Mother-Father God
How do you view God?
A big question, yes. But an important one. A good percentage (70-something) of people (including youth) believe in God, but most do not know what they believe about Him.
We've talked about God in descriptions of an Old Testament and New Testament God, but another way to look at it is justice versus mercy. Often we get both from God. Some view this as the fatherly and motherly roles of God.
Often we attribute to God the male sense of being: a dominating, disciplining law giver, who seeks to provide stability for His children through rules, punishments, and rewards. The opposite, yet balancing perspective of God is that of the female: a maternal caregiver, who offers refuge and tender love.
I see God as a mixture of these two roles - throughout the Bible. Only by growing to understand these seemingly conflicting natures can we begin to comprehend all that is God, our Mother-Father.
Look over the experiences of your life. Have there been times where you've felt God's presence as being more like a father? a mother? a mixture of the two?
How have these experiences shaped your picture of God? Is there any way to more accurately express the presence of God (rather than "He")? Or does that break God down too much into a concept? Do we do that already through our current verbalizations of God's presence?
posted by Ben George @ 10:16 PM
1 Comments:
Interesting thoughts. I think it's so cemented that God is a "he" in our understanding it really is hard to see him as a she (ha!). It's an interesting thought. We're created in his (there it is again) image, both men and women, so I can't imagine that only half of the earth is made in the image of God and the other is kind of like God.
In our recent discussions of limiting God to an idea, I suppose gender is one of those limitations. But it still feels like going against the grain to refer to him as anything other than, well, him. Weird.
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