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There are critical elements in Hebrew monotheism that should
have and can mitigate against the identification of monotheism with only
the male gender. God is thought of as beyond all literal anthropomorphic
images. So concerned were the Hebrews that people should not take
either pictorial or even verbal images literally that all visual pictures were
forbidden and the holiest name for God was not allowed to be pronounced.
This understanding of the distance between God’s nature and our human
experience leads to the apophatic tradition in Christian theology. This
has been restated in recent years by Sallie McFague in her Metaphorical
theology. 8 It declares that although all our language for God is necessarily
drawn from human experience, since this is the only experience we have
directly, its application to God can only be analogical or metaphorical,
not literal. To take male imagery for God literally, to imply that God is
male and not female, is idolatry.

Although the Hebrew Scriptures use predominately male images and
gender grammar for God, it does at times use female images. This occurs
when God is compared both to male and female roles, to a warrior and
to a birthing mother. The Wisdom tradition sees the immanence of God
as Wisdom in female personification. This line of thought continues in
the Jewish mystical tradition that sees the divine Shekinah or Holy Presence
of God with Israel in female personification. 9 There are expressions of
this view also in Syriac Christian imagery of the Holy Spirit as female. 10
This does not get us fully free of gender stereotypes. To see God
transcendent as male, God immanent as female, to relate the two as
husband and wife, obviously is built on social role complementarity,
although it assumes a very powerful role of the wife as ruler of her
household and teacher of her children and imagines divine Wisdom
operating in a similar way in the household of the world. But it does
make clear that biblical thought did not take literally God as male. God
who is beyond literal gender could be imagined in metaphors drawn from
the social roles of both males and females.

This re-envisioning of God, in terms of liberating, loving and mutual
human relationships, suggests also a need to rethink divine transcendence
in relation to creation. Instead of thinking of divine transcendence in
terms of disembodied absolute power, outside and above the world, ruling
over it by remote control in a way that does not touch God’s own being,
one might think of divine transcendence as the divine matrix of being
and new being. God is that ‘still more’ of transcendence being, from
which we ourselves and all things emerged from nothingness, and that
‘still more’ that opens up potential for transformation and newness of
life beyond our sinful deformations of our creative possibilities.
God does not create in a way that crushes our freedom. God grounds
our finite freedom and calls us into a free choice of our good possibilities,
against our own failures to live up to this potential. God also suffers and
is wounded by human evil, is hung on the cross of human misery and
human violence. We and God are reciprocal partners in building a
redeemed earth. We cannot do it without God, but equally God cannot
do it without us. God cannot redeem the world apart from our free and
loving response to God which is, at the same time, a choice to love and
support one another.