Of queens and fathers
Most of us can readily agree that God isn’t actually a man or male in some fundamental or exclusive sense. And I think many people understand the value in moving away from gendered language for God, with its implication that some humans are made *more* in God’s image than others.
But one of the most difficult issues in the conversation about gendered language in our liturgies is naming God as a Father. Fathers are male. And Jesus called God “Father,” and taught his followers to do the same. For some, that inarguable fact blocks any question about the role of Father-language for God in our liturgies. Whether you write a liturgical theology essay about it or just feel it in your bones, the upshot is this: Because Jesus uses this language for God, God must, in some ineffable, mysterious, fundamental way, actually be a Father.
Before my call to the priesthood, I studied cultural anthropology. Coming at the question of God’s Father-ness from that direction, it looks a little different. One of the fundamental tenets of anthropology is that our cultural maps shape our thinking, perceiving, and acting much more profoundly than we generally realize. To see what that means for this question of God-language, let’s start with bees. Specifically, let’s start with this fascinating essay, which started out as a thread on Twitter. Go read it — it’s fun — but the gist is: People thought queen bees were male — and called them “king bees” — because scholars operating in a patriarchal society simply could not conceive that the most important, and apparently most powerful, bee in the hive was a girl.
The “king” name stuck for centuries — even among beekeepers who saw queens laying eggs. (Fun fact for Anglicans: This author suggests that our own Elizabeth I may have been part of the cultural shift that allowed 17th century scientists to finally recognize the femaleness of queen bees.)
Of course queen bees aren’t really queens; they’re only slightly more like human queens than they are like human kings. Bees, and bee society, are very, very different from humans and human society. But we humans love to use language, and we love to seek understanding. So we described bee society using human social, cultural, and political patterns. That one bee seemed really important — and we call our most important people “king” and “queen.”
The Bible is a human book, inspired by God but written down by human authors (Book of Common Prayer catechism, page 853). It’s full of wisdom, vision, challenge and truth; but it’s also full of human biases and assumptions. For the Old Testament tradition, the patriarch, the great father of a household or lineage, was a dominant image of authority and power. Of course humanity, coming to know God, would think, This one God seems really important — he must be a Father. And when God birthed Godself into history in Jesus Christ, Jesus named God as a Father to evoke a sense of divine authority as familiar and affectionate — over against the prescribed and mediated sacrificial system of the Temple, and the golden god-king pomp of Roman religions.
Perhaps — try on the idea — God is named as a father not as a divine endorsement of human gender roles, but as an adaptation to them — even a concession to them. Perhaps all our God-talk, all our words and images, are approximations, gestures, metaphors, while God’s true nature remains as unknowable to us as the thoughts of bees.
