The Compleat Love of God

By Jean Uayan

      No, there is nothing wrong with the title. Although most dictionaries treat the words “compleat” and “complete” as variant spellings, I am intentionally using this “archaic” word as an adjective connoting “full information: having or exhibiting full knowledge of a particular field or skill.”[1] This word became popular because of a book on fishing entitled The Compleat Angler (1653) by Izaak Walton. I’d like to take it to describe God’s love not only as complete and perfect, but as compleat in the sense that He loves us with the heart of both a father and a mother.

Theologically and biblically speaking, the Israelites in the Old Testament were made aware of the warm reality of God as their loving Heavenly Father, as seen from the following verses:

Dt. 32: 10-11            “In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye, like an eagle that stirs up its nest   and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions.”

Ps. 68:5             “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.”

Mal. 2: 10             “Have we not all one Father? Did not one God create us?”

However, there is another verse in Jer. 2:27 where the Israelites are rebuked for their idolatrous tendency:

“They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’ and to stone, ‘You gave me birth.’ They have turned their backs to me and not their faces; yet when they are in trouble, they say, ‘Come and save us!’”

Hence in the Old Testament period, the danger of association with fertility cults explains why the parental imagery is much less frequently used to describe God's relationship with Israel, as compared with the covenant and kingship metaphors.

            And yet when Jesus came, He highlighted not only the Father and Son relationship of the godhead, but also brought us into an even more intimate knowledge that God is truly our Father, for he said:

Jhn. 8:41            “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me.”

Jhn. 8:54            “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me.”

I Jhn. 3:1            “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”

            When the Bible used parental imagery, it wasn’t only depicting God as Father, but there are passages where God’s love is described in maternal metaphors, as the following verses show.

Isa. 49:15            “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!”

Isa. 66:13            “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.”

            These verses reveal another dimension of God’s parental love – the maternal side. We are fully aware that the love of a father and that of a mother have different expressions or dimensions. Although rare in the Old Testament, the above major passages clearly provide the two dimensions of God’s parental love. When we turn to the New Testament, Jesus displayed the maternal aspect of God’s love through the following verse:

Mat. 23:37 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”

Jesus had canonical precedents for this imagery. For instance, in the book of Ruth, when Boaz praised Ruth for her care of Naomi, he said, “May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge." (Ruth 2:12 NIV) Another verse is Psa. 91:4, “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”

This mother hen imagery might also be tapping into a passage in the apocryphal book of II Esdras 1: 27-30a (NRSV): “It is not as though you have forsaken me; you have forsaken yourselves, says the Lord. Thus says the Lord Almighty, Have I not entreated you as a father entreats his sons or a mother her daughters or a nurse her children, so that you should be my people and I should be your God, and that you should be my children and I should be your father? I gathered you as a hen gathers her chick under her wings.”

Such imagery depicts that God’s love is so sheltering, unconditional and long-suffering, that we need fear only if we reject it and respond with poor substitutes as the Israelites did with their ritual offerings.

Was the parental imagery also de-emphasized by the early church in its understanding of the Old or New Testaments? Actually, there is strong evidence that prior to A.D. 400,[2] the church, especially of the Syriac tradition, used such imagery quite extensively. Two samples from the Odes of Solomon and from the Hymns of Ephrem Syrus will show quite well how the Church of the East incorporated this imagery into their worship and belief system. It must be pointed out that these two sources are orthodox, not Gnostic or pagan, according to evaluation of modern scholars.

Ode 19 imaged the Holy Spirit as well as the Father as feminine. The passage reads:

A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it with the sweetness of the Lord’s kindness.

The Son is the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him.

Because His breasts were full, and it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.

The Holy Spirit opened her bosom [other translations, “womb”], and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.

Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, and those who received it are in the perfection of the right hand.

Here the cup refers to the Son, the Spirit is both the One who “milked” him, ie., took God’s grace and bestowed it on the world, and who opened the womb, the place in which His activity is conceived. Hans Drijvers has traced the image of God’s womb in this Ode back to the earliest Syriac version of John 1:18, which reads, ‘the only-begotten Son, which is from the womb of the Father,’ a wording kept in the Peshitta version.”[3] In the NIV and other English versions, the word has been rendered as “bosom” or “side,” with the phrase given as “who is at the Father’s side” or “who is in the bosom of the Father.”

According to an authority on Syriac Christianity, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, for the Odist, the perfection of the body reflects and reveals the perfection of the believer and the body becomes truly the image of its Creator. The goodness of God’s creation (physical/spiritual, visible/invisible, body/soul) is affirmed and celebrated and justly understood to provide images by which to ponder the mystery of God’s salvific work. This is the context by which the use of gender imagery should be understood appropriately. Gender imagery declares that the whole of the human person is created in God’s image; that gender, like any other part of human identity, barely reflects what Harvey calls a “reality that contains all things, transcends all things, and is greater than any language can convey . . . it bears witness to the notion that gender – but not one gender only – is somehow fundamental to both human and divine identity, albeit in ways that do not fit the human social conception (or construction) thereof.”[4]

Another source is the hymns of the famous poet-theologian of the Church of the East – Ephrem the Syrian. In Hymn II.1 of Ephrem’s book, The Pearl: Seven Hymns on the Faith, the imagery is applied to the Father. The passage reads,

Thy mother is a virgin of the sea, though he took her not [to wife]: she fell into his bosom, though he knew her not; she conceived thee near him, though he did not know her. Do thou, that art a type, reproach the Jewish women that have thee hung upon them. Thou art the only progeny of all forms which art like to the Word on High, Whom singly the Most High begot. The engraven forms seem to be the type of created things above. This visible offspring of the invisible womb is a type of great things. Thy goodly conception was without seed, and without wedlock was thy pure generation, and without brethren was thy single birth.[5]

The Feminist Movement has been quick to such Biblical and extra-canonical texts, interpret them in their own way to formulate an inclusivistic theological language referring to God as both male and female, and then push for their platform of equality between the sexes, some even going as far as advocating for the revival of worshiping mother-goddesses as the pagans did.

Harvey cautions that such use of gender imagery “may constitute an aspect of identity in ways that do not correspond to social or biological constructions of gender, because it is beyond our ability to understand what gender within the divine essence might mean (writer’s emphasis). In this instance, gender’s metaphorical significance lies precisely in its suggestive capacity; it is related to the prototype yet it cannot be equated with it.”[6] In Harvey’s analysis of Ephrem’s work, God’s use of female imagery is like putting on a “garment of words” just like putting on a physical body in order to reveal Himself to man. Ephrem calls this incarnation into language or words, in comparison with what is theologically called incarnation into a body. Harvey’s words give us the proper perspective in understanding female imagery and should be used to counter the extremes of the Feminist Movement.

Just as gender was a part of creation in God’s image – and thereby consecrated – so, too, could it be used as an image for contemplating the Creator. Religious language, according to this understanding, serves as a reminder that gender lies within the essence of identity in ways that exceed literal (social, biological) understandings; but being metaphorical by its very nature, religious language cannot define that essence here, on the matter of gender, or in any other considerations. The Godhead remains transcendent.[7]

            Understanding the love of God as comparable to the love of a father and a mother is compleat and biblical. It must be reclaimed from the dangerous reinterpretations that feminist authors are offering to the church and the world at large. Through metaphors in revelation, God has communicated truth to believers through analogical and prepositional statements about His nature. He wants us to distinguish between pagan representations and beliefs about Him and the truth that is found in Him alone. May our faith be founded on His truth and may all of us experience God’s compleat love every moment of our lives!