Romantic or Blessed Language When Speaking to or about God?

The ladies have been writing some good posts over at BoneofBones. April had a great article concerning contemporary speech and music that displayed romantic gestures toward God. To this article I would add just two things.

Jesus as my boyfriend is certainly a different picture of Christ than the one where He stands up to the most furocious powers of nature, the wind and the sea, and tells them to be silent . . . and they obey Him! Jesus isn't our boyfriend. He's our Lord and our God.

1. Although we often have to point out that God is neither male nor female, it is actually not true that His own self-expression to us is genderless. God overwhelmingly communicates Himself to us through maleness. The pronouns used for Himself, the imagery, the designations as Father rather than Mother, King rather than Queen, Lord rather than Mistress are important. His incarnation is that of a man, Christ Jesus, who is the Son and not the Daughter of God.

Although God does use analogies a couple times between Himself and a woman, it is always to compare His love for His people with a mother's love for her children (or a hen's love for its chicks). It is never as a woman to be desired.

This creates a potential issue for men who speak romantically of God. In essence, it is not only an effeminization of men, but perhaps, even a type of homosexuality rather than ordered, heterosexual sex that is being pictured in this type of language.

Truly, sex is an analogy between our relationship with God. It is meant to communicate in an earthly relationship the joy and pleasure one has in the presence of God. The Song of Songs is meant to display this. But this is an analogy, not a vocabulary presented by the Bible of direct speech one should employ when speaking to God or about Him. This is much in the same way that analogies, like God being a hen or a mother, are made of God and His relationship to us, but should not form our language in speaking to God (as though referring to God as our Mother or the Great Chicken is appropriate for creatures claiming to have reverence toward their Creator).

2. On the flip side of things, the romantic language used for people often crosses the line of worship. Talking about another person as one's "everything." or "sole desire," or "rock in life," etc. are all things that should actually be said of God and not of other human beings. In this regard, not only are modern songs and declarations about one's partner sappy and empty (I often have to wonder if a particular song declaring one's eternal love for another is said of a girlfriend that he had twenty girlfriends ago), they are outright idolatrous.

Human beings are not meant to function as the fulfillment of one another's purpose and meaning. God does that for humans who have been made to worship Him and Him alone.

So on the one hand, language that should not be used of God is spilling over into our vocabulary toward God, and on the other, language that should not be used of humans is spilling over into our vocabulary toward one another. In essence, we are a people who have transgressed the boundaries of the Creator/creature distinction, the holy and the profane. We are polytheists and polygamists, looking for our gods and our lovers wherever we can find them, even mixing them together as the Greek myths of old.

We likely do this because we have been trained to think that our relationships are only meaningful and fulfilling if they are emotionally exciting, and romantic relationships cause our dopamine fountains to runneth over more than any other relationship. But God is not valuable to my life because of the way He makes me feel. His value is not subjective to me. It is intrinsic to Him, and this causes me to value Him beyond my subjective feelings. There is no need to become sappy about God in some futile effort to allow Him to compete with all of the other drugs around me, including romantic relationships. Instead, it is through the truth that our eyes are opened, we see God's beauty and value, and therefore, make application to our lives that God is worthy to be worshiped, not because He makes me feel a certain way, but because all things were made by Him and for Him. I would call this blessed language. It is a language which acknowledges the greatness of God and what He has done for us without the degrading of Him into a means to meet my emotionally romantic needs. Romantic relationships in our culture are one of the many drugs with which we intoxicate ourselves in our self worship, but God is not an aspirin to be used as pain medication to hide a broken life, as we use our other drugs. He is life and health itself. Our language, as it does in the Bible, should reflect this sort of exaltation, and call the winds and waves of emotionally romantic speech to be silent.