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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > October 1994

Moving Beyond Masculine Metaphors

The holy God is beyond all our categories, including gender distinctions of masculine or feminine.

By Bernhard W. Anderson

A great furor has arisen over the Re-imagining Conference—dedicated to reconsidering the ways we “image” or conceptualize God—held in Minneapolis in November 1993. Gathered together from various religious bodies, women were encouraged to reflect on women’s experience and to use feminine imagery when speaking of God. While many participants found the conference stimulating, they have since been accused of ridiculing Christianity and of replacing it with goddess-worship.1 Appealing to such biblical books as Proverbs, where Wisdom (Hebrew hokmah) is personified as a woman, conference delegates addressed God as Sophia, the Greek word for Wisdom. In the first part of the […]

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Endnotes

1.

See the report by Peter Steinfels on “Beliefs,” The New York Times, June 25, 1994, p. 12.

2.

Kathleen M. O’Connor, The Wisdom Literature (Glazier, 1988), p. 61.

3.

This is emphasized by Richard J. Clifford, SJ, in his essay, “Woman Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs,” Biblische Theologie und gesellschaftlicher Wandel, ed. by Georg Braulik, OSB, Walter Gross and Sean McEvenue (Herder, 1993), p. 61.

4.

Gale Yee, “The Theology of Creation in Proverbs 8:22–31, ” in Creation in the Biblical Traditions, ed. by Richard J. Clifford and John J. Collins (CBQ Monograph Series 24, 1992), p. 85.