mutuality of interdependency. These images are beyond theism, but they are not beyond God. Surely we can now see that we have created the theistic God in our image, even as we asserted that it was the other way around. We then used this God to justify the dreadful things we were and are doing to our world. Theism is a false notion, a human idol that must die, and when it does, God—seen as the sacred dimension in all of life—must replace it. The minority voices in our religious past must become the majority voices of our religious future.
So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy. I experience God as the source of love calling me to love wastefully all that God has made, including the earth with its plants and animals. I experience God, in the words of Paul Tillich, as the “Ground of Being” calling me to be all that I can be and to affirm the sacred being of all that is. The worship of such a God could never result in the destruction of the planet that has produced us.
We have looked upward for a God above the sky for centuries, but we now know that this infinite universe is empty of supernatural invasive deities. We need to shift our vision to look within—at life, at love, at being.
The theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote that the “alienation of nature brought about by human beings can never be overcome until men [and women] find a new understanding of themselves and a new interpretation of their world in the framework of nature.” 20 That will occur, I believe, only when a new understanding of God is achieved. Good ecology requires good theology, and good theology alone will guarantee our very survival.
SECTION 3
THE BIBLE AND WOMEN
THE TERRIBLE TEXTS
Then the Lord God said: “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name…. But for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.”
Genesis 2:18–23
For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
1 Corinthians 11:8–9
7
CREATION
THE WOMAN IS NOT MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD
You [woman] destroyed so easily God’s Image [man].
Tertullian 1
P atriarchy and sexism are certainly not limited to our own Judeo-Christian heritage, though that is the channel through which these evils have entered most of us in the Western world. It is also through that particular lens that I will seek to trace their ramifications. Before beginning that, however, I need to note the all but universal quality among human beings of a pro-male, anti-female bias.
This realization points us, I believe, to the fact that there is something deep in the human psyche that fuels an anti-female bias. If it is not a human phenomenon, it is at least present in the depths of the male psyche, and since prejudice is always a reaction to fear, it must, therefore, be assumed that men’s hostility toward women expresses a primal threat that needs to be addressed. One has only to examine quotations from pre-Christian philosophers and from the sacred writings of each of the world’s great religions to glimpse the
So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy. I experience God as the source of love calling me to love wastefully all that God has made, including the earth with its plants and animals. I experience God, in the words of Paul Tillich, as the “Ground of Being” calling me to be all that I can be and to affirm the sacred being of all that is. The worship of such a God could never result in the destruction of the planet that has produced us.
We have looked upward for a God above the sky for centuries, but we now know that this infinite universe is empty of supernatural invasive deities. We need to shift our vision to look within—at life, at love, at being.
The theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote that the “alienation of nature brought about by human beings can never be overcome until men [and women] find a new understanding of themselves and a new interpretation of their world in the framework of nature.” 20 That will occur, I believe, only when a new understanding of God is achieved. Good ecology requires good theology, and good theology alone will guarantee our very survival.
SECTION 3
THE BIBLE AND WOMEN
THE TERRIBLE TEXTS
Then the Lord God said: “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name…. But for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.”
Genesis 2:18–23
For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
1 Corinthians 11:8–9
7
CREATION
THE WOMAN IS NOT MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD
You [woman] destroyed so easily God’s Image [man].
Tertullian 1
P atriarchy and sexism are certainly not limited to our own Judeo-Christian heritage, though that is the channel through which these evils have entered most of us in the Western world. It is also through that particular lens that I will seek to trace their ramifications. Before beginning that, however, I need to note the all but universal quality among human beings of a pro-male, anti-female bias.
This realization points us, I believe, to the fact that there is something deep in the human psyche that fuels an anti-female bias. If it is not a human phenomenon, it is at least present in the depths of the male psyche, and since prejudice is always a reaction to fear, it must, therefore, be assumed that men’s hostility toward women expresses a primal threat that needs to be addressed. One has only to examine quotations from pre-Christian philosophers and from the sacred writings of each of the world’s great religions to glimpse the
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