The goddess squad

National Review, Nov 18, 1991 by William Oddie

PREDICTING the future is a risky business. Over forty years ago, C. S. Lewis explained why the Church of England would never ordain women to its priesthood. Writing within the Anglo-Catholic tradition, he saw the priest as "a double representative, who represents us to God, and God to us." As he usually did, Lewis moved beyond the immediate topic to what lay behind it. "Suppose," he said,

the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God, and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to "Our Mother which art in heaven" as to "Our Father." Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female form as a male form, and the second person of the Trinity as well called the Daughter as the Son. . . . All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.

Now it is surely the case that if . . . these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion. Goddesses have, of course, been worshipped: many religions have had priestesses. But they are religions quite different in character from Christianity.

Was Lewis right? Has radical Christian feminism, as it has developed since his day, borne out his analysis? How close are radical feminists within the churches to being "embarked on a different religion"?

Certainly, they are more than inclined, like Lewis's "reformer," to say that "we might just as well pray to 'Our Mother which art in heaven' as to 'Our Father.'" More: they will mostly insist that calling God "Father" is part of a "patriarchal" system of ideas which has established and nurtured the alleged oppression of women within the Christian Church.

This last claim is worth examining, for it is almost universal among Christian feminists. In the words of the Catholic feminist activist Catharina Halkes, "it is hardly possible to call to mind a single feminist theologian, whatever her phase of development may be, who does not find the image of the Father-God a challenge and a direct confrontation." Miss Halkes goes on (almost inevitably) to quote the famous battle-cry of the matriarchalist pagan writer Mary Daly: "If God is male, then the male is God." To see God as a Father, in other words, has confirmed the status quo of "patriarchal" society, and has sacralized the domination of women by men.

There are clear objections to this line of argument. Most obviously, perhaps, it is far from clear that matriarchal religions, or religions with a mixed pantheon of gods and goddesses, were ever reflected in a higher status for women: there is, in fact, considerable evidence to the contrary.

A more straightforward objection is the lack of any evidence that, either now or in Christian history, women in any significant numbers have felt themselves excluded and oppressed by the perception of God as Father, or have expected their own femaleness to be mirrored in their symbolic understanding of God as an object of worship. This inconvenient fact is explained away by the centuries of supposed conditioning by a patriarchal Church which has made it acceptable to women to pray to a Father God.

The feminists' mission, therefore, is to "raise the consciousness" of their mentally enslaved sisters. Finding a language for God which reflects a specifically female image and which refuses to accept as definitive the New Testament symbolism of God as Father and as Son is a first priority of Christian feminist theology and liturgical experiment.

God the Mother

IT IS becoming increasingly clear, as the evidence accumulates and its implications emerge, that the attempt by feminists to use non-Biblical female language for God is--to use unfashionable but unavoidable language--plainly heretical, and that this makes "Christian feminism" itself a heresy in the classical sense. As the "post-Christian" feminist theologian Daphne Hampson (a veteran of the Anglican campaign to ordain women) puts it:

Nothing would seem to indicate better the incompatibility between feminism and Christianity than the difficulty in naming God in a female way within that tradition. Yet that they should see God in their own image, and not in the image of the opposite sex, has become fundamental to many women. [My italics.]

But the Fatherhood of God, for Christians, is no mere metaphor. The Fatherhood of God is a reality; it is part of the revelation Christ came to give. Jesus Himself is recorded in the Gospels as using the word "Father" some 170 times: it is His name for God, and with only one exception, it is the only word He uses to refer to God or to address Him. At no point does Jesus imply that God is merely like a Father to Him: His message is that in very truth God actually is His Father. He is begotten, not made.

And this understanding is at the heart of the faith of the early Church. In the words of the great Biblical scholars Edwyn Hoskins and Noel Davey: "the definition of Jesus as the Son of God, and the consequent rider that God is His Father, underlie all the books of the New Testament. These were the fundamental dogmas of primitive Christian theology and ethics."