Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 36:3 (Summer 2022)
Article: The Father And The Feminine: Assessing The Grammar Of Gender-Inclusive God Language
Author: Spencer Miles Boersma

PP 36:3 (Summer 2022) p. 16

The Father And The Feminine: Assessing The Grammar Of Gender-Inclusive God Language

Spencer Miles Boersma

Spencer Miles Boersma teaches theology at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia and is an accredited ordained minister recognized by the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada. He holds a ThD from Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. Spencer is a board member for the Atlantic Society for Biblical Equality (see www.BiblicalEquality.com).

John Piper, one of the most committedly patriarchal theologians writing today, insisted at a conference in 2012 that Christianity is a “masculine” religion: God is Father and King (not mother or queen), Jesus is Son (not daughter), pastors are to be men, and this is what the Bible clearly teaches.1 Meanwhile, the feminist theologian, Mary Daly, writing in the 1970s, saw statements like this in her time as evidence of how an idolatrous patriarchy has infected Christianity and the Bible, and this is why, leaving Christianity, she insisted God must be called Mother, a goddess who prophetically fights for the liberation of women against these representations that reiterate male-domination.2 Between these two theologians, a vast gulf stands, and so we must ask: Is language for God exclusively male? Is Christianity synonymous with patriarchy? Is there a causal connection between the two? Can God be spoken about in motherly or in other feminine ways? This article seeks to clarify the debate over the possibility of feminine God language by charting the crucial topics and how they can be addressed.3

This debate, like many others in Christian theology, is a sprawling battleground where two divergent sets of theological sensibilities collide. Is there divine revelation in historical events and in written and spoken words? Are statements and narratives about God in Scripture realistic, depicting God’s actions and character, or is there an unbridgeable divide between human words and God’s being? Are claims of the Christian creeds correct concerning Jesus’s deity, and do the Gospels depict Jesus Christ in a historically reliable way? Are a person’s experience and social location relevant to theological reflection, or is the role of such things minimal and fallible? I ask these questions only to admit that this topic, where the immense pluralism and fragmentation of Christian theology are on full display, presupposes many other conversations.

However, for the purposes of this article, I assume several rules, or “a grammar,” for how to speak about God in order to move forward:

• First, the Bible has a normative usage in legitimating the con...
  
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