Marcus Borg points out many other good reasons to identify and honor the female (as well as non-gendered) images of God throughout the Bible:
Male images for God are often associated with power, authority, and judgment. When used exclusively, they most often create an image of a punitive God. God must be appeased or else.
Male images for God most often go with patriarchy—with male primacy and domination in society and the family.
Male images of God most often go with domination over nature. Nature is often imaged as female (“mother earth”) and domination over women extends to a rapacious use of nature.
Female images of God suggest something different. God is the one who gave birth to us and all that is. God wills our well-being, as a mother wills the well-being of the children of her womb. God is attached to us with a love that is tender and that will not let us go. And like a mother who sees the children of her womb threatened and oppressed, God can become fierce.
It is also important to realize that male and female metaphors for God are not intrinsically incompatible. God as “father” can be compassionate. This is the point of the parable of The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). So also in both Old and New Testaments, “the Lord” whom we are to love with all our heart, strength, and mind is also compassionate—a word whose semantic associations in Hebrew mean “womb-like.”
Moreover, just as God as Lord is demanding, so is God as Wisdom/Sophia. Both images of God combine imperative and compassionate.
.. “The way”—the way of wisdom—is also what “the father” at his best teaches. The issue is not that mothers are better than fathers, but that a particular way of imaging “father” can produce a distorted form of Christianity—as if Christianity is about meeting the requirements of an authority figure who will punish us if we don’t get it right.
Christianity is not about avoiding punishment or gaining reward. It is about loving God and loving what God loves.
asked respondents whether they believed that Trump “probably has or has not made unwanted sexual advances toward women.” Sixty-eight per cent of registered voters believed that he had; only fourteen per cent believed that he had not. Forty-three per cent of likely voters in the poll said that they would vote for Trump, suggesting that a significant portion of Trump’s supporters think that he’s lying, and do not care.
.. Even in his denials, Trump is acting like Trump, offering a string of epithets and diminishments that reinforce the idea that preying on women is a normal thing to do. It seems entirely clear that these allegations disturb Trump only because they inconvenience him. He has not once spoken about the matter as if he understands that groping women, in itself, is wrong.
.. That makes twenty-four women who have corroborated Trump’s own boasting, twenty of whom have offered up their identities.
.. consider the time he told ABC that he had advised his friends to “be rougher” with their wives
.. This isn’t sexual misconduct as much as it is the language of a man who doesn’t believe that such a thing really exists.
.. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, said that, “by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse,” and then he threatened revenge over the story.
.. As Trump has done, Cohen refuted an allegation of sexual violence in an alarming tone that immediately brings sexual violence to mind. “What I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting,” he said.
.. he worked with many of his accusers, and even the witness produced by Trump’s campaign to discredit Leeds—a man who, by the way, once boasted about arranging underage sex parties for politicians—acknowledged that Leeds and Trump were sitting next to each other on the plane.
.. At the Greensboro rally, he addressed Leeds’s story in a similar manner: she wasn’t hot enough to be preyed on. “Believe me, she would not be my first choice,”
.. He and his team have repeatedly defended themselves by invoking the idea that women with assault stories are looking for “some free fame,” as Trump said at the Greensboro rally, or “free publicity,” as Hope Hicks said about Kristin Anderson. Trump raised the issue again at Wednesday night’s debate, saying that the accusers had been brought forward by the Clinton campaign to enjoy their “ten minutes of fame,” as if any person could possibly find this enjoyable.
Trump is more consistent. He is a pig in public as well as behind closed doors. In 1992, New York Magazine reported that he said the best way to deal with women is to treat them like excrement, though he used a more vulgar term. He has followed his own advice. His first wife, Ivana Trump, accused him of raping her in a fit of rage. (She later denied that the events she’d recounted were rape “in a literal or criminal sense,” but stuck to the underlying story.)
.. He owned beauty pageants and, by his own admission, would barge into changing rooms to ogle the naked contestants. The makeup artist Jill Harth said that he tried to rape her. Multiple women have accused him of groping and sexual harassment.
.. Somehow, in the wake of the Weinstein revelations, the president’s supporters appear to believe they hold the moral high ground. Donald Trump Jr. — a man who once said that women who can’t handle workplace sexual harassment “should go maybe teach kindergarten” — has been tweeting about Weinstein incessantly.
.. For the past 11 months, many feminists have been reeling from the defeat of the first female major-party presidential candidate by a predatory misogynist. The confirmation that a hugely powerful man who is supposed to be on our side is just as bad as Trump is shattering.
.. Yes, Ailes had to leave Fox News after charges that he’d demanded sexual favors from women in exchange for professional opportunities. But in the aftermath, conservatives did not ostracize him. Instead, Trump defended Ailes and defamed his accusers, then brought him on as an adviser
In certain ways sexual predation actually was the culture in the years when Weinstein came of age, in the entertainment industry and the wider society it influenced and mirrored.
.. There is a liberal tendency to regard sexual exploitation as a patriarchal constant that feminism has mitigated, and a conservative tendency to regard it as a problem that’s gotten steadily worse since the sexual revolution.
.. You can remember some of it with ’70s statistics: Never so many divorces, never so many abortions, a much higher rate of rape, an S.T.D. crisis that culminated in the AIDS epidemic.
.. something new happenedin Catholicism between 1960 and 1980: The prevalence of pedophilia stayed about the same, but suddenly the rate of priests groping and seducing and raping teenagers shot way, way up. As went Bowie and Zeppelin, so went the most putatively-conservative institution in the country.
.. The coarse worldview I’ve called “Hefnerism” endured, as the victims of Weinstein and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump can well attest.
.. They featured our civilization’s last great burst of creative energy. Those predatory directors and rape-y rock stars made great movies and memorable music.