Baptist Women in Ministry http://www.
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Carolyn Goodman Plampin http://home.netcom.com/~cplampin
Series-Subjects Relevant to an Informed Opinion about Christian Women in Ministry
LANGUAGE ABOUT GOD
First created in January, 1996, Revised January 10, 2007
Baptist Women in Ministry http://www.bwim.info/index.php/welcome
c/o McAfee School of Theology
3001 Mercer University Drive
Atlanta, GA 30341
(678) 547-6475
e-mail: BWIM@hotmail.com
Questions, comments, or suggestions
of bibliography or sites to include may be sent to
Carolyn Goodman Plampin
Coordinator Subjects Relevant to an Informed Opinion
1220 Vienna Dr., #504
Sunnyvale, CA 94089-2007
(408) 734-5141
Master of Teaching, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil, March 20, 1968
Master of Divinity, Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, June 2, 1978
Missionary to Brazil of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1957-1988
Academic dean (without title) and professor, Instituto Biblico Batista, A.B. Deter and
Seminário Teológico Batista do Paraná, Curitiba, 1959-1979
Academic dean and professor, Seminário de Educacao Crista, Recife, 1980-1986
e-mail: cplampin@ix.netcom.com
It must have been in the latter part of 1978 when my beloved missionary colleague, Roberta McBride Damon, posted on my seminary office door in Brazil a cartoon that she had received in the mail from the U.S.A. The caption under it said: "Pray to God, She will help you." It shocked me so much that I lost my breath! My concept of God has grown since then. Now I think that it should be no more shocking to say that God is like a mother than to say that God is like a father. The Bible does. All of the biblical metaphors for God increase our understanding of God. I have come to understand that to call God "she" is to ere in the exact same measure as to call God "he," for God has no sex.
Smith says: "'For thus says the Lord: ... As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you (Isa 66:12-13).' The first time I used the words of this passage in public prayer, "God you are like a mother who comforts her child," someone rushed up to me and told me I should stick with the way the Bible talks about God. When I pulled a Bible from the pew in front of us and turned to this verse, he was dumbfounded. I empathized with him because I too had been raised in a Southern Baptist tradition which loudly proclaimed to all that we really took the Bible -- all of it -- 'seriously.' Yet the warm, nurturing, maternal image of God was suppressed. I had read through and studied the entire Bible several times as a teenager, and I continued even more intensively through seminary and as a pastor and teacher in my adult life. But until I was fifty years old I had no appreciation of the maternal images in these passages. Since I hadn't heard about the feminine image of God, I didn't recognize it even when I read it. My experience in the church had radically influenced my interpretation of the Bible," (pp. 67-68).
Smith, Paul R. IS IT OKAY TO CALL GOD "MOTHER," CONSIDERING THE FEMININE FACE OF GOD.
Bibliography on Language about God
Clanton, Jann Aldredge. IN WHOSE IMAGE? GOD AND GENDER. New York: Crossroad, 1991.
Bloesch, Donald G. BATTLE FOR THE TRINITY: THE DEBATE OVER INCLUSIVE GOD-LANGUAGE. Ann Arbor: Servant, 1985.
Engelsman, Joan Chamberlain. THE FEMININE DIMENSION OF THE DIVINE, The Study of Sophia and Feminine Images in Religion. Revised Edition. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications,1994.
Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey. THE DIVINE FEMININE, THE BIBLICAL IMAGERY OF GOD AS FEMALE. New York: Crossroad, 1984.
Patai, Raphael. "The Masculine Godhead," in THE HEBREW GODDESS. New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1967, pp. 21-23.
Schneiders, Sandra M. WOMEN AND THE WORD, The Gender of God in the New Testament and the Spirituality of Women. New York: Paulist Press, 1986.
Smith, Paul R. IS IT OKAY TO CALL GOD "MOTHER," CONSIDERING THE FEMININE FACE OF GOD. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993.
