Jesus Sophia: Returning to Woman Wisdom in the Bible, Practice, and Prayer
Sally Douglas, CASCADE BOOKS, ISBN 9781666735796
Sally Douglas has a great gift for writing simply and invitingly about faith for a wide audience. Her research and her popular writings have focused on a central challenge to the Churches: to proclaim the Good News through life and in words in a way that resonates with women’s experience.
As a scripture scholar and Uniting Church minister Sally goes to the heart of a central question today: Do our Scriptures and our belief in Jesus Christ speak to women? In Jesus Sophia she shows how they constantly represent God through the imagery of feminine experience as Wisdom – Sophia in Greek. In the New Testament Jesus is often represented as Wisdom in his relationship to God. This entitles us to address God as woman, to identify child-bearing and raising with God, and to see and pray to Christ as including both women and men.
She also shows that the Scriptures identify female Wisdom with a full range of human experience, and not merely feminine traits. Wisdom makes peace, but is also angry. Wisdom is gentle but also strong. Wisdom mends but also builds.
People sometimes claim that God is above all gender and so represents women when referred to as he. Sally Douglas shows that this cuts both ways. If it is true, God can also be spoken of and prayed to as she in an inclusive way.