Janet Soskice has long-standing interests in the philosophy of religious language and in feminism. This volume of essays focuses on the vocabulary of kinship between God and humanity, attempting to reawaken our sense of its daringness, and to link it with the dynamic movement of the Christian life, from birth to our eschatological fulfilment. ‘Kinship imagery’, she writes, ‘is both compelled and resisted by the Hebrew scriptures, compelled for reasons of intimacy, and resisted from fear of idolatry’ (p. 2). Dr Soskice's attentiveness to the complex and subtle fluidity with which we use religious vocabulary is one of the strengths of this volume.
It begins with a reflection on love and attention, contrasting the classical understanding of the contemplative life as withdrawal from the world with the attentiveness of a mother: ‘Of life's experiences, none is so ‘unselving’ as attending to a baby’ (p. 25). Such loving attention requires humility and self-discipline, and is ‘rewarded with reality’ (p. 27), which, for us as creatures, is something that both changes itself and changes us as we attend to it. The ‘imago Dei’, the second chapter argues, is dynamic, as we grow into the image of Christ. All of us, male and female, share our identity with Christ, as the image of God. Yet, Dr Soskice argues, sexual difference has a more than instrumental purpose: it is through ‘the reciprocity of our human condition, through being in relation to others who are different from ourselves’ (p. 51), that we learn to love. Relatedly, she concludes in the next essay that Christians cannot respond adequately to problems in bioethics without grounding their arguments in the mystery of our identity as ‘imago Dei’.
The central chapters of the book directly raise questions shaped by feminist concerns. Can a feminist call God ‘Father’? If not, can a feminist be a Christian? The feminist critique goes deeper than the obvious claim that Biblical and ecclesial language has excluded women, and targets all idea of binary hierarchy. Using Ricoeur, Dr Soskice argues that the great reserve in the Old Testament about the use of ‘Father’ for God provided a space in which Jesus’‘Abba’ could seem ‘audacious’; the meaning of the term is not already fixed and understood, but rather disclosed precisely through the ministry of the Son. The humanity of Christ, meanwhile, has allowed material elements to be used as powerful expressions of our relationship with God. Dr Soskice explores the way in which blood has functioned as a symbol of both impurity and nourishment and fecundity. ‘Birth as well as death is a type of sacrificial giving’ (p. 91); the blood of women, like the blood of Christ, is life-giving. The most demanding essay in the book draws on theoreticians of French feminism in examining the charge that Trinitarian language places both maleness and hierarchy at the centre of God. It makes the curious suggestion (citing Jean-Luc Marion) that it is only with the death of the Son that the distinctive nature of the fatherhood of God is established. The more familiar point, that God's being is intrinsically relational in a way that overcomes the polarisation between ‘One’ and ‘Other’, seems independent of this point.
The final three chapters focus on relationships. A comparison of Augustine's De Trinitate with Julian of Norwich's The Revelation of Divine Love finds an unexpected degree of shared ground in the linking of Trinity, image of God and our union with the God of love. However, Augustine's privileging of the mind and sapientia over the body and prudentia contrasts with Julian's use of physical and familial imagery, and her insight that it is through our very fragility and fallenness that we progress in love. Thus our sensual nature is to be valued in its own right. Through our bodily life, we ‘travail’, that is both travel and sorrow, with Christ, and thus become his kin, through his love: ‘De Trinitate speaks of our thirst for God, Julian of God's thirst for us’ (p. 152).
The Christian tradition has also, and equally daringly, used the language of friendship with God. Dr Soskice suggests that Cicero's ideal friendship based on shared virtue is unrealistic, and criticises the account of friendship in C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves as ‘sterile’ in its rejection of embodiment and emotion. She turns instead to Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig for an interpretation of friendship as ‘lived in dialogue’, which gives it a genuine open-endedness and capacity to change the friends. The Christian life, of course, is intrinsically oriented towards change and growth and towards the future that they will make possible. The final essay relates metaphors of kinship with this dynamism towards a ‘convivial’ future in which we shall have been transformed by love. ‘We shall not only be loved, but ‘lovely be’, through the kindness of God’ (p. 188).
In this gentle and imaginative volume, Dr Soskice combines analytical nuance and clarity with mature human experience, all clothed in an elegance and simplicity of expression that makes the essays eminently quotable. In doing so, she expresses the distinctive beauty of the Christian theological tradition.
