Notes on God's Violence

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Catherine Madsen

Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent. ...A woman...acknowledges the anomaly of female power when she prays exclusively to a male God. She may see herself as like God (created in the image of God) only by denying her own sexual identity and affirming God's transcendence of sexual identity. But she can never have the experience that is freely available to every man and boy in her culture, of having her full sexual identity affirmed as being in the image and likeness of God. [4]

Most other feminist theologians and their male allies have approached the question similarly ever since without much debate. [5] But--leaving aside the question of whether the man or boy who identifies proudly with God on the basis of gender has understood his religion at all, or whether male power can ever be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent, or whether God's psychological function is primarily to affirm us, sexually or otherwise -- is it flattering to be made in the image of God? Is this a God either women or men can be pleased to resemble? Is a female sexual identity a sufficient protection against resembling him?

And would a God whom women could resemble really end the trauma of God's violence? Are women so unfailingly gentle? Perhaps our resemblance to God consists not only in our acts of imagination and kindness but in our capacity for destruction, for ambivalence, for enacting our rage on people we should not hurt. There is nothing particularly male about this pattern. Women act it out on their own children, and on men, and on other women; nothing in our sexual identity (whatever that amounts to -- our bodies? our socialization?) acquits us of human evil.

We could represent God in the most disturbing of female terms: the Goddess who sneers at her lover, goes in for sexual bargaining and emotional blackmail, screams at her children with loathing and calls it love.

Feminist theology, of course, does not want the equivalent of the biblical God in female form; it wants to redraw the boundaries, to leave violence outside the definition of God. (How the essentially monistic feminist sensibility hopes to leave anything outside the definition of God is a puzzle; if God is immanent, if God is everything, there is -- as in ecology -- no "away.") It calls for a Goddess of nurturance and consolation, modeled on women we love. It assumes that what women want in a God is not a fully realized female personality but an idealized self, and that we are willing to idealize our actual relations with women in order to get it. But an idealized image, though it may seem like the highest form of flattery, is really the quickest way to falsify one's relationships with both women and God. Also, of course, no story can be told about it: there is no tension and no resolution. [6]

Feminist theology has understood -- accurately enough -- that God-language is constructed; it does not seem to have grasped entirely why it is constructed. God as he appears in the Bible is not so much goodness personified as the whole of life personified--what we love and what we dread, what we hope to do and what we would never do: an attempt to pack everything into one image, a synthesis of the lived and the unlived life. We may, with every good reason, prefer "power-with" to "power-over" in our own dealings, but the universe works both sides; we cannot limit its operations as we try to limit our own. [7]