Dear reader,
I’ve had the relationship between men and women on my mind over the past few weeks, and today, on International Women’s Day, I’m wondering about the way that relationship is often framed as one of competition.
What I want to suggest is this: perhaps the sense of competitiveness between men and women, while directly attributable to the Fall’s effects on our relationships, stems in part from our understanding of God. In other words, women are denigrated not simply because the way we think about women is wrong, but also because of the way we think about God.
I’m thinking here of the way that we view God as someone who competes with creatures. In my own Reformed tradition, which emphasises the priority of God’s glory in all that we do, this view manifests in the way we view the glory of humans as competitive with the glory of God. So, the more glory creatures have, the less glory God gets.
In this instance, the concern is to give God what God is due. Yet, it can be distorted, as well, as we see in the serpent’s tempting of Eve: he suggests that God is keeping something back from Adam and Eve. He promises them that if they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they will be like God—suggesting that they are not already like God. In eating the fruit, they grasp after God’s glory, not realising that they have already been crowned with divine glory by being made in God’s image.
If this is the way that we view God, then it makes sense that we will transfer that perception onto others. The other—particularly the other sex—becomes a threat to our own glory. Deborah is sometimes the victim of this way of thinking: the honour she receives as a judge and prophetess of Israel is misread as an indictment of the men. Her glory is assumed to be the result of men’s failure.
I’m suggesting that we need to rehabilitate the way we think about God in order to rehabilitate the way we think about women.
This is not because I’m speaking of an analogy in which men represent God and women represent creatures. That comparison has led into theological error already. Rather, it’s because how we think of God influences how we think of reality. As the creator, God’s character is reflected in the character of the world. Perceiving God as competitive with us deforms reality into a zero-sum game in which we cannot flourish as our whole selves and in which something is being held back from us. In this type of world, it makes sense to view women with suspicion, because if we have to be diminished for God to be glorified, then a woman’s glory must be diminished in order for men to be glorified.
So how then ought we to think about God?
Kathryn Tanner begins her short systematic theology insisting that God is in a non-competitive relationship with creatures. This means that “The glorification of God does not come at the expense of creatures. The more full the creature is with gifts the more the creature should look in gratitude to the fullness of the gift-giver.” Essential to this argument is that God is transcendent—so different from us, that we are not on the same plane. And so when God pours out from abundance, when God crowns us with glory and honour, divine glory is not compromised or diminished.
Of course, sin distorts our perception of glory, so that we think it means making a name for ourselves. If this is the kind of glory we have in mind, then no—our glory cannot exist alongside of God’s, because we are setting ourselves up against God. Instead, our glory comes from sharing in the glory of God, a sharing by which the Spirit makes us more the particular selves that God has made us to be. The humility that God calls us to is not a diminishment of ourselves, but a recognition of our radical dependence on God for all that we are and have—and that the gift of who we are and what we have is extraordinary and abundant.
To bring it back to women—not by way of analogy, remember!—how would such a view of God and ourselves transform the way we think of the other, the way we think about women? I want to suggest that if we view the world as an abundantly rich space created by an ever-giving God who does not require our diminishment in order to be glorified, then it doesn’t make sense to think of men and women as competitors in God’s economy. Instead, the more the Spirit shares divine glory with us in transforming us into Christ’s image, the more others benefit. My glory, because it is the glory of the abundant giver, will lead to yours, in a cascading movement of the Spirit.
This is why I think we ought to resist language and arguments that suggest that the good of women is in any way counter to the good of men. We ought to insist that when women flourish, men will flourish too—and that when women are silenced, abused, dismissed, and denigrated, men suffer, too.
It’s been a while since I’ve written, and with a summer in between these letters, I’ve had the chance to read for fun more than I usually do. Here are a few words about just a few wonderful books I’d recommend:
Jesus through Medieval Eyes by Grace Hamman: what a lovely meditation on the different metaphors medieval theologians used to describe Jesus!
The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge: this is the second Goudge book I’ve read, and it has made me decide to read everything she’s written.
Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda: I was blown away by Onda’s ability to describe music, and I’ve been recommending it to all of my students.
May the love of the Father enfold us,
the wisdom of the Son enlighten us,
the fire of the Spirit inflame us;
and may the blessing of the triune God rest on us,
and abide with us,
now and evermore.
from https://acollectionofprayers.com/2017/04/04/trinitarian-blessing/
On the road with you,
Laura