THE FEMININE GOD
Wisdom and Christ
Rediscovering God’s Feminine Side: Part Ten
So what about Jesus?
If any member of the trinity could be described as obviously male, it would be Jesus. Wouldn’t it?
In actuality, it’s not quite as simple as that.
Why? Well, because there is this character called ‘wisdom’ who turns up in Proverbs. Wisdom is portrayed as having a character rather than being a character trait. She gets about nine chapters in Proverbs all to herself.
Wisdom, speaking in Proverbs, says,
‘The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works…I was formed long ago when he marked out the foundations of the earth… Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in the human race.’ (Proverbs 8:22 and 30–31)
We are told that
‘by wisdom, the Lord laid the earth’s foundations, by understanding, he set the heavens in place.’ (Proverbs 3:19)
This sounds remarkably like Christ, who is the Word through whom God created. In fact, Paul explicitly says that:
Christ is the power and wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:24)
Theologians through the centuries have postulated that Christ and Wisdom are one and the same. Augustine made this link very strongly, seeing Christ as wisdom incarnate. Daniel Ebert, writing for the Gospel Coalition (which is nothing if not conservative in its outlook), also makes the connection:
In the Old Testament, wisdom undergirds the whole creation. In the New Testament, like Lady Wisdom of Proverbs 8, Christ is identified with the work of creation but far exceeds that role as sovereign Lord of the universe. (Daniel J Ebert IV writing for the Gospel Coalition)
This is not, of course, to claim that Jesus was really a woman. It is simply to say that Jesus, as God incarnate, embodies the whole of the person of God and not just the characteristics that we would regard as masculine. There is an interesting synergy between the understanding in both Jewish and Christian tradition that divine wisdom is regarded as feminine and the understanding that Christ is the incarnate expression of that divine wisdom.
I have to admit to being somewhat gratified by the fact that Wisdom is so clearly identified as ‘she’.
You see, while all the extraordinary and beautiful childbirth and womb and breast imagery is undeniably female, for those of us who haven’t actually had to use our wombs and breasts for the purposes of procreation, it leaves us potentially feeling a little left out.
Being a woman is not just about breasts and wombs, any more than being a man is just about beards and penises.
So I want to know what being female, created in God’s image, means when you take away the procreating bits. To be fair, we’ve already seen much of that as we’ve thought about the Holy Spirit. In the person of Wisdom, we get some more clues. Above all, there seems to be a creative intelligence as well as a grounding in nature. Wisdom is ‘a tree of life to all who take hold of her’ (Proverbs 3:18). And listen to this:
‘I possess knowledge and discretion…
Counsel and sound judgment are mine;
I have insight, I have power,
By me, kings reign, and rulers issue decrees that are just
By me, princes govern and nobles
All who rule on the earth….
I walk in the way of righteousness,
Along paths of justice…’ (Proverbs 8:12, 15–16, 20)
I love this picture of a feminine creative intelligence at the heart of the foundation of the earth. Feminine engineering. ‘By wisdom, the Lord laid the earth’s foundations, by understanding, he set the heavens in place.’
Do you think we could argue that physics and engineering, then, are essentially feminine sciences?
I am being slightly facetious. However. It is noticeable that the things with which the character of wisdom is credited are all things from which women have been excluded on account of the fact that they are women. Science. Engineering. Acquiring knowledge. Making laws. Holding positions of power. Dispensing justice.
If wisdom is Christ and Christ is wisdom, then within the incarnation is the feminine as well as the masculine. We can expect to see, in Jesus, femininity as well as masculinity. That feels like very good news to me.
Of course, it leaves us with a whole divine gender fluidity thing which I think is rather beautiful, but I can see how it could be disconcerting.
It also makes perfect sense to me that if God is incarnate in Jesus, then the full nature of God is incarnate in Jesus. Not just the masculine characteristics but the whole fullness of God.
Next part of this series:
To start reading this series from the beginning:
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References:
The Wisdom of God by Daniel Ebert
Christ, the Way: Augustine’s Theology of Wisdom by Benjamin T. Quinn
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