021074 IS GOD A WOMAN? IS DEBATED HERE By N.O.W. ignoranmi

'Ain't She Sweet?' Sets the Tone for Discussion 

By ISRAEL SHENKER

As the audience arrived last week for the Town Hall debate on whether God is a woman, two guitarists strummed and sang "Ain't She Sweet?"

It was hardly the hymn to get the debate moving in an  impartial direction, and the original overture  that followed  - "A Woman's Work" (is never done) - was equally, feminist.

Sponsored by N.O.W. (National Organization for Women)a panel of six specialists followed the music and considered the prose of Revelation and the concepts of women's liberation.

Betty Friedan, the  modulator, announced that she was disturbed by "the sexism of the church ... the very concept  of divinity being male.

'Is God He, or was God He, or how did that come about she demanded of her microphone.

Notions Cast in Doubt

Rosemary Reuther, professor of theology at Howard University, replied that the Bible had turned truth upside down by suggesting that man created woman. She charged that Aristotle's idea of woman as "misbegotten male" had been taken over by church fathers, paranoiac about women. 

Why had St. Augustine, one of those fathers, hated women? Friedan wondered, "It was because of his mother," answered Dean James P. Morton of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Professor Reuther argued, that ... the linchpin of the church" is sexual repression. "If we ever blew that apart," she said, "it would be like slipping LSD into the Pope's chalice."

From the left of the cloth-covered table came the voice of the Rev. Gregory Baum professor of theology at the University of Toronto: "If Catholicism is so full of anti-
feminist ideology wouldn't it better to leave it? I think that, too, quite often."

 Issue of Eschatology

Father Baum told the audience of 100 that he put his faith in "eschatology" and the promise of good times to come.

. Frances McGillicuddy, founder of the United States section of St. Joan of Arc's International Alliance, a Catholic feminist organization, promptly dissented. "Eschatology deals with the final ends," she said, "and I don't want to wait that long."

Mrs. Friedan was equally impatient, "Is God He?" she demanded.

'When you read the Scriptures, God does sound like a chauvinist," Father Baum said, but he noted that in Hebrew Scripture the word for spirit was feminine and that there were passages in which God was likened to a mother.

Prof. Edith Wyschogrod of Queens College objected to using motherly phrases about God. "I'd almost rather leave Him alone than put Him into that picture," she said.

Perhaps language is not applicable to what God is, suggested Professor Wyscbgrod"The result is that we're left with statements about what God is not."

Problems of Change

There seemed no easy way to recast Biblical usage. "What the hell do you do with your revelatory tradition?" demanded Dean Morton. "What do you do with your psalms?"

"Change them!" called a woman from the audience, and a second voice suggested: "Two Gods - one for him and one for her."

"Esther and Judith were sex symbols," said Sister Margaret Traxler, founder of the National Coalition of American Nuns. "There's no reason why some of those (Bible) stories which didn't really happen can't be taken out.".

"Since God's sex is in doubt, a man in the audience called out. "perhaps we can address ourselves to another question - the sex of Satan." Professor Wyschogrod suggested that there are "she-he's and heshe's" and that Satan is male in his power and female in his temptations.

"None of you are really challenging the concept of one God," complained a woman in the audience.

Holding her head wearily; Mrs. Freidan said she wanted to close the debate by quoting a great Hebrew proverb: "If I am only for me, who will be?"

That didn't sound right, so she tried another version, a third, a fourth -_ and finally cried for help to the multitude about a hundred who had braved the night's theological pitfalls. She was answered by a babel of shouts.