Feminine Aspects of Divinity

by Erminie Huntress Lantero

Overview

In recent years there has been growing recognition that the religious language of the Judeo-Christian tradition is over-weighted with masculine symbolism. It took shape in an era of patriarchal domination, first in Hebraic and Jewish society, then in the Roman Empire. As women today become aware of their femininity as a major style of being human, they quite properly resent this. Male theologians have pointed out that masculine pronouns are used for God simply because some pronouns have to be used; the statement is annoying, if also reasonably correct. Christianity always taught that sexual distinctions are not really applicable to the transcendent mystery we call God. But the manward aspect of that mystery, the perennial experiences of Divine calling, providence, shepherding, communion, made it necessary to continue to speak of God in personal terms. “He” is at least more adequate than “It.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940151287098
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	03/12/2015
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #191
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	30
File size:	112 KB

About the Author

Erminie Huntress Lantero spent four years at Pendle Hill (1938-42) as librarian and first editor of Inward Light. With a B.D. from Union Theological Seminary and a PhD. from Radcliffe, she taught Bible and religion at Wellesley and Sweet Briar. She later married an Italian Catholic, was assistant editor of an interdenominational quarterly, Religion in Life (1945-1961), and research assistant to Samuel McCrea Cavert (formerly general secretary of the National Council of Churches) on his two-volume history of the American Churches in the Ecumenical Movement. She is preparing a book, Space, Time and Deity: A Pilgrimage through Science Fiction and Speculative Fantasy, and is at work on a book-length study of “The Feminine Aspects of Divinity.”