The Analogical Imagination

Martyn Percy (Editorial, Modern Believing, Volume 43:4, October 2002)

By the time you read this, I should have returned from a sabbatical in the USA, where I have been enjoying a period of study and teaching as an Adjunct Professor of Theology at Hartford Theological Seminary, Connecticut. Sabbaticals offer considerable opportunities to reflect in fresh ways on familiar things. I have been looking at theological education, the shaping of applied theology, and on the changing face of the local church - Hartford is one of the leading centres in the world for studying congregations. These three areas don't perhaps, at first sight, appear to fit together that well. Indeed, I am bound to say that the areas would not be ones that I would especially select myself - it is rather that they appear to have selected themselves, and then pressed themselves upon me.

Over the last few years I have found my attention constantly drawn towards studying the 'concrete' church, and then trying to develop practical and applied theologies that help the church live faithfully and imaginatively between tradition and truth, between reality and vision. This praxis-based approach is not to everyone's taste, to be sure. But it is one that I have attempted to develop in the pages of Modern Believing as much as in my own work. Methodology in theology is always a contested arena. What counts as 'tradition'? Who interprets truth? What are the foci and limits of enquiry?

Such questions are timely for the Church of England at present, as it continues to ponder the question of women bishops. The Rochester Commission, ably chaired by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, is sifting and weighing the various contributions that are offering perspectives on the issue. But what weight to give to such contributions? Is a plea for a moratorium on the issue worth the same as a plea for progress? Is tradition something to be preserved, or part of the organic life of the church that is always changing?

The uses of tradition are a curious feature of such debates. My attention has recently been drawn to a new book that insists on the revealed 'maleness' of Jesus. In Robert Pesarchick's book The Trinitarian Foundation of Human Sexuality as Revealed by Christ According to Urs von Balthasar: The Revelatory Significance of the Male Christ and the Male Ministerial Priesthood (Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 2000), the author argues that priests must be men, because they represent Christ's maleness, which is part of God's self-disclosure. It is a curious book in many regards, not least because it assumes that the partiality of analogy must nevertheless reveal the fullness of reality, besides assuming (with Aristotle, and wrongly, of course) that men are creative (i.e., life-giving of their seed) and women more passive (i.e., nurturing and receptive of the seed).

Analogy is rather swampy ground on which to try and build a concrete theological argument. Consider, for example, the theological tradition that emphasises Jesus and God as being mother-like, just as the Holy Spirit can also be referred to as 'she'. Granted, this aspect of our analogical imagination has been repressed over time by the establishment of God as 'male' and 'father'. Whilst the masculine language is the dominant tradition in Christianity, the feminine, and most especially the language of motherhood, has been largely forgotten. Yet for medieval mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux, feeding off Christ's blood was like suckling God's breast milk; it nourished the soul. Indeed, the mystics often celebrated the maternal nature of God and Jesus, as a way of stressing divine tenderness and instinctive love. Sometimes the imagery would be sentimental, but its purpose was to remind believers that gestation, birth and nurture were, so to speak, aspects of God's feminine or maternal side. As Anselm (1033-1109 - and an Archbishop of Canterbury) says in one of his devotional writings: But you Jesus, good Lord, are you not also our mother? Are you not the mother who, like a hen, collects her chickens under her wings? Truly master, you are a mother . . . for by your gentleness, those who are hurt are comforted; by your perfume, the despairing are reformed. Your warmth resuscitates the dead; your touch justifies sinners . . . you, above all, Lord God, are mother . . . .

A concentration on God or Jesus as mother once had profound implications for the structuring of ecclesial authority in medieval Christendom. True, the centrality of Mary in Christian teaching has celebrated the various virtues of motherhood, but it has still tended to ascribe a subordinate, even passive role to women through Mary's example. Yet those who once led monastic communities - including men like Bernard of Clairvaux - were keen to promote their leadership in terms of being 'mothers' of their communities, not just fathers. For Bernard and his contemporaries, the maternal imagery offered a way of ordering relationships within monastic communities. Correspondingly, terms like 'mother', 'nurse', 'breast', 'womb' and 'feed' were words that carried a particular authority for religious leaders that transcended gender, for they were linked to education, formation and the very life of faith. Thus, to a novice he fears has departed the monastery for the world, Bernard of Clairvaux writes: I nourished you with milk, while yet a child, it was all you could take . . . but alas, how soon and how early you were weaned. Sadly I weep, not for my lost labour but for the unhappy state of my lost child . . . torn from my breast, cut from my womb . . . .

Might the churches be able to learn something from this analogical tradition, and perhaps begin afresh to experience the fullness of 'parenting' from our Christian leaders? Personally, I continue to look forward to the day when we will be able to address our bishops as both mothers and fathers in God, irrespective of their gender.

In this edition of Modern Believing, we turn to the second part of Ralph Norman's meditation on making theology simpler. Paula Gooder reflects on exile and ministry today, Ivor Moody on the lessons we can learn from John Chrysostom for ministry, Stephen Lowe on ministry in urban arenas, and Alastair Barrett on hermeneutics in church and world. The Abraham piece has come to me anonymously, but was so rich and teasing that I felt bound to include it: to the author, thanks. And to you as readers, I hope these articles continue to stimulate and inspire; what else is tradition for?

Modern Believing, MCU, October Vol. 43, No. 4, October 2002