She Who Is by Elizabeth A. Johnson

First published: New York: Crossroad, 1992

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Theology

Core issue(s): Friendship; God; Holy Spirit; suffering; the Trinity; women

Overview

In She Who Is, Elizabeth A. Johnson writes that any approach to knowing a God who is beyond imagining must start with things that are known through human experience. For most of Judaic and Christian history, the names and images used for God have been masculine and patriarchal. God as Father, as Lord, as divine king or ruler, all these names are gender specific and therefore cannot help but affect believers’ mental images. Despite abstract formulations that the deity is beyond gender, a male identity is implied in most God-talk. This means that women see themselves as created in the image of God only by denying their own sexual identity. The consequences go beyond the effect on individual women or even on all women: The Catholic Church also suffers.

Johnson points out that traditional speech about God draws its imagery and concepts almost exclusively from the world of ruling men. The concept of theism was developed by medieval and early modern thinkers in opposition to atheism, polytheism, and pantheism. It stresses divine transcendence, and the traits it ascribes to God are modeled on the pattern of an earthly absolute monarch—a being who is omnipotent, unmoved, and more interested in praise and obedience than in relationship or succor. Insofar as this model remains normative in Christianity, it is an idol. Like all idols, it obscures the glimpses of holy mystery that might be granted to people. It also works against the quest for a more just and peaceful human order.

After establishing the need for feminist rethinking of the names and images used to talk about God, Johnson considers how the task might be done. She rejects the solutions of some—to discard the term “God” entirely, to add “feminine” traits or dimensions to the existing list of usages for God, to reemphasize the role of the Holy Spirit and endow it with female qualities. Another solution, using male and female images equally in referring to God, Johnson supports in theory, but warns that both male and female imagery must be taken from the full reality of both genders’ experience and show male and female as powerful in both public and private spheres. She doubts that any equivalent imaging of God will be possible without a long and hard effort both to find female symbolism applying to God and to use it un-self-consciously.

The rest of the book is a pioneering effort to do just that. The first source Johnson uses is women’s own interpreted experience, with an introductory statement that human experience has always been used as a basis for theology. Among the diverse components of women’s experience, she identifies the common one of conversion, which involves coming to recognize one’s worth as a woman, finding solidarity in community, and knowing oneself through the dialectic of relationship, in which both reflections and differences are discerned. In this light, women and men are both bearers of “the image of God and Christ.”

Johnson’s examination of classical theology points out the richness of both tradition and the Bible in the multitude of symbols used for God. There are symbols taken from personal relationships, from human crafts, from philosophy, and from nonliving objects such as rocks. Many terms refer to the work of creation. African usage tends to honor God as “The One who. . . .” Islamic tradition has ninety-nine names for God; the hundredth name is thought to be the true one that does not exist because God is ineffable. Names multiply because none of them can express the whole nature of God.

One of the most promising symbols in Christian thought, though, is that of Sophia. Often viewed as divine wisdom, Sophia is notable for representing the active presence of God to the world. The wisdom tradition holds Jesus to be Sophia incarnate, the wisdom of God, sent into the world. Sophia appears elsewhere as the spirit that activates the world: “life, movement, color radiance . . . blowing everywhere the winds of renewal in creation” and thus representing the mystery of God. As mother, Sophia can make plausible the images of God the Mother, giving birth to the universe, caring for all her creation, being concerned with the flourishing of her whole household, which is the world. Johnson reminds us of the fierceness of a mother bear, making the point that motherhood is not to be confused with passivity.

The last quarter of the book, while not losing the original focus, explores some topics with other implications. Its title, “Dense Symbols and Their Dark Light,” evokes territory not much explored by the mainstream of theology. The chapter on the triune God points out how, except for Eastern Orthodox churches, the Holy Spirit is the neglected member of the Trinity. God the Father and the Son are spoken of a great deal and usually in male terminology. The Holy Spirit is shadowy, amorphous, and ill-defined. Most thinking about the Trinity assumes that while God the first (Father figure) can be complete in “him”-self, the same is not true of the second and third members, because they devolve from God the Father. Indeed, classical theology has explained their relationship as one based on origins (Saint Augustine) and one of opposition (Thomas Aquinas). Johnson courageously suggests that neither is the only way the Trinity can be envisioned: Why not another order (Spirit-Son-Father), for instance, and why not another way of relating? She suggests that friendship, as a relationship of equals, is a woman-friendly model that might bring into view further truths. With it, a triune entity can have order without subordination. Certainly the doctrine of the Trinity and the person of the Holy Spirit, whatever they may have meant to the early Church, are little comprehended—or even thought about—by most Christians today. New feminist insights deserve at least a hearing.

A chapter on She Who Is considers the implications of “being” as a description or quality of God. Divine aliveness needs a more active term than the word “to be.” The concluding chapter on the suffering God examines the uses of suffering and calls the church to account for the holocaust of women murdered as witches, mostly for the “sin” of threatening males’ dominance in the realms of healing and of connection with the Spirit. For the vast numbers of women violated and tortured in the history of the world, does the concept imago Dei apply? Johnson answers that it does. God is Love. Love entails suffering. This is not self-evident, because the traditional God stands above it all. However, there are situations in which only a suffering God can help, and here too, women’s experience can aid understanding of God.

Christian Themes

Beyond the generally accepted truth that God is ineffable and beyond comprehension, the book’s most pervasive theme is that people’s efforts to do so, through words and images, have not come as close as they might, because male and patriarchal thought patterns have shaped Christian discourse. Women hold up half of heaven, should images from women’s experience not be equally represented when we try to define or describe God?

A secondary theme is relationships as a central model for God’s connection with humanity. Subordinate/superior concepts come from cultural and historical roots, and neither correspond with transcendent reality nor prove useful in achieving a more just order on earth.

Johnson discusses at length the distinction between elements essential to Jesus’ identity as a finite human on earth and those that define his humanity in Christian doctrine. Belonging to a church that ordains only men because of their supposedly more Christomorphic character, Johnson is well equipped to argue this point. Why, she asks, should maleness be a determining characteristic for the priesthood when Jesus’ age, ethnic background, and other accidents of his identity are not? Like the rest of this intricate, superbly argued work, these themes it highlights call out for more attention.

Sources for Further Study

Halbertal, Tova Hartman. Appropriately Subversive: Modern Mothers in Traditional Religions. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Halbertal discusses strategies for living with dissonance practiced by Jewish and Catholic women.

Joy, Morna, and Eva K. Neumaier-Dargyay, eds. Gender, Genre, and Religion: Feminist Reflections. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1995. Feminist insights into various world and tribal religions. Articles from a symposium.

Moses, Paul. “Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is: A Nun Vies God as ’Our Mother.’” Review of She Who Is. Newsday, July 20, 1993, p. 43. A review of Johnson’s work that discusses her desire for images of God as a woman and her receipt of the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 1993 for this book.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. A companion volume to Johnson’s work, this includes more historical and biblical details as well as feminist reimaging of Jesus and Mary.