Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 35:1 (Winter 2021)
Article: Also A Mother: Asian Feminist Theology Promotes God Also As Mother
Author: Kay Bonikowsky

PP 35:1 (Winter 2021) p. 19

Also A Mother: Asian Feminist Theology Promotes God Also As Mother

Kay Bonikowsky

Kay Bonikowsky holds an MDiv from Multnomah University in Portland, Oregon, as well as a bachelor’s degree in film production. She promotes egalitarianism through her Bible teaching, pastoral leadership, public speaking, and her blog (https://KBonikowsky.com). Kay is married, has three children, and lives near Seattle in Snoqualmie, Washington.

Imagine waiting to be born inside a small, warm, and dark home. You feel safe and protected, and every need is provided. You are aware of a faraway pulsing and gentle voice. Eventually, the walls begin to squeeze in on you. At first, gently, then with greater force. You are ejected not so much out, but into a new home. You are born. You experience the gentle voice hinted at inside the womb as a person. You recognize her as Mother. In this way, Aída Besançon Spencer describes being born and intimately recognizing your mother from the inside out. “The mother is experienced first as this all-encompassing presence in the womb.”1 Being close, or immanent, is associated with mother. She asks, “For who could be closer than a mother and an embryo?”2Evangelicals are known as “born again” Christians, evoking the imagery of re-visiting the intimacy of our mother’s womb. Nicodemus imagined this same idea when talking with Jesus in John 3. But Jesus clarified for him that the second birth requires something different than the first: the person doing the birthing. We must be born of the Spirit. Our new Mother is the Spirit of God. Protestant reformer Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf understood being born again in this way, primarily referring to the Spirit as Mother in the last twenty years of his life.3 Zinzendorf did not have a feminist agenda. He used this term because he believed it clearly and persuasively expressed the nature of God. Craig Atwood says that Zinzendorf “actively encouraged the Brüdergemeine [the Moravian church] to worship the Holy Spirit as the mother of the church.”4 As Mother, not only does the Spirit birth new life, she protects, guides, nourishes, comforts, and admonishes her children. She teaches proper behavior. She asks for obedience. Zinzendorf calls the Spirit the “Mother above all other mothers.”5

Should we hesitate to name the Spirit who gave birth to us as Mother? Asian feminist theologians have no qualms about a theology of the womb, which explores and celebrates our intimate relationshi...