God Beyond Gender

by Gail Ramshaw

Book Overview

The Christian use of God-language has become a matter of debate among laypersons, theologians, worship leaders, and others. Such debates are often heated, because the address of God impinges on what many persons find to be close to the heart of their spirituality.

Combining doxological, Christian, and feminist concerns, Gail Ramshaw examines each of the primary types of Christian language about God and in the process, evaluates gender issues...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0800627741
• ISBN13: 9780800627744
• Release Date: February 1995
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Great worship resource

Gail Ramshaw has offered a significant gift to Christian worship with God Beyond Gender. She shows great sensitivity for those faithful Christians who might be resistant to changing the words of worship, while offering innovation that will build a bridge to those wanting something new. She does this through a foundation of sound biblical scholarship and church history. This is a change that soon may become part of the tradition. Our descriptive Christian language is constantly changing, yet our God remains the same. This has been the circumstance since the first telling of the encounter with the God Who Has No Name by the wandering Arameans thousand of years ago. Then during the Reformation, God's Word truly became accessible to the people through Gutenberg's printing press and later translation into Luther's German. Fast forward to the 20th century as church reform removes the barriers of archaic Latin in the Mass and Jacobean English from scripture reading. Lutheran, Gail Ramshaw's concern is our current male-gendered language and how to faithfully and respectfully reform our ways of writing and speaking in liturgy and worship to reflect more contemporary images. To begin Ramshaw goes directly to Old Testament scripture in order to identify the God of the Bible. Here in the first Testament, Ramshaw does her textual spadework on the many descriptive names for God which we loose in translation: God of the Mountaintop, God who sees, God Everlasting, and God Most High. Then she opens a new door, a door I do not believe other feminist theologians have explored, the plethora of verbs available to us to describe God's actions. This book is a must read for anyone concerned with creating meaningful worship for today's church.

useful and thoughtful

Blessedly not an angry feminist treatise, but a helpful, thoughtful exploration of how to represent God in modern liturgy without sexualizing and distorting our image of God. Recommended for anyone struggling to name, identify, or describe God in Christian worship.