She really tried to talk me into believing in God the Mother. She also believed in the Trinity, consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so I'm not quite clear where the Mother fit into all this - shape-shifting, maybe?
To her credit, she had an actual Bible with her, of reputable translation, and kept thrusting verses under my nose. She assured me that she was only saying what Scripture said, and she wouldn't say it if it wasn't in there! I really tried to make sense of her claims. I think she was arguing that:
a) when God created male and female in His image, that proved His image was female;
b) that we're living in the end times, so the verses about mysteries being revealed in the end refer specifically to God being female;
c) the verse in Galatians about "if anyone preaches a different Gospel, he is to be accursed" doesn't apply to this new revelation because it's the same gospel;
d) When Paul is talking about the Jerusalem that is above and the earthly Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem is female, so God is female.
e) Something about "elohim" being plural, and sure that might refer to the Trinity, but it could also be interpreted as referring to His/Her femininity.
A lot of other things came into it too, like the order of Melchizedek, though I have no idea what he did to deserve that. Nobody had ever taught this poor girl how to construct a coherent argument.
I could have escaped more quickly, but I figured that if she was talking to me, at least she wasn't talking to someone else. She was so enthusiastic, so dressed up, and so utterly lacking in theology and logic. I encouraged her to keep reading her Bible, and said I thought that she would find it wasn't really saying what she thought it said...
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Sounds interesting. However, she could actually have made a better argument than she did if she knew her Bible better.
Last fall, I had to read some feminist theologians for class, and they made a lot of hay from the occasional descriptions of God that referred to a womb or to providing milk for us. That's the best place to start for arguing for a feminine God.
My own conclusions on this are that God uses analogical imagery like this in the same way he talks about his arm, eye, or whatever. These are concepts that he made physical in creating us as human beings, and he knows that certain of these concepts are the best way to explain himself to us. Incidentally, I also suspect that such references are a particular help to women who initially have trouble relating to a God who speaks of himself in the masculine, though not being a woman this is something I can never speak on with authority.
And women of course share in the image of God equally to men, but this does not mean specifically feminine characteristics predominate in God--to argue that would require explaining why, in decent translations, God refers to himself as "he."
Final note of weirdness: Julian of Norwich would sometimes talk about Christ our Mother, but still called him "he."
A better argument could certainly have been constructed for her point, and the verses you reference sound reasonable.
I suppose, if you get right down to it, _all_ good things in some way are images of a part of God, because there's nowhere else for them to come from. So in that sense, femininity is an image of God. Female humans are certainly created in His image. And God still chose to reveal Himself with male pronouns. There _is_ a mystery there I don't really understand.
Okay, Julian of Norwich. I thought there was a medieval mystic somewhere who talked about the feminine qualities of God. And am I right in remembering that the general reaction of the church to it was something like, "Well, you've got a point, but mostly, no"?
In any case, pouncing on someone in a crowded mall is just not an ideal set-up for reasoned theological discussion. I don't care who's doing the outreach. It's practically impossible to hold onto a coherent thought long enough to understand it.
I think Ben is right that one doesn't want to run too far with the feminine images the prophets and even Jesus Himself occasionally use. They are good and true metaphors, but they're, well, metaphors.
Dame Julian, being a medieval mystic, knew jolly well what the Church teaches, and said that no one was supposed to read her as saying anything contrary to what the Church teaches -- perhaps that culture offered less leeway for misunderstanding than ours. In any case she's speaking mystically....
If one wants a Biblical argument for the Logos having feminine aspects, one should head over to Proverbs and the stuff about Lady Wisdom, which has been taken as talking about Christ since the first few centuries of Christianity. Not that this really made them modern feminists, either.
Leon Podles argues that we don't really see the feminine aspect of the Trinity until the work of the Holy Spirit kicks in, in and through the Church, at and after Pentecost. This is probably a better argument. Although it doesn't really make God a "mother," it does mean that masculinity and femininity both reflect God's nature in some way. (Besides, you know, the two becoming one reflecting in some fashion the nature of the Trinity, as well as Christ and the Church.)
Speaking of which, the Church is also feminine as our Lord's bride. But modern feminist theologians seem oddly unexcited about that.... :-P
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