Maimonides and Pastor Miller
This post isn't about trans folks or trans rights. I think people should be who they feel they are, choose what they wish to be called, have total bodily autonomy, and be/feel safe. Understand: I will respond with hostility to attacks on trans folks, especially when such attacks are launched with religious 'justifications.'
This post is about religious ideas so thoroughly embedded that most of us don't realize we're thinking inside them...or that others might think solely inside contradictory religious ideas.
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I stumbled across this clip of Pastor Aria Anna Miller speaking from the pulpit:
We are called to be visible and to trust and to believe that all are made in the image of this God of love. And if that's true, then God is transgender. And that means God is not only masculine but feminine also. And it also means that God is agender and intersex. Now you know why God is such a badass.
What interests me here isn't the specifics of Pastor Miller's claim, but the fact that Pastor Miller so confidently declares anything about what God is.
Pastor Miller argues that because God loves all people and all people are made in God's image, God must contain everything humans are.
Pastor Miller is entitled to preach her beliefs about the nature of God, but it got me thinking about how and why a declaration about what God is could be readily heard from the Christian pulpit, but not from the Jewish bima.
The difference between these two traditions can be framed as this question:
Does God reach down to become like us, or do we reach up toward a God we can never fully comprehend?
The former is Christian, the latter is Jewish.
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Pastor Miller is engaged here in a bit of cataphatic theology - describing what her God is.
Maimonides, the 12th century rabbi (and arguably the most influential Jewish philosopher ever) spent much of his major work, the Guide for the Perplexed, stripping human characteristics away from God.
Every time the Torah describes God's hand, God's anger, or God's regret, Maimonides says the same thing: that's a concession to human language, not a description of divine reality. We cannot say what God is. We can only say what God is not.
This is called apophatic (or negative) theology. God is not finite. Not composite. God is not embodied...and therefore not gendered - and this is not because God contains all genders, but because gender is a property of physical creatures, and God has no body, no form, no attributes that map onto creaturely categories at all.
Pastor Miller's progression from "all are made in God's image" to "therefore God contains everything humans are" is exactly what Maimonides argues against.
B'tzelem Elohim (the image of God) says Maimonides, refers to the human capacity for reason and moral agency. It tells you something about humans. It tells you almost nothing about God.
PAstor Miller's claim unsettled me even before I stopped to think about it - not because I think trans folks are any further from the divine than anybody else, but because the Jewish perspective is to resist the slide from "God loves humanity" to "God resembles humanity."
Infinite love, in Jewish thinking, doesn't require infinite similarity.
Our being like God ≠ God being like us
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This isn't just an abstract philosophical difference between Jewish and Christian thought. It shows up everywhere.
Christian art often depicts God as the white bearded father...
...or as the glowing figure looking down through the clouds...
...but these are only possible if God can have a form.
Jewish law doesn't prohibit depictions of God just to avoid idolatry, but because attempting to depict God is, to Jews, theologically incoherent.
One of Maimonides' thirteen core principles of Jewish faith is explicitly that God has no form of a body and is not corporeal.
You can't depict that which has no depictable nature.
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Ideas about the emotions of the divine are also wildly different between Christianity and Jewish thought - and for the same reasons.
When Christians speak of God's grief or heartbreak, they're describing God as responsive, moved by events, affected by human choices, and experiencing emotions the way humans do.
Maimonides explicitly rejects this, not because God is cold, but because being acted upon implies limitation. God doesn't have moods.
The words the Torah uses for divine emotion, in Jewish thought, describe how God's actions land on us, not what's happening in God's inner life.
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The difference between these two ideas about the nature of God has a single source which is obvious if you think about it: The Incarnation.
If God became a person, then God has (or at least had) a body, a nervous system, an endocrine system, emotions...and a gender.
If God has been fully human, the idea that God contains the full range of human experience is almost inevitable.
So it seems to me that Pastor Miller isn't doing anything eccentric here in the context of her own faith tradition, she's following this very Christian idea in the direction it points.
I'm not criticizing that - I'm just trying to explain to Christians why Jews do not anthropomorphize God.
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It's worth noting that the differences between these ways of thinking about God have downstream civilizational impacts.
A civilization built on "God became like us" naturally leans into universalism, confession, and the assumption that inner life should be made visible and witnessed.
A civilization built on "we reach toward what we cannot fully comprehend" leans into debate, irony, comfort with ambiguity, and the suspicion that anyone claiming to fully grasp (or speak for) the divine is probably selling something.
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These differing ideas about the divine produce more than completely different religions. They produce completely different ways of understanding our humanity.
One tradition closes the distance between God and humanity while the other guards that distance.
That single choice quietly determines how much certainty we trust, how much ambiguity we tolerate, and how suspicious we are of anyone claiming to speak for God.
