Cover Blurb
- In middle English Jesus is called 'our kinde Lord’ because he is good, but also because he is 'of our kind' — one of us. In this book a leading scholar of religious language and feminism analyses the intimate and familial biblical imagery for God and divine action — Father, Mother, Son, Friend, being 'born again' — in the context of the central loci of Christian theology: doctrine of God and spirituality, Imago Dei and anthropology, Creation, Christology and Cross, Trinity and eschatology. Janet Soskice argues for the audacity of scriptural metaphors that may look to us worn out by centuries of use. The essays press towards an ‘eschatological anthropology' where to be in the image of God, male and female, is to be always a mystery to oneself, until our true beauty is disclosed in the beauty of God.
- "This collection of essays by Janet Martin Soskice forms a natural extension of the argument in her justly-acclaimed "Soskice (Janet Martin) - Metaphor and Religious Language". Soskice writes in an enticingly accessible style, yet she never fails to enunciate a position of religious and philosophical profundity."
… Sarah Coakley, Harvard Divinity School.
Reviews (collected from Amazon)
- When I began to read The Kindness of God, I could scarcely put it down... The book maintains a marvellous tone. Its manner is kind. It belabours nothing... The tone constructs both the author and the reader as people with interests, who care, who seek to understand something without heat. Everywhere there prevails a light touch. A light touch is such a rare thing... Soskice's scholarly voice is nearly unique. She shares with Thomas Aquinas the virtue of arguing with ideas, while leaving her opponents unnamed... The Kindness of God treats the... fraught topic of God and gender with a range, delight, and finesse that no one else, as far as I can think, could manage.
…Eugene F. Rogers Jr., Modern Theology
- Janet Martin Soskice's new book brings together material published since 1991 together with a substantial new piece and a short coda to the whole book... Her realism always draws the reader away from the flights of abstract fancy to the facts of women's lives as a starting point for theology.
… Gerald Hegarty, Expository Times
- Here is a woman powerfully challenging the patriarchal tradition of her Church and doing it ... by careful scholarly exploration of its faith and spirituality...
… Peter Cornwell, Times Literary Supplement
- This book has two goals; to examine the imagery that the Bible uses for God, and to do so from a "constructive" feminist perspective, rather than one that is simply "critical". Janet Martin Soskice achieves both purposes brilliantly - not least because she expresses herself beautifully. It is rare to come across theology that reads so well.
… Andrew Davison, Church Times
- A very accessible book...Soskice throws off many provocative insights...The book opens perspectives on matters of central theological importance which it will be rewarding to revisit.
… Fergus Kerr, The Tablet
ContentsIntroduction – 1
- Love and Attention: Incarnateness – 7
- Imago Dei – 35
- Creation and Relation – 52
- Calling God ‘Father' – 66
- Blood and Defilement: Christology – 84
- Trinity and the ‘Feminine Other' – 100
- The Kindness of God: Trinity and the Image of God in Julian of Norwich and Augustine – 125
- Friendship: love thy neighbour – 157
- Being Lovely: Eschatological Anthropology – 181
Bibliography – 189
Index – 199
Book Comment
OUP Oxford (13 Dec 2007)
"Soskice (Janet Martin) - The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language"
Source: Soskice (Janet Martin) - The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language
Introduction (Full Text)
- There are many metaphorical names for God in the biblical literature — Rock, Shepherd, Lamb, Fortress, Door, Way — but playing a privileged role amongst them are anthropomorphic titles. These personify God, and it seems that the biblical writers were pressed to use anthropomorphism to do justice to a God whose acts they wished to chronicle. This is a God who cajoles, chastises, soothes, alarms, and loves, and in our experience it is human beings who pre-eminently do these things. Early Christian theologians saw in this plenitude of divine titles a revelation of the manner in which God, while remaining one and holy mystery, is in diverse ways ‘God with us’.
- We can identify biblical anthropomorphic titles in three registers: those appropriate to offices of governance, for instance, where God is Lord, King, and Judge; those related to offices of service, in which God is Shepherd, Watchman, or Servant (Teacher might fall into either of these two categories); and those representing the offices of love — Father, Brother, Son, Spouse, Lover. These last are the most intimate, because they are all, if we extend some generosity to Spouse and Lover, kinship titles.
- Kinship imagery is both compelled and resisted by the Hebrew scriptures, compelled for reasons of intimacy, and resisted from fear of idolatry. Thus the remarkable ‘Song of Moses' at the end of Deuteronomy not only provides one of the few instances of naming God ‘Father' in the Old Testament (‘Is he not your father, who. created you, who made and established you?' (Deut. 32: 6)), but goes on to follow this with a graphic maternal image, accusing Israel of being ‘unmindful of the Rock that bore you' and forgetting ‘the God who gave you birth’. Paternal and maternal imagery in quick succession effectively rules out literalism, as does the astonishing invocation of a parturient rock. The text both gives and takes away, for it is on the face of it preposterous that we, creatures, should be the kin of God.
- Yet there is a sense in which both Old and New Testaments point to nothing less. Kinship titles are mutually implying — if I am your kin, then you are mine. Once one has a brother or a sister, one is a brother or a sister. This is not merely a matter of emotional and domestic ties. A shepherd who ceases to look after sheep is no longer a shepherd. He might become a farmer or, as in David's case, a king. Kinship terms are not similarly disposable. A woman who gives birth is made a mother by the arrival of the child, and this is so, formally, even if the child is taken away without her seeing it, or dies within a few days of birth. The relation of mother to child is formal as well as, in most cases, emotional. To claim that God is our Father, or Christ our brother, is thus to make a strong claim not only about God but about us.
- Given this strength of implication, we should be more startled than we are by the kinship titles in the Bible. Yet for many centuries and until relatively recently, kinship titles and related imagery (father, brother, being ‘born again') was little remarked background noise of Christianity — the common and effaced coin of Christian speech (see Chapters 4, 5, and 7). Derrida wrote of a ‘white mythology’, referring to the ballast of dead metaphors (the ‘stem' of a wine glass, a ‘high' note, economic ‘inflation') in ordinary language so pervasive as to pass unnoticed. Christian teaching, we could say, has been for many centuries in receipt of a ‘grey mythology' — metaphors worn smooth, like an old marble staircase, through centuries of stately liturgical ascent until their original figurative potency was lost. It was left to a later day for kinship metaphors to disturb and scandalize, but also to reawaken us to the promise of what we may become.
- This is effectively what happened in the early days of feminist theology. It is not that earlier generations had excluded the possibility that God might be called Mother as well as Father; it was simply in most cases not considered. It was not, however, possible for any theologian of my generation, or sex, and especially not one like me whose special interest lay in religious language, to ignore questions of gendered imagery. Here were questions not only deeply interesting in their own right but, unlike many that absorb the academy, ones which had the deepest bearing on the lives of individuals and of their churches. The initial response to these genuine difficulties was, in some cases, to try to excise ‘sexed' titles, a project which proved difficult with liturgy and impossible with Scripture. When we change the gender of a term, often as not we change the relationship: a child in general does not occupy the same status in biblical literature as the first-born son. While this seems to put us between a rock and a hard place (either give up the Bible or embrace its outmoded categories), the idea that the biblical books, or parts of them, are too intrinsically sexist to be sustaining for modern readers betrays a strangely wooden literary theory. Books do not contain their contents with the fixity that an individual volume contains so many grams of paper and so many of printer's ink. The message of a book cannot be separated from its living readership, a point made by many modern literary theorists, but long realized by rabbis and theologians who distinguished between the inspiration of Scripture and the illumination of those individuals and communities who read them.
- Many of the essays in this volume had their origins in a desire to explore the Symbolics of sex and in my attendant conviction that if feminism was to be of enduring importance to theology, it must result in constructive as well as critical work. My plan was, in exploring the gendered imagery, to move the reader through many of the main loci of Christian reflection — the nature of God and creation, Christian anthropology, Christology, Trinity. I hope the volume still works in this way. But as the work proceeded, and especially as I explored the systematic connections, it seemed more and more evident that the principal reason why the biblical writings are so dependent on gendered imagery (a dependence which increases as we move from the Old Testament to the New) is not because its writers were so very interested in sex, or even hierarchy and subordination, but because they were interested in kinship.
- In Middle English the words ‘kind' and `kin' were the same — to say that Christ is ‘our kinde Lord' is not to say that Christ is tender and gentle, although that may be implied, but to say that he is kin — our kind. This fact, and not emotional disposition, is the rock which is our salvation. The title of this book wants to recapture that association.
- Kinship may seem, in our egalitarian times, to be a dangerous theological direction to go in not least if we associate kinship titles with dominance and subordination. Without doubt, kinship terms have been used to enforce a certain rigidity into Christian anthropology (what used to be called the ‘Christian Doctrine of Man'), but my wager is that if we return to the texts of Scripture and the classical texts of theology, many of these fears will be dispelled. In Matthew's gospel Jesus exploded normal expectations by asking, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?' (Matt. 12: 48). Early Christians scandalized late antique society by eschewing marriage and choosing to belong as celibates to a new family of brothers and sisters in Christ. The hierarchical expectations of fatherhood and sonship were up-ended by the formulations of the doctrine of the Trinity (Chapter 6).
- Undoubtedly this spirit of freedom in the anthropology of the early fathers was constrained by the particular notions of human perfection with which they worked. Abetted by the Hellenism which was the air they breathed, many early theologians reached a picture of the perfect Christian whose contemplative stillness mirrored that of the impassible Deity (Chapters 1, 2, and 7). This is a far cry from the representation of the human condition in the Bible, which is perfected not in solitary changelessness but in its special mixture of holiness, fractious indignity, and other people, including mothers, fathers, brothers, and lovers (Chapters 1, 2, 6, 7, and 8).
- Kinship imagery has this signal advantage — it is all about birth, growth, and change. From their first appearance in the Old Testament, the divine kinship titles are names of promise, holding before us the vision of a love which is both now and not yet. The family of God is both now and yet to come, and what we will be — either individually or collectively — is not yet apparent. Metaphors of kinship open up for us an eschatological anthropology wherein our constant becoming is our way of being children of God. It is with these themes of birth, growth, and change that these essays begin.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)