![]() ![]() Nevertheless, despite the predictable criticism, plenty of people are persisting in trying to overturn the idea that God is an old, white man. and his depiction of the Holy Spirit as a frail Asian woman with the Hindu name, Sarayu, lends itself to a dangerous and false image of God and idolatry.” Joe Schimmel, a California pastor and host of the documentary Hollywood’s War on God, for example, told Christian News Network that The Shack’s “pretentious caricature of God as a heavy set, cushy, non-judgmental, African American woman called ‘Papa’. If portraying God as a woman upsets some people, portraying the Lord as a black woman, as she is in the 2011 romcom A Little Bit of Heaven (she is played by Whoopi Goldberg) and The Shack, a 2017 Christian drama based on a 2007 book of the same name, sends religious racists into a conniption fit. We’re also seeing more and more instances of God as a woman in popular culture including Lars von Trier’s 1996 movie Breaking the Waves and Kevin Smith’s 1999 film Dogma. ![]() The Rev Emma Percy, the chaplain of Trinity College Oxford and a member of Women and the Church (Watch), a group that successfully campaigned for the ordination of female bishops, said that using more inclusive language to describe God would help dispel “the notion that God is some kind of old man in the sky”. In 2015, for example, a group of female bishops within the Church of England campaigned for more “expansive language and imagery about God” that would encompass feminine pronouns. While history is peppered with occasional references to God as a woman, there has been more of a concerted effort in recent years to ensure religious language is more inclusive. And in her 14th-century Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic, says: “Just as God is our father, so God is also our mother.” St Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, talked of “ Christ, my mother”, for example. ![]() While some may consider Grande referring to God in female terms to be a heresy, it’s one with a very long history, and one that hasn’t always been controversial. Alanis Morissette as God in the 1999 film Dogma.
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