Father God, Mother Eve

The story is told in countless versions. Somebody--a saintly rabbi, a mystic caught up in holy ecstasy, even in one version a lost astronaut--chances to see God face to face and lives to tell about it. "What is God really like?" asks an anxious crowd back home. The narrator hesitates. "You'll be shocked," he warns. He is pressed further. "Well," he finally says, "to begin with, she's black."

The message of the joke would be lost in some cultures; in India, for instance, Kali--an incarnation of the Hindu mother goddess--is both female and black. But it bites enough in Western civilization, where Judaeo-Christian theology has intermittently taught white superiority over black and consistently taught male superiority over female. Color prejudice in theology has been largely expunged. Gender prejudice remains. God is the Father. Jesus Christ is the Son. Even the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament, is "he." And women? Women are the daughters of Eve, the original temptress.

Easy Divorce. Such simple categories are being questioned today, but the questioners are working against some 3,000 years of Judaeo-Christian thought. The trouble began, appropriately, with the creation narrative in Genesis, particularly when the first woman was molded from Adam's rib. Eve succumbed to the temptation of the serpent, and Adam in turn capitulated to her. "The woman you gave me," he was soon grousing to God. "She gave me the fruit." Ever after, Scripture notes with a certain masculine piety, women would bear children in sorrow and pain, and their husbands would be their masters.

Biblical laws reflected the discrimination. Wives were guilty of adultery if they had had sexual relations with any other man; husbands only if they had had relations with another married woman. Divorce was easy for a man. Later, in rabbinical law, women were classed with slaves and minors in being exempted from certain required prayers.

In the New Testament, Jesus set aside the male's privilege of easy divorce. He hobnobbed openly with women, talked about God with them, pointedly saved a condemned adulteress. The rabbis had taught that women could not be witnesses because, like Eve, they were easily deceived. By contrast, the first witnesses to Jesus' Resurrection were three women. For all this, the fact remains that the Redeemer was a man--the son, not the daughter, of God. And his twelve Apostles were all men.

Ill Wind. St. Paul, Jesus' prime interpreter to the world, hardly resolved the ambiguity. On the one hand, Paul encouraged women to prophesy, as they had in Jewish tradition; and at least one of his close colleagues was a woman prophet: Priscilla. He also observed that there was "neither male nor female in Christ." But in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul admonished women to wear veils and be silent at services. Christian theologians came to view this text as proof that women should be excluded from the ministry and priesthood.

The Christian centuries that followed were more plainspoken. Tertullian reflected the mind of many early church fathers when he pronounced, in the 3rd century, that women were "the devil's gateway."

Some centuries later, when Thomas Aquinas baptized Aristotle's biology, he concluded that woman was a misbegotten male, conceived when there were "defective" influences, such as an ill wind from the south. On the other hand, medieval theologians did exalt the Virgin Mary to near-divine status as Queen of heaven and mediatrix of God's graces, a development that Jung later extolled because it provided a powerful "metaphysical representation" of the feminine. The Reformation, however, toppled that image of Mary for Protestants.

How did such a male-oriented theology develop in the first place? Ancient Europe had no-gods, only the Great Goddess, wrote Robert Graves. She "was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent, and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought . . . Once the relevance of coition to child-bearing had been officially admitted . . . man's religious status gradually improved." While agrarian societies preserved the fertility goddess, often alongside later male gods, nomadic societies chose masculine kingly gods. When the two types of societies clashed--as when the nomadic Hebrews encountered the settled Canaanites--religious conflict was inevitable.

Earth Mother. It was more than loyalty to their own faith that made the Hebrews recoil from some of their neighbors' gods. Cybele, the Phrygian Earth Mother, was almost as ferocious as her Indian counterpart Kali. Male members of her priesthood often felt compelled to castrate themselves, then present their amputated genitals to her as a sign of their devotion--just a sample of the dark side of the Earth Mother, who eventually consumed whatever she bore. Small wonder that the Hebrews preferred the minor inconvenience of circumcision as a sign of loyalty to their God.

In any event, apologists say today, the Jews did not have the luxury of multiple divinities, male and female. Egyptians could have their Osiris and Isis, Canaanites their Baal and Anath, but Jews had to choose. Hebrew had no neuter pronoun. God was either "he" or "she," and out of their patriarchal past the Jews chose the masculine. But very early on, the rabbis were teaching what has come to be doctrine for Christian and Jew alike: that God is pure spirit, above and apart from any real gender.

Contemporary apologists also have explanations for the seeming male chauvinism in biblical passages. They construe Eve's origin from Adam's side--as opposed to, say, his foot--as a symbol of woman's equal partnership with man. As for Eve's culpability, notes Conservative Rabbi Seymour Siegel, it was Eve who had to be tempted; Adam failed even to put up a fight.

St. Paul, too, has come in for rehabilitation. His admonitions to the women of Corinth may have merely been sound advice: Corinth was a mixed community of Jew and Gentile Christians, and Paul probably feared that the more liberated Greek women would offend the Jews if they did not wear veils or spoke up too loudly during services. Jewish Theologian Richard L. Rubenstein, in a new book, My Brother Paul, admits that Paul's theology is pointedly masculine for much of its course, but sees a feminine image in Paul's vision of the "restoration of all things" in Christ at the end of time. That restoration culminates in a return to the primordial garden--Mother Earth again.

Divine Presence. Despite such apologies and defenses, at least a few feminist theologians argue that Judaeo-Christian theology is still far too dominated by male concepts. Boston College's Mary Daly, a Roman Catholic laywoman, says a woman's revolution within the church is needed to overturn the patriarchal, male idea of leadership, which she describes as hyper-rational and aggressive. With it would go the masculine habit of constructing boundaries between "self" and "other." Gone, too, would be a God who keeps mankind in "infantile subjection." The new God would "encourage self-actualization and social commitment." Daly also sees a de-emphasis of Jesus: "The idea of a unique divine incarnation in a human being of male sex may give way to an increased awareness of the divine presence in all human beings."

Another Catholic feminist, Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether of Howard University, suggests that a rise of feminine influence would liberate men as well as women by overthrowing man's technological empire--a "denatured Babel of concrete and steel." Then, says Ruether, men and women together could "learn to cultivate the garden . . . where the powers of rationalization come together with the harmonies of nature."

Ironically, Daly, and to some extent Ruether, seem to be practicing what they preach against: gender stereotyping. They do not seem to recognize that power could possibly corrupt women, just as it has men. Many theologians would also reject Mary Daly's dismissal of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. He was incarnated as a man and chose male apostles, they would argue, because that was the need of his time: a female Messiah (and even female apostles) would have been outlandish. But there is no reason that Jesus and his Apostles could not represent feminine aspirations in their own humanity.

One prescient forebear of Ruether and Daly saw no problem in Jesus' manhood. Nor did she seem rattled by masculine pronouns for God. Lady Julian of Norwich, an anchoress who lived in Chaucerian England in the 14th century, laid out her prophetic theology in a book called Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love. "God, Almighty, is our kindly Father," wrote Lady Julian. "God, all-Wisdom, is our kindly Mother." As for the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity--the Person incarnated in Jesus Christ--Lady Julian found that he was strongly feminine: "our Mother in kind, in whom we are grounded and rooted. And he is our Mother in Mercy."

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