Notes on God's Violence

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Catherine Madsen

Yet God's own violence moves quickly beyond mindfulness. If we did what he did or threatened what he threatened, we would be unjust and merciless. God is more like Lear than perhaps any invisible and worshipful creator has the right to be, not least in his misogynist invective and his need for praise. In spite of him--and against the clear intent of some biblical writers, though I think with the clear encouragement of others -- the filtering process begins, and we are drawn into reading the story as art. It begins to have an indirect effect on our decisions which may outweigh and counter its direct effect.

God claims to operate out of moral purpose, which is how he is unlike Zeus; children are not brought up to call Zeus good. The Ten Commandments are meant to be followed; God takes an intimate interest in people's moral behavior. His own utterances and subsequent tradition discourage us from taking an equal interest in his. Pious readers have done mental contortions in order to interpret his rages as good, to exonerate him from the accusations we would incur if we demanded (even as a test) that a man burn his son on a mountaintop, or if we spread plague among an insubordinate people. The effort is exhausting; God seems to resist exoneration. The whole enterprise of theodicy -- of justifying God's ways to man, or rewriting the definition of God such that God can be justified -- failed long ago, before feminist theology got hold of it, before Job's comforters got hold of it. God refuses to fit the mold of perfection.

Why are children brought up to call God good?

Again and again women write -- it seems to be especially women -- of being told that God watched over them and finding themselves forsaken: of being lonely as children and finding that God did not assuage the loneliness, of living a selfless life as adults and still losing a child or being betrayed in marriage, of following all the rules and still getting cancer. Or simply of reading the Bible and wondering how that God could be trusted in simplicity and sweetness. Why did anyone lie to these women to begin with? Why such a transparent lie, as if doubt and the sense of forsakenness were unusual, as if the dark night of the soul were such an uncommon experience as never to strike a nice girl?

Jeremiah, one of God's many reluctant prophets, in Abraham Heschel's translation:

O Lord, thou hast seduced me,

And I am seduced;

Thou hast raped me

And I am overcome. (Jer. 20:7) [3]

Jeremiah was a child of nine when God first spoke to him. Did he put on His knowledge with His power?

II

It is peculiar to encounter the assumption in feminist theology that it is a wonderful thing to resemble God: that women are denied this resemblance because of their gender and that men, who are permitted the resemblance, must be endlessly proud of it. Carol Christ's early and definitive essay, "Why Women Need the Goddess," assumes that what a woman wants in a God -- and what a man automatically has -- is a mirror, a gendered self writ large, a ratification: