If you would like a review copy of the print version of my new book:

Tim Bulkeley, Not Only a Father: Talk of God as Mother in the Bible & Christian Tradition (Signs) Auckland: Archer Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-1468091373

Please contact me, please say both where you expect to publish the review (blogs are quite acceptable though a full review rather than a short note would be good) and when you are expect to write it. There are no conditions and you should be as critical as you normally would.

Psalm 90 makes a fine reading for a new year. Through the psalm, time (and especially the haunting disparity between short brutish human time and the timeless divine reality) is a strong theme. The psalm is peppered with time words:

• dor generation in v.1 (x2)
• b’terem before in v.2
• shanah year in vv.4, 5, 9, 10 (x3), 15
• yom day in vv.4, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15
• ashmorah night watch in v.4
• boqer morning in v.5, 6, 14
• ereb evening in v.6
• chish quickly in v.10

The psalm opens in the distant past with a heading associating it with Moses the great leader from Israel’s pre-monarchic origins.¹

The rest of the first verse forefronts the two key ideas of the psalm, time and our relationship with God. The wording of the opening stresses the persons involved. Very literally it would read: “Lord, a dwelling, you, you have been for us from generation to generation.”

This attention to time carries on through the psalm, and is straightaway extended in the next verse from a human timescale from “generation to generation” to extend from before the birth of the world into the “age”²  to come:

Before the mountains were born
or ever you had given birth to the earth and the world,
from age to age you are God.

From verse 3 to 11 the focus on time stresses time and again that the human and the divine timescales are incommensurable, and that humans suffer the divine wrath. This is not a psalm for the faint hearted, or for people living the comfortable smooth lives our TVs and magazines tell us should be ours. This psalm is not compatible with the Western dream.

But it “works” in a world full of natural disaster: earthquakes (still going on in Christchurch after over a year), floods (and even the minor ones in the Bay of Plenty yesterday cause pain and disruption), and all of man’s inhumanity to man (although 2011 was a year with more glimpses of hope for Burma that anyone expected as 2012 begins the Army is still attacking ethnic villages and destroying their crops, the political prisoners kept in inhuman conditions in the jails can still be counted as over a thousand).

Ps 90:10 is often quoted in something approximating to the fairly literal KJV: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years” this with its mention of strength suggests (or in the last few generations reminds us) that we might even live longer. However, in the psalm the effect is quite different, to quote the whole verse:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labour and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

The whole point of the verse is that even if our life is long it is marked (sooner or later) by toil and trouble, and in any case (by any measure but our own pitifully brief one) are so short. Anyone who has reached “a certain age”³ will recognise how the years begin to fly away faster and faster.

So far, if I have presented it as I think it should be read, Psalm 90 is as far from contemporary cheery upbeat “worship songs” as it is possible to be ;)

Yet, it was my grandmother’s favourite psalm. Perhaps because the hymn based on it “Our God, our help in ages past…” used to be sung every “Remembrance Sunday”, and she had cause to remember. Her groom, my father’s father, was killed in the first world war leaving his new wife and toddler. Psalm 90 is a good new year reading in such circumstances. For as well as human mortality it reminds us of the divine author and finisher of our lives. “…our hope for years to come!”

There are two more reasons why this psalm is a favourite of mine. It is one of the few passages in Scripture to deal seriously and in any depth with human aging. And it contains one of the Bible’s few descriptions of creation as birthing:

Before the mountains were born
or ever you had given birth to the earth and the world,
from age to age you are God. (Ps 90:2)

As a result it gets a brief appearance in my new book Not Only a Father,⁴ and will deserve much fuller treatment in the one on human aging, if I ever write it ;)

1. Although there is considerable evidence that the headings may have been added to psalms after they were first written and used, there is no textual evidence for them being absent from the psalms that have them in most modern translations. Rather the reverse the early Greek  translation and the Qumran psalms scrolls seem to have more of these headings, suggesting that they were later additions.
2. Whatever exactly ‘olam means.
3. 50, 40, 30…?
4. I will add a link to the print version soon, for now the text is already available online in discussable format.

Photo by sean dreilinger

See also: Jesus and talk of God as father (part one)

When thinking about Jesus’ talk of God as father it is useful to examine how, in fact, he pictured God the Father. What did he mean by calling God ‘father’? To set this question in context it is helpful to consider the cultural stereotypes of father that were common in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and the Roman Empire. Authority and discipline (especially the disciplining of male children) were strong and frequent overtones of father-language in the ancient world. Pilch explained the cultural stereotypes of parents in the biblical world like this:

Clearly, the father is viewed as severe, stern and authoritarian; the mother is viewed as loving and compassionate. Children respect and fear the father but love the mother affectionately even after they are married.¹

Such an understanding of the stern authoritarianism is almost absent² from father-talk in the Gospels. Rather, in Jesus’ speech, fathers feed and clothe their children (Matt 6:26-32; Luke 11:1-2, 13; 12:30; John 6:32 cf. Luke 24:49; John 6:27); give gifts to both good and bad children (Matt 5:45); are forgiving rather than punishing (Matt 6:14-15; 18:35; Mark 11:25; Luke 6:36 though the father does judge, in John 5:45; 8:16 but cf. 5:22); God as father deals with “infants” and “little ones” (Matt 11:25; 18:14; Luke 10:21). This divine “father” acts in ways which often fit the ancient world’s cultural stereotype of the mother more closely than they do the expectations of fatherly behaviour.

Herd of goats (photo by AlMare)

On Facebook yesterday I was prompted to reflect on the oddities that our herd mentality imposes on humans. We often signal words that name these “herds” linguistically (rightly or wrongly)¹ by giving nouns that name human herds capital letters. Thus I am catholic but not Catholic in my tastes.²

Capitalisation to indicate herd membership is a handy tool. But it can make life complex.

Am I egalitarian or am I complementarian? Surely the answer has to be yes. As a Congolese student replied when my American colleague (who liked things to be precise) asked if he spelled his name with or without a hyphen – he did, he spelled it either way! I am egalitarian, I believe that God created men and women equally and of equal worth and with equal “inalienable rights”. I am also a complementarian, I am delighted that God made men and women different, to return to teaching classes comprised (as they were 20 years ago) almost entirely of men would be horrible!

But rewrite the question: Am I a Complementarian? and I have to answer “no”. For to answer “yes” to that question would imply agreeing with the lunatic posturings of those insecure human males who seem to think that if women are allowed to be really equal they will outperform them. On the other hand, I am not too keen to label myself as Egalitarian. For then I’d be tarred with the brush of those stupid enough to pretend that there are no consistent gender differences, and while Barbara can and did bear and birth babies I cannot, and I like to respect such brute facts.

So, on this issue am I a E/egalitarian and/or C/complementarian? Yes I am if you wish to label me and my views on issues of gender please refer to me as an E/egalitarian and/or C/complementarian !

1. All you orthographic pedants can have a field-day discussing which ;)
2. Though actually this statement, made by way of example, may not be true, I suspect in many things I’d be both, though I am not at all a member of the Catholic “herd”.

A search for "Christ as a man" brought up this photo by mararie

I have just posted another short section to my online discussable book on motherly talk of God Not Only a Father which addresses the question of how The Nature of Christ as a Man interacts with my ideas of the (non)gendering of God.

Not Only a Father  is an attempt at a new way of writing a book, discussing it with people as it is written. So the text currently on the site is subject to change, but I need your comments and questions or objections to help make this work. So please visit, comment/argue with me, and/or get your friends involved :)

Image from a pot found at Kuntillet Ajrud above the inscription mentioning "Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah" (from Wikipedia)

The God of the Bible is aniconic,¹ meaning never to be painted, sculpted or drawn. The second commandment forbids all idols, even images of the true God. In a world of gods and goddesses, both sculpted and drawn, the Bible pictures God with words alone.

Yet God is person, not an abstract philosophical concept. The Old Testament reveals God as person at the deepest level, using God’s personal name. Indeed, later tradition, through respect and fear, refused to pronounce God’s name, reading simply “Lord”, so that we no longer know how people pronounced the consonants yhwh. The best guess is “Yahweh”.

The name of the not-to-be-pictured-God even had abbreviations “Yah” and “Yahu” (a nickname?), in the exclamation “Halleluia”² (“Praise Yah!”) and in names like “Elijah” (Eli Yahu in Hebrew). In a previous generation, an Old Testament scholar would say, “His personhood… is involuntarily thought of in terms of human personality… not the spiritual nature of God.”³

The people of Canaan and every other ancient near Eastern culture, except that portrayed in the Bible, depicted gods and goddesses with statues based on human and animal forms. People thought of them as either male or female. Only the Bible’s aniconic God could avoid being of one sex or the other.

Biblical history shows that Israel’s folk religion was seldom as pure as biblical law demanded. At “high places” across Palestine and even in Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, Jews worshipped the Lord alongside Asherah poles representing a goddess. Popular religion often confused the real God, the Lord, Yahweh, with the Canaanite god, Ba‘al (whose name means “lord” or “master”). Yet archaeologists have found no proof of Yahweh in pictorial form. (Some people claim that one picture shows Yahweh, and his wife! The drawing is on an ostracon⁴ from Kuntillet Ajrud, an Israelite fortress in Sinai occupied early in the monarchic period). The text speaking of Yahweh and “his Asherah”, has with it three stick figures, two presumed male and female, and a seated (female?) figure playing a lyre. The text reads, “I bless you by yhwh and his ashera”. Yhwh is God’s name and Ashera could be the goddess. If this is so, and if the stick figures represent the text, though they are crude beside a beautifully written text, then here is an Israelite picture of God. That this is unique, and from a distant outpost, at least shows how strongly Israelites prohibited carved images!⁵

Psalm 131

The Bible wanted people to imagine God in words. In the Old Testament, word-pictures about God refer to mothers, fathers, other humans, animals (including lions and mother bears) as well as inanimate things like a rock or fortress. Psalm 131 is a short but delightful example of motherly language.

1. Lord, my heart is not proud,
nor my eyes haughty;
I’m not concerned with things
too great and difficult for me. 

2. But I’ve calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul with me is like a weaned child.

3. Israel, hope in the Lord
now and forever.

Verse 2 poses problems for translators and I have followed NRSV and NIV⁶ . The picture is a “weaned” (the passive of gamal) child. Compared with the more usual picture of a child feeding at the breast, later the common motherly image of relating to God, this picture suggests a less demanding (even more mature) relationship, the weaned child who still depends on a parent but not on mother’s milk. In other Ancient cultures divine beings were represented by sculptures, such gods or goddesses in human form must be either male or female. Biblical writing, by contrast, shows a human clinging to God in a way that does not rely on a parent being either male or female. Why? The aniconic God is not limited by belonging exclusively to one sex or the other.

1. Aniconic, comes from the Greek word “ikon” an image or picture with a prefix meaning ‘not’, so not-to-be-depicted. The Jewish and Muslim religions have obeyed this commandment strictly, Christianity has often understood it as forbidding images of other gods!
2. The form “alleluia” is a version for Latin speakers, the Hebrew transcribes as hallelu Yah, “hallelu” being a plural imperative form of the verb “praise”.
3. Eichrodt (1961) 211.
4. An ostracon was a piece of broken pottery. Since writing materials like leather or later papyrus were expensive, these fragments became writing surfaces for all less important occasions.
5. See e.g. the review article Freedman (1987) 241-249.
6. But compare e.g. Dahood (1970) 238ff..

Previous post in this series: Not Only a Father: 1. Talking Pictures: a. Introduction
Not Only a Father: 1. Talking Pictures: b. Why Change the Habit of Centuries?

The god Baal about to throw a thunderbolt (from the Louvre photo from Wikipedia)

In view of this pastoral need (see previous post), we may ask why we evangelicals do not talk of God as motherly. Does some clear and strong reason prohibit this? A number of admired evangelical thinkers believe there is. Alongside the feminist argument for equality in God-talk, an opposing literature claims this is unChristian.¹ Key figure Elizabeth Achtemeier, a respected evangelical biblical scholar and teacher of preaching, posed a case against speaking of God as mother.² She claimed, along with others, that the Bible uses “father” not merely as a picture but as a name, so that to speak of God as mother speaks of another God, different from the God of the Bible.

Below, in the section “Yahweh or Baal” in Chapter 5, I argue that her conclusion is precisely the wrong way round. Those who speak of a God who is father rather than mother talk of a different god. Baal the Canaanite god was a male figure, as were half of the gods of the pagans. The biblical God is no more male than “he”³ is female!

1. Kimel (1992) collected notable examples.
2. See Achtemeier (1986, 1987, 1992, 1993) and my critique in “Shall we serve Yahweh or Baal?”
3. I will put gender-specific pronouns for God in inverted commas, indicating that, though the use of “he” is traditional for God, this implies nothing about God’s nature. “S/he” and “her/his”, or an impersonal pronoun the worst alternative for the living God seem clumsy. Quotation marks are intrusive, slowing reading, but this lets us examine our unrecognised prejudices.

Previous post in this series: Not Only a Father: 1. Talking Pictures: a. Introduction

View from the rock fortress of Massada (Photo by pboyd04)

In order to avoid some extremes of politically correct Christianity, and because they lack understanding of the historic and biblical background for a theologically sound talk of God as mother, many evangelicals speak of God as male. Yet there are pastoral, theological and cultural reasons to broaden our God-talk.

All talk of God is picture language; it cannot be literal. “No one has seen God,” as the Bible puts it.¹ God the maker of universes is so far beyond the capacity of human experience and language that only metaphor and analogy can provide ways of talking about “him”. And yet all pictures have some deficiency. Picture language depends on our experiences, comparing with some aspect of life to give it the power to be useful. But sadly, many people have not had good fathering, and some fathers abuse their children. Children may grow up in one-parent families. Father may be a distant and less loving figure than mother, and some children prefer one parent more than the other! Boys may be closer to mother and girls may prefer father.² A God who is father, not mother, risks being lopsided, and potentially unavailable to people who most need to experience divine love.

1. This is quite striking in John 1:18, even though “God the only son” (Jesus) “has made him known”, it is still true that “no one has ever seen God.” (In Greek as in English “see” is used more widely of understanding and experience and not merely of visual sighting). In other words, even when God was revealed in Christ, eyewitnesses still only knew God through a picture. Even though in this case the picture is God himself in human flesh, they still could not “see God”.
2. Could this factor contribute to the 3:2 ratio of women to men in church?

Lion by Leszek.Leszczynski

The central task of theology, talking about God and discussing the nature of true talk about God, is difficult. How can one express the ineffable? One cannot hold the infinite within human language. Theologians and Pastors have used a number of approaches to their impossible task.

1. C.S. Lewis (ed. Walter Hooper) Undeceptions London: Bles, 1971, 193 (article first published in 1948).

Last night we launched:

Reconsidering Gender: Evangelical Perspectives
Edited by Myk Habets, Beulah Wood

and two other books edited by my colleague Myk. The man is a book production machine!

I have a chapter in the Gender book: “The Image of the Invisible God: (An)iconic Knowing, God, and Gender”

The publisher describes the book thus:

Questions related to the issue of gender remain insufficiently acknowledged and explored in contemporary theological literature. These issues form the basis of significant unresolved tensions among evangelicals, as evidenced in debates over the nature of the Trinity, Bible translation, church practice, choice of language, mission leadership, decision-making in homes, and parenting, to name but a few examples. The essays in this volume are not meant to provide a monolithic evangelical theology of gender, but rather to provide evangelical perspectives surrounding the topic of gender. To further this aim, each of the main essays is followed by a formal response with an attempt at a concise and lucid perspective on the essay and pointers to further areas for investigation. Some contributors are complementarian while others are egalitarian, although who is what is left to the discerning reader. Regardless of one’s position on the issue, all will benefit from the contributors’ commitment to the further exploration of gender issues from the perspective of a broadly conceive evangelicalism.