May 01 2023 24 mins 47
Evangelical Questions: Heavenly Mother by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Heavenly Mother. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Before we get started though I want to let you know about a very cool event coming up. Every year FAIR hosts the most fantastic 3-day party. When I say “party” what I mean is getting to listen to and interact with some of the smartest people in our church. They give a talk on what they’ve been working on – and frequently the FAIR conference is the first place their ideas are presented in public. That’s my kind of party. And maybe it’s yours too. This year the FAIR conference is on August 2-4 (Wed – Friday) at the Experience Event Center in Provo, Utah. You can buy tickets to attend in person, or online by going to https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2023. I will be there all 3 days and would so happy to meet you. I am presenting a talk on one of those days, I don’t know which on yet, but will let you know once the schedule is finalized. 2 of the talks I am very much looking forward to are…1) Michaelbrent Collings is an American horror novelist and he’ll be talking about, “Horror: the Genre of Goodness, Godliness, and Hope.” Horror is not my genre at all, but I am completely intrigued by what he will say. 2) Dr. Janiece Johnson – her specialty is religious history – will be speaking on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I’ll try to highlight the talks every couple of weeks here – if you enjoy sitting around listening to me, you probably will enjoy sitting around listening to my friends too. Okay, back to our scriptures… Our scripture this week comes from Luke 13:34 : O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Evangelical Views So here we have God compared to a mother hen. The traditional Evangelical conversation around this verse goes something like this….Yes, God is compared to a female chicken, a hen, but this verse does not require us to believe God is female any more than it requires us to believe God is a Cosmic Chicken. Fair enough. No one is asserting that God is a giant chicken. And for a long time, this was the boundary on thinking about God and gender. God is male, and images in the scripture that refer to God as female such as a hen, a woman looking for her lost coin, a woman in labor, a nursing mother, a mother bear, and a mother eagle….these were just poetic images and not to be taken too seriously. But the boundary has certainly changed in even the last 10 years. It used to be that if you wanted to talk about any kind of feminine identity for God you were being scandalous. Only the most liberal of the Evangelicals would be talking about this. But last year Eerdmans published 2 books on the topic. If you are not familiar with the Evangelical publishing world Eerdman’s is willing to push the boundaries, and that’s been true for a long time. They’re not Zondervan or Lifeway which are going to take a very traditional Evangelical line, and to my knowledge have not, and would not, publish something about a feminine identity for God. But Eerdman’s isn’t ignored by Evangelicals either. So it’s a big step forward that this is being talked about. The traditional Evangelical view is not all that interesting to talk about. God is male. End of story. S [...]
