228 WHERE IS EVANGELICAL FEMINISM TAKING US?
The bookstore carries a book by Paul R. Smith called Is It Okay to
Call God “Mother”? Considering the Feminine Face of God. In this
book Smith says, “In one sense I wrote this book so that our congrega-
tion could have a fuller explanation of why I believe it is important to
call God ‘Mother’ as well as ‘Father’ in public worship.”^3
Smith introduces chapter 3 with a cartoon of Moses arriving in
heaven, Ten Commandments under his arm, saying to God, “Gee, I
didn’t expect you to be a soprano!” Later in the book, Smith asks the
question, “Will the next thing be to say that Jesus should have been a
woman?” and though he affirms that Jesus did come as a man, he says,
“Something is wrong when we cannot conceive of the Messiah coming
from a different cultural setting or being of a different race or gender.”
He says he personally owns a sculpture of “a female Jesus hanging on
the cross” and he admits that some people “have violent reactions” to
it.^4 Smith concludes this section by saying, “I personally try to avoid
using masculine pronouns for the risen, transcendent Christ except when
I am speaking of him during his time here on earth before his
ascension.”^5
Smith does not explain how he reads the dozens or perhaps hun-
dreds of passages in the New Testament epistles that refer to Jesus as
“he” and “him” after he ascended to heaven, using masculine singular
pronouns in Greek, such as this passage from Colossians 1:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For
by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth... all things
were created through him and for him. And he is before all things,
and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body,
the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in
everything he might be preeminent (Col. 1:15-18).Or this statement from Philippians, talking about Christ after his ascen-
sion into heaven:
(^3) Paul R. Smith, Is It Okay to Call God “Mother”? Considering the Feminine Face of God
(Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993), 1.
(^4) Ibid., 134, 137, 140, 141. Page 142 suggests that this sculpture, like another picture he has,
is hanging on his office wall.
(^5) Ibid., 143.