Written by William E. Mouser
Is the Bible's God Feminine?
In 1994, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott published The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female.1 Reacting to a slight committed by Christian scholars, pastors, and teachers, Mollenkott charged that their patriarchal viewpoint caused them to ignore places in the Bible where God was revealed to be feminine. Others before Mollenkott had cited various biblical texts to validate God's intrinsic femininity, but in The Divine Feminine Mollenkott pulled them all together to show that “the Bible supports human sexual equality and mutuality [through] the images of God as female that sprinkle the sacred writings of Judaism and Christianity."2
Mollenkott's agenda is not confined to academia, of course. When a New York congregation erected a crucifix displaying a female Christ-complete with breasts, hips, and vagina-feminist dogma triumphed over mere history, at least in the minds of that congregation. Jesus' biological masculinity was a mere accident of history; and, the dogma which overcame that accident is what Mollenkott sought to prove-femininity resides in the Godhead.
Does the Bible support the idea that God is feminine? The search for the Goddess in the Bible, now on-going for over thirty years, has not yielded much. The passages cited by religious feminists fall into four groups-those where God is said to give birth; passages where God performs motherly activities; texts in which God's activities, while not motherly per se, are customarily done by women; and, biblical statements which compare God to a female animal.
The discussion below shows that none of these passages support the claim laid upon them by egalitarians and other religious feminists.
The God Who Gives Birth
Dueteronomy 32:18
The Song of Moses, Deut. 32:1-43, is a prophetic fore view of Israel's relationship to Yahweh. It extols God's greatness and goodness to Israel (vv. 1-14), indicts Israel for breach of covenant (vv. 15-18), promises judgment (vv. 19-35), and assures Israel of a future, gracious redemption (vv. 36-43). Embedded in the indictment are these words:
You [Israel] deserted the Rock, who fathered you;
you forgot the God who gave you birth.
Deuteronomy 32:18
The parallelism is clear and illuminating—fathered paired with give birth. The parallelism designates Yahweh as the source, origin, and maker of Israel.
So far as God's gender is concerned, the passage was never intended to say anything. Moses interwove his data, vocabulary, figures of speech, and rhetorical devices (including parallelisms) in order to express what he intended to say. The parallelism in question is occurs in the midst of an indictment which sets forth the filial duty that Israel has toward Yahweh. God's gender is wholly alien to the subject matter of these verses. What conceivable point would such a revelation have in an indictment for faithlessness? Does Israel's crime arise from God's femininity, or from God being both masculine and feminine? Is the bisexuality or androgyny of God a factor in Israel's guilt?
Or, is the matter simpler? Hundreds of years after Moses, Isaiah paints the same picture, but he uses slightly different colors when he ascribes the following to Yahweh:
I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner's manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. Isa. 1:2b-3.
We incur a debt of honor and loyalty to anyone who makes us prosper. Even dumb animals know this. Ordinarily, we incur such debts to our parents, both mother and father, to whom we owe our very lives. If we owe such debts to parents, how much more to God? This is the very point Moses made in Deut. 32:18. He is no more telling us that God is feminine than Isaiah is telling us Israel is a cow or a burro!
Isaiah 42:14-15a
In the midst of a hymn of praise for God's judgment on His enemies (vv. 10-17), Isaiah compares God to a woman in the crisis of childbirth:
“For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant. I will lay waste the mountains and hills and dry up all their vegetation...”
Isaiah 42:14-15a
“Going berserk” is commonly observed in unsedated women in childbirth, in the final moments before the child emerges from the womb. As labor moves toward its climax and the baby begins to move through the birth canal, the mother's body experiences a hormonal and physiological riot. Until that point, the pain and discomfort of labor can be endured and even controlled. But, once the baby is being expelled, nothing restrains the events which stampede to a conclusion.
When God has “had enough,” He too will “go berserk;” and, a frenzy of judgment will ensue just as surely, irresistibly, and relentlessly as a woman's childbirth. The point of Isaiah's comparison is not to tell us God is feminine. Rather, he selects the climax of childbirth as a fitting picture of God's judgment, because it so clearly portrays two things which are true of God in judgment-His fury and the inexorable arrival of His judging actions.
Job 38:8, 28-29
In Job 38, God begins to rebuke Job for the views he expressed in his debate with his counselors. The admonitions come as questions designed to highlight Job's smallness, weakness, ignorance, and impotence compared with the wisdom, majesty, and awesome power of God. Among those questions are the following:
Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness?
Job 38:8
Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens...?
Job 38:28-29
None of these questions, of course, explicitly compare God with a birthing woman. What the womb in 38:8 refers to is not at all clear from context, and it is arbitrary to suppose that God's womb is referred to. The questions in 38:28-29 recall the earlier discussed imagery in Deut. 32:18. Here, the point would seem to be that God is the creator of rain and ice, not that God is feminine (or masculine, for that matter). Indeed, so far as God is concerned, all the questions from 38:4 through 38:38 point to Him as the creator and controller of all the phenomena which take place in the heavens-particularly weather and the movement of stellar bodies.
The mention of father and begetting [v.t. “fathers” in the NIV above] in Job 38:28 and the immediate mention of womb and giving birth in the following verse is reminiscent of the “creative” agency of both father and mother in Deuteronony 32:18, discussed above. The idea conveyed in both Deuteronomy 32 and Job 38 is the origination of something, by a personal agency. To suppose in these contexts that God's gender is the point of the comparisons is an interpretive stretch far beyond any boundaries of reason.
Thus, only a single reference—Isa. 42:14—explicitly compares God to a birthing woman. Two other references-Deut. 32:18 and (possibly) Job 38:28-29-compare God simultaneously to a father and a mother. When we consult the context of these three pictures, we see that God's gender is an issue in none of the passages.
God the Mother
Isaiah 49:14-15
Isaiah 49:14-15 records God's response to Israel's lament:
But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.”
“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!”
Isaiah 49:14-15
In verse 15, the search for the Goddess runs into a cul-de-sac. Verse 15 contrasts God with a mother-He is unlike the best mother. Yes, even a mother may forget her own child, but God will never forget Zion. If anything, Isa. 49:15 tells us that God is not a mother. Nevertheless, this passage is often cited by those claiming that the God of the Old Testament is portrayed as a mother!
Isaiah 66:13
Isaiah 66:13, on the other hand, would seem at first glance to compare God to a mother.
“As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you.”
The comparison dissolves, however, when one glances at the context. Isaiah 66:13 concludes an extended metaphor which begins in Isaiah 66:7. The metaphor mother is not God, but Jerusalem:
8Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children...
10Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad for her, all you who love her...
11For you will nurse and be satisfied at her comforting breasts; you will drink deeply and delight in her overflowing abundance...
12...you will nurse and be carried on her arm and dandled on her knees.
13As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.
Throughout the passage, God superintends the birth (v. 9), the mother's welfare (v. 12), and her subsequent care for the newborn (vv. 12-13). In this passage, possibly also on Paul's mind in Galatians 4:26, Jerusalem is our Mother, not God. Rather, God is actually portrayed as the mother's husbandman.
It should be noted here, that the egalitarian misreadings of Isaiah 49:14-15 and 66:13 are shocking because they are so egregious. Their ambition to find any kind of potential application of femininity to the Godhead evidently robs most egalitarian interpreters of the most elementary hermeneutical tools. One does not need to read Hebrew to understand that Isaiah 49:15 is a contrast, not a comparison; or that the context of Isaiah 66:13 is an extended comparison between a mother and Jerusalem. Yet, egalitarian interpreters have trumpeted these verses as comparisons between God and a mother so often, that one suspects that some of them are blindly echoing these preposterous mistakes without once going back to take a look at their Bibles!
Interestingly, Mollenkott avoids the usual egalitarian botchery in Isaiah 66:13, correctly discerning that the mother in these verses is Jerusalem. She is reluctant, however, to release these verses from service to egalitarian views, and so she asserts that God is compared to a midwife throughout the metaphor.
Isaiah 66 depicts Zion as a woman giving birth to the sons who will defeat her enemies. God is the midwife at this rapid, easy birth process .... God then proceeds to send “flowing peace, like a river” toward the woman called Zion, so that her babies may be “suckled, filled,/ from her sonsoling breast,/ that you may savor with delight/ her glorious breasts.” God's ministrations toward Zion are like the acts of the midwife immediately after birth. She cleans up the infant and the mother, and then lays the newborn baby upon its mother's consoling breast to be suckled and filled.3
Two things may be said about this reading:
(1) Even if it is correct, it is another exercise in special pleading to find this passage affirming that God is feminine. Men in the Bible are compared to women in a few places (see below), and in none of those passages is it the author's point to affirm that the men have feminine gender. If it is midwifery that Isaiah describes in 66:7-14, his point is to assert similarity between God's care for Zion and a midwife's care for a birthing mother, much as he compared a woman's frenzy at childbirth with God's frenzy when He finally breaks out in judgment on His enemies (Isa. 42:14). In both passages, God's activity is deemed to be similar to an activity peculiar to women; but, that is a far cry from asserting God's intrinsic femininity.
(2) God's gender, when it is addressed explicitly in these verses, is masculine, as we can see in verse 14 which concludes the extended metaphor—
When you see this, your heart will rejoice and you will flourish like grass;
the hand of the LORD will be made known to His servants,
but His fury will be shown to His foes. [emphasis supplied]
Hosea 11:3-4
If bad Bible study habits won't show us the Goddess, perhaps imagination can. In The Divine Feminine4, Mollenkott cites Hosea 11:3-4—
“It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms;
but they did not realize it was I who healed them.
I led them with chords of human kindness, with ties of love;
I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them.”
Mollenkott urges that because women traditionally taught children to walk, served as healers in the domestic economy, and prepared food for their families, Hosea is showing us God in maternal garb, His (Her?) actions cloaked in feminine domesticity.
But, Mollenkott's understanding of Hosea is incredible on two counts. First, Hosea is chief among the Old Testament prophets to compare Israel's relationship to God with a marriage. In both Old and New Testaments, the foundational male-female relationship is used as a picture of the divine-human relationship, with God in the role of the husband. In Hosea 11, however, the imagery shifts momentarily to parent-child (“out of Egypt I called my son”). This shift, even though it is momentary when considered against the over-riding marriage imagery of Hosea, shows that Hosea was capable of deploying some other human family relationship to speak of God. If, however, Hosea's words in 11:3-4 are supposed to teach us that God is feminine, or that God is a mother, that message is profoundly obscure, and Hosea's effort is astonishingly inept.
Second, Mollenkott relies for her suggestion on a tenet which feminists and religious egalitarians routinely attack-that femininity is a social construct defined by gender-specific behavior, such as child-rearing, food preparation, and so on. But, when it serves her purpose, Mollenkott appeals to “stereotypical” behavior as proof that God is feminine! One wonders if she would appeal to Hosea 11:3ff to mandate gender-specific behavior as normative for women!
Psalm 131:2
Even more far-fetched is the appearance of a maternal deity in Psalm 131:25. The pertinent verses read:
But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
Psalm 131:2
The only comparison announced in these words is a comparison between David's soul, on one hand, and a weaned child on the other. God is no where linked to any element of the simile. David's purpose in the simile is to tell us something about his own psychological and spiritual composure. To suppose that David is telling us that God is feminine makes the same incredible claim as Mollenkott does regarding Hosea 11:3ff. That alleged meaning is, in fact, entirely missing from the words of the Psalm; and, if David is supposed to be telling us something about the femininity of God in that verse, his effort must be judged an utter failure! Mollenkott, however, has no problem with any of this: “we must allow ourselves the time to lie in the lap of God our Mother,” she writes, in making an application from David's words.6
Excepting the passages discussed below, where God is compared to a female animal, the passages cited above are the most common ones (effectively the only ones) in either Testament which feminists point to as evidence that God is a mother. In each case, the evidence evaporates when the passage is examined even briefly. None of these passages make a credible claim that God is feminine, even parenthetically. No where in the Bible is God ever said to be a mother in relationship to His creatures or creation.
God the Matron
The absence of mother imagery for God makes searching for the Goddess an entirely dubious project. Of all the feminine vocations, mother is an obvious candidate for portraying God's nature, particularly in view of the copious references to God as Father. But when Mother-God fails to make even one unambiguous appearance in the pages of Scripture, further searching for the Goddess seems desperate.
Desperation, for example, cloaks Mollenkott's appeal to Psalm 123:2, where she sees God in the role of a matron—a responsible feminine figure without any necessary reference to marriage or parenthood:7
As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till He shows us His mercy.
This verse “means” the same way as Deut. 32:18-God is implicitly compared to both male and female versions of a single social role. In Deuteronomy 32:18, God is compared to a parent; in Psalm 123:2, He is compared to a slave-owner. The explicit comparison, of course, is between the singers of the psalm and domestic servants.
The point of verse 2 is nothing more than this—“We are like household servants, waiting patiently for our owner to act.” Of course, the one who gave direction to a servant's activities might be the master or mistress of the household. Typically, male slaves were under the direction of the master, maid servants under the immediate supervision of his wife. Masters and mistresses rule because they are both in God's personal image. This is not to say that God shares both of their genders!
But, when the Psalm mentions both the master and the mistress of the house, Mollenkott urges us to suppose that God is feminine:
... the Psalmist gives us two similes. We are to lift our eyes to Yahweh at home in heaven in two ways: first, like the eyes of slaves fixed on their master's hand; and second, “like the eyes of a slave girl/ fixed on the hand of her mistress.” Who is this mistress of the household to whom we human beings look for guidance, assistance, and compassion? Psalm 123:2 makes the answer clear:
like the eyes of a slave girl
fixed on the hand of her mistress
so our eyes are fixed on Yahweh our God8
None of this would have any force at all if Mollenkott had extended her quotation of Psalm 123:2 just five more words: “until He shows us His mercy.” The use of the masculine singular pronoun confirms that whatever else the Psalmist is telling us, he has nothing to say about God being bi-gendered! So Mollenkott conveniently ends her quotation of Psalm 123 at the very point where it serves her purpose to do so.
Matthew 13:33, Luke 15:8-10
Even further afield are alleged glimpses of the Goddess in Jesus' parables:9
“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not . . . search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she ... says 'Rejoice with me, I have found my lost coin.' In the same way, I tell you there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” Luke 15:8-10
“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” Matthew 13:33
In Matthew, it is not God but kingdom of heaven which Jesus compares to a woman. In Luke 15, we may plausibly infer Jesus to teach that just as the woman rejoices, so also God rejoices. This comparison between God and a woman carries no more meaning about God's gender than do the two verses in the Old Testament where some activity of God is compared to an activity of a woman (Isa. 42:14; possibly Isa. 66:7ff). The idea of God's gender is alien to both near and far contexts of Jesus' words in Matthew 13 and Luke 15.
Lady Wisdom
Finally, it has become increasingly common for feminists to see Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 1-9 as a feminine version of God. Some evangelicals make company with them when they suppose Lady Wisdom prefigures Jesus Christ, whom Paul calls the wisdom of God in 1 Corinthians 1:24. To identify Lady Wisdom with Christ, however, combines three errors:
1. Exegetically, it ignores the clear evidence in Proverbs 8:22-26 that Lady Wisdom is a creature.
2. Theologically, it contradicts the gender-theology of the Messiah.
3. Hermeneutically, it makes the same kind of error which led to the ancient heresy of Arianism. Arians in the Fourth Century reasoned like this-Christ is God's Wisdom, prefigured in Prov. 8:22; in Prov. 8:22, Lady Wisdom is manifestly a creature; therefore, Christ is a creature and not God. Today, sixteen centuries later, Jehovah's Witnesses champion a modern version of Arianism, and they support it with the same kind of appeal to Proverbs 8:22.10
However, modern religious feminists do not argue for Christ's creatureliness. Rather they reason like this-Lady Wisdom is Christ; Lady Wisdom is feminine. Therefore Christ is feminine.
God the Maternal Beast
Our discussion cannot conclude without noting feminist appeals to the animal imagery for God. Feminist reasoning proceeds like this—sometimes God is compared with an animal; when that animal is a female of the species, the simile teaches us that God is feminine.
Mollenkott sets forth the commonly cited passages:11
[God is] like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions. Deut. 32:11 [cf. Ex. 19:4]
[God speaking] “Like a bear robbed of her cubs, I will attack them and rip them open.” Hosea 13:8
[Jesus speaking] “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” Luke 13:34 [cf. Matt. 23:27]
Mollenkott seriously ask us to read these verses as Biblical evidence that God is feminine! For these passages to bear that weight, we must assume (1) that the prophets wanted to tell us that God is feminine, and (2) that the prophets compared God to a female animal in order to make this point. Such assumptions are fantastic on their face. Mollenkott's focus on the gender of the animals in these biblical passages is completely arbitrary. Why not, instead, understand these passages to reveal God's possession of other animal features, such as claws? Since mother bears, mother eagles, and hens all have claws, why not insist that God must have claws too?
God's gender is irrelevant to the contexts of these passages. Some feature other than the animal's gender accounts for the prophet's comparison God to the animal. Mother bears are more ferocious than father bears when deprived of cubs; mother eagles and mother chickens present obvious protective behavior when their young are endangered. This behavior-whether ferocity or protectiveness-is the burden of the similes, not the animals' gender. Besides, with so many clearer and more obvious ways to signal that God is feminine (e.g. by referring to God as she, or by plainly calling God Mother), it is simply incredible to suppose the biblical writers would try to show us God's femininity by referring to female animals.
When Men are Compared to Women
Feminine images for God (in those two or three cases it actually occurs) lose all import as far as God's gender is concerned when we note exactly the same imagery applied to human males. In no case does anyone use such imagery in order to tell us that the men are actually feminine.
Consider, for example, the following verses which compare men to women:
“Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant?” [Num. 11:12; Moses, complaining to God about his difficulties with Israel]
“A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born, she forgets the anguish because of her joy . . . So with you . . .” [John 16:21-22, Jesus encouraging His disciples]
My dear children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you [Gal. 4:19, Paul, writing to the Galatians]
We were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. [1 Thess. 2:7, Paul writing to the Thessolonicans]
Does anyone think for a moment that Moses, Jesus, or Paul use this kind of language in order to tell us that men are actually feminine? The notion is fantastic. Equally fantastic is the notion that similar imagery in the Bible tells us anything about God's gender, in those rare instances when it is applied to Him.
The Meaning of Metaphor
Sometimes the debate about the Bible's alleged comparisons of God with something feminine turns on whether or not the comparison takes the form of a metaphor or a simile. Some will urge that similes assert a likeness while metaphors are closer to allegations of fact.
However, this distinction between metaphor and simile is pressed incorrectly, if it be alleged that a metaphor carries more “metaphysical” weight than a simile. In fact, both metaphor and simile convey meaning by the same semantic notion-by comparing one thing to another. Simile makes the comparison explicit-A is like B. Metaphor is simultaneously less explicit and more emphatic-A is B, or A is doing what B does.
The interpretive challenge posed by a metaphor is to recognize it in the first place as a metaphor. If we say, for example, “My love is a red rose,” the metaphor is not hard to discern. As an affirmation of concrete fact, this statement is nonsense. It is simply a more vivid or emphatic way of saying “My love is like a red rose.” If we say, however, “God is a father” or “God is a mother,” are these statements metaphors? Or are they “literal,” that is, affirmation of categorical fact? The grammatical form of such statements will not help us. Usually context will let us know the author's sense, though sometimes the context must be enlarged to encompass the theological framework that informs the author himself.
In the case of genuine metaphor or simile, however, to say “A is B” or “A is like B” is to assert that in some particular A and B are identical, even though they are not, categorically, the same kinds of thing. “My love is a rose” does not (indeed, cannot) mean that my love (presumably a species of homo sapiens) is also a member of the genus Rosa. Instead, this statement asserts that my love and a rose each possess one or more characteristics in common.
Which characteristics? This is the crux facing any interpreter of metaphors or similes.
Sometimes the answer is obvious. Santa's belly shaking “like a bowl full of jelly” is not difficult to understand; the word shaking points our attention to the characteristic common to Santa's belly and the jelly in a bowl. Santa's nose “like a cherry” is a bit more obscure, though not much so. Surely, it refers to the rounded tip of Santa's nose, which is about the size of a cherry, and (from the metaphor) a vivid color of red.
Other metaphors, such as many found in the Book of Proverbs, are deliberately opaque—they are dark sayings, riddles to be solved by those advanced in wisdom (cf. Prov. 1:6; 30:18-19). Generally, however, we may safely assume that an author's intent is to communicate a discrete meaning. He will deploy a metaphor or a simile, not to obscure his communication, but to clarify it. And, if we do not immediately penetrate the meaning of a comparison which he uses, the context of his comparison will point us in the right direction.
The question, therefore, arises in any of the handful of places in the Bible, where God is compared with something that is feminine, can we demonstrate that the author's meaning in any of the comparisons is to assert femininity as that thing shared in common by God and the feminine thing to which He is compared? Can we demonstrate that “God is feminine” is the what the author was trying to tell us? Egalitarians and religious feminists will say “yes,” but the preceding review of these comparisons shows that contention to be flummery. God is not compared to something feminine in order to tell us that He, too, is feminine. Rather, in those few places where this kind of comparison occurs, the feminine thing possesses some specific characteristic which, in the mind of the Biblical author, applies equally to God in the context of whatever it is the author is trying to tell us.
Said another way, in none of the alleged “feminine metaphors for God” is the author trying to tell his audience anything about God's “gender,” much less that God's gender is feminine.
Underlying Issues
Data confirming God's intrinsic masculinity is, of course, voluminous, compelling, and crystal clear.12 If the data of the Old Testament is insufficient, the New Testament provides yet another hurdle for feminists like Mollenkott-the incarnation. Jesus' historical, biological, and abiding maleness is a perpetual embarrassment to those who insist that God is above gender, or bi-gendered. Paul's statements about Jesus in Colossians are particularly compelling:13
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. [Col. 1:15]
For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him , [Col. 1:19]
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, [Col. 2:9]
If these words mean anything, they tell us that whatever God is Jesus is. Maleness (admittedly a biological, creaturely quality) and masculinity (a spiritual quality which even females may possess) are united in Jesus. After the incarnation, God is not only masculine, He has become human in the form of a male.
In the face of such overwhelming Biblical witness, the question arises again—why do religious feminists, exemplified by Mollenkott, use strained (and often ridiculous14) interpretive tactics in an attempt to extract from Scripture what is not actually there? Elisabeth Elliot suggests an answer in her foreword to J. David Pawson's book Leadership is Male:
For years I have watched with increasing dismay the destruction the feminist movement has wrought in the world, in the church, in Christian homes and marriages, and in personalities. I have studied the tortured argument of those who would persuade us that Galatians 3:28 cancels everything the author says elsewhere in his epistles about the vital distinctions between men and women. I have listened to the endless discussions of Paul's rabbinical prejudice and cultural insularity. ..., and I have on a few occasions been asked (as a “traditionalist,” whatever that means) to debate those who would rewrite history, literature, psychology, and the Bible itself to make them palatable to the woman of the late twentieth century. I have done practically everything but jump up and down and scream about it.
... [Pawson's book] tells us that his subject is not a clerical issue, nor it is hierarchical, situational, historical, or experimental; it is biblical. With that I agree whole-heartedly.15
The way religious feminists interpret the Bible shows us what they think of the Bible. Whenever the Bible can be twisted to reveal a sense that supports their agenda, egalitarians do so; and the search for the Goddess in Scripture is one of the most determined efforts of feminist interpreters to rewrite centuries of Biblical interpretation, and to rewrite the Bible. A far more honest option would be to abandon the Bible, and the Christian faith itself. Mollenkott seems to have moved in that direction since her original penning of The Divine Feminine in 1983.
Mary Kassian describes Mollenkott's spiritual journey like this:
As a result of Mollenkott's commitment to feminism, her view of God was changing. This trend was even more evident in her subsequent work, Godding: Human Responsibility and the Bible (Crossroad, 1988). In Godding, Mollenkott followed the feminist presupposition further toward its logical end. She began to see herself as God. She proclaimed,
“I am a manifestation of God. God Herself! God Himself! God Itself!. Above all. Through all. And in us all.”
It is noteworthy that Mollenkott also departed from other evangelical views. She argued that Christianity should yield its “exclusive claim” of Christ being the only way to God. Finally, Mollenkott advocated an inclusive morality. According to Mollenkott, Christians should not condemn those who find sexual fulfillment outside of the context of marriage, nor should they condemn homosexuality. Mollenkott had claimed the right to name herself, her world, and God. Ultimately, this led her to a total rejection of the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.16
Elisabeth Elliot was correct in her assessment that the basic issue in all these debates is biblical. If we take seriously the Bible's own claim to be a revelation of an infinite, personal God to His creatures, we must acknowledge that there is no Goddess in the Bible.
1Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Feminine, (Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994), 119 pages. Citations of The Divine Feminine are from the 1994 Crossroad edition.
9Ibid., pp. 64-65 in a chapter entitled “God as Female Homemaker,” and pp. 79-81 in a chapter entitled “Bakerwoman God.”
10For further discussion on this point, see the ICGS pamphlet Who is Lady Wisdom?
11Mollenkott devotes entire chapters to each animal. See, for example, “Christ as Female Pelican,” pp. 44-48; “God as Mother Bear,” pp. 49-53; “God as Mother Eagle,” pp. 83-91; and, “God as Mother Hen,” pp. 92-96.
12See the pamphlet Is God Masculine? for further details. Available from ICGS.
14See, for example, Mollenkott's strained exposition of the Shekinah in pages 36-43; or, consider her statement about the Holy Spirit: “Because the dove is an androgynous image, emblematic of the supreme Goddess yet also considered to be phallic, it is an image of God that draws together and unites all the masculine and feminine imagery concerning God” (pp. 108-109).
15J. David Pawson, Leadership is Male (Oliver-Nelson Books, 1990), pp. 11-12. Emphasis original.
16Mary A. Kassian, The Feminist Gospel: The Movement to Unite Feminism With the Church (Crossway, 1992), pp. 238-239. Kassian details similar spiritual evolution in the works of Mary Daley and Rosemary Radford Ruether in pp. 227-237.
