Rhetoric Race and Religion
An article on WORLD magazine’s website bemoans a Grammy-nominated Christian band’s “drift from biblical orthodoxy.” The substance of this move toward heresy?
- the band leader no longer believes in an historic Adam, Eve, or Noah
- the band’s newest album expresses doubt (for the record: so does the biblical book of Job) AND, most importantly and heretically:
- a new musical track experiments with feminine metaphors for God!
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, tweeted the WORLD article, saying “this is really sad.”
Owen Strachan, who teaches theology at Boyce College, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, and who serves as president of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, was more expressive, tweeting the second part of that tweet is an allusion to 1 Peter 2:8…except that there it’s Jesus who’s the stumbling stone and the rock of offense — not Bronze Age-appropriate gendered expressions that the Bible, being a text of its context, employs, along with other notions that not even the strictest patriarchalist adheres to — such as the implication in the various laws that women are property (property that ought to be treated decently, but property nonetheless.)
I’m not sure why Bible’s female metaphors for God (some of my favorites are in Deut. 32 and in Isaiah) get almost no airtime and to suggest that we might think about God as Mother equals heresy. Sure, the language of masculinity is used to to talk about God more than the language of femininity, but it is there, albeit largely ignored in certain quarters.
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