Sophia Wisdom; Christ Sophia
Posted Under: Liturgical Calendar
The reading from Sirach 1: 1-10 today speaks of Wisdom.
Before all things else wisdom was created;
and prudent understanding, from eternity.
The word of God on high is the fountain of wisdom
and her ways are everlasting.
I immediately thought of the beautiful icon of Christ Sophia. You can see it here. When I first saw this icon, I was struck not only by its beauty, but by the realization that there was definitely another way to think about Christ.
Wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures is feminine. What if, in the first chapter of the Gospel of John the writer had used the feminine term for Wisdom, instead of the male term for Word? We would have had this wonderful image of feminine Wisdom being incarnate as the male Jesus, bringing together the two genders in a mysterious way.
In the beginning was Wisdom, and Wisdom was with God, and Wisdom was God. She was with God in the beginning.
Through her all things were made; without her nothing was made that has been made. In her was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. …
Wisdom became flesh and made her dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from God, full of grace and truth.
The idea of the feminine image of God, Sophia-Wisdom, becoming flesh and incarnate as a man named Jesus is wonderful. It is like so many of the mysterious things of God. You would have to hold the two images together: Sophia and Jesus. Once again, like the ideas of God as transcendent, and God as imminent, held together as revealed truth. As I wrote before, it is like taking two magnets and pushing them together, and feeling them resisting each other — and realizing that the truth lies in that mysterious stuff in between.
There is such an overpowering perception of God as Father, Lord, male! It is very difficult for people to understand that God is neither male nor female, but God is perhaps best described as Spirit. It is also difficult for people to wrap their minds around the idea that there is One God, and yet we have three persons in One Being. Back in the first few centuries of Christianity people tried to explain God using Greek philosophy, and once these explanations were established, they have sort of stuck with us. There was this need to find logical explanations for all the mysterious stuff of God — like Trinity. The unhappy thing is that people began to think that their explanations actually explained things.
Using male and patriarchal language for God has done a lot harm down through the ages. In fact these descriptions of God have not so much revealed God to us as they have been used to puff up the male ego, justify patriarchy, and generally diminish the feminine.
Reader Comments
“The unhappy thing is that people began to think that their explanations actually explained things.”
What a terrific explanation for how poorly we’ve explained things! Brava! Or is that sexist? Should it be “bravo”? The gender twist keeps wringing us tighter and tighter and I’m not sure we’ll ever be free of it.
You are absolutely right that many in our faith have exploited the inadequacies of language to push a Chauvinistic agenda. The tension, I think, comes from the fact that the most logical solution–objectifying God as a neutral neither/nor Presence–essentially an “It”–works best on paper, but it isn’t pleasing to the tongue. “It” loses all familial/parental tonality, and enhances the sense that God is a monumental thing, rather than the Divine Being on whom each of us (male and female) is modeled. “It” leeches the emotional power of Word/Wisdom right out of the Creator.
But then I also have to confess that when I attend services that bend over backwards to compensate for linguistic limits, I feel a little awkward, even embarrassed. This has nothing to do with any gender bias–in all honesty, God’s gender is irrelevant to me because it’s irrelevant to Him/Her/It. It’s that “Him-Her-It-He-She-Mother-Father-Sister-Brother” thing… Somehow I feel like we’re saddling God with our sensitivities and shortcomings. In my mind (which I realize doesn’t speak for very many people), God is a He by grammatical default. It is our choice to make Him a “Him” because in English neuter nouns take the masculine. I don’t think He cares, which makes our concern about the language more reflective of other anxieties He most definitely cares about–e.g., equality, respect, etc.
Perhaps the best pronoun for God is ONE, much like the Old Testament’s LORD. I haven’t the foggiest idea how we’d deploy it case by case, but it’s something to think about…
Thanks, Kedda, for this challenging piece. (And I’m delighted to get back by here after being swamped lately!)
Hi Tim. I’d like to challenge you to try referring to God as She for a while and let the conflict within lead you into the mystery. For us women there is a lot of healing in using the feminine for God, because only then can we begin to image ourselves in God. For men I think that it can also be a healing experience to pray to God with a feminine image. If it feels awkward, it may be there are lingering places within that see using the feminine images of God as lessening God, or diminishing God — because the feminine in society is so often diminished and disvalued. You can heal your image of the feminine by seeing God in a new light — in the feminine. It is not God who cares — but women do care about the healing process of seeing the feminine in God.
Kedda, thanks for this challenge. I have no issues with referring to God in the feminine and will make a practice of doing it more often. Actually, though, my image of God lost its gender bias long ago. When I pray I “see” neither male nor female. I see a spirit totally devoid of human traits, proclivities, and limitations. This comes from being taught at a very early age that when we pray, we exit the physical and enter the spiritual. A former pastor consistently reminded us that Jesus said, “God is Spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth.” And since we were fashioned, both male and female, to reflect God’s image, I’ve always regarded Her/Him as both, which is to say neither.
I couldn’t agree more that the masculine image of God has done enormous damage to how Western culture–men and women–regard the feminine. And I also believe prying our minds free of the male concept of God will indeed bring much needed healing to both genders.
Yet I must be candid and take issue with the assumption that my personal “image of the feminine” is skewed and in need of healing. I realize my comment may have suggested this, but I want to be as clear as possible that my struggle with reassigning God’s gender is based on the limitations of language and nothing more. Calling God He, She, or It–even interchangeably to ensure balance–still leaves us with the same basic problem, i.e., we’re still only recognizing half (or, one supposes, a third) and ignoring the whole. However we choose to describe God is inadequate because English (and most other tongues) lack an all-encompassing pronoun to accurately capture God’s person.
I trust you know me well enough to believe that I would never consciously offend anyone by hanging on to a misogynist convention when a better alternative exists. But to date we have none. I routinely wince every time I type “He” for God, just as I would were I to write “She.” This dilemma leaves me high and dry because it invites me to be disingenuous in suggesting that swapping pronouns fixes the problem and it doesn’t. While tinkering with pronouns may win me points for sensitivity, it also dishonors the intelligence and integrity of anyone, male or female, who sees God’s image with every glance in the mirror. I’m convinced that’s where the healing needs happen first and once that’s done, words will lose their grip entirely.
I apologize for rambling on and submit this knowing I’ve probably hurt the discussion more than I’ve helped. I ask your prayers that if I’m wandering blindly through this wilderness, God will open my eyes. I have total confidence that She will.
Blessings always to you.
Tim, thanks for your response. It is so good to meet someone who has moved beyond gender with God. That doesn’t happen too often. On my own account, what amazes me is how there were places within that opened up to greater mystery once I moved beyond gender. However, as a woman I needed to go through the feminine images first, using She, in order to first heal as female, and come to feel — not just know — that I also image God. You may recall that as women we were often taught that men reflect Father God, and we women are merely subsumed in the male. We were told that when we heard the word “men” for example, we were to assume that we were included — unless we weren’t. For women there was a constant effort to translate words to find ourselves included. Men can simply listen and find themselves included immediately. In my experience sitting with God as feminine is often necessary for men, too, until they can feel it — that women image God, and are not included as some kind of subset of the male.
I prepare a lot of liturgies, and my challenge is to write prayers that hold together a personal image of God while not limiting God to our human pronouns. So I leave out the pronouns, and refer to God as God, with perhaps a descriptive adjective or two — Compassionate God, Caring God — or simply as Creator. It is when we pray together that I think it is most important to take care with our language. And when we talk or write about God, I think it is good to leave open the idea of God beyond genders. Writing in that manner — without pronouns — is challenging, but I really work at it. I like your idea of using One for God.