A few years ago John Piper created some controversy over his
declaration that Christianity had a masculine feel. The claim raised several issues,
one of which was the way a divorce of theological reflection from Christian
tradition leads to a lopsided and impoverished theology. The impoverished theology of a “masculine
feel” undercuts a Christian view of human sexuality.
Christian tradition employs masculine and feminine ideas
about God and the soul in a variety of ways that suggest both are necessary
complements that correct one another. Admittedly, feminine ideas about God are
not as prevalent, but they remain threaded into the fabric of the tradition,
popping up sometimes in surprising places.
One need only take notice of the Syriac tradition, which
viewed the Spirit as mother from the second century until at least Ephrem the
Syrian in the fourth century. This image of the Spirit became fused with the
church as mother and the waters of baptism as womb. Under the Spirit’s power,
these waters teem with life and grace since the Spirit of creation, who hovered
over the primeval waters, is also the Spirit of salvation. The priest serves as
the midwife who delivers the new-born child of God into the world.
This same idea flows like an underground current through
biblical texts in which the Spirit is the one who gives birth to believers. Many
Christians miss this feminine symbol behind regeneration because it is a “dead”
metaphor. Nevertheless, to proclaim with the NT that one must be born of the
Spirit is to underscore the Spirit’s role to give new life just as a mother
does. Every evangelical who declares, “I’m born again,” implicitly points
toward a feminine idea, and this is not peripheral to evangelical theology.
In the twelfth century Bernard of Clairvaux reflects on
Jesus as mother. For Bernard, Christians nurse at the breast of Christ through
the Eucharist. In this event, they drink the milk and honey of the Promised Land
as they receive his life into their lives. When Julian of Norwich declares that
Jesus is a mother in the fourteenth century, she is picking up on a stream of
spirituality that goes back at least to the early twelfth century.
Even more than this, however, a spirituality of love emerges
in Christian tradition that treats the soul as feminine and Christ as its
lover. The images of the church and the soul as the bride of Christ draw upon
allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs to point toward the ultimate
fulfillment of eros in God. Such a
spirituality goes back at least to Origen in the third century, finding its
biblical warrant in a fusion of the Song of Songs, Pauline ideas, and the
bridal imagery of Revelation.
Holiness is about the soul beautifying herself for Christ,
her lover. The ultimate end of this beautification is, according to William of
St. Thierry, to become “one spirit with God, beautiful in Beauty, good in
Goodness.” There is an evangelical manifestation of this trend in the Wesleyan
holiness movement in which bridal mysticism comes back into prominence as a
fusion of the soul’s ascent to God and the church’s preparation
Lord. The early Pentecostal claim that Spirit baptism makes one a member of the bride takes its rationale from this backdrop. This more feminized Christianity provided a counter to the muscular
Christianity of a Billy Sunday in which athleticism and Christian maturity went
hand in hand.
The use of these metaphors for God and the soul does not mean
that salvation involves a denigration of the biological and psychological
differences between men and women any more than it means God is male or female.
Rather, taken together these multiple symbols speak to the
contingency of sexual acts and thus the purpose of sexuality. As mystics in the
church have understood, the erotic dimension of the sexual life will be taken
up into ecstatic union with God. The appetitive urges behind sexual acts evince
intense longings for intimacy that speak to a deeper union.
Even as ecstatic intimacy is but a foretaste that cannot be
sustained this side of the End, so the passion of eros offers a momentary glimpse of something more to human
existence. The moment of abandon in love, when persons pledge their entire
lives to one another, offers only a faint whisper of selflessness.
When the wave of eros
crests, as it must, persons can succumb to the void that remains without the
support of charity’s vow, which translates the whispers of amor into an enduring pledge. The effect must be cumulative so that
amor is taken up into and stabilized
by caritas. Those who idolize eros find their commitment waning,
choosing instead to see the problem as a lack of passion either on their part
or their lover’s. In either case, the result is a dehumanization of the other,
a reduction of the person to mere pleasurable object.
The sacramental understanding of marriage calls for a
re-ordering of sexual desire that ultimately points away from sexual acts, as
strange as this may seem in a late modern culture of sex. This is one reason
why the unitive and procreative dimensions of the sex act must be held together,
whether conception actually occurs or not. The procreative end of sex signifies
its contingency in the same way that masculine and feminine images of God and
the soul do. Procreative and unitive, as male and female, form complementary
pairs that balance and correct.
It is an antidote for the over spiritualizing of sex (and
the idolizing of eros) to the point
that one seemingly cannot be human unless one engages in it, and frequently at
that. To be sure, Christian tradition has often leaned in the other direction
because of a failure to maintain the tension between the goodness of human
sexuality and the contingency of sexual acts. Proclaiming that Christianity has
a “masculine feel” breaks the tension in a way that undermines female sexuality
in favor of male prowess by implying the former is less than human.
To make the masculine supreme is to sacrifice the human. Not
only does this lead to a devaluing of the person in the sexual act, it also
opens the person to eros’s seduction
that the whispers of passion can produce a lifetime of loving. Indeed, the two
usually go together.
By proclaiming that in heaven there will be no marriage,
Jesus signaled the end of sexual acts as a means to facilitate union between
two persons and the beginning of a new order of human relationality. The use of
masculine and feminine metaphors for God and the soul within Christian
tradition points toward the latent potential for more within the image of God
as male and female. It undermines Christianity to say that it has a “masculine”
feel. Instead, Christianity has a human feel.
