The Image Of God and the Idea of a Person
A few weeks ago I chanced upon a copy of a book, Women, Spirituality and Transformative Leadership, edited by Kathe Schaaf, Kay Lindahl, Kathleeen S. Hurty, and the Reverend Guo Cheen (Published at Woodstock, Vermont, 2012). Among the articles, I noticed a short piece by Phyllis W. Curott, “Thou Art Goddess: The Return of the Divine Feminine” (pp. 211–216). In it the author puts a case for thinking of God in feminine images, as a kind of counterfoil to the admittedly dominant patriarchal image of God that we have inherited. She highlights the need to speak of “the feminine side of the Divine” (p. 214), saying that this alleged feminine side of God “is not His replacement but His partner” whose return “remedies the isolation of a transcendent God with the partnership of an immanent Goddess.” Thus, this alleged feminine side of God is not intended to replace masculine images of strength, independence, courage, intellectual acumen, and aggressiveness, that are said to be attributed to men but often denied to women in our culture; rather, the feminine side of God is said to complement these masculine qualities with softer relational qualities, so that “cooperation can now balance competition, compassion mediate conflict, nurturance temper dominance, connection heal separation.” (p. 214).
Some might welcome this as a perfectly legitimate piece of feminist theology, a counter-balance to an over-concentration on the inherited masculine image of God in our tradition; but others might react quite negatively to it as simply a return to a kind of neo-paganism, a revival of the cult of the fertility Goddess, that has actually been around at least since the time of the ancient Hittites, as evidenced by the figurines in the Archaeological Museum at Ankara, or by the first century Romanized expression of essentially the same thing with which St Paul came into conflict at Ephesus: “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.”
I have some problems with the dichotomy that is drawn up between transcendence and immanence, and especially with the identification, which strikes me as entirely arbitrary, of transcendence as masculine and immanence as feminine, and also with the stereotyping of qualities of “competition, conflict, dominance, and separation” as masculine and “cooperation, compassion, nurturance, and connection” as feminine. Surely males are not always lacking in cooperation and compassion or without the capacity to nurture or to connect with others.
I am particularly concerned by the implicit assumption that suggests that terms that normally and literally apply to human beings, such as those asserting the gender differentiation of male and female, can be projected on to God, so that God can be said in some sense to be masculine and feminine. Is not this a classic case of fashioning God in our own image, rather than the other way around? In other words, the anthropomorphism here is what I find troublesome.
Surely, the point of worshipping a transcendent God is to affirm that God is beyond all our humanly formed images of him, as one who even when revealed to us remains essentially mysterious, sublime, and ultimately incomprehensible to our limited and finite human minds. For, if God is by definition Infinite, and ultimately beyond the words with which we seek to describe him, thus always transcending our human capacity to express him, we have to exercise a little caution before speaking of God in either feminine and/or masculine images. After all mental images of God can be as idolatrous as metal ones. So Curott’s article is not something I would normally take all that seriously.
However, I did take notice of it when I chanced upon it, because I had already come across a similar set of related ideas in a recent Report to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. The text of the Report to the 77th General Convention at Indianapolis in July, 2012, “I Will Bless You and You Will Be a Blessing.” See: https://www.churchpublishing.org/products/index.cfm?fuseaction=productDetail&productID=9743
Later this year I will be publishing a sustained critique of the theological essay in this Report, but for today it is sufficient to note that this Report also seems prepared to trade belief in the Transcendent Otherness of God for some anthropomorphic images of God, this time in terms of erotic sexual desire. Our sexual experience of human desire is said to be an analogy to a similar desire in God. And then the same troublesome human gender differentiation of “male” and “female” is also projected on to God. The Report notes, for example, in the Genesis story of creation, that God is said to say in Chapter 1: v.26: “Let us make man in our own image” and then in the very next verse “Male and female created he them.” The juxtaposition of these two statements, is then understood to involve a logical connection or entailment: for us to be made in the image of God and to be made male and female, means that God as God is in God’s self must also be male and female. This contention is said to be supported by ancient commentaries on the Talmud which suggest that the original human shared with God all of the possible gender characteristics, that were later divided between male and female. In turn these texts are said to raise many questions about “gender and sexuality in both humanity and God.”
I think this notion is very hard to sustain. For the Report’s suggestion that God made humans in his own image involves male/female differences in God, is entirely undone when it is noted that the “image of God” in humans is usually understood to be what differentiates humans from all the other animals. But, the animal world is also made male and female; gender differentiation can hardly be said to be the “image of God” in humans if this is what distinguishes humanity from the rest of the animal world. The Report’s attempt to argue that male/female intimacy is somehow reflective of the divine nature must surely be judged to be entirely fanciful. And is not the negative theology of classical theism which asserts that God is infinite, immaterial, atemporal, unchanging, impassible, and so on—designed to defend the transcendent Otherness of God, the ultimate mystery and incomprehensibility of God as God is in God’s self, and to prevent us from falling into the pitfall of fashioning God in such crude finite and anthropomorphic images?
So where do we go from here? I want to suggest not just that the idea of the “image of God” has nothing to do with what we call masculinity and femininity, or with gender differentiation in God, but that there is in Genesis at least a suggestion of an alternative understanding of things.
If we attend for a moment to the whole of the Genesis creation story, we find that it contains a series of fiats—let there be light, and so on. Then after all these fiats, God says in another fiat “let there be man and woman” who are created in God’s image. But then immediately after these fiats the language changes and God addresses the man and woman: In verse 28: “then he said to them…You shall……etc” . This suggests that being made in the image of God has to do with the capacity to be addressed by God, and to respond to God in a similar kind of way, and so to be able to enter into the fellowship of inter-personal communion with Him.
In other words, the idea of the “image of God” would in this case have something to do with the capacity of a person to be addressed by another and to respond as person to person, and nothing at all to do with gender. So let us explore this idea of the “image of God” as the interpersonal capacity to address another and to expect a similar response in return. For this purpose, I want to set the Biblical texts to one side for a moment and fast-forward to the fourth century to the formulation of the Doctrine of the Trinity, particularly at the hands of the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, and Gregory of Nazianzus.
Broadly speaking, there have been two different approaches to the doctrine of the Trinity—one Western and the other Eastern. In the thinking of the Latin West, largely dominated by the seminal thought of St Augustine of Hippo, the formula of Three Persons and one Substance has tended to dominate, with the idea of the shared divine substance providing the unifying element so as to make the three Persons One. In the East, by contrast, the unifying element is not so much the idea of a divine substance as the Person of the Father. The Father as the First Person of the Trinity, exercises a logical—not a temporal—priority (monarchia) as the origin of the other two. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds eternally and ineffably from the Father. Thus, the more dynamic concept of relationality predominates at the outset over the idea of substance as the controlling category. Indeed, the three Persons are said to receive their identities from one another by being related to one another for (and from) all eternity, for a father cannot be a father without a son or some off-spring, and sons cannot be sons without a father and so on.
The Cappadocian Fathers saw that there was a unity of being in the life of God so that each of the Persons was spiritually engaged with the others to such an extent and with such a degree of harmony that their wills overlapped and inter-penetrated. It was not that the Son did the will of the Father as a kind of subordinate, begrudgingly, out of a sense of duty or under duress. Rather, the Son gives himself freely to the Father in love by self-gift, and the Son’s will coincides with the Father’s will. St. Basil of Caesarea thus spoke of a “coincidence of willing” in the life of the Trinity. Alternatively, he said, the Father finds his own will reflected back to himself, freely, by the Son, like an image in a mirror. Thus the Persons of the Trinity are united by a common will and a common purpose. The three are of one heart and one mind, they share a common exchange of love. The three enjoy what might be called not just a numerical oneness but the qualitative oneness of interpersonal communion: each Person is related to the Others in adoring love.
Given this fundamental emphasis on the dynamic inter-relatedness of Persons, when Basil spoke of the Trinity in his Treatise on the Holy Spirit in 374AD, he spoke not so much of three persons and one substance, though this formula was already in the air at the time; rather, he showed a distinct preference to speak instead of three Persons and one Communion. The relational harmony of the divine life is the harmony of love, of mutual self-gift.
Moreover, through the Church’s proclamation of the Gospel, God calls us to share in his very own life, for by baptism into Christ, we share in the communion of God, the Holy Trinity. The communion of the Church is not just a kind of Platonic reflection on earth of a heavenly reality. Rather, the Communion of the Church is the Communion of God, the Communion of the Holy, the Holy Communion in which we are invited by baptism into Christ to participate. As the First Epistle of John would have it: “Our communion is not just with one another but with God, through Jesus Christ our Lord,” and we would add “in the power of the Holy Spirit” (see I John 1:3–7). It is here in turn that we ourselves discover our identities, as distinct persons in the one unity of being. We are thus “partakers of the Divine Nature” as 2 Peter 1:3–4 puts it. The image of God in which we are made and for which we are made, is something in which we actually participate; as we are by baptism in Christ incorporated into the life of God as a diversity of persons in one unity of being.
One of the great achievements of the Cappadocian fathers in developing their particular way of expressing the distinctly Christian doctrine of God was that, as a by- product of their thinking about the relatedness of the three Persons of the Trinity, they in fact discovered or re-defined, the idea of a Person. This was a most momentous step forward in the history of ideas. Up until their work on the doctrine of the Trinity, a person, or persona had been understood in couple of different ways: The first was drawn from the context of Greek drama where the term prosopon or “face” was used to refer to the mask that was held up by the actor and spoken through. The mask or prosopon later became the role played by the actor, and this meaning carried over into the Latin persona. Indeed, we still speak in English today of the persona as a role, the persona of a father in the home, or of his persona as the boss when the same individual assumes his work-place role in the office. The difficulty with this view of a person for the Early Fathers was that it suggested that God acted in three different roles, and this led to what was defined as the heresy of modalism, one God acting in three successive modes—for example, as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifer. This is the heresy of Sabellianism.
However, another meaning of the concept of a persona in the Roman Empire was where a person or persona was an individual with a legal status, a citizen of the empire, who possessed certain civil rights and privileges. A person in this sense could own slaves and property, and so on, who in today’s language could “sue and be sued.” In the first instance this meaning of the term could be picked up by the Fathers who saw that the Three Persons of the Trinity were equal in divinity, and therefore, of equal status and dignity. The Son was not subordinate to the Father; he had the same right as the Father to be honored in worship, and the same could be said of the Holy Spirit. But such thinking suggested the noxious idea that the Persons of the Trinity were three separate individuals, each with the same status and rights. This unfortunately led straight into the heresy of “Tri-theism.”
In the course of their reflection on the nature of God and the harmonious life of Three distinct and identifiable Persons in one Unity of Being, the Fathers came to define the idea of a person, or persona, as distinct from the inherited ideas both of a single individual acting in three ways or modes, or three separate and distinct individuals with equal legal rights. They came to appreciate that the basic difference between a human individual and a human person, is precisely that by definition an individual is conceived of in separation from others, as a discrete being, over against others and unrelated to others. A person, by contrast, is the exact opposite. A person is a human in relation to others, involved in inter-personal give and take. That is why we think of self-service vending machines and ATMs as impersonal: they do not facilitate any interpersonal give and take; indeed, they eliminate the need for any interchange or engagement between persons. So to be a person, by contrast with a human individual, is to be in relation with others. Relationality is basic to our understanding of who we are as persons, and we find our personal identity in relation to others.
All this is Biblically rooted in the text of scripture, starting with the idea of the God who creates us “in his own image.” God is One who addresses us, and from us he can anticipate a similar response in prayer and praise. The image of God in us is our personalness, the capacity to enter into relations with others, to be addressed by them and to respond in a similar way. It is no accident that the primary category of God’s revelation is his Word, calling us to obedient discipleship.
I think this means that the “image of God” is not some kind of Platonic reflection on earth of the God of heaven that we as individuals have to try on earth to emulate. For if the Communion of the Church to which we are admitted by Baptism is the Communion of God, the Communion of the Holy—so we really are “partakers of the Divine nature,” not just pale reflections of an imagined divine nature, but rather, the image of God as something in which we concretely participate.
And this takes us back to the point with which I began. The book of essays containing the piece by Phyllis Curott promotes the view on its dust jacket that “listening and collaboration” are feminine characteristics. As we noted at the outset, Phyllis Curnott herself thinks that connectedness, co-operation, and relationality are feminine characteristics to be contrasted with the masculine. But ideas of the intimate inter-connectedness of persons, inter-personal cooperation, and relational harmony are essential elements within the traditional orthodox Trinitarian view of God as three Persons and one Communion. Indeed, these are qualities that apply to persons as distinct from mere individuals. We find them in both males and females equally without any hint of discrimination, precisely as persons created in God’s image, and particularly as we are all by baptism incorporated into the life of the God in whose image we are thus continually re-made.
