Going to the Shack, Part 2

Picking up where we left off...

Question 2 — “How do you feel about God the Father being depicted as a Black Woman?”

I believe it was in a philosophy text book, in a chapter dealing with our preconceived notions that I first encountered the joke about an astronaut who returned from space in a catatonic state. When he came out of it his doctor asked him what happened.

I saw God!

Wow, I guess that would shock anybody!

No, you see, she is black!

What does God look like to you? When you imagine God how does God appear?

When I was a child I was given my first Bible (KJV) by my grandmother. I still have and cherish that Bible. That Bible had color prints of biblical stories and Jesus was always portrayed with fair skin, brown hair and blue eyes. For most of us we tend to make God in our own image. Perhaps we picture God as a well-formed fatherly figure with a flowing beard and hair as in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or on an episode of the Simpsons.

While the second person of the Trinity became flesh and dwelt among us as a man, the emphasis is not on Jesus’ maleness, but on his humanity. What is important is to remember Jesus is fully human and fully divine. We never emphasize the maleness by saying that Jesus was fully male. The incarnation is to be inclusive of all humanity — not just men.

When we speak of the first person of the Trinity as a Father we are using the term as a metaphor. We are not referring to a Father as God, but to a God as Father. Masculine terminology is not exclusively used to describe God. Jesus portrays himself as a mother hen wishing to gather her chicks under her wings. He refers to the Father as a woman sweeping every corner of a house searching for a lost coin and as a woman who hides leavening in flour to make it rise. In the first chapter of Genesis, when God creates humanity, he made them in his own image — “male and female he created them.” While there are historical and theology significance in the use of Father, there are obviously many other biblical metaphors for God (e.g., rock, fortress, shepherd, potter).

Yes, God is black and white, red and yellow. God is male and female. God encompasses all of it and none of it. The thing that is important about metaphors are not the metaphors themselves, but what they represent. There is always the danger of worshiping the metaphor rather than God.

Even when we speak of the Christian community we often make too much about our differences. Paul said that in Christ there is no male or female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free. We are one in Christ.

In The Shack, the Holy Spirit (the third person of the Trinity) is depicted as an Asian woman. Let’s spend a little time looking at this.

In today’s common usage, there is often little difference between the words gender and sex. The two words are considered synonyms. In the social sciences, sex is used to refer to biological aspects and gender is used to refer to sociological or cultural aspects. In language and grammar, gender plays a special role in language classifications. We speak of the gender of words. Now, English has evolved into a genderless language (one less thing we would have to learn as children!) But if you have spent any time studying other languages your quickly realize that nouns have gender. For example, in German, a book is neuter. It is Das Buch. Gender is not sex. Non-biological things do not have sex. To illustrate the difference, again in German, a young girl (whose sex is female) is neuter, Das Mädchen. I say this to preface my remarks on the Spirit. In the Greek, the word for Spirit (pnuema) is neuter. In Hebrew, the word (ruach) is feminine. Now, in the New Testament, while the word for Spirit is neuter, the masculine pronoun (he in English) is used for the Spirit. I’m not sure why — I am not a Greek scholar. My opinion is this (and I may be projecting a bias of my own back on the biblical writers): to use the neuter form of the pronoun (it in English) would depersonalize the Spirit (the third person of the Trinity). I see this happening it English all the time. People are often in the habit of referring to the Holy Spirit as it. [See Notes on Gender, below]

Metaphors are powerful. Consider the difference it makes in a business when you use war metaphors (destroying the enemy) instead of something like sports metaphors (competition). Even religious metaphors have entered the business world. Businesses no longer have spokespersons who represent a brand, but evangelists who wish to convert you to it.

Metaphors can also be ambiguous. We have so many different backgrounds and so many different experiences that words take on different meanings — hence metaphors can take on different meanings. That doesn’t mean that we should eliminate them from our language or theological discussion. We can’t. We would be so much poorer without them. But we must keep in mind that metaphors are just that — words and images that represent some reality or concept we would find difficult to explain otherwise. Just don’t confuse the metaphor for the reality.

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Notes on Gender —

Dictionary.com Unabridged, Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009. (in many languages) a set of classes that together include all nouns, membership in a particular class being shown by the form of the noun itself or by the form or choice of words that modify, replace, or otherwise refer to the noun, as, in English, the choice of he to replace the man, of she to replace the woman, of it to replace the table, of it or she to replace the ship. The number of genders in different languages varies from 2 to more than 20; often the classification correlates in part with sex or animateness. The most familiar sets of genders are of three classes (as masculine, feminine, and neuter in Latin and German) or of two (as common and neuter in Dutch, or masculine and feminine in French and Spanish).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Copyright © 2006. Usage Note: Traditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of &ldqio;masculine,” “feminine,"” and “neuter,” but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender. This usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. According to this rule, one would say The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient, but In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined. This distinction is useful in principle, but it is by no means widely observed, and considerable variation in usage occurs at all levels.