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God Language: The Deeper Issue
Article by
Colette Volkema DeNooyer
Minister of Faith Development
and
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Published in
Perspectives
A Journal of Reformed Thought
March 1993, pp. 18-21
A decade ago, in the early 1980s, Richard Rhem preached a sermon entitled “The
Gender of God: The Humanness of Jesus.” The message brought that day pointed
to the wonder of the incarnation being not that God had visited us in male flesh
but that God had “pitched a tent” in human flesh. Then in 1986, in this journal,
Rhem developed that theme further in an article entitled “The Accident of the
Incarnation” using accident in its philosophical sense of not belonging to the
essence of the matter. Never in the decade of the eighties was there a ripple of
consternation from the Christ Community congregation. That the incarnation
transcended human gender differentiation seemed apparent to all. That God was
not choosing maleness over against femaleness in this revelatory act appeared to
stand uncontested.
Then in the Epiphany season of 1992, we determined as a ministry team that the
community’s commonly held biblical-theological understanding should find
bolder and more obvious expression in both our worship experience and our
liturgical forms. We had been sensitive to sexist language—using masculine
pronouns less and less in prayers, sermons, and hymnody, publishing in bulletins
our intention to be an inclusive community. But on a fateful Sunday morning in
January we proposed that the community join us in addressing God as “Our
Mother/Father who art in heaven...” The reaction from a vocal few was
immediate and sharp. We had touched a nerve and discovered that many had not
truly understood the implications of our earlier theological conclusions.
We had been naive. A good friend, learning of the rumble we had caused and our
dismay, chided us gently for failing to see that a little tinkering with language was
© Grand Valley State University
�God Language: The Deeper Issue, Colette Volkema DeNooyer & Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
hardly sufficient to get at the larger issue of male domination in the church,
reinforced perhaps by sexist language but hardly caused by it. He wrote,
True, we need to change our language. But I am not as hopeful as you
seem to be about language changes constructing a new social reality. An
emergent reality (a true novum) will forge its own language (as has always
happened, from the emergence of Christianity to Marxism), but I am not
sure, especially in our age when we play fast and loose with words, that a
reformation in language will bring a reformulation of social reality.
Rescripting the present “paradigm” merely relieves points of potential
rupture and allows the old story to continue.
He was alerting us to the painful reality that little real change happens until there
is a reduction to chaos. He cites Simone Weil who wrote of the necessity of
“decreation.” His final shot was a suggestion that we fully engage the issue, for it
might just be time for us all “to chaoticize, deconstruct, decreate.”
After such a cogent puncturing of our noble project we were forced to plunge
more deeply into the relationship of language and social reality. Our friend is
quite right; we are dealing with a paradigm shift of major proportion. In
Speaking the Christian God, Janet Martin Soskice cites Rosemary Radford
Ruether making the point sharply:
We cannot simply add the “mothering” to the “fathering” God, while
preserving the same hierarchical patterns of male activity and female
passivity. To vindicate the “feminine” in this form is merely to make God
the sanctioner of patriarchy in a new form. (“The Female Nature of God,”
Speaking the Christian God, 66)
Soskice adds,
Similarly, tinkering with the language of the liturgy, changing “he” to “he
and she,” may be a cosmetic change which, from the feminists’ point of
view, conceals a more profound and idolatrous teaching to pray to a male
God. (Speaking the Christian God, 86)
What this foray into language has revealed is the critical challenge that feminist
theology throws out to the classical Trinitarian and Christological creedal
formulations that came to expression in the philosophical language and
conceptuality of the first five centuries of church history. Such an expression was
a proper and necessary translation of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth
and the experience of the apostolic community, but it was a culturally
conditioned translation fully as much as any contemporary theological
formulation in the post-modem paradigm (e.g., liberation, black, or feminist
theology).
© Grand Valley State University
�God Language: The Deeper Issue, Colette Volkema DeNooyer & Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
Hans Küng contends that, ironically, it was Karl Barth who inaugurated the postmodern paradigm that is so explicitly grounded in human experience (the
experience of suffering and oppression). Barth had turned sharply from
experience as the ground for knowledge of God. His particular target was
Schleiermacher, who grounded faith in God in the “feeling of absolute
dependence.” Barth found the Protestant liberalism of the nineteenth century so
in tune with European culture that there was no word of judgment or grace to
address to the social chaos in the aftermath of the First World War. In his
struggle to find a word for preaching, he wrestled with Paul’s “Letter to the
Romans.” He found there the God who is “Wholly Other.” His conviction about
the deceitfulness of human experience was confirmed when he witnessed his esteemed professors of theology sign on with Hitler’s National Socialism, the
movement that led to the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust.
His whole great theological project was posited on the conviction that only God
reveals God; knowledge of God is the gift of God effected by the miracle of the
Holy Spirit. Against Brunner he denied that there is anything in the human
person that provides a “point of contact” for divine revelation.
Such a radical position drew criticism. Bonhoeffer spoke of Barth’s theology as a
“house without doors.” There was no way to get in if one were not already in.
Bonhoeffer called it “Revelational Positivism.” Paradoxically, from the
perspective of the present it is evident that Barth’s theology did not arise apart
from his own personal, existential experience; it was precisely in reaction to that
experience that his theology took shape!
After Barth turned the tide of European theology in the first half of this century,
the pendulum began to swing back to the pole of experience. In the revision of his
Christian Faith (1985), Hendrikus Berkhof added one entirely new section—
paragraph ten—entitled “Revelation and Experience.” The place of experience
also played a considerable role in his Introduction to the Study of Dogmatics
(1982). He points to some theologians through the centuries who have a special
gift for sensing shifts taking place in a given culture and in human perception—
people like Augustine, Luther, Wesley, Barth, and Küng, who experience
existence very differently from previous generations. In such instances new
experience calls forth a new language of faith. In former times such prophetic
voices have been labeled heretical. But today there is a growing recognition and
acceptance of a plurality of faith formulations. For, as Berkhof writes, “someone
may be so driven by a series of experiences that his personal faith and theology
affect the very nerve of the tradition of faith.” He speaks of “ahead-of-the-pack”
thinking arising in recent decades from unexpected sources:
The unheard-of phenomenon of groups of believers, previously not at all
part of the dogmatic process, who began to intervene in it. Pacesetting
dogmaticians ... giving expression to the faith in a way that was hardly
recognizable to those who had learned to read the Bible from the
perspective of a very different set of experiences… In their best works they
© Grand Valley State University
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Page 4
give evidence of new discoveries made in Scripture. To the “official” practitioners of dogmatics they pose the question of what unconscious
conditioning factors have had their distorting or inspiring effect on them.
(26)
We have come to recognize that it is not enough to refer to Scripture, the creedal
tradition, and the transconfessional dimensions of ecumenicity “as the funding
sources of dogmatics.” This becomes evident when these are held in common, yet
opposite experiences may make our respective interpretations of the gospel
mutually unintelligible.
This is, of course, the flash point of contemporary controversy. Berkhof raises the
question, “[I]s it our duty radically to exclude the factor of our life experiences?”
But he then further asks, “Who can jump over his own shadow?” Of course we
cannot. The call for contextual theology has simply made us aware of our own
contextuality—the fact that no theology arises out of a cultural vacuum devoid of
experience.
In reference to the claims of Third World theologians and First World feminist
theologians for whom experience is the key to theological understanding, Berkhof
contends,
We cannot cancel out their bewilderment by proclaiming: “Not what we
say is important but what the Scripture says” or the question is, “Who is
Christ himself?” All our central words such as “salvation,” “Christ,”
“Church,” and “Scripture,” have a much more contextual shape and focus
than we are aware of. (71-72)
Rosemary Radford Ruether in her seminal work, Sexism and God-Talk (1983),
asserts:
What have been called the objective sources of theology; scripture and
tradition are themselves codified collective human experience.
She further declares:
Human experience is the starting point and the ending point of the
hermeneutical circle. Codified tradition both reaches back to roots in
experience and is constantly renewed or discarded through the test of
experience. “Experience” includes experience of the divine, experience of
oneself, and experience of the community and the world, in an interacting
dialectic. Received symbols, formulas, and laws are either authenticated or
not through their ability to illuminate and interpret experience. Systems of
authority try to reverse this relation and make received symbols dictate
what can be experienced as well as the interpretation of that which is
experienced. In reality, the relation is the opposite. If a symbol does not
© Grand Valley State University
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speak authentically to experience, it becomes dead or must be altered to
provide a new meaning. (12-13)
What the feminists have uncovered is the sociology of theological knowledge
putting the lie to the claim that its ground is an objective, divine, and universal
authority apart from human experience.
Here, of course, we arrive at a watershed of understanding. With our present
knowledge of the development of dogma, our knowledge of that process in the
early centuries of creedal formulation with the intervention of emperors and the
political motivation of popes and patriarchs, one can hardly deny an historically
conditioned understanding of all theological formulation. In Theology for the
Third Millennium, Hans Küng reminds us that new prophetic traditions are not
born in a cultural vacuum. New paradigms, while incorporating the truth of the
old paradigm, break through with new revelatory insight. Then at some point in
the process this new insight comes under the control of leaders who
institutionalize the inaugurating vision. A series of criteria are imposed to
determine the correct interpretive line, and soon the new paradigm begins to
ossify.
If, however, present experience is sidelined or denied a place in the continued
development of theological understanding, those for whom the symbols no longer
illumine their experience of being human may well drop out, abandoning the
faith of their foremothers and forefathers. Janet Soskice asks, “Does the ‘father
God’ have a future?” She answers:
If Christianity has a future, then the answer is probably “yes.” But it would
be reasonable for a dispassionate student of religions to wonder whether
Christianity will survive the rapid changes taking place—around the world,
not just in the privileged West—in women’s self-understanding. In my
opinion, Christianity now faces a serious challenge, and one that addresses
core metaphors, narratives, and ideologies. ... It may be that Christianity
will not meet the challenge or will linger on as a pleasing anachronism
distant from the life of the cultures it inhabits. You may well think we are
watching yet another stage in the death throes of a dinosaur. (Speaking
the Christian God, 94)
Christian faith need not die unless we cling to symbols and forms that no longer
mediate the truth in compelling fashion, idolizing the medium and confusing it
for the message itself. In his journal, Morning Light, Jean Sulivan writes,
Your certitudes—are you so blind? What are they generally based on? The
failure to deepen your knowledge. We rush past questions in order to
avoid anxiety....
Some weep for the certitudes of the past. We must preserve, they say, this
or that which was beautiful and good. Perhaps that’s true, but those who
© Grand Valley State University
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Page 6
complain like that are weeping for themselves. In the last analysis, we
shouldn’t weep but create. Gothic churches were built over Romanesque
structures, which were built over pagan fountains and temples. To create is
the only important thing, to rediscover the fervor that produced the thing
you’re weeping for. (123-24)
The legitimate place of experience in theological formulations given voice by
Küng, Berkhof, Ruether, and Sulivan among others seems to us beyond refute.
But refuted it is. An example is Speaking the Christian God, subtitle: “The Holy
Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism,” eighteen essays addressing the question
of the use of Father as a designation for God. Covering the spectrum from
moderate to strident, the necessity of the Father designation is defended as the
sine qua non of classical, Western, Trinitarian theology, indeed of Christian faith.
This is an excellent collection of essays for identifying that the stakes in the
feminist challenge run deeper than a superficial adjustment of pronouns. What is
maintained almost uniformly throughout from various perspectives—language
theory, worship, as well as creedal formulation—is that feminist claims must be
denied because they undercut cherished creedal paradigms as well as a
traditional orthodox reading of Scripture. Without the slightest apology or
concession for possible human fallibility, the opinions of Church Fathers and
early Christian councils are cited as pronouncements of eternal and divine truth.
Present experience of ecumenical councils, popes, bishops and church leaders
would seem to alert us to the ever-present political and personal agendas that dog
very human leaders. Our contemporary understanding of parliamentary
procedures and authorized committee reports should caution us that as Ernest
Campbell has noted, “There was a lot of good stuff left on the cutting room floor!”
Many of the writers in Speaking the Christian God seem to forget that the
distance of centuries removes us from the passionate conviction of the
opposition’s arguments as well as votes that at times were almost too close to call.
That is precisely the claim of Reuther. And her exegetical work is impressive. It is
remarkable that the appeal for preserving the Father designation in Christian
usage in Speaking the Christian God is replete with references to the writings of
the Church Fathers and the ecumenical councils but wrestles little with biblical
material. The defenders of the classic creedal formulations have not gone back far
enough! In absolutizing the formulations of the post-apostolic period when the
gospel moved out into a Hellenistic world, the writers in Speaking the Christian
God attribute an authority to those formulations that failed to recognize that
these were already translations of the revelatory events. These formulations
pulsated with passionate human experience in a cultural context that supplied
the linguistic and philosophical tools by which to bring that experience to
expression. But the experience of the post-apostolic age is hardly ours, and the
language and philosophical conceptuality are alien to us on the threshold of the
third millennium.
© Grand Valley State University
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Page 7
Stephen M. Smith in “Worldview, Language, and Radical Feminism: An
Evangelical Appraisal,” (one of the essays in Speaking the Christian God) writes
that we live in a time of massive cultural conflict. This conflict, he says, “is in
reality a clash of worldviews.” Right! And is it not about time? There was no
significant threat to the philosophical worldview within which the classic creedal
formulation came to expression until the eighteenth century. But consider what
has happened since. Not only have there been revolutionary breakthroughs in our
understanding of the physical universe, but even more significant for our present
focus, the rise of historical thinking has illumined the process of development of
human understanding.
Could it be that the classic paradigms, once the Spirit’s medium for the revealing
of the living God, must be dismantled to make room for a new paradigm that
takes up the truth of the old but makes space for the emergence of the new?
One theologian who is seeking to bring to expression a new understanding of God
in light of contemporary experience is Sallie McFague. She receives sharp
criticism from Smith for holding a monist world view, which she acknowledges,
but in the sense of panentheism, which The Oxford Dictionary of the Christum
Church defines as “the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the
whole universe, so that every part of it exists in him, but (as against pantheism)
that his Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe.”
The issue must not be whether McFague challenges and undercuts the orthodox
world view, but whether or not her models of God are able to illumine more adequately our present human experience as she wrestles with the biblical story and
the revelation that was en-fleshed in Jesus. In her probings, McFague is engaged
in the very process that is the responsibility of every serious theologian—testing
the received tradition and bringing it to fresh expression. Otherwise dogmatics
becomes fundamentalist, the mere reiteration of formulations that illumined
yesterday’s experiences, and that is idolatry.
A much more sympathetic reading of McFague comes from James Fowler who
writes,
She ... makes clear that we require new metaphors if our faith is to enable
us to make sense of our contemporary experiences.... In our religious
language we are naming ourselves, one another, our world, and our
relatedness to God in terms from bygone times. Such anachronistic names,
helpful in earlier times, are distorting and hurtful now. (Weaving the New
Creation, 61)
Brian Wren, a minister in the Reformed Church of England is well known as a
writer of meaningful contemporary hymnody. In his book What Language Shall I
Borrow? he addresses the concerns and issues that motivated him to write such
hymns as “Bring Many Names,” in which he expands our language horizons by
referring to God as:
© Grand Valley State University
�God Language: The Deeper Issue, Colette Volkema DeNooyer & Richard A. Rhem
Page 8
Strong mother God, working night and day,
Planning all the wonders of creation...
Warm father God, hugging every child,
feeling all the strains of human living...
Old aching God, grey with endless care,
calmly piercing evil’s new disguises...
Young, growing God, eager, on the move,
seeing all, and fretting at our blindness ...
Great, living God, never fully known,
joyful darkness far beyond our seeing ...
The poem that opens What Language Shall I Borrow? a poem written by Wren,
sums up his understanding that language can be one step in the process of freeing
ourselves from idolatrous attachment to earlier faith expressions.
The Main Question
If
every naming of God
is a borrowing from human experience,
And if
language slants and angles
our thinking and behavior;
And if
our society
makes qualities labeled “feminine”
inferior to qualities labeled “masculine,”
forming women and men
with identities steeped in those labelings,
in structures where men are still dominant
though shaken
and women still subordinate
though seeking emancipation...
Then it follows that
using only male language
(“he,” “king,” “father”)
to name and praise God
powerfully affects our encounter with God
and our thinking and behavior;
So that we must then ask
© Grand Valley State University
�God Language: The Deeper Issue, Colette Volkema DeNooyer & Richard A. Rhem
Page 9
whether male dominance and female subordination
and seeking God only in male terms
are God’s intention
or human distortion and sin;
For if
these things are indeed
a deep distortion and sin,
So that
women and men are called to repent together
from domination and subordination,
Then how
can we name and praise God
in ways less idolatrous,
more freeing,
and more true
to the Triune God
and the direction of love
in the Anointed One, Jesus?
His prolific production of hymns for worship is his answer to “The Main
Question.” And that brings us back to where we began. The letter from our friend
is full of profound insight—a little cosmetic tinkering with the language of
worship is not enough. We have to do with a far more profound issue, indeed,
with the necessity of a whole new paradigm for our speaking of God. And that will
probably come about only through chaos and decreation. But in the meantime it
is not unimportant to watch our language as a sign that the Christian community
is honestly listening for the ways in which God may be coming to us through the
voices of experience.
References:
Henrikus Berkhof. Introduction to the Study of Dogmatics. Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1985.
Rosemary Radford Ruether. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist
Theology. Beacon Press, 0010 Anniversary edition, 1993.
Janet Martin Soskice, “The Female Nature of God” in Speaking the Christian
God: Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism. (Editor Alvin F. Kimel).
William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., first edition, 1992.
Brian Wren. What Language Shall I Borrow?: God-Talk in Worship: A Male
Response to Feminist Theology. First published 1989; Wipf & Stock Pub., 2009.
© Grand Valley State University
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
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Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
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Rhem, Richard A.
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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English
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KII-01
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1981-2014
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References
Hendrikus Berkhof, Introduction to the Study of Dogmatics, 1989, Rosemary R. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 1993, Janet M. Soskice in Speaking the Christian God, 1992, Brian Wren, What Language Shall I Borrow?, 2009
Dublin Core
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RA-4-19930301
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1993-03-01
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Title
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God Language: The Deeper Issue
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Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought
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Colette Volkema DeNooyer & Richard A. Rhem
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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eng
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Article created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on March 1, 1993 entitled "God Language: The Deeper Issue", it appeared in Perspectives, pp. 18-21. Tags: Nature of God, Creeds, Historical Thinking, Metaphors for God, Nature of Religious Development, Theological Paradigms. Scripture references: Hendrikus Berkhof, Introduction to the Study of Dogmatics, 1989, Rosemary R. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 1993, Janet M. Soskice in Speaking the Christian God, 1992, Brian Wren, What Language Shall I Borrow?, 2009.
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application/pdf
Creeds
Historical Thinking
Metaphors for God
Nature of God
Nature of Religious
Development
Theological Paradigms