God our Mother

the Divine Feminine in Judaism and Christianity

This paper is a final I wrote for a class called “Women and Religion” as a part of my undergraduate in Religious Studies. I would love feedback on the writing and the ideas as I work on honing my ability to write, synthesize, and hustle.

As I wrote to my professor, this is only a preliminary look at the subject but i have done my best to keep it concise, clear, and still constructive. Lastly, the length (1250 words) is real factor, especially with an attempt at synthesis between traditions, so I have tried my darndest to say something without saying too much.

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Judaism and Christianity have long struggled to empower women and treat them as equals to men. Worse, both have justified the disenfranchisement, subjugation, and profound mistreatment of women, and of the feminine more broadly, in the name of their shared scriptures. My question is this: do these traditions inherently have the hermeneutical and theological resources to reverse their history of patriarchal existence? This paper argues that the shared concepts of the Shekinah in Judaism and Sophia in Christianity offer precisely such resources, providing theological tools for a feminist renewal of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

1. The Problem

Sadly, the Judeo-Christian tradition has done great damage to women in their dependence on poor theologies. In Christianity, quintessentially orthodox figures such as St. Augustine wrote things such as “they had become servants” in reference to wives who had entered a marriage where their husband beat them. (Augustine, 176) Men are primary in this view, and even abused wives should at minimum keep their heads down and continue to serve their husbands’ needs. Elsewhere, of Augustine, Rosemary Ruether writes “he regards her as possessing the image of God only secondarily. The male alone possesses the image of God normatively.” (Ruether, 95) Anselm, another Church Father, objected to calling God “mother” because “male is superior to female and... the father contributes more to the child in reproduction than the mother.”(Bynum, 113) Judaism has abundant examples, but Anderson’s example serves well; “at a key moment in Jewish history... women are invisible in the text.” (52) This quote not only drives home the theological bias against feminism but establishes the textual foundation for this negative theology.

2. Judaism Conceptual Groundwork

Judaism possesses the key idea of the Shekinah. Although a long history of debate surrounds the intricacies of this concept within Judaism, the basic idea is clear: Shekinah names the divine presence, God dwelling with God’s people.(Scholem, 147) Later Jewish tradition often links this presence with the wisdom figure of Proverbs 8, especially the claim that “the Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago,” and with the feminine figure of Wisdom in the Wisdom of Solomon, who is loved and sought “to take her for my bride” (Wis 8:2–3). In both strands, the tradition circles around a reality that is at once a kind of blueprint for creation and a living presence within it.

As Daniel Matt writes, “the rabbinic Shekhinah has no character of its own and serves only to refer to God in His nearness to man.”¹ This emphasis on inseparability is essential: Shekinah is not a second deity, but the name for God-with-us. If the divine were purely masculine, there would be an impassible wall keeping women out of the most sacred spaces of Judaism, literally and figuratively. Matt goes on to describe how Shekinah in kabbalistic thought becomes a “distinct being” from God, a kind of personified presence.² Using the image of a king and his daughter, he suggests that this feminine presence functions as the window or mediator by which humanity gains access to the transcendent. He even summarizes Shekinah as “the caring part of God.” ³ In this way, Jewish mystical theology quietly locates the divine concern for the world and the nearness of God in a feminine figure at the very heart of its doctrine of God.

3. Christianity Conceptual Groundwork

Just as Judaism built a rich theology around the wisdom figure of Proverbs 8, so did Christianity. Under the name Sophia, the Christian notion of the divine feminine, the hypostasized Wisdom and presence of God, has provoked both fascination and controversy. Critics suspected that Sophia might function as a “fourth hypostasis” in addition to the Trinity, and therefore as a threat to classical dogma. In response, certain theologians, especially in the Russian sophiological movement, labored to recover Sophia as a way of speaking about God’s eternal Wisdom without multiplying deities. Sergius Bulgakov developed perhaps the most elaborate version of this in his speculative sophiology. In The Lamb of God, he writes that Sophia is “the revelation of the Wisdom of God; and she is also Glory, as the revelation of God’s beauty and All-Blessedness.” (107)Here the feminine principle is at least the mode in which God’s Wisdom, beauty, and blessedness appear, and at most an inner name for the divine life’s self-revelation.

Bulgakov’s daring account of Sophia also opens a path toward a Marian form of the divine feminine. He writes, “Divine Maternity is the human side of the Incarnation … Heaven could not come down to Earth if the Earth had not received Heaven.” (179) “Elsewhere he insists that “if the Son of God is made incarnate, it is the Holy Spirit, descending upon the Virgin and making her the earthly heaven, who renders him incarnate.”(179) The same attributes Bulgakov connects with Sophia, receptivity to God, mediation between heaven and earth, the visibility of divine glory, he also ascribes to Mary. It is easy to see how the logic found among other theologians, that Christ coming as a man redeemed all that is manhood, is also true of Mary as the female embodiment of the incarnation. (The creaturely locale of the divine Sophia) As in Judaism the Shekinah appears as and for God, so in Bulgakov’s Christian sophiology the divine Sophia is concretely manifested in the Virgin Mary, who becomes the personal center of creaturely Sophia.

4. Construction

The foregoing sections have established the reality of a divine feminine grammar in both Judaism and Christianity but have only begun to defend the central thesis. The key question remains: how can these concepts work toward feminist renewal in the Judeo-Christian tradition?

First, if Shekinah and Sophia are genuinely modes of God’s self-revelation, then the identity of God already includes the feminine. God is both paternal and maternal. Against epochs in which men have been treated as more valuable or more God-like than women, these figures leave no room for anything less than the full equality of the sexes. Without both sides of the coin, the divine is not fully God, just as humanity is not fully itself when either sex is denied equal dignity. The Judeo-Christian tradition positively contains the theological roots necessary to overturn the tides of history, but the mystical aspects of the theologies need brought into the mainstream. As human societies change, so too must the concrete applications of the liberating elements within their religious traditions; retrieving Shekinah and Sophia is one such application.

Secondly, the feminine theologies briefly outlined in this paper offer a view of creation that has a distinctly feminine shape and inflection. As the final sefirah, Shekinah offers access to the divine, the bridge between humanity and its God. Sophia reveals the presence and glory of God in creation, likewise mediating communion. More than an enticing or eccentric theological idea, these notions stand close to the center of Judeo-Christian theology: they explain basic aspects of the faith and respond to a central question of the Abrahamic religions: how we know God and do God’s will. It is true with all areas of debate over the Hebrew Bible, abundant texts exist that support multiple viewpoints. Androcentric, as well as feminist texts are there, which means the tradition needs to turn to a theological and presuppositional synthesis that carries out the Sophianic vision of reality in accordance with a text like Proverbs 8:22-36. If Shekinah and Sophia belong not at the margins but at the doctrinal core of Judaism and Christianity, then feminist renewal is not an external correction to these traditions, but an internal act of fidelity to their own deepest grammar of God.

Works Cited

Anderson, Leona and Pamela Dickey Young. Women and Religious Traditions. Oxford, 2004.

Ariel, David. Kabbalah. Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Augustine. Confessions. Hackett, 2006.

Bulgakov, Sergius. The Lamb of God. Eerdmans, 2008.

Bynum, Caroline. Jesus as Mother. University of California Press, 1982.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk. Beacon Press, 1983.

Scholem, Gershom. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead. Schocken Books, 1991.