How Feminine Participation in the Divine Might Renew the Church and Its Leadership

Introduction

My late mother-in-law had a wealth of amusing sayings and would regularly select one from her treasury that was appropriate for the occasion. Her mildly caustic quip, ‘It’s like working with a nail in your boot’, would refer to having someone assisting with a task which hampered rather than aided progress. The struggle to work ‘collaboratively’ as a parish priest within the hierarchical structure of the Anglican Church has, for me, felt like working with a metaphorical nail in my boot and has led me to question the Trinitarian theology which supports the relational frameworks of Christian community and accompanies us as a fait accompli. That is to say, there is a certain dissonance between the requirements of twenty-first century ministry and traditional theological concepts which are still firmly in place. For instance, the report Women Bishops in the Church of England? (General Synod, 2004: 149–52) sets out two theological arguments against the consecration of women as Bishops: the paternal rather than maternal Fatherhood of God, and ‘functional subordination’ in the Trinity. Such gendered discourses, unlikely to disappear even when women are admitted into the episcopate, underpin an ideology that impedes collaborative working patterns and hampers our capacity to provide an accommodating, nurturing, non-coercive space for people at intense moments of life, which is a crucial gospel task.

In this article I aim to show how female participation in the Church’s leadership has been obstructed, on the one hand, by a theology of subordination within the masculine Trinitarian Godhead, and, on the other, by the downgrading of the 3^rd Person, the Holy Spirit. I begin by addressing the theological hurdles to the participation of women in relationship to a Godhead defined exclusively as male; I then highlight the difficulties of supplanting, or even supplementing, the term ‘Father’, particularly in relation to the ‘Son’. I go on to address concerns about feminine alternatives for the Persons of the Trinity, and by extension the use of any gendered terms for God. I conclude by presenting ‘Midwife’ as an appropriate metaphor for the Holy Spirit which resolves some of the Trinitarian gender issues discussed, and offers a renewed vision of the Church’s central gospel task as the releasing of souls which includes all members of the community in this work. Although I write from an Anglican perspective, the debate is relevant to all Christian denominations which espouse Trinitarian doctrine.

Participating in the Male God

In Participating in God Paul Fiddes (2000) develops a pastorally-oriented doctrine of the Trinity in which the ‘relations’ within God denote the Persons. He integrates Augustine’s use of psychological analogies and Aquinas’ notion of subsistent relations, which begins with ‘movements or actions within God rather than subjects who act in various ways’. He is then able to show that human involvement in God must be ‘associated with the triune persons’, that participation in the ‘relations’ of God is thus what we are engaged in when we pray, rather than observing the three Persons as if they were objects; for Persons seen as objects would inevitably become individual subjects of activities within the Godhead, not relations (2000: 35–6). Significantly he insists that ‘talk about God as “an event of relationships” is not the language of a spectator, but the language of a participant’ (2000: 37). Thus, despite his attempt to escape from object-relations talk and to connect the Church’s task with Trinitarian relations, there is a major drawback with Fiddes’ argument. For although Fiddes does realize that the ‘Father’ relation in God needs qualification when he asks ‘whether this does not entrench patriarchy and male domination at the heart of Trinitarian theology’ (2000: 89), and furthermore is willing to acknowledge the existence and legitimate use of maternal biblical imagery for God, along with others not so willing (for example, Achtemeier, 1992; Frye, 1988; Gunton, 1992), he nevertheless insists on the primacy of ‘Father’. More than half the human race is thus eliminated from the relatedness of God which he has described. For since Fiddes maintains that the relating of the Father to the Son, for example, describes the relating we can as Christians participate in, this is problematic for women. If our ‘participation in the movements in God’ is ‘like the relationship “between a son and a father”’ (2000: 89), then there is no possibility for any female to participate in God, because we can only be spectators, observing sons and their father relating. We can never be a son of a father, or the father of a son, so how can we be sure we are a participant in any such kinship with God? Without wishing to mirror patriarchal gender essentialism, the question is begged whether an observing, mimetic relating on the sidelines can be authentic, since women’s relating is that of daughterhood, motherhood, sisterhood, wifehood, and so on. Indeed Luce Irigaray has criticized the male Trinity with its exclusively masculine relations, questioning whether women can ever find their own subjectivity when there is no female imaginary in the divine (D’Costa, 2000: 5).

The argument of those insisting on the exclusive term ‘Father’ for the 1^st Person of the Trinity goes that Christianity is a historically revealed religion through the incarnation, and ‘Father’ is the form of address used in the unique revelation of Jesus. But how all-encompassing is ‘Father’ as Jesus’ revealed name for and way of relating to God? Furthermore, if revelation was over with the Christ-event, with the closed canon of Scripture and with the formulation of Trinitarian Doctrine, how can our present participation in God be authentic? Has God stopped revealing God-self to the world, and are our discoveries in relation to God superfluous?

We know from studies of the condition known as ‘autism’ that closed human systems preclude any form of relating, for relating requires openness to being affected by an ‘other’. Such relating must therefore offer possibilities of ever new revelation about this ‘other’. Although human nature may not have changed in general since the first few centuries CE, we now need new God-talk to relate to different situations and different people. Accordingly, Janet Martin Soskice in her essay ‘Can a feminist call God Father?’ asked whether Christianity can ‘survive the rapid changes taking place – around the world, not just in the privileged West – in women’s self-understanding’ (1992: 94). Moreover, Maggie Ross’s insight that ‘the characteristics we ascribe to God may very well be determined by the factors that we find meaningful’, cuts to the heart of the problem of Trinitarian doctrine:

Too many of the arguments surrounding the development of the unfinished doctrine of the Trinity … are compromised because they reflect the arguers’ intoxication with their own controlling ideas …We always have to remember – even if its creators did not – that Trinitarian theology developed as a series of responses to specific problems, and while its artificial propositions are useful guidelines for thinking about God under specific conditions, they are not descriptions of God, and they are not immutable and eternal or appropriate to every context and age (1987: 66–7, emphases added).

Theological development must continue for our twenty-first century culture, knowledge and needs are very different from those of late antiquity, which interestingly Virginia Burrus (2000) describes as a time of acute male identity crisis. If we fix God at a certain point in history as the divine was perceived through one particular human experience, we create an idol.

Accordingly, Sallie McFague asserts that the metaphor ‘Father’ is idolatrous as well as irrelevant. She argues that there should be a variety of metaphors to describe the relating of God to human beings and that ‘Father’ has been all-consuming, explaining that dominant models are hard to supplant by their very nature, having already supplanted all others (1983: 147–52). One might call this successful ‘branding’ when all competition is beaten off and a monopoly held. McFague maintains that the root model for the gospel is not patriarchy, but rather the kingdom of God and ‘Jesus as parable of God’, and she delineates a model of God as ‘Mother’ whose love is agapaic, whose activity is creating and whose ethic is justice (1987: 97–123). These attributes are scripturally evident about the nature of God, and could of course be attributed to ‘Father’. However, it remains true that generally accepted maternal and female characteristics have either been subsumed into the all-encompassing traditional ‘brand’ of a male-gendered Godhead, or ignored.

Irigaray’s argument, that changing one’s image of God is likely to affect how a person relates to God and him/herself (D’Costa, 2000) may be an underlying factor in the fear that using feminine alternatives would change Christianity into a different religion. Indeed, the need for change in the patriarchal structures of the Church which have excluded women from leadership and participation, is disconnected by Gunton (1992), as well as by Achtemeier (1992: 2–3) and Fiddes (2000: 90), from any need to change the Church’s foundational theological structures and metaphors. They blame a history of ecclesiological selling-out to culture for this travesty, rather than cultural influence on the very foundations of Trinitarian theology. Indeed Gunton claims that ‘Christianity is necessarily “patriarchal” in the sense that it concerns the realization in time of the eschatological rule of God the Father over creation’, and that there is no other self-relatedness of God to us than as Father of Jesus (1992: 74–5). But did the Trinitarian God have to be made in the patriarchal image? What was really revealed by Jesus about ‘God the Father’? Could the Christian Church have been different?

The ‘Son’ of the ‘Father’

Regarding the all-encompassing metaphor ‘Father’, there is no argument that Jesus referred to God as ‘Abba’. There is argument, however, about what ‘Abba’ meant for Jesus, and moreover whether it came to mean much more to his followers than it did to him, even maybe something different. Jesus’ address of God as ‘Father’ was an amazing revelation and Robert Hamerton-Kelly observes that even though Yahweh was already affirmed as having a relationship of covenant with Israel, God’s fatherhood in the Hebrew Scriptures has few references, and these not primarily as a form of address (1979: 53–4). He observes that ‘Abba’, an Aramaic word of intimacy within the family, reveals the intensely close relationship between Jesus and his God, yet with a focus on all-embracing love as opposed to the patriarchal/paternal dimension. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel echoes this interpretation, stating that ‘Abba is … an affront to any patriarchal structure. It shows no respect and makes God familiar and near’ (1986: 100).

The only use of the original Aramaic ‘Abba’ in the Gospels appears in Jesus’ prayer of Gethsemane (Mk. 14.36); a time of utter despair. Elsewhere the Greek term pathr is used. Consequently, Moltmann-Wendel raises the question whether ‘Father’ became a much more significant term after Jesus’ lifetime:

only Mark has preserved … direct familiarity between father and child; in the later gospels the relationship between the two is already characterised by obedience. “To do the will of God” in Mark is still a matter of being in tune with the community of God, something which comes about through communion with sisters and brothers (1986: 100).

In other words filial obedience, as characterized by the contemporaneous culture, became more important as Gospel writing developed theologically. Accordingly, Elizabeth A. Johnson evaluates the frequency, or, rather, surprising infrequency, with which Jesus actually addresses God as ‘Father’ in the Gospels: ‘Mark 1, Q 1, special Luke 2, special Matthew 1, John 73’ (2002: 81). Thus it seems clear that theological reflection by the Early Church on ‘Father’ magnified its importance, this dominant and absolute metaphor acquiring cultural accretion. The implication is that the essential gospel messages of equality, servant leadership and God’s incarnate presence with us, were hijacked by a worldview held uncritically by patriarchal theologians. With the ascendancy of imperial power, when Christianity was taken over by Constantine and the imperial doctrine of the absolute One God and Father of all (Fiddes, 2000: 62–9), Trinitarian theology was bound to be plagued by subordinationism. The priority of the unoriginate Fatherhood of the 1^st Person, and the obedience of the 2^nd Person were here to stay.

Unsurprisingly then, from patristic times the body of Christ systematically excluded women from leadership, and from its structures of creating theology and liturgy. Only in the ‘heresies’ of Montanism and Gnosticism did women have much more than a passive role, particularly as prophets. Moreover, it can be no coincidence that Gnostic sects endorsed female imagery for God, and that such sects were seen as challenges to the developing male institution of the Church (Jensen, 1996: 186–88). While Roland M. Frye, in 1988, argued that ‘the effort to apply inclusive language to the Christian deity is no more than twenty years old’ (1988: 446), this was clearly one of the issues for the Early Church in formulating its creeds, a fact which Frye puzzlingly mentioned later in his text (1988: 455). The ‘ontological price’ for the language we use about God (Gunton, 1992: 76) has been paid by women for the exclusion of divine feminine attributes, still a possibility in the early years of Christianity’s theological reflection on Christ’s words, relationships and action. That this exclusion has led to male, hierarchical forms of ecclesiology to which Rome and theologians like John Zizioulas are tethered, because of the identification of the male church officers with masculine Persons of the Trinity (Fiddes, 2000: 88–9), is borne out by the 2004 General Synod report, as well as by dangerous understandings of atonement theology. According to Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, atonement theologies have led to a valorization of self-sacrificial love by redefining an act of state violence as intimate violence, ‘a private spiritual transaction between Father and Son’ which saves life. Thus ‘behind the holy mask of intimate violence, state violence disappears’ (2001: 49). The intimate violence of the cross preached down the centuries has, according to them, wrought damage on the bodies of women and children in the private sphere, and on the bodies of men in the public field of warfare. Its model of self-sacrifice has been advocated by patriarchal, imperial and religious hegemonies seeking to enforce social control on the one hand, and territorial control on the other. The Father who demands a bloody sacrifice from the Son is a far cry from the ‘Abba’ whose intimate presence is called upon in a time of need and despair. Intimacy will be a crucial factor as we now consider female representations of divinity.

Persons of God as Feminine

Use of alternative female metaphors and feminist theologies of immanence receive criticism that, on the one hand, they introduce sexuality into God, and on the other, that they lack the concept of God’s ‘Otherness’. Accordingly, Gunton (1992: 67, 76) argues that the tradition has never implied the ‘Father’ is male-gendered, and that ‘the logic of the female deity is the logic of pantheism’. The following examination of the ‘logic of pantheism’ in divinity highlights some missed dimensions of what motherhood and intimacy involve, and furthermore challenges a homosexuate understanding of the God to whom we relate. This clears the way for naming feminine Persons within the Godhead without merely replacing a male deity with a female one, always keeping in mind that God, as far as we can know, has no gender or sexuality, whatever metaphor we use.

First, when he suggests there is no true relationality in pantheistic religion, Gunton implies that mothers or female persons are unable to be ‘other’, and therefore unsuitable as divine metaphors. While the ‘phallic mother’ may be an unsuitable alternative to ‘Father’, mothers do not, however, have to be ontologically indistinct from their significant others, tied to family in a symbiotic way, as if the umbilical cord has never been cut. Such stereotyped gendered discourses of smothering mothers indeed smother women’s own individuality and agency.

Second, when theologies of immanence are deemed pantheistic, it needs pointing out that immanence and transcendence are not mutually exclusive. The divine may be experienced as both transcendentally other in its divine substance, and simultaneously immanently present. In view of the contradictory biblical narratives about the nature of Christ’s risen body, the resurrection appears to have been an event experienced like this, and Moses’ encounter with the burning bush was undoubtedly a revelation of God within, but separate from, creation (Exodus 3). Accordingly, Pamela Young (2002: 46) describes transcendence, not as the dualism between mind and body, nor disembodied spirit, as male tradition has viewed transcendence, but in seeing resurrection as the body of the world, in ‘a new and renewed embodiment’. This undercuts the sort of ‘smothering’ relationality Gunton feared from immanence, since God is still ‘other’, even as we are met by the divine presence within creation. Being in does not mean identity with. A child in the mother’s womb, for example, does not share identity with her.

Third, if identification is at issue, then one could argue that ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Lord’ are not truly ‘other’ for men anyway, since these metaphors are male-gendered. Gunton accuses McFague of exaggeration when she illustrates God as an old man with a beard. He argues that the word ‘Father’, which paradoxically can only be understood with the help of the theory of metaphor, has lost its original connection. That is to say, the literality of ‘Father’ no longer pictures God as a human father. However, even if theologians hold this as intellectually true, when people say prayers and experience liturgy pervaded with the words ‘Father’ and ‘Lord’, a male is what they see in their mind’s eye. Two cultural examples of the ubiquity of divine male imagery illustrate this point. First, Alice Walker’s (1991: 168) character Celie, an abused black woman, struggles to free herself from oppression by constantly reminding herself that God is neither male, nor white:

Well, us talk and talk ’bout God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking ’bout him I never truly notice nothing God make…Like Shug say, “You have to git man off you eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall. Man corrupt everything”, say Shug. “He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself in the other end of it, tell him to git lost”, say Shug. “Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock”. But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don’t want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it. Amen.

Second, in reference to questions asked by many about the existence and nature of God in the wake of the Tsunami disaster of December 2004, the image of Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Cistine chapel appeared in The Mirror. This is perhaps the most famous depiction of God as male, white and virile, the image of an old, white man with a beard, his loins cloaked, in one instant giving life to Adam.

Furthermore, father still has familial meaning, just as it did in patristic times. We still know what a father is. So who are men relating to when they pray to a ‘Father in heaven’? A father cannot be ‘other’ and different for a man, in the way that a father is ‘other’ and different for women. Would a female person within the Godhead allow men to truly relate to an ‘other’, rather than experiencing sameness in the patriarchal identity they share with God the Father, and the filial identity they share with God the Son? Masculine terminology used in liturgy and prayers is home territory for men. For any woman it is outside of her experience of embodiment. That male dominated theology has refused to allow femaleness within the deity might reveal that the genuine ‘otherness’ of the divine is feared, or rather that real intimacy is feared which a person can only experience with someone who is truly ‘other’. Additionally, we might reflect both on the challenge a female Person might offer women who relate poorly to themselves and their mothers, and also on the present crisis in men’s relationships with absent fathers. Certainly Irigaray argues that one must truly love the same first, then one can love the other (D’Costa, 2000: 5); therefore there is requirement, for male and female Christians who relate to God through gendered imagery, for trinitarian Persons of both sexes. There is of course complexity and ambiguity here which go beyond my present concern of challenging one-sided definitions of divinity, and how this affects the Church’s structure and action.

Finally, although Irigaray may be open to the charge that feminists have introduced sexuality into the Godhead by demanding the use of female images, McFague argues that sexuality has always been there, although cloaked – that is, male sexuality has always been there. Father is, after all, not just a relational term, but also has to do with sexual reproduction. Furthermore, if, like Barth, Gunton (1992: 72) believes that ‘the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God derives from the fact that he is the Father of Jesus Christ, and this is revelatory of the character of true human fatherhood’ then has true human motherhood had no revelation? Do mothers not also need revelation of how they are made in the image of God, a model with which to identify? Accordingly, McFague argues that Genesis 1.27 reveals that sexual differentiation in humans constitutes the full image of God in a non-subordinating relationship (1983: 168–69). The need for an image of God (that is, the need for a Father revealing human truth about fatherhood) touches again on questions about projection, the criticism often leveled at feminist theologies, and of course identification is a danger: anyone who identifies themselves with God is powerful, as Constantine’s strategy proved (Fiddes, 2000: 62–5). But is it not, then, masculine theology that has been the culprit? As D’Costa notes, ‘all too often the semiotic economies of representation utilized by Christian theologians implicitly reproduce the male symbolics of desire’ (2000: 19), which echoes Ross’s point above. He argues that one omission in Western trinitarianism, based on male-embodied Aristotelean epistemology, is the mother’s experience of loving the child within her before it is born. He maintains that Aristotle assumed that something cannot be loved until it is known, but mothers know otherwise (2000: 13).

So regarding the possibility of seeing God as ‘Mother’ as alternative to ‘Father’, it is argued that despite maternal imagery, there is no scriptural occurrence of God addressed as ‘Mother’. But in reference to the incarnate ‘Son’, praying to God as Mother was not a possibility for the Jesus of the Gospel writers, for Mary of Nazareth is clearly referred to as his mother. Hence it would have been absurd for him to call God ‘Mother’ too. Not because, as objections to the feminist rediscovery of Goddess/Mother religious practices suggest, this denies the nature of God as transcendent or ‘other’, rather because it would have been merely confusing. ¹ Catholicism, then, may have something to commend its view of Mary as Mother of God, a representation which holds together transcendence and immanence in the way I have suggested, and expressed by the doctrine of the Assumption. D’Costa indeed pursues the effect of a high form of Mariology on Trinitarian theology, seeing Mary as ‘Co-redemptress’ with Christ. He terms this ‘as near to divinisation as Christianity can get’ and his Marian themes are ‘an outgrowth of taking the Holy Spirit seriously’ (2000: xiv) to which I will return, but this also directs attention to the 2^nd Person of the Trinity.

Connecting the ‘Son’ with femaleness has largely been attempted by highlighting the way in which the earthly Jesus of Nazareth related to women, used female imagery about himself, and behaved in a maternal fashion. However, the Christ who is a relational symbol for the 2^nd Person of the Trinity cannot be purely male. In her recent book, Nicola Slee refers to Rosemary Radford Ruether’s challenge to the all-male priesthood as icon of Christ, and argues that:

Christian community continues Christ’s identity and presence in the world … and since this community includes women, it is perfectly legitimate, even necessary, for women to therefore represent Christ (Slee, 2011: 8).

Slee presents the ‘Christa’ as one symbol amongst many which reveal a re-emergence of the divine feminine, helping repressed peoples, who want their experience, wisdom and gifts recognized and taken seriously, to find their voices. She maintains that ‘Christianity rejects that wisdom and those gifts at its peril, expelling the very life force that can heal and revivify the ancient paths’ (2011: 6–7). This relation of the 2^nd Person includes all-comers, and returns us to the idea that participating in God is about relations with, and within, a whole community.

The Holy Spirit and Female Participation

Drawing on the Christa, a symbol which is by no means without historical precedence (Slee 2011: 18), may help to revitalize the Church. Some feminist theologies on the other hand have sought to designate the Holy Spirit as feminine in order to resolve the lack of a female imaginary within the Godhead, but this also presents problems. The Hebrew terms ruach and shekinah suggest that the Spirit is female, but feminine gender, grammatically, is no basis for innate femaleness in nouns. For instance, chair is la chaise (feminine) in French and der Stuhl (masculine) in German, yet is an inanimate object. Although language for persons is gender specific, the feminine ruach and shekinah are abstract nouns in that they refer to ideas when applied to God’s breath, or God’s presence. Moreover in the Western tradition, the 3^rd Person is regularly defined with the abstract nouns ‘Gift’ and ‘Love’, therefore possessing no personhood (Weinandy, 1995: 8–9). The Spirit is also usually depicted as non-human or amorphous in form. So use of feminine nouns does not mean the Spirit is female, and abstract nouns rob ‘her’ of personhood anyway.

Furthermore, the significance of gender re-presentation in the persons of the Trinity, and the reasons why the person of the Spirit in particular has been ‘shadowy and inchoate, and so shamefully neglected’ are profoundly linked (D’Costa, 2000: 1). Thus D’Costa suggests that allotting femaleness to the Holy Spirit is ‘ironically ambiguous’ because of:

the tendency within western trinitarian theology to subordinate the Spirit to the exclusive function of the relationship between Father and Son – the Spirit is third in order, as a result of the love the Father has for the Son, and the Son for the Father, and is therefore already positioned as woman within patriarchal discourse. Eastern theology’s tendency to subordinate both Son and Spirit to the Father also retains male self-love as the central symbolics within the Trinitarian Godhead (2000: 11).

However, he insists that lack of full equality for the Spirit is the place we must look if Christianity is to survive and revive, as does Weinandy (1995), who notes the connection between the decline of prophecy and the lack of an active role for the Spirit within the life of the Church. We must persevere.

A stronger argument for characterizing the Holy Spirit as feminine revolves around the experienced activity of the Spirit in the Economy (Johnson, 2002: 133). God’s Spirit brooding over creation in Genesis 1.2 and participation in the Incarnation are striking, for both are fundamental images of God’s active Spirit in the universe (D’Costa, 2000: 25–6; Weinandy, 1995: 26; 40–3). From an analysis in which he explores the action of the Spirit in the Father’s begetting of the Son, Weinandy can claim that the three Persons not only subsist as relations of opposition as Aquinas emphasized, but also that each actively plays a role in determining the subjectivity of the others: ‘They consummate one another’ (1995: 82, emphasis added). Consummation of a relationship is a term with sexual connotations, as I have also suggested ‘Father’ can be perceived. However, if ‘Father’ is accepted in theological terms as un-gendered and transcendent 1^st Person, then this loving, creating consummation, between (masculine) Father, (masculine) Son and (feminine) Spirit can be seen as an un-gendered, metaphorical action, imaging the male/female community that comprises humankind in Gen. 1.27; a community which transcends sexual interpretation. So, as D’Costa suggests:

the divine triune God might actually re-present the possibility of relations between gendered persons that are characterized by loving, forgiving, relational and redeeming indwelling – not occlusion, murder and male narcissism (2000: xiv).

Gendered personal terms become neutralized in the Godhead, yet humanity has a range of symbolic gendered representations and relationships, enabling them to fulfill their full identity, which includes sexuality, in relationship to God. Thus the relation of the Holy Spirit is one which enables the 1^st Person to be parental creator, empowers the 2^nd Person to come into life, and participates in transforming the world whenever humanity is consummated in relation to this 3^rd Person in prayer and loving action. The nature of this divine lover might then be represented by the woman who riskily goes out into the streets at night to search diligently for her beloved, brings him to the place where she was conceived, so that their love can now be consummated (Song 3.1–4). Thus conception and birth, literally and figuratively, become the manifest location for the relation of the Holy Spirit. Echoing Grace Jantzen’s concept of natality, the death of the theology of violence on which our society is based would accompany the breaking in of shared female leadership, ‘bringing the god to life through us’ (1998: 275). This is not passive God-bearing, but active engagement in creation, and re-creation.

Holy Spirit as Midwife

To broaden and deepen this idea, I propose that the image of the Holy Spirit as ‘Midwife’ is a metaphor which is doctrinally, pastorally and ecclesiologically helpful. ‘Midwife’ is not an original metaphor for the Spirit, but doctrinally it addresses some of the difficulties of gender within God and gendered terms for Persons of the Trinity as I have discussed them. Neither is ‘maieutic’ pastoral care new, although what I describe here is less like the client-centred questioning of Socratic dialogue, and more like the action of being ‘called alongside’ people as the paraklhtos, to bear with them. Furthermore, the action of the Trinity which is shown to be interdependently dynamic with perichoresis, taken seriously, provides a relational framework for all-member ministry.

First, ‘Midwife’ is a female term, so gives the feminine a part in divinity as co-equal 3^rd Person. However, it concerns an activity that is non-gendered. Although this might be thought of exclusively as a female role, midwifery as a profession is now open to men, and many men must have acted as impromptu midwives, Joseph amongst them. The activity of bringing to birth is a role of the Spirit within the Godhead, enabling the generating creativity of the Mother/Father, bringing forth the Son in the immanent Trinity. In parallel, in the economic Trinity, she brings to birth all of creation in Gen. 1; is agent of Mary’s conception of the Christ-child (Lk. 1.35); is present at Christ’s baptism and throws him out into the wilderness, heralding the beginning of his ministry (Mk. 1.9–12); is breathed by the risen Christ into the fearful disciples to empower them at the resurrection (Jn 20.22); is initiator of the new Church at Pentecost (Acts 2); and aids all of creation that is groaning ‘in the pains of childbirth’ for the eager expectation of the revealing of the children of God (Rom. 8.19–23).

While the 3^rd Person as birthing partner communicates God’s initiating and renewing presence, if the metaphor is pushed yet further into the scenario of delivering identical twins, both Trinitarian economies become dynamically synthesized: at a twin birth, the midwife hands a child each to father and mother to hold in love. Perichoretic harmony, regularly lost in patriarchal theologies, is restored, as well as the intimate embrace of a present Abba/Mother. Furthermore, the human and divine in the 2^nd Person can be seen as identical in substance, but different in nature, for identical twins share their genetic code, yet have different personalities and natures. Thus Chalcedon has its model for the two natures of the ‘Son’; Constantinople has its Holy Spirit as co-equal Person, both within the immanent trinity involved in the generation of the 2^nd Person, and also within the economic trinity, involved intimately with creation and birth. There is no subordination, only equal partnership. For in a healthy birth, all are in co-operating harmony: parent(s), midwife and neo-nate(s).

Second, building on Ross’s notion of the ‘unfinished doctrine of the Trinity’, a further possibility opens up of including any person who cooperates with, and therefore participates in, God. Just as D’Costa’s focus on Mary as co-redemptress produces a sort of quaternity, or a Trinitarian community, as co-workers we also can become not only God-bearers, but God-birthers. Holding an accommodating space for a person – or for a community – while they experience the extremities of life, whether in suffering or celebration, is a difficult task, yet a crucial gospel task at the heart of Christian ministry. John’s Gospel, shortly after introducing the Spirit as paraklhtos, describes the disciples’ sorrow at the death of Christ in terms of a woman’s labour (Jn 16.20–21), which acknowledges that at major moments of transition, of spiritual (re-)birth, we need a midwife. A good midwife is someone who protects our space when we are at our most vulnerable, and gives advice at the right moment; figuratively mops the brow when labour is painful; prays with us; breathes deeply with us; knows when the time is ready to push out the new life; cuts cords that bind; ensures that new-borns breathe and have what they need for their first moments of life. If there is danger, then a midwife must take efficient, but compassionate action. Moreover, midwives quietly go about clearing the afterbirth, not afraid to get hands dirty with the blood and guts that are the accompaniments to life. This is the work of the paraklhtos.

Third, a community midwife is intimately involved with the whole family, reflecting the shared relations of the Trinity. Ecclesiologically we need to see that spiritual nurture concerns the whole Church. No birth process can happen with only one person involved, for a united family shares the expectation and prepares for the event to come, providing acceptance, warmth and care for the new arrival. Midwives hand over new arrivals to their parent, since they do not own the children they help to bring to birth, and so we are reminded that the heart of gospel ministry is servant-hood, handing over one’s power for the freedom of the other. The servant-hood of a whole Church empowered by the Midwife, would act in a way that humbly enables the vulnerable to find strength. For although labour confines a woman to one place until she has given birth, and can reduce an involved father to helpless tears, the joyful and creative process also brings a sense of immense empowerment. Releasing the spiritual potential of all, particularly the oppressed, is the Church’s task, but we do not own the souls we help to liberate. Finally, like the midwives of Exodus 1, who not only protected the vulnerable, but also embodied a Spirit of resistance, the Church has a role in facing up the Pharoah’s abuse of power. For we need to safeguard God’s promised leaders, and God’s future children.

We are at a moment of painful expectancy, in an age of enslavement to materialism and threatened spiritual barrenness. The time is upon us when we need to be good birth partners, with, and for each other; we need to start pushing – together. God’s new church leaders, including the women called to be Bishops, need a Midwife to help them into being. Enid, my mother-in-law, had another little saying gleaned from her own experience of giving birth to her two sons: ‘Just when you think you’re about to split in two and you will die, the baby is born’. When we participate in the birthing task of the Church, we participate in God who gives life.