Archive: Patriarchy and Language

by Roland M. Frye

Feminist theology often defends the use of gender-inclusive language for the godhead by arguing that the vision of the biblical writers was bound by the patriarchal limits of their society and that they could not recognize the possibilities inherent in the idea of God as Mother or in affirming both the fatherhood and the motherhood of God. They thought of God as Father rather than Mother because they were culturally conditioned or even controlled, and we are told that we in the twentieth century should correct those “errors.” It is a plausible debating point, but it happens to be wrong. Far from being unable to conceive of worshiping female deities, the ancient Jewish and Christian authors of our Bible were more aware than we of the range and implications of polytheistic alternatives. They were surrounded and at many times almost engulfed by cults worshiping the Great Mother, along with other divinities of both sexes. Further, pagan societies in the ancient world who worshiped female deities were surely no less patriarchal than were the ancient Hebrews. The biblical authors were more familiar with the alternative than we are, and their awareness was both direct and existential.

Biblical scholar Elizabeth Achtemeier puts it this way: “It is not that the prophets were slaves to their patriarchal culture, as some feminists hold. And it is not that the prophets could not imagine God as female; they were surrounded by people who so imagined their deities. It is rather than the prophets, as well as the Deuteronomists and Priestly writers and Jesus and Paul, would not use such language because they knew, and had ample evidence from the religions surrounding them, that female language for the deity results in a basic distortion of the nature of God and of his relation to his creation.”

Roland M. Frye is the Felix E. Schelling Professor of English Literature Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. This is excerpted from “Language for God and Feminist Language: Problems and Principles” (Princeton, NJ: Center of Theological Inquiry, 1988).