By Jeanne Melchior
Wrightwood Series on Gender
It is nearly spring once again on my ridgetop here in southern Indiana, and all about me the miracle of creation plays out yet another season. Spring rains drench the woods, soaking into earth, slowly composting last year's leaves to provide new soil for still sleeping seeds and roots. This place seems far removed from the larger world where forests are being destroyed, poisons are being dumped into air and water, and bulldozers are irrevocably altering landscapes that took millions of years to evolve into a tenuous state of fragile beauty.
My newspaper tells of wars that rage in distant places, many of them fueled by religious intolerance, by one sect claiming that it has the truth which it must defend against all change, and that all humans must change to conform to particular cultic concepts of identified truth. Humankind has had a long history of religious wars, of bloodshed and violence towards one another and towards the earth. That this has been done in the name of God is, perhaps, an indication of how limited we are as humans in our expressions of and about truth, goodness, and beauty, for surely these realities surpass individual, cultic, and cultural differences.
Even among those who proclaim to worship the same God, and who use the same sources and language to speak of this God, there are many variations and differences, leading different sects of the same faith family to break free from each other, and to wage a continual warfare of words rather than focusing on goals -- and on all that unites them. In the mainstream Christian churches today one of the most heated areas of disagreement since the Reformation would have to involve gender issues and gender-referenced language. Indeed, as Elaine Pagels points out in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, gender issues have been widely debated from the earliest days of the Christian church until the present. Much of this debate has centered on sexuality and even a brief glimpse into Christian history gives us an indication of where some of our current gender difficulties took root. Today, however, much of the debate more appropriately centers on the language about God and how this has shaped human sexual codes in the West and how this continues to shape our culture and our ability to know God and to be more like God.
Seeing God as only a father has severely limited the human race by subtly proclaiming that male gender is normative, claim some, while others find the image of God as a caring father comforting. A major difficulty occurs, however, when those who find the language of religious tradition so necessary that they become unable to accept any notion that others might see things differently. They become upset and reactive by any language change, that while the old language still perhaps serves them, it no longer expresses the reality of God to others. Unwilling to co-exist with such differences, they all too often ascribe any such impetus for change to Lucifer (or Caligastia).
We live in a world of intense change. In fact, more changes have occurred in the past fifty years than in the previous two thousand. And as the human cultures have evolved, so have their languages. I wish to explore further this recent explosion of change as I examine more closely the way gender-referenced language is used in The Urantia Book.
Last Christmas, my 10 year-old daughter came home with a banner she had made at school which proclaimed, "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All." I was exultant. Not just because she was expressing a message of peace in an over-secularized and commercialized season, but because she was expressing this message using inclusive language. When she described God as a friendly face fronting pink circles stretching as far back into infinity as the eye could see, and described her as being a loving and happy God, I was both amused and heartened. For despite growing up in a Christian world that views God primarily as an old man with a white beard, she had managed to find her own private vision, a vision that will no doubt alter greatly as she matures.
What does this have to do with The Urantia Book, you might ask? "The Urantia Book says that men and women are equal and that's good enough for me," or "I'm a woman and I don't feel excluded by the use of the word mankind to refer to all humans, and using the term father for God doesn't mean that God doesn't have female qualities as well," or "If we really study the book we can see all the ways that male- female balance occurs in the universe."
I will say to those who are satisfied with your understandings, then blessings be with you. May you ever be drawn to greater experiences of God's love. But it's important to recognize that many individuals, and I am one of them, are feeling increasingly uncomfortable with a language about truth that too often hides or excludes others from the truth. There are many who feel excluded rather than invited by the predominantly male symbolism for God in The Urantia Book. We feel even more excluded by those humans who insist that the male symbolism be accepted by us as the Truth.
There are many of us who recognize that language is a human construction of mutually agreed upon symbols, and as such can only partially reveal truth which is beyond any human symbol. We must surely know that the First Source and Center is beyond gender, and use of gender reference to refer to God is an indication of the limitations of our language as well as a reaching out by humans to understand more deeply the unknowable in terms that we are familiar with. As Genia Pauli Haddon, author of a just-published book, Uniting Sex, Self, and Spirit, points out:
"All our various names for God originate as forms of endearment
springing from the lips of those who are on intimate terms with deity."
She goes on to say that as a human species moves on into a new age, as
they evolve, that the "old formulations will lose their power to connect
people to God" (Dare to Call, 6)
Because there is such an
apparent hunger growing all across our planet for spiritual connections
with the Divine, and because traditional churches are failing to feed the
spirits of the many individuals searching for truth, it's important to
be open to new and more powerful ways to connect with the Divine, to experience
the love that God has for us so that we can live more fully as channels
of that love. By bringing this debate into the open and explaining why
many feel such pain to read words that no longer mean what they purport,
to find truth explained in language that distorts at times the very message
it needs to express, we can come to a deeper understanding of one another
so that we can focus on our true task, which is experiencing God's love
for each of us and sharing freely this divine gift with one another.
When I first began reading The Urantia Book in 1982, I was able to overlook what I shall term the FOGBOM language (the fatherhood of God/brotherhood of man). But in the intervening years, as I have taught English and communication skills and have spent much time exploring the ways in which meanings are transmitted in various cultures via various forms of symbolic language, I have become increasingly sensitive to the subtle -- and not so subtle -- changes that are occurring in the language, changes that linguists and grammarians as well as religionists and truth seekers from many faith backgrounds are openly debating.
In order to understand how the English language used on Urantia in 1934 distorts truth in 1993, we will first need to look briefly at the nature of language itself -- what it is and what its limitations are -- and then relate this to the problems of language that abound in
The Urantia Book, making the truth contained in it ever more difficult for succeeding generations to discover.
Language is, first of all, a human construction of limited human symbols. It can never fully explain reality and it can especially be presumed to only marginally approximate any concept of God. Even the revelators of The Urantia Book acknowledge this:
"We are also seriously handicapped in the execution of our
assignment by the limitations of language and by the poverty of material
which can be utilized for purposes of illustration or comparison in our
efforts to portray divine values and to present spiritual meanings to the
finite mortal mind of man." [UB: 33]
As The Urantia Book
points out in many such places, all revelation of God must be incomplete.
"While such admissions as these may possibly detract from
the immediate force and authority of all revelations, the time has arrived
on Urantia when it is advisable to make such frank statements...."
[UB: 1008]
Not only is language a human construct, but it has changed
radically as humans have evolved, and this change continues at an ever-accelerated
rate. Invasions of England by the Romans and the French as well as conquests
and crusades by the British added much to the original Anglo-Saxon, and
the melting pot that is America continues to expand the English language
greatly. Over the centuries, sentence structure has been altered, meaning
of words changed, and even letters of the alphabet have been modified.
One has only to look at the history of the English language to recognize that use of words such as man to refer to both the male sex and to humanity as a whole is rapidly changing and that this usage has had a most checkered past (Miller and Swift, 12). Although mankind is still an acceptable term to refer to the entirety of the race, many grammars are now indicating that humankind is the preferred term. Because studies are confirming that when people read the word man the image of an adult human male is what comes to mind, use of the word man to refer to women as well, and the male pronoun he or his to refer also to women is discouraged (Miller and Swift, 13). The National Council of Teachers of English has a new stylistic manual which prescribes usage of non-gender-biased language, and the latest edition of the American Heritage Dictionary (1993), which includes over 15,000 new words, also discusses these changes. Many Christian denominations are turning to inclusive language editions of the Bible, and to inclusive hymnals and other materials for worship in an effort to more accurately use words to reflect the intended meanings. Use of the old terms will quickly relegate a piece of writing to stylistic obsolescence.
According to Randy Frame, in an article appearing in Christianity Today, "Contemporary Bible Translations: The Quest for Spiritual Purity," recent archeological discoveries and intensive scholarship are only part of the reason why we need new translations of the Bible. Although he is not specifically referring to inclusive language editions, he points out that when the King James translation of the Bible was made there were only a half dozen manuscriptsand now there are over 5,000. He points out that time also takes a toll on language and says, "some words today do not mean what they meant even twenty years ago...." If the goal of Bible translations is to use words that people can understand, new editions must be prepared. The 200 different translations and over 7,000 editions of the Christian Bible are an indication of the seriousness of this question.
Countless Christian theologians are debating the much broader ramifications of the usage of the term father as applied to God, which in Christian iconography, has its roots in the ancient Greek and Hebrew languages. These theologians are finding, among other things, that at least some of the dominant male images in the Bible were added over the centuries by male translators as well as by a hierarchical male church, and that an in-depth study of the Bible and its original language reveals many female images for God as well. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts and the Dead Sea Scrolls, both discovered in the 1940s, gave scholars much new material with which to work. Recent historical studies also indicate that many facts were suppressed in the early Christian Church when what we know of as the Christian Canon was indited as the true word of God. Rosemary Radford Ruether explores the historical basis for the Old Testament in Sexism and God Talk, and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza explores the history of women and gender-biased language in early Christian literature in her book, In Memory of Her. Both of these writers explain in detail how the Judeo-Christian religions were caught up in the andocentrism of the times, how they became easily attached to a social system that was totally connected to the idea of a male monotheistic God.
But The Urantia Book can hardly go to these ancient documents for such study. That it used the symbols of Christianity predominating in the Western world at the time of its transcription into the English language (circa 1934) is surely an agreed-upon fact. The revelators state that the words of Jesus are
"freely translated into the modern phraseology current on
Urantia at the time of this presentation." [UB: 1428]
In addition,
they frequently remind us of the relative aspects of the language.
"Down through the ages of the world's history, the revelation
of religions are ever-expanding and successively more enlightening. It
is the mission of revelation to sort and censor the successive religions
of evolution. But if revelation is to exalt and upstep the religions of
evolution, then must such divine visitations portray teachings which are
not too far removed from the thought and reactions of the age in which
they are presented."[UB: 1007]
Undoubtedly, revelation always
occurs in a historical context. Christians interested in the teachings
of not only Jesus, but of the recognized prophets of the ages, understand
the importance of cultural relevance. Feminist Christians are especially
interested in portraying the real message of Jesus in language that will
open the doors of perception rather than close them. Because The Urantia
Book is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition, the language and
usage of the Bible has a direct bearing on the future impact of The
Urantia Book, which is certain to become an archaic document if it
becomes stagnant and untouched by continuing generations.
Going beyond such overt problems with the language, and perhaps less easy to spot, are the many shifts in connotation which accompany the more abstract terms, and which are more directly related to the culture of each succeeding age. For example, because the English language is impoverished when it comes to words about love, we are often confused by the meaning of that word when we meet it on the page, for it is colored by the perceptions of what we have experienced. (This managed to baffle the revelators of The Urantia Book in 1934. See UB: 40) Other loaded words, whose meanings are largely subjective and are highly colored by an individual's unique experience within a given age and culture, include family, mother, and father. While the terms male and female have nearly universal meanings, based on biological description, the concepts mother and father have as many connotations as there are cultures, or even as many meanings as the subtle individual experiences within each culture, making it difficult for many to understand the concepts of deity in these terms.
According to Margaret Mead, about the only constant we can posit about human fathers is that in all cultures men must learn to be fathers (188). Parenthood is not innate, and the way both male and female sexuality and sex roles are expressed varies widely from culture to culture. Other more recent paleoanthropological studies suggest that the mother-child relationship is the primal relationship in all societies, from the primitive to the present, and it has been the female who has led the way in spreading the culture, in socializing, in teaching males to share [Ruether, Gaia and God, 145].
In addition, the concept of parenthood would be dramatically different in the mind of an individual suffering severe physical or sexual abuse at the hands of a parent, than it would be in an individual who had loving parents. It is unfortunately true that there are in existence fathers (and mothers) who, if their child asked for a loaf, the parent would give them a stone. Alice Miller in her classic work, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence, and John Bradshaw, in his new book, Creating Love, are two of many psychologists who are attributing such violence and abuse to a patriarchal family system (which holds that the father is its head, the mother is of lesser value, and the children are least important of all) and to the patriarchal tradition that produced this unhealthy family system.
Even the word family has a wide range of meanings" from nuclear family to extended family; from inclusion of blood relatives only, to inclusion of a wider community. Because communication is dependent upon the use of mutually agreed upon symbols, it is of utmost importance that these symbols are mutually defined, a difficult feat in a multi-cultural world. And, as culture continues to evolve, and as humans evolve with it, the old ways of formulating truth are certain to no longer be enough to carry us into deeper spiritual understandings. It is in this realm that many of the difficulties with the traditional language of religion occur.
In the "Lesson on the Family" (UB: 1603), which I have found to contain some of the most troublesome language in the entire Urantia Book, Jesus says:
"The people of another age will better understand the gospel
of the kingdom when it is presented in terms of the family relationship
-- when man understands religion as the teaching of the Fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man, sonship with God."
Then the Master
discoursed at some length on the earthly family as an illustration of the
heavenly family, restating what he termed:
"...the two fundamental laws of living: the first commandment
of love for the father, the head of the family, and the second commandment
of mutual love among the children, namely to love your brother as yourself."
In this passage the gender bias of The Urantia Book is at
its worst, for in the entire "Lesson on the Family," the word
mother is never mentioned once!
This insistence that fathers are, according to some "fundamental law" the head of a family is much more expressive of the social realities in the time of Jesus (or the 1930s) than it is of any deeply experienced truth. That this is a result of what Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza terms an androcentric paradigm, a way of looking at the world as being male-centered which has directed human affairs for many centuries, is hard to dispute (In Memory: 43). In another passage, The Urantia Book says:
"The names which the creature assigns to the Creator are
much dependent on the creature's concept of the Creator. The First Source
and Center has never revealed himself by name, only by nature. If we believe
that we are children of this Creator, it is only natural that we should
call him Father." [UB: 22]
Is it not equally natural to call
God Mother? Throughout the ages many women and men have worshiped the Divine
Creator they termed Mother, who was, in essence, the same Great Mystery
termed Father by others. Many well-intentioned Christians have written
numerous tracts explaining why these male terms for God are integral to
knowing God. Mary Daly writes about Deity and gender in The Urantia
Book in an article appearing in the Study Group Herald:
"The Fatherhood of God, and in particular the fatherhood
of the first person of Trinity is a basic tenet of revealed religion...the
First Source and Center must be conceived of as masculine, and therefore
fatherly -- because feminine primacy is contradictory..." [23]
But
nowhere does she indicate why she believes feminine primacy is contradictory.
Indeed, that the earliest humans saw God primarily as female is indisputable,
and the primacy of the mother-child relation is borne out by both science
and history. However, Daly maintains that father primacy is literal truth
and to not accept this is to deny The Urantia Book as a revelation.
But without question, both history and personal experience dictate that spirit-led humans can come to know the First Source and Center (who is genderless) without calling that being Father. We even read in The Urantia Book that on other planets other terms are used to designate God. (UB: 33) Indeed, insisting that God be called Father creates an image limiting God to one aspect of being. As Rosemary Radford Ruether pointed out in Sexism and God-Talk:
"When the word Father is taken literally to mean that God
is male and not female, represented by males and not females, then this
word becomes idolatrous." [66]
On page 4 of The Urantia
Book, we read:
"The word GOD is used in these papers with the following
meanings: 1. God the Father -- Creator, Controller and Upholder. The Universal
Father, the First Person of Deity."
However, to primarily
see God as father, as controller, especially in this limited sense, makes
it difficult for many of us to see those generative, nurturing, forgiving,
compassionate, merciful qualities, attributes that are frequently associated
with women and with mothers, as being part of who God is. It was this limited
view of God and of God as such a father, that many historians are coming
to identify as a primary force that shaped (and was shaped by) a male-dominated
culture, a culture which has limited both men and women, and has prevented
both sexes from more fully experiencing the God of Love that Jesus, Christ
Michael, came here to reveal to us.
God the Son is defined in The Urantia Book (UB: 4) without reference to the mother qualities assigned to God the Son (UB: 79). Here we read that the son is the Universal Mother, the counterpart of the Father, and all the rest of us are their children. However, this analogy is hardly mentioned again. God the Supreme is also defined on page 4 without reference to the mother qualities so beautifully mentioned on 1288:
"As God is your Divine Father, so is the Supreme your Divine
Mother, in whom you are nurtured throughout your lives as universe creatures....
All soul-evolving humans are literally the evolutionary sons of God the
Father and God the Mother, the Supreme Being."
Yet even though
the mother connection to both the Son and the Supreme is made (does the
male God have two female counterparts?), the masculine pronouns he and
his are regularly used to refer to both the Son and the Supreme -- a most
confusing state of affairs, while the word son is used to refer to daughters
as well.
This passage also says that in the central universe of eternity the
"Father nature becomes increasingly manifest, reaching its
height with the `recognition of the Universal Father'...."
So
even though humans come to know God as both Mother and Father, somehow,
the book maintains, the knowledge of the Universal Father is highest and
best. While the concept of experiencing God ever more completely in coming
ages as we become more spiritized perhaps points in the direction of truth,
to equate the highest and best with the term father can only distort this
truth.
But the gender confusion intensifies as we go to a more local universe level and consider the Creator Son and the Divine Minister who
"enacts the role of a mother, always assisting the Son...."
[UB: 368]
Only after she pledged subordination, fidelity, and obedience,
did a "Proclamation of Equality" ensue, which,
"...becomes the transcendent pattern for the family organization
and government of even the lowly creatures of the worlds of space. This
is in deed and in truth, the high ideal of the family and the human institution
of voluntary marriage"[UB: 369]
Not only is all this extremely
confusing, but when even the most elementary readers bring with them a
world of individual and highly subjective meanings to these terms, any
truth that might be lurking in these muddy images is easily missed.
In addition, many an astute reader, particularly one who is familiar with the human origins of this type of marriage as well as with the historical use of androcentric theological language to subjugate women, can simply not accept this as representative of divine truth. For just as I cannot accept the notion of a God who would need to sacrifice a son in order to save humankind, so I cannot accept a male God who must proclaim a female counterpart his equal only after she pledges her allegiance.
Undoubtedly, the authors of The Urantia Book meant to include women, and all the attempts to ascribe certain aspects of God as relating to women are, I believe, an indication of this good faith. I have no doubt of my inclusion in the "brotherhood of man" and I feel that the God of the Universes (who incidentally, I have come to know in ways other than as father) loves me personally. It is not the truth in The Urantia Book that I take issue with, but the language of patriarchy which continues to cloud thought and to suppress this truth. Using such language is not only inaccurate, and places a heavy burden on a sensitive reader to decide exactly what meaning is intended, but it perpetuates a view of reality which deems one sex inferior to another. But the revelators of The Urantia Book, at least partially, give us a way out of this dilemma. They tell us:
"Truth cannot be defined with words, only by living....
Man tends to crystalize science, formulate philosophy and dogmatize truth
because he is mentally lazy in adjusting to the progressive struggles of
living, while he is also terribly afraid of the unknown. Natural man is
slow to initiate changes in his habits of thinking and in his techniques
of living.... There is never a conflict between knowledge and truth. There
may be a conflict between knowledge and human beliefs, beliefs colored
with prejudice, distorted by fear, and dominated by the dread of facing
new facts of material discovery or spiritual progress." [UB: 1459]
In many passages throughout the book, the revelators tell us that
it is difficult to express the realities of truth into human language,
and that they are limited to the times of the presentation. As many champions
of patriarchal language in all religious traditions continue to insist
that androcentric language is the truth rather than a most limited attempt
to point at truth, they are no doubt reacting out of such "fear of
facing new manifestations of human spiritual progress." The nature
of revelation itself makes it necessary for God to speak to and through
individuals of all times, and no single book can ever truly contain God's
messages to humanity. Rosemary Radford Ruether states this eloquently:
"We must postulate that every great religious idea begins
in the revelatory experience. By revelatory we mean breakthrough experiences
beyond ordinary fragmented consciousness that provide interpretive symbols
illuminating the whole of life.... The hand of the divine does not write
on a cultural tabula rasa." [Sexism: 13- 14]
It is easy to explain some of the bias in The Urantia Book as well as the Bible by being aware of the limitations of revelation to the language and culture of the past.
But the androcentric language of The Urantia Book is only a part of the problem. An equal limitation is the androcentric focus, a point of view which many feel is even more biased than the language. Both the Jesus of the Bible and the Jesus of The Urantia Book stand out in their fearless way of treating women and men equally, an occurrence that was very unusual among the Jews at the time Jesus lived, for this was a culture in which males were the dominating force, women were treated as possessions, and slavery was common. We are told that there was a women's corps of disciples; however, it is primarily the stories of the twelve men that have been revealed to us, both in the Bible and in The Urantia Book.
In this same manner, the history of the races is presented in a way that points to a focus on male activities. Adam and Eve, the Material Son and Daughter, were equal partners, we are told, but the focus of the text is on Adam and all the things he did while an administrator of the garden. Throughout The Urantia Book (as well as throughout the Bible) we read primarily of the males who participated in the early struggles of the races. Even the Melchizedeks, who are without gender, are portrayed as male. While there is some mention of the female side of history, it is almost completely overshadowed by the discussions of supposed male beings, in male terms. We are even told that the 24 Jerusem Counselors, who represent the exemplary mortals from throughout the ages, are all male except for Eve, subtly leaving us to conclude that only males would be worthy of such a position.
One of the major historical imbalances of revealed Christian literature is that it has, for the most part, excluded the sayings, the doings, the activities of women, no doubt because most of these books were written by males. Judith Plaskow explores these themes in her books on the history of women in Judaism, and aptly describes the pain and anger women feel when they read these texts of truth that were written by and for men, with no mention of women's experience. When God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, for instance, we hear not a word of Sarah's story.
"At the central moment of Jewish history, women are invisible.
It was not their experience that interested the chronicler or that informed
and shaped the text." [Weaving: 39]
We have only to study
Judeo-Christian history to see how this one- sided reporting came about,
for gender bias is made up of what is not there as much as what is there.
Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza points out that women are only included in
these religious texts when they are either a problem or when they are exceptional,
and that the scriptures do not give an adequate amount of information about
the women of the times and how the revelation impacted them or was impacted
by them, and that this selective reporting is necessarily biased.
That the Old and New Testaments were written by males can explain this imbalance in that piece of literature but it is important to note that The Urantia Book section on the life and teachings of Jesus was primarily compiled from human records and the
"...majority of the ideas...had their origins in the minds
of the men of many races who have lived on earth during the intervening
generations...."[UB: 1343]
Given the idiosyncratic use of
the word men in The Urantia Book, it is difficult to know exactly
which usage is intended here; however, contextually, men here apparently
means human males, for women are no more discussed in The Urantia Book
than they are in the Bible. But what is responsible for the underlying
bias in the rest of The Urantia Book? Are we looking again at the
limitations of revelation? Does God only reveal divine truth to males?
According to many anthropological studies based on recent archeological finds, historians are looking at the ancient matrifocal cultures to find out what human societies were like when there were strong images of female gods. Their conclusions are startling. While it might appear that these ancient societies in which a mother god was a predominant figure would naturally be matriarchies, it is believed that this is an "either/or" fallacy, an error of androcentric thinking which assumes that one group must be in control because the primary paradigm is built on control. In fact, these early societies appear to be what Riane Eisler has termed partnership societies. These societies were highly evolved, and artifacts indicate that there was an equality among the members, there was little extreme poverty contrasted with wealth held in the hands of few, there existed an advanced culture of art and science, and articles of war appear to be very limited.
In these cultures women were held in high esteem, and because the language of God included prominent female images, Eisler makes a convincing argument that since these societies also included men, and male gods, that the conflict between the sexes was not nearly so troublesome as it has been in the male-dominated cultures that overran these gentler societies and remain the dominant culture today. (Chalice: 30-39) Interestingly, we read in The Urantia Book (UB: 1022) that the Melchizedek teachings were absorbed by the early mother cults, (although this teaching appears to be lost in the male-dominated societies), and vestiges of female gods have lingered in myth, and in Christianity as Mary the mother of God.
It was in what Eisler terms the dominator societies that males appropriated the male god figure and attempted to keep women submissive by proclaiming that there was only one true god of revelation, and that god was male. These monotheistic dominator societies evolved into Christianity, and are marked by war and strife, by slavery and subjugation of others. Because these societies are rigidly and oppressively hierarchical, they promote strife by their very nature [Chalice: 43-58] Susan Griffin was one of the first to point out the connection between this suppression of women and the degradation of the environment. This theme is further explored by physicist, Fritjof Capra; paleo-biologist, Thomas Berry; eco-feminist author, Charlene Spretnak; and many others. That these andro-centric cultures have dominated women (as well as each other and the earth), not only by language, but by force, is historical fact, and is borne out by many studies.
Gerda Lerner, in The Creation of Patriarchy, shows how, over time, these patriarchal societies gradually elevated the male son/consort gods to the status of one omnipotent being, and ultimately, Judeo-Christian thought came to be expressed in the limiting language of these patriarchal societies. It is also important to note that the historical sections in The Urantia Book, including the sections on marriage and the family, are firmly rooted in the limited knowledge of the 1930s, on anthropological theories of the 19th century that were in vogue at the time. These theories held that patriarchy is a higher stage of development (Ruether, Gaia and God, pg. 145). New discoveries and intensive scholarship have caused a deep reevaluation of all this.
These many incongruities serve to explain why the truth in The Urantia Book is difficult for a language-sensitive or historically aware reader to find. The divergence between what is stated as truth, namely that women and men are equal, and the meta-language, the slanted way in which these concepts are explained, sends a double message. When a truth-seeking human confronts such conflicting messages, the seeker becomes confused, often at subconscious levels, as they are called upon to choose between the explicit meaning of words or symbols, and what they experience as a gut-level discomfort, a knowing that something isn't right. When we experience this cognitive dissonance, we are left feeling confused.
Since the dawn of civilization, humans have struggled with the limits of revealed truth, all too often insisting that the words themselves constitute the truth. At the root of fundamentalism is this tendency to worship images created by humans -- human- constructed language. Genia Pauli Haddon explains this:
"All our words about the Divine are metaphorical rather
than literal statements. They work as pointers, aiming us toward the God
beyond the words, or as vessels, welcoming us to encounter God between
the lines. Even the most hallowed formulation becomes idolatrous if we
mistake the name for the Reality toward which the name leads." [Dare
to Speak: 6]
At the other extreme, many seekers, aware of only
their discomfort and unable to experience truth as being beyond language,
deny the reality of truth simply because the language has no words to express
it. For these reasons, as it is, The Urantia Book is limited in
its ability to convey the truth to this generation, and will certainly
have even greater difficulty with succeeding generations.
"Christianity suffers under a great handicap because it
has become identified in the minds of all the world as a part of a social
system, the industrial life, and the moral standards of Western civilization;
and thus has Christianity unwittingly seemed to sponsor a society which
staggers under the guilt of tolerating science without idealism, politics
without principle, wealth without work, pleasure without restraint, knowledge
without character, power without conscience, and industry without morality."
[UB: 2086]
By using the male-centered metaphors for God, by championing
the father-dominated family system, and by limiting the reporting to the
patriarchal social system operating on Urantia in 1934, the book cannot
escape charges of also apparently participating in such sponsorship.
Because of our androcentric world view -- a world view inherited from Judeo-Christian tradition and perpetuated in the language of The Urantia Book, have we readers of the book become as limited in our ability to see possibilities as those operating in more traditional Christian belief systems? As Joseph Campbell points out in The Power of Myth:
"You have to go past the imagined image of Jesus. Such an
image of one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier.
You hold on to your own little ideology, your own little manner of thinking,
and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than
you were prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the
image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith."[209-210]
It's important to note that the revelators of The Urantia Book
also warn us of this kind of crystallized thinking.
"All static, dead concepts are potentially evil. The finite
shadow of relative and living truth is continually moving...static concepts
may represent a certain knowledge, but they are deficient in wisdom and
devoid of truth." [UB: 1436]
By clinging to a language that
is inadequate to express new realities, by clinging to old metaphors that
limit our experience of truth, and by taking literally every word of any
book as being divine truth, do we not then risk missing the voice of God
that is even now speaking to us in new languages?
That we see God as either male or female has less to do with the nature of God than with the human tendency to anthropomorphize deity. In reality, God is neither male nor female. We have ascribed these qualities to God for want of a better language and simply as a way to begin to grasp the experience of God's great love for us. The revelators of The Urantia Book point out that the term Father is used to depict all that universe creatures can know of God, but that there is much that will ever be incomprehensible (UB: 1153). Many individuals believe that using gender to define God will ever miss the mark because of these limitations.
Rosemary Radford Ruether stated in her book, Sexism and God-talk, why she feels that using the parent image to refer to God doesn't work. To see God as a parent of either gender, she says, limits humanity, for as it sets up a relationship between us and God as parent and child, it infantalizes us and keeps us from becoming spiritually mature. We remain children, unwilling to take responsibility for our own actions. She feels that while we need a language of revelation that is inclusive of both sexes, we might turn to apophatic traditions, which teach that all names for God fall short of describing who and what God is, and that while we might do well to avoid becoming too abstract, we need to find
"a new language that cannot be as easily co-opted by the
systems of domination."[66-67]
Mary Daly, (a different Mary
Daly than the one mentioned earlier), makes similar comments in her book,
Beyond God the Father. She and many other theologians are pushing
the perimeters of traditional Christianity and are seeing God as process
(God the Supreme?), as beyond the limiting language of our past.
Sallie McFague, a feminist theologian, makes a strong case for continuing to see God as a parent. She believes too, that imagining God as Mother is one of the most potent of all images,
"for it is the image of gestation, giving birth and lactation
that creates an imaginative picture of creation as profoundly dependent
on and cared for by divine life." [Weaving: 146]
Aware of
the contemporary explanations of reality that have thinned the line between
spirit and matter to almost nothing, she explains:
"An evolutionary, ecological sensibility makes no clear
distinction between matter and spirit or between body and mind, for life
is a continuum and cannot flourish at the so-called higher levels unless
supported at all levels. God as parent loves agapically in giving, with
no thought of return, the sustenance needed for life to continue. This
is creative love, for it provides the conditions minimally necessary for
life to go on."[Weaving: 148]
A Native American described
the use of the term Grandfather or Grandmother to refer to God among his
people by explaining that to a human, the oldest, wisest being you know
is your grandparent, and that it was only natural to use these terms when
speaking to the Great Spirit. I like these gender terms better than Mother
and Father, for they are expressive of a respect for wisdom that comes
of long life as well as of a deep love, for it is only humans who can love
their grandchildren. However, if the male term Grandfather is a viable
term to use when speaking to and of God, then so must Grandmother be an
equally viable term. Many feminists today are discussing Christianity and
its major message of coming to know God more fully as encompassing both
female and male images of deity. Feminists unable to find the message of
Jesus hidden in the androcentric language are turning to earth-centered
goddess worship, to religions which encompass Jesus' message of love, but
do so in different language.
Unfortunately, much of what is currently understood as feminism is based on the secular premise that women are an oppressed class. Caught up in the patriarchal system but unable to see beyond it, these individuals fall into the trap of assuming that women must rise up and take power from the males, and in doing so, become like males. As long as we think in these terms, however, as long as we compete for power in an androcentric world of hierarchies (which according to Deborah Tannen is the male way of doing things), there will be war among the sexes. As long as revealed religion insists that God must be seen primarily in terms of gender, with one gender designated as highest and best, any inequality between the sexes cannot be resolved, for to see women and men as spiritual equals, this must be demonstrated as fact rather than as proclamation.
Sam Keen differentiates between ideological feminism, which is "hostile and blaming," and prophetic feminism, which is "insightful and enlightening." (Fire: 196) Even though this may come close to falling into the trap of false dualisms, he makes some excellent points. It is important to note that it is no longer possible to see this as either a spiritual or a secular issue, for the new science is rapidly erasing the boundaries between matter and spirit, making such duality an illusion.
As Charlene Spretnak, who is certainly such a prophetic feminist, points out in detail in her book, States of Grace, cultural studies done by Peggy Reeves Sanday found that when a culture has either a female image of God, or a balance of male and female images, the societies are also marked by a great deal of gender equity -- men and women working together in jobs that are not classified according to gender. In these cultures, women and men more equally participate in child care. In contrast, cultures where God is male are marked by deep divisions between the sexes, with men making most of the decisions, women doing most of the labor -- and nearly all the child care. In addition, these cultures are marked by high levels of aggression towards women (115-116), Rosemary Radford Ruether explores these same studies in Gaia and God. Clearly, it is the patriarchal (or androcentric) paradigm that is responsible for much of the historic inequality between the sexes, and as long as truth is revealed in its limiting language, the experience of that truth will remain limited. It is important to note that these historians, theologians, and scholars do not suggest that a matriarchy replace patriarchy. Rather, they show very clearly that males and females both need strong images of deity that are representative of both the male and female experience. And they suggest that we move forward to a new age of peace and environmental justice, not by overthrowing patriarchy, but by men and women becoming true partners. This will clearly happen only when we perceive reality in new ways.
I have worshiped the First Source and Center in terms of goddess with Margo Adler, and I have chanted praise to this same Divine Source with Starhawk (two leading proponents of goddess religion in America). I have spent several years studying women's medicine ways with Amylee, a Native American woman. I have worshiped with the Tibetan Gyoto Monks and I have participated in "Deep Ecology" rituals of recognition of the Divine as the Source of All Things. I regularly attend Catholic mass and receive communion, and I occasionally worship in Christian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Nazarene, Baptist and other Christian denominational churches. I am part of a vast network of spirit-conscious individuals, who, no matter what we call God, are speaking to the same deity, at least to the extent that we focus on the reality of Deity rather than the symbol, for it is apparent that both Christian and Pagan run into trouble when they confuse the symbol -- the image or the word -- with the reality of God, and worship this symbol rather than the reality.
I have come to experience even more deeply the love of the God of the Universes and I am more convinced than ever that it is the same Divine Being that we all worship and seek to know more fully, and realize more fully in our lives with increasing fruits reflecting truth, beauty, and goodness. Clearly, it is only the language that divides us. The Urantia Revelation makes clear that:
"Divine Truth is a spirit-discerned and living reality.
Truth exists only on high spiritual levels of realization of divinity and
the consciousness of communion with God. You can know the truth, and you
can live the truth; you can experience the growth of truth in the soul
and enjoy the liberty of its enlightenment in the mind, but you cannot
imprison truth in formulas, codes, creeds, or intellectual patterns of
human conduct. When you undertake the human formulation of divine truth,
it speedily dies.... Living truth is dynamic and can enjoy only an experiential
existence in the human mind.... Truth is a spiritual reality value experienced
only by spirit-endowed beings who function upon supermaterial levels of
universe consciousness, and who, after the realization of truth, permit
its spirit of activation to live and reign within their souls.... The true
child of universe insight looks for the living Spirit of Truth in every
wise saying." [UB: 1949]
The incredible spiritual renaissance that is happening now is an indication of the hunger of all humankind for a guiding spiritual truth. When we focus on the limited language about God that we humans have created -- a language that can never come close to reflecting reality, and use terminology about God to substitute for the experience of God in our midst, we can never discover the reality of deity for ourselves, for we will be too busy defending our linguistic turf of spiritual terminology against all change, against all new revelation to an ever-evolving humanity. We will be too busy judging those who speak to God and of God in different languages as followers of the devil. We will have little time to seek the silence wherein we can hear God and all of God's many manifest voices. We will be too closed to hear the voice of the Spirit of Truth which is everywhere, in every corner of our little planet.
Humans are evolving to a point where all symbolic language use is rapidly being altered. Because of incredible changes in communications systems, we are more aware of the vast array and wide variety of cultural contexts of words like mother and father and are becoming able to conceptualize God in ways that are beyond gender -- to experience God as the "super-ideational" reality that God undoubtedly is. Individuals throughout the ages have written about such experiences, and it is likely that this evolutionary advancement will continue to open the imagination to greater and more real experiences of God and of God's love for us.
Scientists have reached a point in their studies of the workings of the universe where they are coming face to face with matter in ways that are akin to dealing with the mystery of God. Fritjof Capra, a physicist, explores these scientific breakthroughs in The Tao of Physics, and relates this to other aspects of our earthly existence in The Turning Point. The belief that all reality is connected, and when one part changes this has consequences felt everywhere, is termed systems theory. Capra, and many others, feel that we are at a turning point in the course of human affairs. He and almost all these futurists feel that massive positive changes, changes that read to me like the beginnings of the age of light and life, will come about as part and parcel of a widespread spiritual renaissance. This renewal is specifically predicated on a new paradigm of reality which is linked to a feminist re-evaluation of culture and spirituality, not by replacing the patriarchal system with a matriarchy, but by getting rid of oppressive hierarchies, by seeing God in ever greater aspects, by recognizing the true and basic equality of all creatures, and by learning true partnership between women and men, between human beings and all of the animate and inanimate world. Daniel Maguire, a Christian ethicist states this succinctly:
"Something profound is going on, and feminization is its
name. It is going on in the culture, shaking foundational categories of
awareness, striking at long regnant myths and metaphors, affecting not
just the splashing waves of issue-debates, but actually shifting the deep-running
affective and symbolic tides that carry our thought in ways that argument
often does not even know.... What we see at present are but the first auguries
of what will be, if this still fledgling, but potentially epochal, re-evaluation
of human identity continues." [106]
Whether or not this "epochal
re-evaluation/revelation," this coming age of all peoples truly knowing
the living love of God -- the true brother/sisterhood of humanity will
come about because of a language of truth that includes both female and
male images for God, or whether the primary language of the God of the
Universes in the next millennium is yet to be revealed to us is unclear.
But it is clear that the old androcentric language alone will not be a
relevant factor because of the way in which it limits humanity from truly
experiencing all the many facets of God. As the revelators warn,
"The modern age will refuse to accept a religion which is
inconsistent with facts and out of harmony with its highest conceptions
of truth, beauty, and goodness." [UB: 2083]
In many places the revelators point out that each generation must seek truth anew, and one has only to look at the social climate of the 1930s to understand why the female image of God would not have been widely accepted in the 1930s. Even though the concept of a Father-Mother God had been introduced by Mary Baker Eddy in the mid-19th century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written her women's Bible, and many early Christian writers such as Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, and others, had used female metaphors for God. At the time of the revelation of The Urantia Book this concept of God as female was not in common usage. Even today the concept frightens many individuals. But I believe that it is likely that the revelators, in keeping with the understanding that revealed truth must be contemporaneous with the times of the revelation, down-played the female aspect of the universal deity, while at the same time, they briefly introduced the topic to a patriarchal culture. While The Urantia Book doesn't give us much insight into gender issues, being too mired in the language of the old paradigm, it does point us away from itself in new directions:
"The future of Urantia will doubtless be characterized by
the appearance of teachers of religious truth -- the Fatherhood of God
and the fraternity of all creatures. But it is to be hoped that the ardent
and sincere efforts of these future prophets will be directed less toward
the strengthening of inter-religious barriers and more toward the augmentation
of the religious brotherhood of spiritual worship among the many followers
of differing intellectual theologies which so characterize Urantia of Satania."
[UB: 1010]
Even though the revelators are bound to the FOGBOM language
of the past in this quote, they presage the new science which sees the
"fraternity of all creatures," a fundamental precept of both
the science and the religion of the future.
That there are many women and men who are writing a cosmology of the future, a vision of God and science based on recent explosions of knowledge and understanding in ways that are spiritually fragrant cannot be denied. The Spirit of Truth is at work in literally every corner of the planet. Many of these prophets are describing a future for humanity that is only broadly hinted at in The Urantia Book, and many of these writings are specific about what we -- the human race -- can do to bring about this new world order.
In addition, many readers of The Urantia Book are being inspired to enlarged revelations of love and truth, goodness and beauty by the teaching ministry. Groups and individuals worldwide and in great numbers, are receiving messages, presumably from a variety of spirit teachers who ever remind us that God's love for us must be experienced rather than just talked to death, and that truth is only viable when it is a living truth. There are many who remain skeptical of this ministry, who feel that The Urantia Book was meant to enlighten the human race for the next thousand years (possibly due to the reference on page 330 that no new personalities will be revealed in the next thousand years). In fact, throughout the book there are many references to the timeliness of all expressions of truth. The revelators state plainly that the book is to be regularly updated:
"The spirit of religion is eternal, but the form of its
expression must be restated every time the dictionary of human language
is revised."[UB: 1087]
Of all the many books which claim to
have divine origin, The Urantia Book is the only one to proclaim
its limitations and essentially to mandate its obsolescence.
And so, in 1993, Urantia time, the religion of Jesus is being talked about, being written about, and most importantly, it is being lived by greater numbers of people. The God of the Universes continues to manifest to peoples everywhere, and Christ Michael's promise, to be with each of us always, is being realized in individual lives. As we read in "The Second Discourse on Religion":
"I have called you to be born again, to be born of the spirit....
And so may you pass from...the authority of tradition to the experience
of knowing God.... The religion of the spirit leaves you forever free to
follow the truth wherever the leadings of the spirit may take you. And
who can judge -- perhaps this spirit may have something to impart to this
generation which other generations refuse to hear? ... You must cease to
seek for the word of God only on the pages of the olden records of theological
authority. Those who are born of the spirit of God shall henceforth discern
the word of God regardless of whence it appears to take origin. Divine
truth must not be discounted because the channel of its bestowal is apparently
human."
We are certainly being called out of the old and into
the new ways for each of us, male and female, to relate to one another
and to our God. As Matthew Fox, who is certainly proclaiming the message
of Jesus in his book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, points out,
if there is to be a future for the planet, what is needed is
"...a spiritual vision that prays, celebrates and lives
out the reality of the Cosmic Christ who lives and breathes in Jesus and
all God's children, in the prophets of religions everywhere, in all creatures
of the universe." [7]
Undoubtedly, we are in the midst of
a paradigm shift of epochal proportions, a moving from a patriarchal paradigm
that has dominated history for thousands of years, to a paradigm of reality
which is indeed universal, which is based upon true equality of all creatures,
in which we will recognize our true sense of being partners with God, of
our cosmic citizenship.
And so with this, my study of gender and The Urantia Book comes to an end. Rather I should say that it has brought me to a new beginning, for it will take many ages beyond this lifetime before I can begin to have any real understanding, even though I spend my entire human lifetime in the attempt. It is quiet here in my woods. Once again the phoebe has returned and found a place to nest. Baby rabbits nibble the new green leaves. Hepatica bloom in the woods, a yearly miracle of rebirth from all that is dead and dry. The entire world outside my porch is teeming with birth and death and new life. It is good to sit back in the peace of this place, which has no issue with gender bias or language differences, where all creation, according to Native American belief, goes about quietly doing the will of God. It is only we humans who haven't learned this yet, no matter how we try.
I am awed by the presence of God -- a God so beyond gender that I have
no words for this great mystery. But that it is the same God who spoke
to Job out of the whirlwind, who sent Christ to us, who has spoken to poet
and prophet, and saint and sinner, to Pagan, to Buddhist, to Hindu, to
ordinary men and women throughout the ages, I have no doubt. This God is
within me always, and beyond -- a light in the darkness of my ignorance.
And in the silence here, as I am intensely aware of the presence far greater
than my imagination could ever create, I perceive a humorous God, made
more knowable to me no doubt, in the likeness of all humanity. In the twilight
this formless, nameless God laughs, a dry but hearty laugh like wind in
branches. And an ancient voice, a voice that is neither male nor female,
nor even human, murmurs through the leaves -- "I don't care what you
call me, just call me!"
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The Urantia Book Fellowship