Institute Essay: Why God Is Not Mother

A response to feminist God-talk in the church.

Sexuality and gender issues continue to have a profound impact on church and society. Now some feminist thinkers are challenging the idea of God as our heavenly Father. (Fortunately, most evangelical feminists are more interested in fairness than in revising names for God.)

Elizabeth Achtemeier believes the issues in this debate penetrate to the core of the Christian faith. Not all readers will agree with every aspect of her analysis (as, for instance, our own J. I. Packer and Kenneth Kantzer disagree with each other about women’s ordination). Most readers, however, will agree with Achtemeier’s conviction about what is at stake.

No aspect of the feminist movement promises to affect the church’s life more basically than that movement’s attempts to change language for God. Rather than refer to God as Father, many feminists insist, Christians must be more “inclusive” in how they speak to or about God.

With the introduction of the first volume of the National Council of Churches’ Inclusive-Language Lectionary in 1983, such language has steadily made its way into the Scriptures, prayers, liturgies, hymns, and publications of the mainline churches, often to the dismay of the people in the pews. While inclusive language for God is less hotly debated in evangelical churches, the issue has wide implications and relevance for all Christians.

The radical feminists argue that women in the church have been oppressed since the first century, and that language has contributed to the oppression. By the use of generic terms such as man and mankind, males have come to be seen as the definition of what it means to be human. And the use of masculine titles and pronouns for God absolutizes maleness and gives men the right to rule over women. “Since God is male,” radical feminist Mary Daly says, “the male is God.” Claims feminist theologian Anne Carr, “God as father rules over the world, holy fathers rule over the church, clergy fathers over laity, males over females, husbands over wives and children, man over the created world.” Such a hierarchical worldview must be abolished, say these feminists, and one way to do that is by changing our language.

In many respects, women have legitimate cause for concern. They have suffered discrimination in the church for centuries. They have been denied respect for their learning and persons. They have been labeled the source of sin in the world. They have been kept from key leadership roles because they do not biologically “resemble Christ.” Discrimination continues today, with the Bible misused as its instrument.

Such discrimination is a corruption and fundamental denial of the Christian gospel. The Scriptures clearly proclaim that both female and male are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), that husband and wife are to join flesh in a marital union of mutual helpfulness (Gen 2:18), that the ancient enmity between the sexes and the subservience of women are a result of human sin (Gen. 3), that such enmity and subservience have been overcome by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:28), and that all women and men are called equally to discipleship in the service of their risen Lord. The Scriptures further show that our Lord consistently treated women as equals and that the New Testament churches could have women as their leaders.

It therefore seems only fair for feminists in the church to ask that the church’s language about human beings be changed to include them, so that males no longer define humanity. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible takes seriously that request, and in its translation, generic English terms have been changed to reflect the meaning of the original texts. For example, John 12:32 now reads, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people [rather than ‘men’] to myself.”

There is, however, a great difference between feminism as fairness and feminism as ideology, as Catholic thinker Richard John Neuhaus has cogently pointed out, and it is in relation to language about God that some feminists are most radically ideological. By attempting to change the biblical language used of the deity, these feminists have in reality exchanged the true God for those deities which are “no gods,” as Jeremiah put it (2:11).

IS “HE” REALLY “SHE”?

The feminist claim is that all language about God is analogical and metaphorical, and that therefore it can be changed at will to overcome the church’s patriarchalism and foster women’s liberation. The radical feminists therefore seek to eliminate all masculine terminology used of God, either by supplementing it with feminine terminology or by using only neuter or female images for the deity.

In speaking of God and Christ, some simply use she and her. For the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, others substitute Creator, Liberator, and Comforter. They avoid the excessive use of terms such as Father, King, and Master by substituting God, Yahweh (the Hebrew name for God), or Abba (an affectionate Aramaic word for Father). In An Inclusive Lectionary, the Bible’s Father is changed to Father (and Mother); Lord to Sovereign; King to Ruler or Monarch; Son of Man to Human One; and Son of God to Child of God.

Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether consistently calls her deity Godless, while Jewish feminist Rita Gross uses God-She. Others apply feminine usage only to the Holy Spirit or avoid the problem altogether by using impersonal terms for God such as Wisdom, Holy One, Rock, Fire, and First and Last, or neuter terms like Liberator, Maker, Defender, Friend, and Nurturer. Jesus is described as a male only in his earthly life, while he becomes Liberator, Redeemer, and Savior in his representation of the new humanity.

Those who attempt to justify such changes in biblical usage point to female imagery for God in the Bible or claim that the Catholic cult of Mary furnishes us with a tradition of female language and imagery in speaking of the divine. “If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery,” asks Rita Gross, “then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?” She continues, “Female God language compels us to overcome the idolatrous equation of God with androcentric [man-centered] notions of humanity in a way that no other linguistic device can.”

Several things must be said in reply:

• Biblical scholars agree universally that the God of the Bible has no sexuality. Sexuality is a structure of creation (Gen. 1–2), confined within the limits of the creation (Matt. 22:30), and the God of the Bible is consistently pictured as totally “other” than all creation. This is what the Bible means when it says that God is “holy”: he is “set apart.” “I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst,” he says in Hosea 11:9. “To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?” asks the the prophet (Isa. 40:18).

By thus insisting on female language for God, the radical feminists simply continue to emphasize the nonbiblical view that God does indeed have sexuality. In fact, some of them have misused the biblical concept of the image of God to say that God must be female as well as male, since both sexes are made in God’s image (Gen 1:27). That is a complete (or fundamental) distortion of the biblical understanding of God, who is without sexual characteristics.

• The few instances of feminine imagery for God in the Bible all take the form of simile, not metaphor, as literary critic Roland Frye has amply demonstrated. That distinction is instructive. A simile compares one aspect of something to another. For example, in Isaiah 42:14, God will “cry out like a woman in travail,” but only his crying out is being referred to; he is not being identified as a whole with the figure of a woman in childbirth. In metaphors, on the other hand, the whole of one thing is compared to the whole of another. God is Father or Jesus is the Good Shepherd. Thus the metaphor, as Frye writes, “carries a word or phrase far beyond its ordinary lexical meaning so as to provide a fuller and more direct understanding of the subject.” Language is stretched to its limit, beyond ordinary usage, to provide new understanding.

• The Bible uses masculine language for God because that is the language with which God has revealed himself. Biblical Christian faith is a revealed religion. It claims no knowledge of God beyond the knowledge God has given of himself through his words and deeds in the histories of Israel and of Jesus Christ and his church. In fact, it is quite certain that human beings, by searching out God, cannot find him. Unless God reveals himself, he remains unknown to humanity.

But the God of the Bible has revealed himself. Contrary to modern theologies (such as that of Sallie McFague) that claim God is the great Unknown and that therefore human beings must invent language for God, the God of the Bible has revealed himself in five principal metaphors: King, Father, Judge, Husband, and Master, and then finally, decisively, as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

If we ask, “What is the actual nature of God?” we must reply, “God is the Father of Jesus Christ.” As the Episcopal writer Alvin Kimel explains,

God is not just like a father; he is the Father. Jesus is not just like a son; he is the Son. The divine Fatherhood and Sonship are absolute, transcendent, and correlative.… The relationship between Christ Jesus and his Father, lived out in the conditions of first-century Palestine and eternally established in the resurrection and ascension of our Lord, belongs to the inner life of God. It constitutes the identity of the Almighty Creator.… “Father” is not a metaphor imported by humanity onto the screen of eternity; it is a name and filial term of address revealed by God himself in the person of his Son.

If one believes that Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh, the Son of God incarnate in time and space—a belief that feminists such as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Rosemary Radford Ruether and a host of others would deny—then there is no contradiction that can be made to the particularity of God’s self-revelation. God is not just any god, capable of being named according to human fancy. No, God is the one whom Jesus reveals as his Father.

Encountering The Goddess At Church

Recently I went to the regular Thursday Holy Communion service at the theological school where I teach. A highly visible feminist leader led the service, an ordained minister who has for some time had an uncommon fixation on the worship of the goddess Sophia, or Wisdom, poetically described as the agent of creation in a few biblical passages.

I come from a tradition that views Communion as a sacrament that unites the body of Christ. In all my 60 years of participation in the United Methodist Church, I have never seriously considered withdrawing from a Communion service because of a scrupulous conscience. This time I struggled with whether to attend at all. At one point, I told myself I should not because I might be tempted to do or say something rash. (The ugly fantasy of dumping over the Communion table flitted through my mind.) No, that would merely cause a stir and tend toward scandal and disunity. And this is my worshiping community, so I felt I had a right to receive the sacrament duly administered, even if occasionally by an unworthy minister. I decided I must go.

Bad poetry, worse theology

Our first hymn, entitled “Sophia,” sang the praise of the goddess Sophia, who “ordains what God will do.” “She’s the teacher we esteem, and the subject of life’s theme.” This was bad poetry, sung to the tune of Salve Regina, which Catholics sing in honor of the mother of the incarnate Lord.

With this surrogate hymn I began to feel more queasy. I wondered if I was in a place where some Lord other than Jesus Christ was being worshiped.

Then came the homily, addressed solely to feminists and those who readily make concessions to radical feminists’ demands. In the name of inclusiveness, all other audiences were demeaned and excluded.

The sermon focused not on a Scripture text, but on an event in the woman’s experience as a feminist preacher. It was a “victory” story in which a pious Methodist lay leader and other members were driven out of her church and forced to join another after they challenged her authority to offer the Lord’s Supper in the name of the goddess Sophia. She recounted triumphantly how she had preached on the virtues of doctrinal diversity and invited all members who did not agree with her to look for another church. She was apparently oblivious to the fact that in the name of inclusiveness she was practicing exclusion.

Scripture was imported occasionally into the service, but it was culled chiefly from the Apocrypha, Proverbs, and Psalms. She quoted the apocryphal Sirach, but only passages that seem to reify Wisdom into a deity distinguishable from the triune God. Then, incredibly, she likened the yoke of discipleship to sadistic and masochistic sex.

Could I in good conscience receive Holy Communion under these circumstances? I began to consider how I might inconspicuously withdraw from the service. And I confess that for a brief moment I did ponder a comic response: going calmly to receive Holy Communion while holding my nose. But that seemed out of sync with the very nature of the service of Communion.

I prayed for wisdom to know what to do—not to her goddess but to God, who by grace illumines our hearts and minds.

The preacher herself gave me the decisive clue. She urged those present not to wait to assert their authority in worship. She then offered the invitation to come to the Lord’s Table, not in the Lord’s name, but in the name of the goddess who was speaking through Christ. We were invited to Christ’s table, but only in Sophia’s name.

That did it. I decided that she was inadvertently correct, that I could not delay in attesting the authority of Christ in the worship service. As we were “passing the peace,” I grasped the hands of two or three women nearby, then quietly left. As I went down the steps from the chapel, I gave hearty thanks to God for his kind counsel of wisdom in a profoundly knotty situation.

By Thomas Oden.

GOD DEFINES HIMSELF

We find the same particularity in the Hebrew Scriptures. Once again, God is not to be identified with just any god. For this reason, the central commandment in the Bible, first contained in Deuteronomy 6:4, begins with, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” That is, the God of Israel is not identical with the diffuse gods known to other peoples but is one particular God who has done particular things in particular times and places. Principally, he is “the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exod. 20:2 and throughout the Old Testament). If Israel asks who God is, the reply is that he is the God of the Exodus. And it is that God of the Exodus whom Jesus also reveals to be his Father (see Mark 12:29–30). God defines himself in the Bible, through centuries of acting and speaking in the life of his covenant people, and it is only through that self-revelation, now handed down to us in the Scriptures, that we have any knowledge of him.

Several questions arise, however. The first is this: Why does God reveal himself primarily in personal terms? If God has no sexuality, if he is Spirit (John 4:24), then why does he not name himself through the medium of impersonal, metaphorical language? Why are not his primary designations Rock, Fire, Living Water, Bread, Way, Door, Refuge, Fortress, and other such metaphors found throughout the Scriptures? Put another way, why does the Bible insist on those awkward anthropomorphisms for God, in which he is described as having hands and feet and mouth like a person, and which are finally brought to their ultimate anthropomorphism in the incarnation of Jesus Christ? Why a personal God when God transcends all human personality?

For one, a God named primarily Rock or Door does not demand that we do anything. All those impersonal biblical metaphors for God are encompassed within a principal revelation of God as supremely personal. The God of the Bible meets us Person to person and asks from us the total commitment of ourselves: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5); “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). God asks of us primarily love in return for his love that was manifested in his dealings with us: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1); “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). No impersonal designations of God, except they be explained by the Bible’s personal names for him, can adequately express that gracious and demanding relationship of love with himself into which God woos and calls us.

More pressing for the radical feminists, however, is the question of why God reveals himself only in masculine terms. Scholar Elaine Pagels is quite correct when she states that “the absence of feminine symbolism of God marks Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in striking contrast to the world’s other religious traditions, whether in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and Rome, or Africa, Polynesia, India, and North America.” But why could a personal God not have revealed himself in feminine metaphors instead? God is never called Mother in the Bible and is never addressed or thought of as a female deity. That was unique in the ancient Near Eastern world; Israel was surrounded by peoples who worshiped female deities—Asherat and Anat, Nut and Isis, Tiamat and the Queen of Heaven, Demeter and Artemis. And such a masculine conception of the deity is still unique in our world.

The radical feminists argue that the names for God in the Bible have been determined by the patriarchal cultures out of which the Bible arose, but that argument founders on the revelation in Jesus Christ, as we have seen. These feminists have a very difficult time with God the Father and the Son, although some of them hold that the feminine element is introduced by the Holy Spirit, even though the Spirit, too, proceeds from the Father and from the Son and is one with them. No, the Bible’s language for God is masculine, a unique revelation of God in the world.

The basic reason for that designation of God is that the God of the Bible will not let himself be identified with his creation, and, therefore, human beings are to worship not the creation but the Creator (Rom. 1:25). To be sure, God works in his creation through the instruments of his Word and Spirit; he orders his creation and sustains it; he constantly cares for it; but he is never identified with it. And it is that holiness, that otherness, that transcendence of the Creator, that also distinguishes biblical religion from all others.

A GOD WHO BREAST-FEEDS?

It is precisely the introduction of female language for God that opens the door to such identification of God with the world, however. If God is portrayed in feminine language, the figures of carrying in the womb, of giving birth, and of suckling immediately come into play. For example, feminist Virginia Ramey Mollenkott writes of “the undivided One God who births and breast-feeds the universe.” The United Church of Christ’s Book of Worship prays, “You have brought us forth from the womb of your being.” A feminine goddess has given birth to the world! But if the creation has issued forth from the body of the deity, it shares in deity’s substance; deity is in, through, and under all things, and therefore everything is divine. Holding such a worldview, Mollenkott can say that “our milieu” is “divine,” just as Zsuzsanna E. Budapest can go even further and write, “This is what the Goddess symbolizes—the divine within women and all that is female in the universe.… The responsibility you accept is that you are divine, and that you have power.” If God is identified with his creation, we finally make ourselves gods and goddesses—the ultimate and primeval sin (Gen. 3).

But we can never rightly understand ourselves and our place in the universe, the Bible tells us, until we realize that we are not gods and goddesses. Rather, we are creatures, wondrously and lovingly made by a sovereign Creator: “It is he that made us, and not we ourselves” (Ps. 100:3). The Bible will use no language that undermines that confession. It therefore eschews all feminine language for God that might open the door to such error, and it is rigorous in its opposition to every other religion and cultic practice that identifies creation with creator.

The principal fight found in Deuteronomy through 2 Kings and in the prophets is with Canaanite baalism and with Mesopotamian star worship, in which God has been identified with his world. The New Testament implicitly endorses the separation of creation and Creator by carefully stating that before there was the creation, there was the Word and the Word was God (John 1:1). Indeed, prophets and psalmists and the New Testament are quite certain that the world may pass away, but God will not pass away, because God and his world are not one (Pss. 46:1–2; 102:25–27; Isa. 51:6; Mark 13:31 and parallels).

God, the biblical writers are saying, is in no way contained in or bound up with or dependent on or revealed through his creation. God creates the world outside of himself, by the instrument of his Word. Between God and his world stands the Word of God (John 1:2), which always addresses the creation as an object of the divine speech (see Isa. 1:2; 40:22, 26; Mic. 6:2–8). The world does not emanate out of the being of God or contain some part of him within it. He has not implanted divinity within any part of the creation, not even in human beings, and therefore no created thing or person can be claimed to be divine.

Rosemary Ruether has written liturgies for worshiping groups of women that celebrate the cycles of the moon, the solstices and the seasons, as well as the cycles of menstruation and menopause.

VANITY OF VANITIES

The assurance and meaning that this biblical understanding of the Creator’s relation to this creation give to faith, then, are profoundly important. First, because God is not bound up with his creation, that means that heaven and earth may pass away—we may blow the earth off its axis at the push of the nuclear button—but the eternal God is able to take those who love him into an everlasting fellowship with himself that does not pass away (see Ps. 102:25–27; Isa. 51:6; Mark 13:31 and parallels). In this nuclear age, the person of biblical faith can therefore lead a life not of fear and anxiety, but of joy and certain hope in God’s eternal salvation (Ps. 46:1–3).

Second, because God is not bound up with nature’s cycle but stands above and beyond its spiral and subjects it to the linear time of his purpose (see Rom. 8:19–23; Isa. 11:6–9), the pattern for human life is no longer that of nature’s endless round of becoming and passing away. It becomes instead a joyful pilgrimage toward God’s kingdom.

The feminists, who want to make Creator and creation one, should realize that there is no meaning to human life if it is patterned after and subjected to nature’s round. As Ecclesiastes puts it, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.… A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.… What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun” (1:2, 4, 9).

In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, no action takes place because all action is meaningless. Life goes around in a circle and finally means nothing. History is an endless repetition of events, having no goal or purpose.

Such meaninglessness results from a theology that identifies God with his creation. And that identification almost automatically comes about when feminine language for God is used. Many feminists argue that that does not necessarily happen. But feminist writings demonstrate it does.

This can perhaps most clearly be shown from the works of Rosemary Radford Ruether, perhaps the leading feminist theological writer in the United States today. Ruether wants to use female language for God, and therefore she names the divine God/ess. But Ruether, like many feminist writers, does not want her deity to rule over her. For them, God must be not a Sovereign but a “friend” (Sallie McFague) or a “householder” (Letty Russell) or the power of love-inrelation (Isabel Carter Heyward, Dorothee Sӧlle). Ruether therefore defines her God/ess as the Primal Matrix, as “the great womb within which all things, gods and humans, sky and earth, human and nonhuman beings are generated.” But this is no mere image or metaphor for Ruether. This God/ess is divine reality: “the empowering Matrix; She, in whom we live and move and have our being … She comes; She is here.”

For Ruether, then, this God/ess is very much bound up with nature’s life. Therefore in her book Women-Church, Ruether offers liturgies for worshiping groups of females that celebrate the cycles of the moon, the solstices and the seasons, as well as the cycles of menstruation and menopause. We “reappropriate the hallowing of nature and cyclical time of ancient pre-Judeo-Christian traditions,” she says. We “reclaim our true relationship with somatic reality, with body and earth, and with the Great Goddess that sustains our life in nature.” That is clearly a return to the worldview of Canaanite baalistic and Mesopotamian pagan theologies.

The result is that Ruether and all those feminists who want to erase the distinction between God and his creation finally share with the most radical feminists, who have abandoned the Christian church and faith altogether, a view of divinity that is at home in modern witches’ covens. Writes Starhawk, a self-proclaimed Wicca worshiper,

There is no dichotomy between spirit and flesh, no split between Godhead and the world. The Goddess is manifest in the world; she brings life into being, is Nature, is flesh. Union is not sought outside the world in some heavenly sphere or through dissolution of the self into the void beyond the senses. Spiritual union is found in life, within nature, passion, sensuality—through being fully human, fully one’s self.

Our great symbol for the Goddess is the moon, whose three aspects reflect the three stages in women’s lives and whose cycles of waxing and waning coincide with women’s menstrual cycles.…

The Goddess is also earth—Mother Earth, who sustains all growing things, who is the body, our bones and cells. She is air … fire … water … mare, cow, cat, owl, crane, flower, tree, apple, seed, lion, sow, stone, woman. She is found in the world around us, in the cycles and seasons of nature, and in mind, body, spirit, and the emotions within each of us. Thou art Goddess. I am Goddess. All that lives (and all that is, lives), all that serves life, is Goddess.

In such views, meaninglessness haunts human life. Perhaps that meaninglessness can be most poignantly illustrated by Ruether’s view of death. There is no eternal life for those of faith in Ruether’s female God/ess religion. Rather, the end she envisions for all of us and our communities is that we will simply end up as compost: “In effect (at death), our existence ceases as individuated ego/organism and dissolves back into the cosmic matrix of matter/energy, from which new centers of individuation arise. It is this matrix, rather than our individuate centers of being, that is ‘everlasting,’ that subsists underneath the coming to be and passing away of individuated beings and even planetary worlds.”

Such a view finally means that there is no purpose for the creation of each individual human being, and that my life and yours in our communities have no eternal meaning beyond their brief and transitory appearances on this earth.

EMBODYING THE DEITY

Most disturbing of all is the radical feminists’ claim to embody the deity within themselves—in other words, to be divine.

“I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely,” exults Carol Christ; that is the logical result of a religion in which the deity is believed to be contained in all things and all persons, and feminists who hold such views then become a law unto themselves. Indeed, for feminists Dorothee Sölle and Isabel Carter Heyward, there is no such thing as original sin, and the “fall” of Genesis 3 is good, a liberation into knowledge and action and reliance on one’s self. “We do not have to sit around all year singing, with Luther, ‘Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing,’ ” writes Sölle. No, “We are strong; we can accomplish things.” According to Sölle, “The most telling argument against our traditional God is not that he no longer exists or that he has drawn back within himself but that we no longer need him.”

God is in us, maintains Sölle, as our capacity to love. We are one with God in a mystical relation. We do not serve God; we manifest him. And because God is in us, all we need is love. That is the central idea in the Bible, she maintains.

To the contrary, however, in a world where torture is the rule in most of the globe’s prisons, where a person on a subway platform in New York City can push a woman in front of an oncoming train just for “kicks,” where little children in a nursery school can be tied up and sexually abused, where whole races can be uprooted or starved to death or burnt up in gas ovens, it must be said that Sölle’s is a naïve understanding indeed. We do need a Power greater than human evil—or, for that matter, a Power greater than even the highest human love and good, for it was the best religion and the best law that erected the cross on Golgotha. If there is not a God who is Lord over life, who intervenes, judges, and confirms, and who has given his final judgment and won his decisive victory in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then human evil will always have the last word and there is no hope for this world.

The radical feminists, believing themselves to be divine, think that by their own power they can restructure society, restore creation, and overcome suffering. But the tortured history of humanity testifies to what human beings do when they think they are a law unto themselves with no responsibility to God, and those feminists who are claiming that God is in them will equally fall victim to human sin.

The God of the Judeo-Christian biblical faith is holy God, the almighty Creator and Lord, totally other than everything and everyone he has made. We therefore cannot know and worship him unless he reveals himself to us. But with a love surpassing human understanding, he has revealed himself to us as the Holy One of Israel, who delivered her out of the house of bondage, and as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In that revelation, now mediated for us through the Scriptures, he has offered to adopt us as his beloved children (John 1:12; Gal. 4:4–7), to allow us to call him Father, Abba (see Rom. 8:14–17), and to know him as his Son Jesus Christ knows him.

If in trust and obedience we accept that offering of himself to us, he promises to be with us all our lives long, to guide us in the paths of righteousness, to give us joy in the midst of the world’s tribulation, to unite us in communities of love and peace with like-minded believers, to send us out to perform tasks that will give meaning to all our lives, and finally, at death, to receive us into his realm of eternal life and good that cannot pass away.

For my part, I can imagine no reason ever to reject such a God or to exchange him for those deities of earth that are “no gods.” Women suffer discrimination, yes; our world is full of all kinds of evil. But God is holy, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and by faith in him we shall always be more than conquerors, and nothing shall ever separate us from the love he has for us in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.