ABSTRACT
At the same time, when I hear these words, week after week, I can’t help but wish that on occasion I’d hear a similar blessing that might go something like “May the love of God the Mother go with you…” Many segments of the Christian church today defend an exclusively masculine set of terms for God, with an occasional foray into neutral language (Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer).2 While in some interesting ways this exclusivity offers an important counter-weight to cultural images of masculinity, is also problematic for a variety of reasons. Because God’s central and defining nature involves love, and because the love of God takes on different shades of meaning in different contexts as it is associated with particular conceptions of gender, race, class, and other central socially-structuring concepts,3 it is worth our while to think critically about how masculine conceptions of God might affect the way we understand the nature of God’s love, paradigmatically agapic love.
