This reticence may be because of where I grew up – Ohio, while not flat all over like Kansas, isn’t always so different in values – or because of the churches I’ve frequented. Or maybe it’s just the people I know: most of the few Christian women I know who are feminists are unavowed feminists (acting as feminists but not preaching, so to speak) or are deeply conflicted about their disjunctive beliefs.

My feminism stems in part from my personality. I’ve always been branded as “gifted” as well as independent (and obstinate). And while I know a lot of singularly intelligent men now, until I was in my teens I didn’t know any man I respected for being smarter than me. Why does this matter? It means that I grew up unconvinced of any masculine superiority and, watching my mother become a single parent to eight children, I felt confirmed in the idea that not being a feminist was a sign of an uncomplicated life or an unoriginal mind.

So I am a feminist, and I have also made an intellectual commitment to the idea. It’s difficult to define feminism in a way that men actually care about, just as it is hard to define it so that people don’t think you mean that women are better than men. And all of that is complicated by the waves of feminism, with modern feminism circling somewhere around Third and Fourth Wave. I call myself a feminist because I passionately believe in the equality of women and men not only politically, but also culturally, intellectually, and sexually; that sexism is prevalent and must be opposed; that being a feminist is important to living my own life. I even read feminist blogs. (Hopefully that won’t sound too much like a manifesto because these ideas have caused a lot of inner wrangling incompatible with the certainty of a manifesto.)

But I am also a Christian, and I don’t want to be a feminist Christian in the vein of “feminine divine” thinking popularly represented by people like Sue Monk Kidd. I don’t want to keep pretending that the Biblical passages about feminine submission don’t exist. I want to be a feminist Christian without moving to the West Coast. So I am asking publicly the same question I have always been afraid to answer: Is it possible to be a feminist and a Christian?

My reasons for this are long, complex and a good subject for another article, but the biggest reason (to paraphrase Bonhoeffer) is: God is not truly God but an idol if He is proven. If one is compelled by force of logic to believe in God, one doesn’t really come to a true life changing knowledge or experience of God. Logical proofs and the like are akin to trying conversion at the point of a gun, and often I from what I see done out of the same anger, fear, and hatred. Not really the best way to introduce someone to a relationship to a loving God.

So what then is God if he is not provable? God is experiential, or as a lot of Evangelicals say, God is relational. Its sad to me that so many repeat the aphorism of a relational God but don’t understand its implications. To truly know God you must experience Him. This relationship is just like any other relationship. If you want to introduce an acquaintance to one of your friends, you don’t first go about trying to prove the existence of your friend, you bring this acquaintance to a place where they will meet with this friend of yours. On the other hand, if you want someone to relate to an object as an object you prove its existence to them. If you want someone to relate to a person as a person you allow them to meet them. Objectifying God destroys the most basic and important characteristic of Him, turning him into an idol. It thus follows that if God is Truth and God is not an idol, then Truth does not have to be objective.

That’s all well and good, but rather irrelevant without biblical examples. So Here are a few more obvious indications of the relational nature of God and how He has chosen to reveal Truth: In the beginning God walks with Adam and Eve in the garden, metaphorically indicating a relationship between God, Adam and Eve, and Creation. Later on God meets with Moses in the desert, then on Mount Sinai, and personally leads the entire nation out of Egypt. Again, He appears in human form to Moses, covering Moses with His hand as he walks by and allowing Moses to see his back. Then throughout the Prophetic books we have very powerful images of God being like a jealous husband to Israel the adulterous wife.

Fast forward a bit to what Christians believe to be the ultimate revelation of God, the advent of Jesus. Jesus isn’t a set of postulates or a book of rules but rather living, breathing Truth in Human form. Surely if God wanted our mental assent to rigid dogma and objective truths He could have sent a book of postulates or maybe an elegant Equation of Life the Universe and Everything. Instead, we have as our ultimate ideal of revelation a living, breathing God as man.

Ah, but you say Jesus did teach as well as live? He absolutely did. A great portion of the Gospels is Jesus preaching and teaching. The perplexing thing about Jesus, though, is that a great portion of his teaching uses parables. These are Stories that must be understood in context, not acontextual formulae! The morality Jesus teaches is also extremely contextual. When Jesus asked what the most important commandment was, he boils down the entirety of the law into 2 commands rather than picking out one particular command. Jesus says that the entirety of the law is encompassed in loving God and loving your neighbor. That is probably the most subjective moral commandment ever given. Each and every instance of living that command will be different depending on context and audience, mood and relationship.

We then are lead inexorably to the conclusion that if the Biblical God who revealed himself as Jesus is Truth, then Truth is subjective, contextual, and above all relational. The impersonal objective view of God has made God appear inaccessible and distant for far too long, its time that Christians of all sorts embrace the implications of a relational God.