Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Re-imagining God’s Feminine Presence w/ Prof. Juliana Claassens

Johnny Ova: Welcome back everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I'm your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have Dr. Juliana Claassens with us. Man, do we have a topic to discuss today, huh, Dr. Claassens?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Yeah, it's wonderful to be with you today. We're talking about a topic I love, a book that was so foundational in my own scholarly journey.

Johnny Ova: I'm really excited. Right before we went live, I told Dr. Claassens that I YouTube stalked her and watched every video she had put up: seeing her on the news and on different shows, being highlighted by the academy, all the work and the books, and really fighting for the cause of gender equality. So I'm really interested in going deeper with you today. Let's learn a little bit about you. I always ask our guests so our audience knows where you're coming from. Tell us about your upbringing. Were you born and raised in a Christian home? Is faith something you adopted later in life? Are you closer to God now or further away? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: I grew up in South Africa, in Pretoria, in a Christian household, and I learned a lot about God from my mother. She's a very strong figure in my religious upbringing. We always went to church, and somehow I fell in love with the Bible and with proclaiming and preaching the Bible. I was one of the first women to go study theology in our denomination. It only opened up in 1990, so I was there in 1991, the first year, at the University of Stellenbosch. We didn't really have role models as female pastors. I only had a female teacher when I went to Princeton. At Princeton Theological Seminary I had Katharine Sakenfeld.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: My journey, with this book and some of my other work, is very much about thinking about God in a very personal way, but also worrying about the misuse, the abuse of God language, and trying to find other ways of speaking about God. In terms of closeness, I still would say for me, I feel very close to God. God's a very real presence in my life. But as I tried to argue in this book, which came out many years ago in 2012, there is a bigger image of God. I think our constructions of God are often so narrow. My work, and the work others have done, tries to show a bigger God, a God very much committed to justice and love and calling us to follow suit.

Johnny Ova: I've got to say, this has come at the perfect time, because I'm literally starting a series on Sunday called What Does the Bible Say About That? We're talking about the verse where Paul tells the women to be silent in church. Just so you understand the framework I'm coming from, which will help our conversation: I have women elders and deacons and leaders in our church. We just had a young lady minister for the first time on Sunday. I get killed and crucified by a lot of the surrounding churches for it. It's still crazy to me that we're in 2025, with all this knowledge and understanding of history, and we still can't understand the simple verses: no male nor female, no slave nor free. Jesus came to level the playing field. God uses everybody differently, but everybody equally. Everybody is equal in value and should be treated, protected and honored like that. We can see so many women God used throughout the Scriptures and ordained in ministry, and even after the canon was completed, all the amazing works women have done. So I'm known to shake up the foundation a little bit over here. What inspired you to write Mourner, Mother, Midwife? That would be a good starting point.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: That was actually my second project. For my PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary I worked on the image of God who provides, and that was already a feminist interpretation. I showed that the rabbis and some of the early texts spoke about God who provides in terms of nursing language, and that it's in the biblical text too. That was really the start of my journey of reimagining God, doing it in conversation with Scripture and its interpreters, and seeing the life-giving possibilities in this metaphor. That became my first book, The God Who Provides: Biblical Images of Divine Nourishment.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: After that I continued with images of God, metaphors for God, language for God, but I turned to the metaphor of God as liberator, which is so often connected with the image of God as warrior, this very powerful male image of God with blood on his hands. I'm working on that again now in Nahum, so I'm circling around some of these topics. God as liberator is a very foundational image, and we see it all the way into the New Testament, in the image of Jesus on the cross. But I was trying to understand: is that the only way, or are there other ways of speaking about God as liberator?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: So I found these minor voices in the text, but so important: God as a mourner or a wailing woman in the book of Jeremiah, a number of texts in Deutero-Isaiah that speak about God as a mother, a woman in labor, and also a nurturing, caring, nursing mother, and then the image of God as midwife in the Psalms. All three images are connected with liberation, with giving life, nurturing and sustaining. They are strong images, and they also recode or challenge a very typical, narrow, male construction of violence that leads to death. These texts really want to ask: what can be life-giving?

Johnny Ova: It seems like this created a passion in you. Being from Long Island, I don't know much about the South African community and culture, but I have to believe that something, not just in the culture but in the church, really burned a passion inside you, seeing women oppressed in the name of God, though not really in the name of God. Can you speak on what you've witnessed?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Growing up, as my colleague always says, you only know what you know, or you see what you can see. It was only later, when I returned home to teach after teaching for eight years in the United States in different contexts, that I saw it. I've now been teaching for 15 years back home at the University of Stellenbosch. In terms of poverty and gender-based violence, South Africa is sort of the rape capital of the world. I've been trying to understand why that is, and why women are still excluded in so many ways. That has influenced my work, how I teach and how I write.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: And I've been thinking about what role our constructions and images of God play. Mary Daly, one of the first feminist scholars, always used to say, if God is male, male becomes God. So I'm trying to find alternative ways of speaking about God, but also empowering women and men to say it can be different, it should be different. Let every voice count. Let every person count as well.

Johnny Ova: I couldn't agree more. It is challenging to traditional constructs, and unfortunately it takes time. When you've been taught something for so long, and you come at someone who's 40, 50 or 16 with something different, you can almost see it colliding in their brain. When I look at the beginning, at the story of God creating Adam, he pulls from Adam and separates Eve from Adam, and now they're both equal reflections of the image of God. And when the unity comes, I feel like it reveals God more. That leads to my next question: why do you think feminine imagery for God has been overlooked or suppressed in traditional theology as a whole, and why are some of these verses taken out and used as hammers instead of his arms extended in love?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: I think it's because most of the biblical texts were written by men, for men, and most of the biblical interpreters over the last two thousand years and more have also been male, looking at the text in a particular way, through a particular worldview. When female interpreters joined the guild, as Elizabeth Johnson says, women interpreters gave us new eyes for reading the Scriptures, for thinking about theological doctrines, and for looking at our practices and what our church communities look like. Then we can reset it in a different way and create communities that welcome everyone equally. In that regard our biblical interpretation looks different, our sermons look different, our prayers look different. It can change things on so many levels. It's not taking away from what it was, but it's enriching, broadening, expanding the circle.

Johnny Ova: I always say our diversity, unified, makes us more powerful. When we only hang out and fellowship with people who look like us, talk like us and think like us, we neglect the whole image of God. One of my friends always says, sarcastically and jokingly, notice that God is always for what you're for and always against what you're against. We create God in our own image and project that, especially in leadership onto a congregation. That's how this stuff multiplies so quickly, in my opinion, and getting different perspectives is really important. So these metaphors, mourner, mother, midwife, how do they expand our understanding of the divine? What did you uncover in these studies that you could share with us, maybe some things that blew your mind?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: It's so interesting how one thing leads to another. I was actually rereading Mourner, Mother, Midwife yesterday, and I could see how emblematic it is of the work I've continued to do over these past 12 or 13 years. I can't believe it. For instance, I've done quite a bit of work since on trauma hermeneutics, reading the text through that lens. This text of God as the weeping God, the wailing woman, is almost a throwaway line in Jeremiah, but it opens up a whole world for reading the book of Jeremiah and the prophets against a context of incredible hardship. Trauma hermeneutics helps us see the importance of putting our pain and suffering into words. Often the trauma response is that we're numb and confused. We don't have words. We don't know what to say. And the wailing women, the wise women in the book of Jeremiah, teach their neighbors and their daughters how to mourn.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: And it's interesting to see that it's God who calls the wailing women. So actually God then being the first mourner, the one who is weeping about what's happening in the world. You could have a whole series on that: a God who weeps about what's around us, and who calls on people to weep as well. I explore that in the chapter on God as mourner. The wailing women, the mourners, are like the prophets. They're the ones saying, what's happening here is wrong. And God is saying it's wrong. That idea of bringing community together is something I've worked on later too. So that was a very strong image.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: On the mothering side, it was so interesting when I looked at the acknowledgments. It's the last book where I don't mention my daughter Suzanne, who was born in 2012. For a very long time I wanted to be a mother, and it was complicated. I worked in America and my husband lived in South Africa. It took a while, but I was pregnant probably just after I finished the manuscript, and she was born the year the book was published. I remember being on maternity leave, and after this book I continued writing on the metaphor of God as a woman in labor, how that is used in Jeremiah in the context of trauma, but also in some of the other prophets as an image of restoration, which you also see in Deutero-Isaiah. A lot of my writing feels very existential and embodied. You don't always say that in the books, but if you read between the lines and below the surface, you'll see a lot of me in the book.

Johnny Ova: The fact that you were pregnant while writing that book is incredible.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: While finishing that book, yes. And there's something in there about the laboring process. I think I write about that in the acknowledgments. Writing a book, and this was a difficult book to get written and published, it took time, it moved across continents and moved back home with me. It's very generative and it's laborious, but in the end it's lovely. And now my daughter is 13, this mourner and the midwife.

Johnny Ova: It goes fast. I have a 13-year-old too. My wife gave birth to our son in May of 2011, so he turned 13. You blink and it's gone. And how much you could relate, being pregnant and going through those pains while working on this book, I guess that makes the book come more to life for you. It means more to you because you went through it. Let me transition. How did the ancient audiences understand these metaphors? If we took ourselves back to the recipients of these writings, how would they have received them?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Sorry, I missed that. It cut out there a bit.

Johnny Ova: No problem. I said, how did the ancient audiences understand these metaphors in their own cultural context?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: That's a very interesting question. Part of it is that there's something very universal to the human experience of childbearing. Giving birth in that context would really have been a battle between life and death. A lot of women died in childbirth. So even the warrior language is there; it's battle imagery. There's something universal about the experience of giving birth. But there's also something very culturally specific, and in biblical scholarship we try to honor that. It wasn't written in our time. It was written in a different time. Some of this would have been quite subversive, I would say.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: In Deutero-Isaiah you suddenly find all this female imagery for God, and people have made suggestions about why. Maybe it was to counter some of the goddesses that emerged at that time. Or it's in the context of trauma, where mothers and children were the most precarious. Even mothers might forget or turn away from their children, as we see in the book of Lamentations, which describes those horrors. But God will not. God will restore. God will protect. So there are these inner-biblical conversations going on, which is quite interesting as well.

Johnny Ova: How do these feminine images intersect with the themes of justice, compassion and liberation? You've mentioned that they parallel a lot.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: What was interesting in some of the texts, like the midwife texts in Psalms, is that I was one of the first people writing on it or noticing it. I'm not a Psalms scholar, but it was so interesting to see it, to see how it's an image of liberation, and then to bring it into conversation with what we know about the midwives in the book of Exodus, which is such a powerful image of resistance. Whether they were Egyptian or Hebrew midwives is ambiguous. They could be Hebrew midwives working for Hebrew women, or Egyptian midwives working for the Hebrew women. Both are interesting to explore. But they go against Pharaoh. They refuse to let these babies die. They almost trick and lie in order to save these Hebrew babies.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: That's so interesting in terms of the question of justice. I used a poem somewhere by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, an alternative liturgy, which speaks about the idea of God as a midwife, and then of human midwives following suit and helping. There are things we can do to bring life into situations of death, and sometimes to resist where there are life-denying circumstances. So yes, I think there's quite a bit of scope in seeing this feminine imagery and how it relates to questions of justice.

Johnny Ova: Beautiful revelation. The prophetic literature also has a lot of birth imagery, like the beginning of birth pangs, birthing new things, old seasons dying, new things coming into creation. How would you tie those together? What role do lament and birth imagery have in the prophetic literature, and why do you think the biblical writers would use that kind of language?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: It's such a profound part of human experience. We all are born. That's how we come into the world. But it's laborious and painful, especially without epidurals and modern medicine. So there's something in there about recognizing the pain that comes. Some of the prophetic literature uses it to speak about soldiers, enemy soldiers and Israelite soldiers, who feel paralyzed like a woman in labor. If you're in labor, which can be hours or days, you can't run a marathon or do your work. You're really unable to fight or unable to go on.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: But there's also an end to it. Women in labor are also the bearers of new life, of beginnings. Maybe that's the point of connection in the metaphor. If you're in the midst of the struggle, if you're in the midst of the pain, in the midst of the trauma, it feels like it's labor without end. But in many circumstances there is a baby being born. There is the promise of new life that comes. That hope is also associated with God, and it comes out of situations of deep distress, which is when most of the prophetic literature was written.

Johnny Ova: You also wrote a book, Claiming Her Dignity. I was reading some excerpts, and you explored the topic of female resistance in the Old Testament, at least from what I saw. How does that connect to your work? Talk a little about female resistance in the Old Testament.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: This is also interesting, how one thing leads to another. I started this in my PhD and continued it, and this image of the midwives Shiphrah and Puah that I reference here is such a strong image of resistance. In some of my other work I looked at laughter and tears as means of resistance. I did an essay on Sarah and Hagar, which is also very emblematic of my work. It relates to this question: in a context of oppression, where the empire is very strong, how do people survive? How do they not give up? James Scott has talked about the notion of hidden transcripts, and you see this very much in the African American community too, in the stories they tell, like Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox. Those are children's stories, but they're actually very important stories. They say that those who are seemingly weak or subjugated can outwit, outsmart and outlast. The empire won't last forever. You must be smart and stay alive to fight another day.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: And you can tell jokes, often jokes about the enemy. Sigmund Freud already talked about that. Telling jokes is a way of survival, and South Africans are very good at that, sometimes with a little dark humor. Telling jokes is a way to sustain oneself. Then there's lament, which we talked about. Lament is resistance. Claiming Her Dignity brought these ideas together. Women in my context, and globally, are very vulnerable in the context of war, poverty and ongoing patriarchy, or what I call kyriarchy, which is the idea that it's not just gender but also race and class that make people vulnerable, especially women and children.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: And then there's violence, and how these biblical stories show women resisting that violence: Tamar resisting the violence of rape, Rizpah resisting the violence of war, lamenting and weeping over her children. These become such strong images, even though they are very small. Rizpah does not speak. With many of these female figures we do not hear their voices, but they are there, and we can see their examples of not giving up. I continued this in my work on Writing and Reading to Survive, showing how biblical stories and also contemporary novels have female protagonists who do not give up, who continue to find ways of staying alive, and not just staying alive and surviving, but in the end also being able to thrive.

Johnny Ova: I'm sure this work has been extremely rewarding for you, seeing the fruit of all the labor you've put in. How does reframing and talking about these stories empower readers, especially women, today? What have you seen?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: I see this very much with my students. I teach a lot of this in my classes. I've been teaching 15 years in Stellenbosch, and before that at a number of different places in the United States. It's really rewarding to see students love this, find it life-changing, and go on to do work of their own in it, in their communities. That's rewarding. And it was interesting: we're currently on sabbatical in Germany, so I don't have my copy of Mourner, Mother, Midwife with me, so I bought it on Kindle. Seeing the reviews on Amazon was so personal for me, that people are actually reading it, and even you picking it up and wanting to talk about it after all these years. It's really lovely to see that words I wrote so long ago make a difference in people's lives. Often it's pastors, people not just in biblical studies but also in pastoral care or systematic theology, saying, you're bringing a different way of looking at these texts, and that's helpful. That's very rewarding. It makes it all worthwhile.

Johnny Ova: Well, I've got to honor you, Dr. Claassens. We've been really ramping this up, doing two a week for the last month and a half, two months, plowing through a lot of these, and you are the first woman we've had on the Dig In Podcast relaunch.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Oh my goodness. Hopefully not the last.

Johnny Ova: No, definitely not. We've already got some more booked. But we're going to dub you the queen of the Dig In Podcast, temporarily, okay?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Okay, I'll take that.

Johnny Ova: A lot of this reminds me that much of the oppression and injustice we've talked about today comes from people's mindsets. I always think about how to break that. On the question of how it impacts women, I really feel the men need to get a revelation of this too, because from my perspective the men seem to be the oppressive ones on this topic. For the most part, women aren't the ones oppressing women here. I remember walking into a church on Long Island, probably 12 years ago, around 2012 or 2013, holding my wife's hand. The usher separated our hands. I thought he was going for a handshake. He made my wife sit in the corner on one side of the room and took me up on the stage, where there was a throne. The head pastor had a big throne, and there were five smaller ones, and me and four other guys were on them. I'd just been invited by a friend to check out the service.

Johnny Ova: So I'm sitting up there listening, looking at my wife in the corner, going, what on earth is happening? What are we part of? They were doing some other really ridiculous stuff, and I got up, walked off the stage and ended up leaving, because they tried to lock the doors. It was a really awkward thing. But you see the oppression in that. I'm fearful for their marriages. One thing my wife and I talk about in our goals and vision for the church is that we want to show people what a healthy marriage looks like: my wife flourishing in her gifts, legitimately joyful and excited to co-labor with me, leading by example. When people comment on our marriage, they comment on how happy and full of joy she looks, and that makes me happy. It's one of the things I think the men need to grab a revelation on. I'm sure you've faced many challenges over the years in your work.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Yes. But I can also say I'm married to a very good man who is also my colleague, so I think we try to model that too. We're really partners, and that is wonderful. On men getting a revelation, there's a lot we need to talk about. Maybe you can have me on another time to talk about fragile masculinities and hypermasculinity. There's a lot of work done on that. People are trained, they're enculturated in a certain system, and men are also really wounded. That becomes part of how they act in some ways. But women are also part of the system. So I think all of us need to be liberated.

Johnny Ova: Sure, I'm interested.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: A lot of the work I do, I often say I do for my daughter. She's a strong, independent woman, and I want her to be safe and to be who she is. I think we need to start our work especially with young people: young girls, so they realize their self-worth and that they have gifts, and young boys, in how they treat women. There's a lot of work to be done, and it starts at a very young age. It's a multipronged approach. We need to preach this and teach this and do it on many levels, but I do think we really need to spend time with the youth.

Johnny Ova: Yes, and having platforms for open conversations about this too. Something I've learned, increasing in empathy over the last decade or so, is that you get so caught up in, this is the way it is, because this is how I was brought up and it's all I know. Then you really make the effort to sit in somebody else's shoes. I run in many different circles, and some of them are not anti this. They're open, and I don't want to paint them as jerks, because they're definitely not. But I've been really pushing on empathy toward all people, whether it was the Black Lives Matter movement or the COVID stuff. One point I kept bringing up was this: if my wife felt neglected by me, even if I was 100 percent sure it wasn't true, the fact that she feels that way deserves my full attention and my ear to figure out what I'm giving off. People say, no, you're not neglected, I do this and this and this. But it's taking the time to sit down and understand why.

Johnny Ova: With Black Lives Matter and COVID happening at the same time, one of the most beautiful moments at our church took place. The church we oversee is very diverse. We were a grassroots church. We planted it and grew from five people to over 100, and about 30,000 people watch us every month. This interview goes right on the homepage, so we've got a pretty cool audience. We were pushing to stay open when everybody else was closing. We took about a month off and then reopened. During one of those gatherings, I remember walking out and seeing our Black congregation members, our white congregation members, the older, the widowed, the young. Our church has Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, legitimately every background represented. They were still in the church. They had formed a circle with chairs and were just talking. I put my bag down, sat in the media section and watched. They spoke for almost two hours that day.

Johnny Ova: To me that was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, such a respectful, honest and open dialogue. I feel like that moment really forged a bond in our church, and we were helping each other. I thought, man, why can't churches do stuff like this? Why can't we sit and have these conversations and be more empathetic? Conversations like ours stir those feelings in me. I think it's such a needed thing to move past some of the limitations we put on ourselves as the church body.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Amen.

Johnny Ova: As we're wrapping up, you mentioned you've done a lot of other work over the last 12 years, since we're talking about a somewhat older book. Tell our audience what you've been working on. What's coming up? Are you traveling anywhere? Can people connect with you on social media?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Since Mourner, Mother, Midwife, I wrote Claiming Her Dignity in 2016. Then in 2020 I wrote a monograph on biblical and contemporary trauma narratives, which brings together my love for the Bible and literature. Novels are a great excuse to read, and it shows some of the interesting conversations that can be created between Bible and literature. That's Writing and Reading to Survive, which is also very existential. Then I worked on a commentary on Jonah for the Old Testament Library series, which just came out last year, 2024. It was such a fun project to work on. I really enjoyed it.

Johnny Ova: Very cool. I'm going to find all of this and link it in the descriptions on the YouTube channel.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Now I'm writing on Nahum, also a commentary, continuing some of these questions about God language, metaphor, trauma, embodiment and lament. I think it's really interesting. I'm on sabbatical. We get sabbaticals every couple of years, which is wonderful. We're in Germany right now, in Marburg, but we're coming to the United States in the fall. I'll be in Atlanta, and my husband and I will teach a class at Columbia Theological Seminary, and I'll be writing. Then we go back home in December. I'm on Instagram, but I mostly post nice photos of traveling. I'm not an activist on social media. That I don't do.

Johnny Ova: So Dr. Claassens is on the gram. That's good. Do you have an email or a website people could use if they have questions?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: People can look on Academia for some of my writings, and they can reach me through my university email at sun.ac.za.

Johnny Ova: Perfect. All right, my last question, and then I'll let you go. How might this vision of God as mourner, mother and midwife shape our faith and justice work today?

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Absolutely. Rereading this, I feel the book is timeless and very important now. A God who mourns and laments about the wars in the world, about injustice, gender-based violence, all the things we could add to that. A God who nurtures, sustains and gives new life. I've been thinking a lot about what happened in Texas over the Fourth of July. There's a lot of hurt, and new life coming up out of death. It's really, really hard for those communities, but people do survive. People do go on. There's the idea of God with them in that situation, and also bringing new life. And then the idea of the midwife, again saving, delivering, and calling us to also be midwives of justice.

Johnny Ova: Well, Professor Juliana Claassens, thank you so much for your time. This was fun. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and maybe we can do it again on some of the other topics you talk about, because I feel like we could go for three more hours on the things you opened up here.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Yeah, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

Johnny Ova: Thanks again.

Prof. Juliana Claassens: Bye.