The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language.
Cunningham, David S.
THE KINDNESS OF GOD: METAPHOR, GENDER, AND RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE. By
Janet Martin Soskice. New York: Oxford University, 2007. Pp. x + 203.
$49.95; $19.95
This accessible and beautifully written book is filled with careful
theological reflection and profound spiritual insight; indeed, it might
well serve as a standard against which good theological writing should
be measured. It focuses on the themes of its subtitle, collecting a
number of the author's separately published essays (each quite
significant, but some having appeared in out-of-the-way places). The
essays have been interwoven with care. In some sense, they offer a
systematic theology in miniature: chapters range from theological
anthropology to Christology, ethics, and eschatology, all developed
within a strongly trinitarian and incarnational framework.
Soskice teaches philosophical theology at the University of
Cambridge. Her groundbreaking Metaphor and Religious Language (1985) is
one of the most significant theological works of the late-20th century
and has become a standard text for doctoral students. The care that S.
demonstrates for religious language is not merely an intellectual
interest; it is embodied in a style of writing that is simultaneously
learned, invitatory, and compelling.
The "kindness" of the title is twofold: God is not only
merciful and loving but is also "of our kind," our kin,
related to us through bonds that we recognize because of our own ties of
tribe and family. S. is careful not to infringe the infinite qualitative
difference between God and humanity, but she takes seriously the
doctrines of the imago Dei and the Incarnation, in which God's
"kindness" (in both senses) is clearly made manifest.
This theme is sounded throughout the book via a number of creative
variations. It appears in chapter 1 as an indictment of the
Enlightenment's focus on "rational man," retrieving
instead a patristic and medieval focus on the importance of love and
attention--and employing insights from Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum,
and Iris Murdoch, that "most religious of agnostics" (7).
Kindness also emerges as central to the joys and sorrows of calling God
"Father": analogical language that profoundly emphasizes the
bond of loving kinship while sometimes also disastrously invoking, for
some, authoritarianism and violence. Analogical and relational language
for God is given fuller analysis in "Trinity and the 'Feminine
Other,'" a 1994 essay that significantly influenced my own
trinitarian theology. Later, these same concerns are transposed from
"relations in God" to "relationships among human
beings" in a moving essay on the theological contours of
friendship.
Particularly significant is a previously unpublished essay that
gives the book its title: "The Kindness of God: Trinity and the
Image of God in Julian of Norwich and Augustine." Julian's
intimate, physically focused Revelations of Divine Love might seem to
have few points of contact with the abstract intellectual gymnastics of
Augustine's De Trinitate. But S. demonstrates their deep
resonances, not only in theological content, but also in dramatic style
and rhetorical effect. Both works explore our kinship with God: Julian
by focusing on Christ's bodily nature and his motherhood; Augustine
in his subtle explorations of the vestigia trinitatis that we bear
(created, as we are, in the image of God). Certainly there are
differences: most important, Julian makes space for the fragility of the
human body and its intimate relations to other bodies, whereas Augustine
retains a Platonic anxiety about such matters (though S. demonstrates
that this is moderated somewhat in the late books of De Trinitate).
Julian wisely focuses on the incarnate, embodied Christ: we are saved by
"that blessed kynde that he toke of the maiden." S. comments:
"Christ is 'our kind,' a human being like us, and by
extension 'our kin'. Clothed in human flesh in the
Virgin's womb, Christ will in turn clothe us in God's
love" (142). Here and throughout the book, the sustaining power of
divine love becomes the key to various theological riddles.
The book is deeply engaged with feminist concerns, but not in
precisely the idiom that readers might expect. Certainly S. shares the
interest in embodiment, relationality, and intimacy that has been at the
center of much feminist theology, along with an implicit critique of the
excesses of abstraction, rationalism, and ascesis that have dominated
much of Christianity's androcentric past. But S. refuses to divide
and conquer; instead, she mines the biblical, patristic, and medieval
sources for everything in them that can be redeemed, while treating
their occasional and incipient misogynism with, well, kindness: with
allowances for their historical context and their philosophical
inheritance, though never simply ignoring their serious errors.
Commentators on all sides of "theology and gender" discussions
have much to learn from this book, not only from its content but also
from its combination of appreciative appropriation and gentle critique.
This book will be an intensely satisfying and productive read for
convinced and devoted Christians (clergy and laity, academics and
general readers). But it might even more profoundly affect the skeptic,
the nominal Christian, the disappointed, and the distracted. It is
hardly a typical work of Christian apologetics, but if I could get just
one recent book of theology into the hands of thoughtful people whose
particular experience of Christianity has left them dubious, or wounded,
or worse, this would be the book. Its "kindness" is apparent
in more than just its title.
DAVID S. CUNNINGHAM
Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg
