Sophia | she who is

Still on a feminine arc here - women in the world in general and where the church stands where it comes to females - throughout history and to this day. Holy Week always brings up issues about the Catholic Church, the Holy See and its history of colonizing oppression. 

25th anniversary edition, 2017

In She Who Is, Elizabeth A. Johnson writes that any approach to knowing a God who is beyond imagining must start with things that are known through human experience. For the Abrahamic religions history, the names and images used for God have been masculine and patriarchal. God as Father, as Lord, as divine king or ruler, all these names are gender specific and can perpetuate deluded patriarchy among its believers. 

Despite abstract formulations that the deity is formless and divine or beyond gender, a male identity is implied in most God-talk. Women then only relate to themselves as created in the image of God only by denying their own sexual identity? That can't be it! The consequences go beyond the effect on individual women or even on all women: The Catholic Church is culpable here too. 

After establishing the need for feminist rethinking of the names and images used to talk about God, Johnson considers how the task might be done. She rejects the solutions of some—to discard the term God entirely, to add feminine traits or dimensions to the existing list of usages for God, to reemphasize the role of the Holy Spirit and endow it with female qualities. She doubts that any equivalent imaging of God will be possible without a long and hard effort both to find female symbolism applying to God and to use it un-self-consciously. 

icon of divine wisdom, Sophia

Johnson’s examination of classical theology points out the richness of both tradition and the Bible in the multitude of symbols used for God. There are symbols taken from personal relationships, from human crafts, from philosophy, and from nonliving objects such as rocks. 

One of the most promising symbols in Christian thought, though, is that of Sophia. Often viewed as divine wisdom, Sophia is notable for representing the active presence of God to the world. The wisdom tradition holds Jesus to be Sophia incarnate, the wisdom of God, sent into the world. 

A worthy image we could all aspire to - a path of harmony and balance to restore and renew our traumatized world.