‘If God is male…’

‘… then the male is God.’ So wrote Mary Daly in a – perhaps the – classic text of early feminist theology, Beyond God the Father (Beacon, 1973). Daly’s argument in the book was that the predominantly masculine imagery deployed for God in Judaeo-Christian traditions inevitably led to a patriarchal society in which women were multiply disadvantaged; the proper ethical response, in her view, was to reject all Judaeo-Christian religious traditions as demonstrably immoral and so unworthy of belief. (This is a too-brief summary of a brilliant book; I actually had the pleasure of discussing it briefly with Daly a few years before she died when she rang me up out of the blue – a long story. As an evangelical minister, I unsurprisingly tend to disagree with most of her conclusions, but the book is strikingly powerful in argument and expression. It takes thought and precision to find ways to disagree with many of the arguments she advances.) The conservative response back in the 1970s was largely to deny the premise: Christianity does, it is true, privilege masculine imagery for God, and perhaps that cannot be substituted or avoided, but that does not mean that Christians believe in a male God; the united, and somewhat strident, witness of the tradition is the gender-categories cannot be applied to God. God is perhaps most often described in masculine imagery, but God is not male, and so there can be no argument that the male is God. In the last few years – no more history, I think, than that – it seems that an alternative argument has been offered – most recently, and already rather famously, in some brief comments by John Piper that prefaced a discussion of the legacy of the great J.C. Ryle (full text here – with thanks to Danny Webster for the link). I hesitate to criticise John Piper – I have been greatly helped by his writing in the past; almost everything I know of him as a man and a pastor, I respect; and it happens that one of my daughters and one of his granddaughters were best friends when both were three (another long story). His argument here has been endlessly reproduced around the web, however, and summarises a position that others have been advancing; it therefore deserves some reflection. (And Rachel Held Evans specifically invited male Christian bloggers to respond, for some sound pastoral reasons, which she explains.) The predominantly masculine imagery for God, Piper suggested, leads us to believe that authority, leadership, &c., are essentially masculine traits, just as Daly had proposed. However (I’m filling in some logical gaps here, but this is my best reconstruction of the argument) the true God uses His authority to promote the best interests of His creatures, and so masculine authority – male headship – properly exercised will lead to the flourishing of women as well as men. To recast – perhaps unfairly – Piper’s argument in Daly’s terms, God is male, and so the male is – head, if not God – but the God who is male is caring, self-giving, and nurturing, and so the patriarchal society established by Biblical male headship is the best possible social context for women as well as men to grow to their full humanity. Although this has become popular just now because of Piper’s brief summary, it goes behind and beyond him, so in the remainder of this post I will refer to it as the ‘God-as-masculine’ thesis. What are we to make of these differing responses? Firstly, we should note that the 1970s responses were generally – there were exceptions – rather simplistic in their analysis of gender. Assuming a straight equation between biological sex and gender, the argument tended to go ‘God is spirit, and therefore has no bodily parts; therefore God cannot be either male or female; God is beyond gender.’ As I’ve noted before on this blog, contemporary analyses of gender suggest that the relationship between biology and gender identity is rather more complex than this, and I’ve discussed one or two examples from the history of the church that in different ways support such analysis. The ‘God-as-masculine’ argument also relies on an assumption of gender essentialism, of course, even if on this view it is divinely mandated rather than biologically determined. A view of gender which sees the stable essences of masculinity and femininity as attitudinal, rather than physical, does seem to allow for a – guarded, admittedly – ascription of gender to God. The united witness of the church through the ages is unquestionably that God is beyond gender, and that speaking of God as male, or even as promoting...

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Jesus is my favoured suitor? Erotic spirituality in earlier ages

A good-natured, entertaining, and informative discussion occurred a week or so ago online, sparked by Carl Beech and Vicky Beeching, concerning the perceived ‘feminization’ of worship songs, resulting in a ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ spirituality in (some strands of) contemporary worship which (it is argued by some) might keep men away from the church. I don’t want to argue the subject at hand particularly, but some historical context occurred to me. I was typing up some songs for our evening service this afternoon, and came across a query from our musical director with reference to Isaac Watts’s ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds.’ One verse, in Newton’s original, read: Jesus, my Shepherd, Husband, Friend, My Prophet, Priest, and King, My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End, Accept the praise I bring. Our more recent songbook, apparently, suggested replacing ‘Husband’ with ‘Saviour’ (which could only be entertained by someone with a tin ear; the more common ‘Master’ is better). I chose to retain ‘Husband’; Newton’s Biblical reference is Song of Songs 1:3, so ‘Husband’ is appropriate. This brought to mind a long tradition of Puritan spirituality, drawing extensively but not exclusively on the Song of Songs to picture the relation of the human soul to Christ. The texts that survive are mostly from male authors (Anne Bradstreet or Elizabeth Rowe would be the most obvious exceptions); they are strikingly graphic and direct in their appropriation of marital and erotic imagery to narrate the relationship between Christ and the believer – or sometimes, drawing on Eph. 5 and similar, between Christ and the church. There is a good discussion of this theme in Belden C. Lane’s Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford: OUP, 2011), pp. 105-115. Lane quotes, for instance, Edward Taylor’s funeral poem for his wife, which moves on to reflect on his own experience of God’s love: Shall Mortall, and Immortall marry? nay, Man marry God? God be a Match for Mud? The King of Glory Wed a Worm? mere Clay? This is the Case. The Wonder too is Bliss. Thy Maker is thy Husband. Hearst thou this? John Cotton, famous pastor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, repeatedly used the image of maternal milk to describe the teaching the pastor offers his people. In commenting on the Song of Songs he casts himself as the ‘breasts of Christ’ from which the pure milk of the Word can be sucked (Lane, p. 114). Michael Winship’s 1992 paper, ‘Behold the Bridegroom Cometh! Marital Imagery in Massachusetts preaching, 1630-1730’ (Early American Literature 27, pp. 170-184) contains other striking examples: for Samuel Whiting, the joy of heaven will include ‘his sweet embraces … in that Celestial Bride Chamber and Bed of Love’; for Samuel Willard, the reality of earthly devotion is that if the saints ‘could but now and then, steal a Sight of him, or obtain a Kiss from him … they reckoned themselves happy.’ Contrast this to heaven: ‘there shall be that intimacy which there is between the most loving husband and most beloved wife and transcendently greater … they will not be interrupted Carresses which they shall have from him … There will be no more Coyness on their part … but the delights which they shall enjoy, shall be both full and uninterrupted … the reciprocal ardours of Affection between him and us, shall break over all Banks and Bounds, and we shall be entirely satisfied, both in Soul and Body.’ (Really, comparing the current Vineyard stuff to this is like comparing Stephanie Meyer to D.H. Lawrence…) There are other examples of such extreme rhetoric in the tradition – medieval Western mystics, for one. The Puritan tradition flowered fairly briefly, with Watts the dying end of it in the 1730s. Some explanations of this sort of spirituality major on the fact that the word ‘soul’ in Latin is grammatically feminine (anima); I think this is a mistake: confusion between grammatical and biological gender seems a very recent phenomenon to this non-linguist, at least. Grammatical explanations also fail to explain the ebbs and flows of such language in history: Tillotson and a moderate Anglicanism disdained such spirituality whilst the Puritans were luxuriating in it; this is not because the Puritans were better Latin grammarians! (And if the Evangelicals of Watts’s day and after also refrained from it, it is not because they were less passionate in their devotion.) Freudian readings are also available (Leverenz, The Language of Puritan Feeling suggests Puritan men desired to be transformed into women and children and protected by a transcendent father); like most Freudian readings of most things, these can and should be ignored....

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The Ecclesiology of a Pilgrim

Talking with a student about Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress reminded me of the old canard about the basic problem of the book being its lack of ecclesiology. For all Bunyan’s brilliance, he paints a picture, the complaint goes, of a solitary Christian, working out his own salvation, with no mention of the church at all. This is a gross misrepresentation. There are images of the local congregation in the text: House Beautiful, for one. But the centrality of ecclesiology to the book is not found there. Throughout the text, Christian hardly walks a step of his way alone. His pilgrimmage is constantly shared with, and guided by, other pilgrims, notably Hopeful and Faithful, but also Evangelist, The Interpreter, Watchful, the Shepherds, the House Beautiful maidens, &c., &c. It would be fair to say that there is little sacramental theology in Pilgrim’s Progress, although Bunyan goes some way to correcting that in the second part, when Christiana and her children go through the garden bath in House Beautiful. For Bunyan, however, the essence of ecclesiology is not sacrament or ministry, but Christian fellowship, believers walking together and aiding each other as they walk in the way. It might not be your doctrine of the church, but please don’t pretend it isn’t a doctrine of the church, and a strong one at...

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Emergent Puritan…

…sounds like it ought to be a blog title. There is considerable grass-roots interest in the Puritans amongst a certain slice of current Christianity. This is, of course, a good thing–any interest in church history is a good thing, and the Puritans represented a practical and doctrinally serious model of living the faith that deserves and repays reflection. I’ve had the privilege of being involved in some attempts to renew popular and scholarly interest in the Puritans, and applaud some others. However… I observe that most of those interested in the Puritans fall into the ‘golden age’ trap. Ignoring all that was wrong with the movement (and there was plenty), and even all the diversity in the movement (and there was even more), the Puritans become a cipher for an idealised vision of uncompromisingly Calvinist and astonishingly reactionary Christianity that never, in fact, existed. ‘Puritan’ becomes some sort of Platonic ideal, or Jungian archetype: Calvinist, presbyterian, separatist, committed to certain ethical stances and certain patterns of worship, it is held out as a well-defined and uniform challenge and ideal to which we are called to aspire. In scholarly use, ‘Puritan’ is astonishingly difficult to define: the movement was just far too diverse. Its centre of gravity was certainly Calvinistic, but there are recognisably Puritan pastors and authors who are Amyrauldian (including Richard Baxter, hardly a minor figure in the movement!) and even Arminian; to a lesser extent, the centre is presbyterian, but the movement includes many congregationalists, some of them Baptist, and not a few episcopalians. Some Puritans (Baxter again) were astonishingly ecumenically-minded for their day; on most controverted ethical issues, they could be found on every side (John Milton offered a defence of divorce; William Perkins–again, not a minor figure–wrote books of casuistry that rival anything the Jesuits produced). The point struck me forcibly last week in two ways; I stumbled across a book in the library whilst looking for something else which rejoiced in the title Liberal Puritanism and Other Essays (A.W. Harrison; pub. 1935); in the epynonymous essay, Harrison makes a convincing case for a tradition of socially liberal thought stretching from the Puritans down. Second, when dipping into a collection of Puritan quotations, published by Banner of Truth, I read some fine words, and saw underneath the name of Ralph Cudworth. Now, Cudworth’s Intellectual System of the Universe is an excellent book, representing (alongside John Scotus Eriugena and Coleridge’s unpublished Opus Maximum) the fullest flowering of a persistent British tradition of mystical Christian Platonism. But Puritan it is not! If I had to define ‘Puritan’ in a useful way, I think I would offer four points. First, the great and uniting rallying cry of the movement was ‘Reformation without tarrying for any!’ Puritanism was a restless and urgent reform movement. They might not agree on what a pure church would look like, but they were utterly at one on the pressing and immediate need to create one. Careful, political steps designed to bring the mass of the populace–or even the mass of the congregation–along with you were not appropriate; what God’s Word said was to be done, and done now. Second, the movement was radically ‘congregationalist,’ not in the sense of a system of church government, although some of them did hold to congregationalism as well, but in the sense of a focus on the local congregation as the place where reformation must be applied, where pastoral care would be focused, and where evangelisation would happen. God’s basic tool, and perhaps God’s biggest idea, was the local church fellowship. A few of the great Puritans held offices other than local pastor, of course (John Owen, to continue the list of the greats who do not fit the stereotype…), but they still witness to the local church, where the Word is preached, the sacraments celebrated, and discipline and discipleship practiced, as the beating heart of God’s mission in the world. Third, and already hinted at, the Puritan vision of the Christian life was an astonishingly high one. Jim Packer entitled his book recommending the Puritans A Passion for Holiness; Kelly and Randall, in the one I contributed to, went for The Devoted Life. Both point to this same instinct, that at the heart of the Puritan vision was a pastoral theology that sought and expected to create a congregation of visible saints. Again, what visible sainthood might look like was somewhat controversial amongst them, but nonetheless, a seriousness in Christian practice, an utter commitment to living the truths of Scripture, was what Puritan pastors expected from themselves and their congregations. Finally, the Puritans were Biblicist, but in a rather particular way....

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