On Male Metaphors for God

When I opened Facebook one day in June and saw the headline, “Men Think God is a Man,” I thought, well doesn’t that say it all… 

In 2020, quite a few men still believe that God is a man. While I don’t particularly care to paint all of man-kind with one broad brush, there is one group of men for whom this thought is largely true: the Catholic clergy. The belief in a male God has spawned centuries of problematic doctrines, statements, and practices upheld and perpetuated by mostly celibate men. The teachings are not based on scientific understanding or sound theology: they are based upon fanciful metaphors.

Let’s explore one metaphor that is the basis for excluding women from the priesthood: Jesus as bridegroom, and the church is his bride, a “spotless and unwrinkled one,” at that. While scripture lists any number of metaphors for God, including a mother hen, a rock and a fortress, John Paul II  insists that “spousal love” is the pre-eminent symbol of God’s love, something neither he, nor most of the Catholic clergy, have ever experienced. The late pontiff and his followers have chosen to reduce the everlasting, munificent love of God to a finite and historically problematic human relationship. This imagery rests securely upon the fallacy that God is a man, and that spousal love can only exist between a man and a woman.

The insistence upon divine maleness and the bridegroom imagery leads to all sorts of silly assumptions and assertions, including the assertion that in order to understand the metaphor the priest must be male. According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, the late Vatican theologian, “The male body is male throughout, down to each cell of which it consists, and the female body is utterly female, and this is true of their whole empirical experience and ego consciousness.”

So, this utterly male Son goes on to “marry” the Church, the spotless, virginal bride during the sacrifice of the Mass. Von Balthasar then wanders off into soft porn while writing: “… the Eucharist is, at a higher level, an endless act of fruitful outpouring of his [the priest’s] whole flesh such as a man can only achieve for a moment with a limited organ of his body. The priestly ministry and sacrament are a passing on of seed. They are a male preserve. They aim at inducing in the bride her function as a woman.” Von Balthasar forgot that the spotless and unwrinkled bride, the Church, is male as well as female.

John Paul II injects sex right into the heart of the Eucharist. In his torturous encyclical Mulieres Dignitatem, the late pope explains that the paschal mystery reveals not a person who sacrificed his life for his friends, but rather a groom who prepares to unite his body with the church by laying upon the altar as a sacrifice to his bride, a rather ghoulish understanding of love, sex, and marriage. This is more akin to a kiss from a spider woman than a testimony to salvation and redemption. 

This warped understanding of married love continues, among numerous other places, in his letter, The Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World: “The messianic wedding took place on the cross when the blood/wine of the New Covenant poured forth from the side of the Crucified Christ.”  It is not surprising, he wrote, “that this context lends itself to the understanding that Christ is, indeed, the bridegroom.”

The use of imagery, poetry, and metaphor is probably the only way to describe an entity that lies far beyond human understanding. Jesus is called many things in scripture: Messiah; King of the Jews; Savior of the world; the Human One; the Resurrection and the Life; the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and yes, a bridegroom.  All words necessarily fall short when describing the Divine. The first set of titles led to the foundational creedal statements of the Christian church. The term bridegroom is, by comparison, but a pretty picture, a theological fancy, and an attempt to limit the expressions of God’s love.

It is time to reject the ridiculous and ruinous ruminations of celibate men who fixate upon male body parts and imagine Jesus as a bridegroom who consummates his marriage with his spotless bride during Mass. Jesus’ love for the world was so great that he was willing to lay down his life for his friends. This is the kind of love we remember and celebrate at Mass. Nothing about that love requires one specific gender.