How Seeing God as ‘She’ Could Transform Our Faith
It’s Time the Church Recognised the Divine Feminine in Scripture
I know a priest who has the unusual habit, for a Roman-collared fella, of always replacing ‘He’ with ‘She’ when reading biblical texts that refer to the Spirit. I don’t know if any of my more hard-line fellow pew-sitting comrades have reported this apparent lapse to the powers that be yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Most Catholics, particularly older ones like me, are hard-wired into conceptualizing God as male. My Roman-collared friend, however, being no slouch in theology, has a genuine point in proclaiming the Spirit as She. Plenty of good scholarship shows that the copious use of Spirit in Hebrew scripture is decisively feminine. Put simply, in Hebrew, the word for Spirit (ruach) is feminine, and this occurs throughout the Hebrew Bible.
Scholarship also reveals that Jewish Christians fully understood and embraced this feminine Spirit (ruach) in the early centuries of Christianity. Indeed, as professor of history and religion Susan Ashbrook Harvey argues, the feminine grammatical gender role of the Spirit was significant for Syriac Christians. She writes:
“It seems clear that for the Syrians, the cue from grammar — ruach as a feminine noun — was not entirely gratuitous. There was real meaning in calling the Spirit ‘She’”
A…men to that! Fully acknowledging the ‘She Spirit’ has depth and weight. It is a game-changer!
That we find the “He Spirit” in Christian texts is a historical and, frankly, most unfortunate translation error. This seems to have occurred when the original Hebrew texts were translated into Greek and later into Latin, the official lingua franca of the Catholic Church.
I’m not saying there was a patriarchal conspiracy at play here to rebrand the Spirit from female to male. But hey, let’s not rule out that possibility!
Sometimes minor errors have big consequences, and this one, however it occurred, certainly did, because boy, did it stick. There is no shortage of Christians of this or that persuasion right until today who remain entirely unmoved, and dare I say it, even violently opposed to giving even an inch to such arguments about the original context offered by the Hebrew writing scribes. Or the early Christians’ understanding of the same.
“God is male!” They say, “It’s not up for debate!”
As for me, well, I’m entirely comfortable with embracing the feminine side of God. Of course, the ‘He Spirit’ gang has legitimate reasons to be scared about such an idea. Without a doubt, there are serious consequences of adopting the ‘She Spirit’ writ large, not least of which is an entirely fresh approach to gender equality. It is perhaps not incidental that those aforementioned early Christian communities were highly egalitarian and included women leaders. Something sadly lacking in the Catholic Church, right up until today.
If the original intent of the Hebrew scribes, and let’s face it, they were almost exclusively men, fully entrenched in patriarchy themselves, could knowingly embrace the Spirit of God as female, then surely, it’s now time to let the revolutionary ‘She Spirit’ fly.
May her emblematic attributes of peace and love fly high and seep into the hearts of the ever-recalcitrant old boys’ club.
Better late to the game than never, comrades!
