The Sins of Scripture (8 page)

Even when the Bible moves on to a second story of creation, the portrait is still of a deity who is not really external. God breathes into Adam, says the ancient Hebrew legend. Adam becomes a living creature because the breath of God becomes his breath. God then creates the animals to alleviate the man’s loneliness. All living things share that divine life. In Hebrew the word for breath is
nephesh,
and it is related to the wind, which was thought to be the breath of God. Nephesh, however, is present in all creation. It is the prophet Jeremiah who says that the animals too are the creation of God and must therefore be regarded as holy (Jer. 27:5). It is the Psalmist who asserts that all creatures look to God for their sustenance and that even the creatures are dismayed when God hides the divine face. When God removes the divine breath, says the Psalmist, even the creatures die (Ps. 124:29). God is
not
external to life. God is to be identified with the life present in all living things. The Psalmist goes on to say that God’s springs quench the thirst of the beasts. God caused grass to grow for the cattle, cedars for the birds, fir trees for the storks, high mountains for the goats, rocks for the badgers. God even made the darkness so that creatures may seek their prey in it just as God made the day so that human beings could earn their livelihood (Ps. 124:10–30).

In the Noah story saving the animals was part of the plan of salvation (Gen. 6:20). In Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth, the Preacher, reminds his readers that “the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same…. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts.” In contemplating death this writer asks, “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?” (Eccles. 3:19, 21). This is not the portrait of a supreme being living beyond the sky, separate from the earth; this is the portrait of a divine presence that permeates all of life, that binds all creatures into the mutuality of interdependency. These images are beyond theism, but they are not beyond God. Surely we can now see that we have created the theistic God in our image, even as we asserted that it was the other way around. We then used this God to justify the dreadful things we were and are doing to our world. Theism is a false notion, a human idol that must die, and when it does, God—seen as the sacred dimension in all of life—must replace it. The minority voices in our religious past must become the majority voices of our religious future.

So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy. I experience God as the source of love calling me to love wastefully all that God has made, including the earth with its plants and animals. I experience God, in the words of Paul Tillich, as the “Ground of Being” calling me to be all that I can be and to affirm the sacred being of all that is. The worship of such a God could never result in the destruction of the planet that has produced us.

We have looked upward for a God above the sky for centuries, but we now know that this infinite universe is empty of supernatural invasive deities. We need to shift our vision to look within—at life, at love, at being.

The theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote that the “alienation of nature brought about by human beings can never be overcome until men [and women] find a new understanding of themselves and a new interpretation of their world in the framework of nature.”
²⁰
That will occur, I believe, only when a new understanding of God is achieved. Good ecology requires good theology, and good theology alone will guarantee our very survival.

THE TERRIBLE TEXTS

THE WOMAN IS NOT MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD

P
atriarchy and sexism are certainly not limited to our own Judeo-Christian heritage, though that is the channel through which these evils have entered most of us in the Western world. It is also through that particular lens that I will seek to trace their ramifications. Before beginning that, however, I need to note the all but universal quality among human beings of a pro-male, anti-female bias.

This realization points us, I believe, to the fact that there is something deep in the human psyche that fuels an anti-female bias. If it is not a human phenomenon, it is at least present in the depths of the male psyche, and since prejudice is always a reaction to fear, it must, therefore, be assumed that men’s hostility toward women expresses a primal threat that needs to be addressed. One has only to examine quotations from pre-Christian philosophers and from the sacred writings of each of the world’s great religions to glimpse the universalism of a patriarchal understanding of life.

Plato, in
The Republic,
recorded Socrates as saying, “Do you know anything at all practiced among mankind in which the male sex is not far better than the female?”

Xenophon stated, “The ideal woman should see as little as possible, hear as little as possible and ask as little as possible.”

In the sacred texts of the Hindus, we learn, “It is the highest duty of a woman to immolate herself after her husband’s death.” In another part of the Hindu tradition, we read, “Women are to be debarred from being competent students of the Vedas.” The Hindu laws of Manu state, “In childhood a female is subject to her father. In youth a female is subject to her husband. When her lord is dead, she shall be subject to her sons. A woman must never be independent.”

In Buddhism one is reborn a woman because of one’s bad karma. Buddhist prayers include: “I pray that I may be reborn as a male in a future existence.”

Jewish men are taught, in a book of Jewish prayers, to say, “Blessed be the God who has not created me a heathen, a slave or a woman.” Talmudic writers added: “It would be better to burn the words of Torah than to entrust them to a woman.”

In the Muslim Qur’an (Koran) we learn that the woman is regarded as “half a man” and that “forgetfulness overcomes the woman. They are inherently weaker in rational judgment.”
²

The reasons for this overwhelming negativity toward the woman are varied, but its reality is consistent. One reason, in early human history, was that the woman generally did not grow to be as large as the man and her ability to run and to compete in various tests of strength, upon which the survival of the tribe depended, were obviously limited. She was thus determined to be something of a second-class human being. The vulnerability of the childbirth process and the necessary dependency the woman exhibited in the later stages of pregnancy and while nursing helped cast her in the role of “the weaker sex.”

The mother and the child were seemingly connected to each other in such a way as to put both out of circulation for long periods of time, causing women and children to be thought of as inextricably bound together in weakness. The phrase “women and children first,” associated in our own folklore with the sinking of the great ship
Titanic,
captured this ancient attitude that defined both females and children as the helpless and dependent ones of society, people quite obviously not to be treated as equals. The children, at least the male children, might grow out of this second-class status, but women, it was thought, could never escape their destiny.

The study of ancient human traditions has uncovered other sources of fear that illumine this inquiry. Anthropologists and mythologists, such as Joseph Campbell, suggest that there was a time in human history when the feminine was the analogy by which God was defined.
³
The fertility cults of prehistory were dedicated to the Earth Mother, who was seen as the source and sustainer of tribal life. In time the male deity who lived beyond the sky and who impregnated the passive Mother Earth with the rains of his divine semen replaced her. This powerful sky deity was modeled after the tribal chief, whose strength led the tribe both in battle and in the hunt.

This shift from the earth goddess to the sky god can also be discovered in the lingering tension that existed in the ancient world between nomadic people and agricultural people. The former were always seeking food and water for their herds, which tended to produce a male deity who governed the wind and the rain. The settled agricultural people were more intent on causing the earth to bring forth a sufficient amount of food to sustain their life, which tended to produce a female deity of fertility.

In the nomadic societies better weapons were developed to fight off predators, both human and animal. It was not enough to hurl rocks and fight assailants with sticks. Long-range projectiles like spears, or even arrows sent forth from primitive bows, were better guarantors of success. These weapons served to remind ancient warriors, albeit subconsciously, of their own thrusting male power. After all, these weapons were so obviously phallic symbols and they would be developed into more and more overtly phallic forms as the years went by. Guns, rifles and artillery were simply erect rods which exploded, hurling their payload at their enemies. On psychic levels surely this identification was clear. The analogy of the male organ being thrust into one’s female partner encouraged, I believe, the increasingly hostile male definition of a woman. Some of our slang words for sexual intercourse reveal enormous hostility even today. Words like “make,” “screw,” and “f——k” are not gentle, loving words. When males refer to lovemaking as a conquest, both the hostility and the military connections are overt and clear. More than we seem able to recognize, women historically came to be thought of as the enemy of men.

There is also a sense in which women were treated in earlier male-dominated societies almost as “prisoners of war.” They had few rights. Their freedom was curtailed, both by social pressure and by male power. Their mobility was compromised, sometimes by a cruel but culturally approved method, such as binding their feet. The power they had to change their surroundings was minimal, resulting in their acceptance of abuse as both their fate and their due. The woman’s inability to talk back without punishment, her general vulnerability and the fact that men had legal protection no matter how they treated their wives became cultural patterns in the West and even found their way into the common laws. Men claimed the “God-given right” to exercise authority over both the bodies and the lives of women. The woman’s only real power was found in her feminine charms, her ability to attract, to seduce and to create in the male a desire and yearning for her body, a desire that rendered him powerless in relation to her, at least momentarily. This power, which also threatened the male sense of independence, was both enjoyed and resented by those against whom it was wielded. Those feminine wiles were techniques learned by women in the school of hard knocks. While the sources of the hostility that men have expressed toward women over the centuries can be debated, there is no debate about the fact that this hostility is real. There is also no doubt that this hostility has been justified as a virtue in religious circles. It has been claimed over the centuries that the all-powerful God of the universe, who was (and is) predominantly male, at least in the religions of the Western world,
meant
for life to be organized in this male-dominant way.

If an attitude finds expression in every prevailing religious system in the world, and in almost every society, one begins to suspect that this attitude has its roots in something very basic in our humanity. Religion incorporates and explains human content far more than it creates human content. Therefore, religion becomes the place where we begin to search for answers to the sin of patriarchy, and when we do so the sins of scripture in the form of the terrible texts about women in the Bible come into view. Read again the words with which this section of this book began, but this time in the older language of the King James Version, and judge for yourself their holiness:

Can anyone seriously argue today that these words are the “Word of God”? Are they not little more than texts of oppression? Centuries after they were written, Paul quoted the words from this ancient Hebrew source to support his negative view of women, and through Paul these words formed the dominant New Testament understanding of a woman. She was not made in the image of God. She was designed to be a male helpmeet, not an independent person. Since this story has been so influential in defining the sexes to this day, it is worth retelling, especially if it can be distanced from the stained-glass accents and pious sounds of scripture and understood not as literal history but as an ancient Hebrew myth. So gather with me around the campfire, where the wisdom of the past was recited for the education of those present in each generation, and allow me to transform this ancient tale—the tale out of which our major definition of a woman has come—into the story that it originally was. In that process we can begin to see how it came to be assumed that patriarchy was the will of God, a system created and blessed by a male deity.

This ancient tale offers a marvelous picture of a trial-and-error deity who was clearly not omniscient or omnipotent, but was rather actively engaged in the world, responding and reacting to each event. It continues: