DFV Project Update

The project is progressing well. We’re very nearly finished with the Good News according to Matthew. By January, the complete DFV text of Matthew should be available, together with the attendant Study Bible helps.

In a Skype conference of November 14 we also agreed to some key changes. Most notably, we’ve agreed to render the term “Holy Spirit” as “Divine Spirit” and the title “Christ” as “Christa.” Both of these editorial decisions should considerably enhance the unique impact of our proposed Bible version.

Conservative Bible Project?

We’re certainly not alone in sensing the need for new versions of the Bible. But here’s one Bible version concept that raises interesting questions: A proposal on a web site called Conservapedia for a Conservative Bible Project, a revision of the KJV free of “liberal bias.” Among “liberal” verses that it proposes to excise are “Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (link) and “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (link).

Among many other things, this project proposes a Bible version that is “Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, ‘gender inclusive’ language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity.”

“Emasculation of Christianity”? As if Christianity is supposed to be a “masculine” religion? Well — we beg to differ.

Poem: In the Beginning Was

I spent most of last week in the book of Proverbs. Dame Wisdom and the Wise Woman of Proverbs 31 inspired this poem.

“In the Beginning”

In the beginning there was

Silence
Chaos
Deep

In the beginning there was

Blackness
Void
Nothing

In the beginning

The Spirit brooded
Godde spoke
And Wisdom cheered

In the beginning was Godde

And Wisdom was with Godde
Before She was rationalized into

The Word

Before She was reduced to

A Housewife

In the beginning was Godde and Wisdom

Creating
Cheering
Saying, “It is good.”

(c)2009 by Shawna R. B. Atteberry (originally posted at Career Women of the Bible and Beyond)

Sermon: Dame Wisdom in Action

This is the sermon I preached this last Sunday on the Proverbs 31 woman. I’m posting it to show that women worked both inside and outside of the home in the Bible, and to also show one instance of how the Bible uses feminine imagery in describing Godde.

Dame Wisdom in Action
Proverbs 31:10-31

Ah, the woman from Proverbs 31, let me count the ways I hate thee. I grew up hearing about this woman every Mother’s Day. How she was a good and submissive wife who obeyed her husband and took care of her kids and was happy with her life in the home. If you come from a conservative or fundamentalist Christian background like I did, you know what I’m talking about. Every single Mother’s Day the male pastor brushes off this passage and preaches how a good Christian woman ought to act. She’s the best wife, mother, and homekeeper of them all. She eschews the public sector to take care of her home and family. She keeps her house clean, obeys her husband and submits to him. She is a wonderful mother, and gets the meals on the table on time. She’s SuperWifeMom.

By the time I hit my teens I was groaning and tuning the pastor out. By the time I hit my early 30s, I was single, not too sure if I wanted to get married, and I knew I didn’t want do the whole kids thing. I stopped going to church on Mother’s Day. If there was one Saturday I conveniently forgot to set my alarm clock and not make it to church, without feeling guilty about it, it was Mother’s Day.

Unfortunately for the conservative evangelical background I grew up with, it was beat into my head that every good Christian reads the Bible for herself. She sees what is there, so she won’t fall into error. This backfired where I am concerned. I did read my Bible. I wanted to know what it said, and how I should act. And I noticed something. I noticed that what I heard all those years about the Proverbs 31 woman was not all of the story. In fact most of what I heard wasn’t even in the story! This woman was not restricted to her home and family. I got to know an entirely different women when I read her story for myself.

This woman is a household manager, industrious, produces and sells textiles, brings in income for the family, oversees planting of vineyard and uses her own money to set it up, she has servants she oversees, she gives to the poor, and her household is a small business that provides for her family, and her husband is praised for it. This is not the picture of the stay-at-home mother that is normally depicted in sermons. She works both inside and outside of her home.

I learned there is a big difference when the Bible talks about a wife and how we talk about a wife, particularly a housewife. Carole Fontaine said this about that difference:

In the Bible, the term wife encodes a set of productive and managerial tasks that, along with a woman’s reproductive role, were essential to the existence of the Israelite household. There is no equivalent understanding of “wife” as a social category in the modern West, where women’s household work does not usually contribute to the family economy and tends to be ignored, trivialized, minimized, or otherwise degraded. The often insulting idea of “just a wife and mother” would have had no meaning in the biblical world.

Or as Rabbi Rosenfeld said at the beginning of his lecture on Proverbs 31: “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Women have ALWAYS worked outside the home, and EVERY mother is a ‘working mother!” Women’s work was necessary for the survival of the family, and she generated income for the family. Textiles—the spinning, weaving, and making of fabric goods–drove the ancient economy for 20,000 years. Women’s work was the backbone of the ancient economy and the ancient household. And I will love Deirdre McCloskey forever for pointing that out to me. So this woman was much more than the imaginary 50s housewife some segments of Christianity hold up as the good Christian wife. I’m not hating her as much.

Then I discovered something about her this week that I never knew, and I may just be darn close to falling in love with her. While reading up on this passage one of the writers pointed out that this poem is filled with military imagery. In fact the word translated as capable in “a capable wife who can find?” is hayil. When it’s used for a man it’s translated as “strong” or “mighty,” and it’s normally used in the context of war. It also means the power that is able to acquire strength through gaining money and raising an army. Right off the bat, we are told this is a strong woman who knows how to get things done.

Then verse 11 says: “[her husband] will lack no gain” or spoils or booty. The writer, Raymond Van Leeuwen notes that using this word here is strange because it “suggests the woman is like a warrior bringing home booty from her victories.”

In verse 16 she “considers a field and buys it.” Here the word “buy” may not the best translation of the Hebrew. Literally, she “takes” the field, and this word is normally used of an army taking a city or a region. It means to conquer and subdue a territory. This verse shows the woman looking at a wild field and figuring out how to tame it and subdue it into a vineyard. In the Judean highlands turning a plot of land into a vineyard took a massive amount of work. The soil was rocky, and all of the rocks had to be removed, then the land terraced, and the rocks built into a wall, so that the vineyard didn’t wash down the hillside at the first good rain. It also had to be terraced to make sure that enough water stayed in the vineyard so the vines could grow. Like a general this woman surveys her battlefield and plans her attack. Anyone who has ever gardened knows this is not an overexagerration.

Verse 17 has the most obvious military language: “she girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong” or in the good old King James Version, she “girded up her loins.” Men normally girded up their loins in the Bible for a heroic deed; a deed that involved fighting. Having a strong arm is another Biblical metaphor for being battle ready.

The end of the poem comes back to where we began with the word hayil. In verse 29 the woman’s husband tells her: “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” Here hayil is translated as “done excellently.” The woman has done deeds of strength and power that again refer to warfare and gaining wealth. “Surpass them all” is another idiom for military activity.” As in the army met the enemy and bested them.

So we see that this woman is not only pictured as a manager, entrepreneur, and merchant, she is also pictured as a military leader. There is nothing submissive or docile about this woman. She makes textiles, buys, sells, and fights for her family’s survival and good. And yes, she still sounds like SuperWoman. But there is a reason for that. Just as this woman is not the fictional housewife of the 50s, she is also not just a woman either.

I’ve always wondered why Proverbs 31 ended with this poem about this woman. So have others. It seems odd. And after all the focus on wisdom and gaining it, why does this book end with a woman going about her mundane daily activities? Part of the answer to this in how the Jewish sages defined wisdom. Wisdom was not just knowledge gained for knowledge’s sake. Wisdom was knowledge that was to be applied to everyday life. In the Bible Godde created the world and set boundaries and laws to govern what Godde created. Wisdom sought to define those boundaries and apply those laws to their daily lives. This woman is living wisdom.

But there is another reason why this book ends with a woman. It began with one. At the end of Proverbs 1 we are introduced to Dame Wisdom. We find out that Wisdom was with Godde when Godde created the heavens and earth. In fact, She was the master designer and architect of creation. She watched Godde bring order out of chaos. She rejoiced in creation, and calls out in the public square and city gates for men and women to follow her. She wants us to learn Her ways, so that She can give us good lives. She builds a house, prepares a feast, then goes out again to call everyone to come into Her house, eat Her feast, and learn Her ways. She continues to create and bring order to the world. After the tabernacle and temple are finished in the Hebrew Scriptures, there are huge feasts for all the people to celebrate. Wisdom does the same. She builds Her house then invites everyone over to celebrate. This the last we hear of Dame Wisdom in Proverbs 9.

And the last thing we hear about in Proverbs is the Wise Woman in the 31st chapter. The reason Proverbs ends with this woman is that it is showing us Dame Wisdom in action. This woman does everything Wisdom does in earlier chapters: she creates, brings order to chaos, feeds and clothes her family, and takes care of the poor. She doesn’t just live wisely, she is Wisdom Incarnate. These verses do not describe what the typical woman of that day is like. They are showing us Wisdom hard at work in the everyday world.

She shows us what we are called to do. Just like Dame Wisdom and the Wise Woman of Proverbs 31 we are called to live wisely in our everyday, mundane lives. We are called to learn what Godde wants, where our boundaries are and live by that everyday. For ancient Israel the boundary was there is only one Godde, Yahweh, and Yahweh alone will you worship and obey. For us as Christians our boundary is to love Godde with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That is our boundary. Day by day we have to figure out how to live that love at home, at work, in the store, on the sidewalk, and at church. Within the boundary of that love, we are called to create, to order the chaos around us, to build Godde’s kingdom and to celebrate Godde’s reign here on earth. Or as Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it:

And truly, I reiterate, . . nothing’s small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim:
And,–glancing on my own thin, veined wrist,–
In such a little tremour of the blood
The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul
Doth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more, from the first similitude.

Our call is to see Godde in our world and then live what we see. When we follow Wisdom and listen to Her, our eyes will be opened, and we will see the holy in everything. When we see the holy all around us then we will know how to live our own lives and show that holiness, God’s love, to others.

(This sermon was originally posted at Career Women of the Bible and Beyond.)

Proverbs 31:10-31

Shawna Atteberry, one of the editors of the DFV, has a great post over on her blog about “The Proverbs 31 Woman.” It’s well worth reading!

From “Father” to “Mother”

Rendering “God” as “Godde” and using divine feminine pronouns are straightforward editorial decisions, as we have argued below. But what about the NT’s pervasive use of the masculine word “Father” to describe Godde? Inclusive Bibles have proposed different solutions.

For example, “An Inclusive Version” often simply replaces “Father” with “God,” but occasionally uses the awkward term “Father-Mother” to balance out the gendered parental imagery. By contrast, “The Inclusive Bible” uses the term “Abba God” instead of “Father.”

In the DFV we have chosen simply to render “Father” as “Mother” in most cases. This decision is based on the fact that the type of intimate familial divine-human relationship that Christians associate with the term “Father” are equally, if not more powerfully, communicated by the term “Mother.” Relying on the principle of dynamic equivalence, and recognizing the language of parenthood as a metaphor with reference to Godde, our decision to use “Mother” instead of “Father” seems an appropriate way to highlight the divine feminine.

Christians have long thought of the “Fatherhood” of Godde as an effective metaphor for talking about spiritual intimacy with the divine. For example, many continue to believe that the Aramaic word Abba means “Daddy,” despite the fact that Joachim Jeremias, the scholar who proposed that translation, later retracted his suggestion as “a piece of inadmissable naïvity.” Nevertheless, though the significance of the term Abba is more ambiguous (see Mary Rose D’Angelo, “Abba and Father: Imperial Theology and the Jesus Traditions, JBL III/4 (1992) 611-630), we recognize the importance of the intimate spiritual experience that people associate with the term.

While rendering the Greek term pater consistently as “Mother” instead of “Father,” the DFV actually proposes to retain the term “Father” as a translation of the Aramaic Abba in Mark 14:36,  Romans 8:15, and Galatians 4:6,  rendering Abba ho pater as “Father, Mother”: Two different ways, among many, of conceiving our relationship to our Godde who is like a loving and caring parent.

From “God” to “Godde”

In the classic feminist book She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992), Elizabeth Johnson grapples with the problem of the traditional term “God” (pp. 42-44). Because of its long history of association with an exclusively masculine image of the divine, to many it implies a masculine way of conceiving the Christian “God,” as opposed to “the Goddess,” a term that Christians have not traditionally embraced.

In an attempt to overcome this “God / Goddess” dichotomy, Rosemary Radford Ruether suggested the term “God/ess,” which may work as a written term but which comes across as simply “Goddess” as a spoken term. Consequently, Johnson decided to work with the traditional term “God” as “an interim strategy” (p. 43), “pouring the new wine of women’s hope of flourishing into the old word God,” while recognizing that “[u]ltimately this strategy may be superseded” (p. 44).

Since then, a new term has bubbled to the surface, gaining ground on blogs and web sites around the internet within the last few years. That term, “Godde,” seeks the middle ground between “God” and “Goddess,” combining a feminine-type ending with the traditionally masculine-type word. It’s intended as a more gender-inclusive term, something broader than both “God” and “Goddess” and yet transcending both as a term that points beyond itself to a divine reality that we can grasp only by metaphor. It’s admittedly not a perfect term, and unless the ending is emphasized in oral speech, it generally sounds the same as “God”; but as a textual marker it does serve as a constant reminder that the Godde of whom we speak is not the ancient man with the white beard so quickly recognizable as a traditional Christian stereotype.

In a sense, then, this too is experimental, and may or may not continue to gain ground among those seeking alternatives to the exclusively masculine image of “God.” In the future, another alternative may emerge, but for the present the editors of the Divine Feminine Version of the New Testament are content to affirm the increasing popularity of “Godde” as a way of describing the One whom Christians worship.

“He” or “She”?

In the Women’s Bible Commentary published by Westminster / John Knox Press (pp. 7,8), Sharon H. Ringe describes the need for gender-inclusive Bible translations:

A particular concern in women’s interpretation is the problem of language and gender. The so-called generic use of words like ‘man,’ ‘brother,’ or ‘mankind’ and of masculine pronouns in traditional translations of the Bible obscure or even negate the participation of women in the communities whose stories are conveyed in the Bible. The translators of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) worked strenuously and systematically to address these problems. Their translation, on which this commentary is principally based, uses words like ‘person,’ ‘human being,’ and ‘brothers and sisters’ where the gender of a person is unspecified or where women as well as men are clearly being addressed.

She goes on, however, to describe a problem not addressed by the NRSV, namely, the exclusively masculine pronouns used of Godde:

A theological issue of great importance in feminist interpretation that was not addressed by the translators of the NRSV is the problem of gender and language about God. All pronouns referring to God in that translation are masculine singular. The explanation given is that these pronouns (or verb endings, as pronouns are often conveyed in Hebrew) are found in the original languages and that therefore the translation is accurate. In both Greek and Hebrew, however, all nouns have grammatical gender, which governs the gender of pronouns used to refer to the nouns. In that sense, those languages are like such modern languages as Spanish, where, for example, ‘table’ (la mesa) is a feminine noun, requiring a feminine pronoun (ella, ‘she’). If one were translating from Spanish to English, however, where pronouns convey biological and not merely grammatical gender, the pronoun that refers to ‘table’ would be translated with the neuter ‘it.’ The same freedom prevails in rendering pronouns from Greek or Hebrew. Thus, the decision about which pronouns to use for God is one that cannot be made on grammatical grounds. It is a theological decision, and one whose resolution affects the way one views God. An interpretative decision that many women make is not to use any pronouns to refer to God (simply to repeat the word ‘God’), thus conveying the theological affirmation that God is beyond categories of gender.

That’s the approach chosen by An Inclusive Version and The Inclusive Bible, and it is certainly a valid approach: Avoiding all pronouns with reference to Godde is an effective way to highlight the historic Christian position that Godde transcends gender. On the other hand, however, avoiding pronouns altogether arguably doesn’t balance out the exclusively masculine language that so many use of Godde; it simply sidesteps the issue. Consequently, Ringe’s point about the gender of the pronouns in the Bible deserves some emphasis.

As grammarians are constantly reminding feminists, the gender of Hebrew and Greek nouns and pronouns doesn’t imply anything about biology or sex. Fair enough, but that point cuts both ways: The reason that pronouns referring back to “Godde” are masculine in gender is not because Godde is more properly described as a “he,” but because they have to match the gender of the word theos. Consequently, “he,” “she,” and “it” are equally valid ways of rendering those pronouns in English, a language in which the gender of pronouns isn’t determined by the gender of their antecedents but by what we intend to communicate in terms of personhood and sex.

When speaking about Godde, we necessarily use the language of analogy and metaphor because we cannot adequately grasp all that Godde is. When we describe Godde as “she” or “he” we’re not saying that Godde is biologically feminine or masculine, but that Godde engages us in spiritual relationship. Experiencing Godde as “She Who Is” affirms the Divine Feminine and expands our appreciation and understanding of Godde.

It’s our contention that a Bible version which uses the pronoun “she” of Godde is just as true to the original languages as Bible versions which use the pronoun “he.” In fact, given the importance of reclaiming the Divine Feminine within the Christian tradition, the need may be even more urgent.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Christian Godde Project, the focal point of an effort to develop a Divine Feminine Version of the New Testament. Whereas other Bible versions, such as The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version and The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation take gender inclusion to “the next level” by not depicting Godde in masculine terms, the proposed Divine Feminine Version (DFV) is being developed to depict Godde in feminine terms as part of a more broad effort to reclaim the Divine Feminine within the Christian Godde.