The Symbol of God Functions?

How attention to the practical function of Christian belief helps and hinders contemporary theology

“The symbol of God functions.” This slogan, associated with the Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson, expresses an idea that can be found everywhere in contemporary theology. The idea is this: talk about God shapes how we view ourselves, our neighbors, and God, in often hidden and unforeseen ways. Our language for God, the argument goes, has effects not only at the level of consciously expressed ideas but also – and perhaps more importantly – at the level of the unconscious, the affective, the not-quite-thought out. There, at the subconscious level, words we use for God can affect how we conceive of God in ways that we did not intend. What’s more, because theological discourse is not carefully sealed off from other spheres of human thought and action, these words affect not only our understanding of God but also how we view ourselves, our neighbors, and the world. This happens whether we acknowledge it or not. And thus it is vital for contemporary theology to be alert to how its language about God functions and to adjust our language about God so that it might function better for human flourishing.

For Johnson, a key example of this idea is the way that the use of masculine language about God has shaped implicit popular understandings of God. Despite the clearly expressed position throughout Christian history that God is not male but is beyond gender/sexual differentiation, there has been a constant temptation, especially at the popular level, to conceive of God as somehow male (or at any rate closer to male than female). Thus the image of the white bearded man in the sky. This assimilation of maleness to God, then, Johnson argues, has shaped our view of women in negative ways that diminish women’s flourishing. The symbol of God – our use of masculine language for God – functions, inadvertently but really, to suppress and marginalize women in day-to-day life. And so she returns to the Bible in search of symbols of God that function differently, finding such a symbol above all in the concept of Sophia (personified wisdom) in the wisdom books of the Old Testament.

But feminist theology isn’t the only branch of contemporary Christian theology that is alert to how language for God impacts how people conceive of themselves and their communities – or that seeks to change this language to so that the language functions to meet their desired ends for life in this world. Thus, for example, social trinitarians such as Leonardo Boff argue for a retrieval of trinitarian thought because it has explosive political implications for organizing life in the world. For Boff, “strict monotheism” – to which Christian trinitarianism has often been reduced – both provides justification for and is historically justified by political tyranny. The dictator is a sort of image of the unitary patriarchal Father-God, and vice versa. But the true Christian doctrine of God, trinitarianism, provides instead an example of life in equal community – an example that should be used to shape our political life today. Against those who have argued that the Trinity makes no practical difference, for Boff it is an eminently practical doctrine. “The Trinity is our true social programme,” he writes. Thus, for Boff, an erring doctrine of God (strict monotheism) undergirds vicious forms of social organization. And the solution is to rehabilitate a Christian trinitarianism, which functions to undergird liberatory politics.

In a similar vein, critics of historical Christian approaches to the atonement have argued that ideas of Christ suffering in the cross as our substitute or of him experiencing God’s wrath on the cross function in vicious ways in the lives of ordinary Christians, especially those suffering from one form or another of marginalization. Most famously, Delores Williams in Sisters in the Wilderness argues that the image of Christ as substitute unhelpfully glorifies the soul-destroying position of surrogate which many Black women have been historically forced to assume. Because of the experience of surrogacy in the lives of Black women, this image simply does not, cannot work, per Williams. It must be done away with; indeed, Christian theology should not dwell on the cross at all. Others argue that any assignation of the violence of the cross to God’s will makes a mess of efforts at peacemaking; the cause of peace means that we cannot in any way say that God wills Christ’s death on the cross or uses its violence to accomplish something. This is to underwrite the ‘myth of redemptive violence’ or the ‘myth of redemptive suffering’ which together have caused any number of harms.

What all these views (and others like them) share is a focus on the anthropological function of a particular theological concept or construal. What a given idea about God does socially or politically is seen as central to its validity for Christian theology. Theologians schooled in a few generations of the hermeneutics of suspicion are hyperalert to concealed operations of power or unforeseen functions of marginalization within apparently neutral, abstract concepts of God. And theologians see as their goal the alteration of how we speak about God in such a way to minimize these dangers and to encourage human flourishing. As theologian Paula Cooey argues, the task of theology is to “make and unmake the central concept [of religion], God,” with “the explicit aim of intentionally altering the symbol systems” with attention to “the values such symbols generate and anchor.”

This approach is increasingly prevalent, and not only among those who think of themselves as theological radicals or liberals. Ironically, Christian-adjacent figures on the right like Jordan Peterson have a broadly similar functional approach to Christianity. For a set of right-wing influencers, the reason to go to church isn’t that it is true – if pushed, they’ll generally say that they think it isn’t – but because churches function to preserve the heritage of the West, or maintain a proper relationship between the genders, or act as a brake on ‘wokeism,’ or what have you. “The symbol of God functions,” these men (they are overwhelmingly men) agree – but for them, the goal is to highlight precisely those putative functions of Christian doctrines which the thinkers discussed above wish to prevent.

Closer to home, I’ve also seen people associated with ‘inclusive orthodoxy’ defending credal beliefs in these functional terms. Here, I trust, the people in question do actually believe the doctrines they are defending (the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection or Christ’s return in glory or what have you). But all the same, the discursive strategies they find most helpful to defend them are in terms of their function. And so, the argument goes, the virgin birth is a good doctrine because it resists the idolatry of heterosexual marriage and childbearing; no man is involved in the conception of the Son of God! Or the bodily resurrection is good because it provides hope to the beaten-down and oppressed, or because it encourages body positivity. Ditto for the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment. Theological liberals who deny the resurrection or Christ’s divinity might claim to be the radicals, but it is actually orthodoxy that is most helpful to undergird a radical politics!

It's a ubiquitous approach. I find it helpful in some ways, but I also think has some real dangers for contemporary Christian theology.

It is worth saying first of all that I think that a version of the claim that ‘the symbol of God functions’ is pretty clearly correct. Our language about God can indeed function in ways we do not want or expect, and we should be alert to this and seek to ameliorate problems that may arise because of it. Let me give an example. I was teaching a class a while ago and a student reacted with surprise to early modern mystics’ use of feminine imagery from God (for example, the metaphor of the soul sucking milk of divine grace from God’s breasts found in Teresa of Avila among others). Why would the mystic use this language, the student asked, when the Bible says that God is male? Theologians have always (and still do) say till they’re blue in the face that referring to the first person of the Trinity as the Father or using a masculine pronoun doesn’t mean that God is male. Yet despite this – precisely as Johnson argues – traditional Christian language about God was functioning in unforeseen and undesirable ways that associated God with maleness. The student believed that God was male, and that it was thus inappropriate to refer to God with feminine imagery or metaphors. And this is a real problem! It behooves those (like me) who are committed to retaining traditional Christian speech about God to be conscious of that possibility and work to avoid misunderstandings. In this way attention to the function of theological speech can help serve as a guardrail against misinterpretation.

And yet, I have grave concerns about how this insight is used in a great deal of contemporary theology, in which it seems to not only be a way to check the appropriateness of an articulation of Christian truth but rather to determine theological speech as such. First, I am worried about theologians’ confidence in linking Christian doctrine to practical payoff in our individual or common lives. Second, and most importantly, I am worried that this emphasis can cause us to neglect what must be the true heart of theology: saying (as best as we are able) true things about God in response to God’s self-revelation to us.

To begin with the first, those who seek to transform the church’s articulation of central Christian doctrines in order that they might function differently are often very sure about the connection between that doctrinal articulation and a practical payoff (whether positive or negative). Thus, say, for the social trinitarians, monotheism generates support for hierarchical one-man rule while trinitarianism allows us to imagine to societies of mutual freedom and solidarity among equals. But is this necessarily so? Kathryn Tanner – no conservative, to be clear! – argues against the social trinitarians in the chapter on politics in Christ the Key, suggesting that the political payoff of how we talk about God’s being is not entirely clear. Can you really say that there is a clear relationship between the two? Did, say, Arian and orthodox emperors rule differently from each other? If indeed – as the social trinitarians argue – Western Christianity was characterized by a subtrinitarian doctrine of God while the East better preserved God’s threeness,¹ it seems hard to explain why modern liberalism developed in Western rather than Eastern Europe. Perhaps the doctrine of the Trinity just doesn’t really relate to how we organize our social and political life.

Relatedly, one of the challenges of linking a doctrine to its supposed function is that different people react differently to the same theological language. For example, JoAnne Marie Terrell’s Power in the Blood?, for example, explores the various meanings that the cross has held in the religious experience of Black Americans and especially Black women, arguing in conversation with Delores Williams that for many Black women, the cross is central and cannot be so readily discarded. What, then, is one to do, if the same image may genuinely be consoling to one person and troubling to another? Here, it seems to me, we are entering the realm of the pastoral. When I am preaching and teaching, it is important for me to know where my people are at, to understand what ways of describing Christian doctrine or exegeting Scripture will be able to be heard as good news by them. This doesn’t mean, of course, denying the more difficult parts of Christian teaching. But it does mean being thoughtful about how they are conveyed rather than succumbing to the temptation to prove one’s orthodoxy by stating things in the most sharp way possible. It does mean attending to how a given construal of Christian teaching functions in the hearts and minds of the people God has given me to serve.

But this sort of pastoral consideration is properly about how to best teach Christian doctrine, not about what Christian doctrine actually is. And this brings us to the second, deeper, issue. It seems to me that the biggest problem with this sort of functional approach isn’t just that we are too confident in our ability to understand how (or that) a given theological articulation functions. Rather, it’s that we sometimes seem to make the function of a theological view the deciding criterion for holding or rejecting it. In so doing, we risk substituting anthropology for theology, utility for truth. ‘Does this function to support xyz thing?’ – usually, in my context, progressive politics – becomes the question determining whether or not Christians should hold a given view, not ‘Is this true?’ And thus a doctrine’s impact on human beings becomes more important than its truthfulness about God.²

Theological radicals are often explicit about this: the point of Christian theology is to liberate from oppression; thus, if we determine some belief does not liberate (with liberation often defined on the terms of secular leftists), it is to be tossed out, no matter how traditional or Biblical or what have you it is. But I worry that adherents for inclusive orthodoxy, when they stake their defense of credal beliefs in terms of utility for the goal of liberation here and now, end up doing much the same. Now, it might well be true that confessional, credal theology better serves the goal of liberation here and now. I tend to think that it does (at least for those forms of liberation consonant with Christianity). But that’s not why I confess that, say, Jesus really rose from the dead. I confess that Jesus rose from the dead not because it is politically helpful but because I think it really happened.

At the risk of sounding decidedly old-fashioned, I maintain that theology is, above all, concerned with truth, and truth about God. That is, the point of theology is to know and love God, to say (as best we can) true things about God in order to love God with our minds and move ourselves and others to worship him. Its proper end is contemplation, now and in eternity. This means that the ultimate criterion for our speech about God cannot be ‘is it helpful for xyz end?’, no matter how worthy an end it is. What matters most about a doctrine isn’t its anthropological function but its theological truth. A doctrine’s social implications have to be logically subsequent to the doctrine itself, rather than determining it. And to be clear, how we determine true speech about God is not by that speech’s conformity to our ideas of what it would be nice or helpful for God to be or do, but by God’s self-revelation to us. This self-revelation happens to some degree in nature and through human reason reflecting on creation, but most perfectly and trustworthily in Scripture – and above all in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

This doesn’t mean that thinking about function has no place in thinking about doctrine. For example, Elizabeth Johnson reasonably ties her concern about masculine language for God leading to a sort of deification of the masculine to a long tradition of Christian (and Jewish) rejection of idolatry. The negative or apophatic theological tradition within Christian thought has been particularly alert to the ways that human language breaks down when talking about God – and the idolatrous danger of thinking that we can capture or grasp God with our ideas or concepts. Noting when language about God is unintentionally leading people into idolatry or mistaken conceptions of God, as in the example of my student above, and working to correct them is a vital task. God is not a man, nor did the Father abuse an unwilling Son on the cross. We must carefully resist idolatry in all its forms, and especially the idolatry that can lurk within even orthodox formulations (as Calvin says, the human mind is a factory of idols!).

For another example of a productive use of thinking about doctrine’s function, I want to turn to the Reformation. In the sixteenth century, Protestant theologians argued that consolation for terrified consciences was a mark of the true Gospel and distinguished their teaching from that of Rome on the basis of the consolation it provided.³ It’s not that the function of consolation was the sole criterion of the doctrine of justification! Rather, the Reformers argued (rightly, to my mind) that if our articulation of the Gospel is leading consciences to despair rather than comfort, it might be a sign to prayerfully return to Scripture and to the history of Christian reflection upon Scripture to see if we’ve gotten something wrong. That is, of course, exactly what Luther did. We might similarly say on the basis of our exegesis of Scripture that God opposes the greed of the rich and hates the oppression of the poor, and that this should lead us to careful consideration if an account of Christian teaching seems to have nothing to say about our economic life (although I maintain that Christian ethics rather than our doctrine of God is the right place to look for such statements!). All these seem to me to be appropriate and helpful uses of reflection on the function of theological doctrines as a guardrail when doing theology.

But the functional criteria we use must themselves be subject to Scriptural and specifically Christological disciplining. That is, we take our criteria for how talk about God is supposed to function from Scripture itself. And this requires careful work, not just the use of proof-texts or theological tags. That is, to say that God desires our ‘abundant life’ is absolutely true – but we need to be sure we’re getting our account of what abundant life is from God and not from our own imaginings.⁴

And ultimately, talk about function has to give way to talk about truth. This is because the theological task is not to unmake and remake the symbols of Christian theology to serve one or another this-worldly end (even very good this-worldly ends!). With apologies to Leonardo Boff, the dogma of the Trinity is not a social program. The warrant for holding the doctrines of the virgin birth, the atonement, the resurrection, the resurrection of the body, and so forth is not that they inspire or provide grounding for a social cause. No, theology is fundamentally about truth about God: about gratefully receiving the truth of God’s self-revelation and articulating it as a form of loving worship of God that leads others to that same worship. This worship begins now but will continue for all eternity, when we leave behind the things of this life to adore the one God from whom we came and to whom we are returning.

1. I, following Lewis Ayres, am very skeptical that this is the case.

2. At the very least, following Lauren Winner, we might call this the characteristic damage of an emphasis on the function of theological ideas in human life; this is the way that such an emphasis tends to go awry.

3. I reflect on how the Reformation can help us think about the relationship between doctrine and pastoral care here.

4. To be fair, I expect that many of those who I would argue foreground questions of anthropological function over truth would respond by saying that they are doing this. They might say that they take a basic principle from Scripture or the Christian theological tradition about God’s desire for liberation and make it the rule for judging a doctrine’s validity. But I worry that the account of what ‘liberation’ means is often insufficiently rooted in Scripture and overly abstract, and thus ends up in practice getting fleshed out in basically secular, this-worldly terms.