human gender in speech about the unknowable One, Johnson attempts the beginnings of equivalent feminine speech about divinity. She approaches the task using the biblical symbol of Sophia, a figure that appears as holy wisdom creating and renewing the world, ordering the cosmos, guiding human beings, pointing the path to God, and who at times personifies divinity itself (90-1). Sophia embodies the creative and ordering power we encounter in the world, the passion for justice and the oppressed at work in Jesus’ ministry, and the “unoriginate origin” whose mystery lies at the heart of the cosmos.

Through this threefold encounter, we come to understand Sophia as the Spirit who is actively at work for the flourishing of all creation, the Wisdom incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and the Mother of all creation who remains transcendent and mysterious to us. When the work of the triune God – met in Sophia’s threefold existence – is described through the lens of women’s experience, new aspects of God are revealed and remembered: the radically, inescapably relational character of motherhood (185); a mother’s fierce passion for justice and the protection of her children (180); the intrinsic connection between life-giving and suffering (159); the friendship and sisterly care for the world that makes human beings friends of God (145). To name the Unnameable “I AM” as “SHE WHO IS” may be initially shocking to most Christian ears, but it is a faithful description of the God revealed in history and Scripture that acknowledges the full and equivalent adequacy of female imagery for pointing to the divine.

Johnson herself insists that none of these descriptions can be erected and clung to as a reified portrayal of holy mystery, any more than the images of father, son, king, or master. In her epilogue she notes,  “All of the above chapters are clues, starting points, commencements” (273). Given her twin affirmations of God’s ultimate transcendence and the necessity for analogical language about the divine, the task of finding new ways of speaking must be unending – where we stop, we lift up a linguistic idol. This is not an exclusively feminist insight, and may well be common ground from which to reach out to Christians uncomfortable with the term. In its depiction of the constructive task  at hand, this text makes a compelling case for fashioning our speech about God in a manner that fully dignifies all of humanity – for all of humanity is an icon of the divine.