(Click on this self-portrait to read my comments on it.)
"You will nurse and be satisfied from her comforting breasts. You will nurse to your heart's delight at her full breasts . . . . As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you...." ---The Creator (Isaiah 66:11, 13a, God's Word Translation)
God made humans physically in His spiritual image with male and female bodies. The woman's body has breasts for a physical reason: to feed babies; and for a spiritual reason: to display God's own nurturing nature, as the verse quoted above indicates. As a mother takes up her infant to cuddle and nourish close to her heart, so the Lord, with divine arms, enfolds us in His bosom where we can draw our spiritual life from Him. Whenever we read 1 Peter 2:2, "Desire God's pure word as newborn babies desire milk. Then you will grow in your salvation" (God's Word Translation), we should be visualizing a suckling infant latched on to a mother's breast. That was the sole and explicit visual image in the mind's eye of this verse's author. In fact, because breastfeeding alone is the original Scriptural picture depicting this divine truth about spiritual growth, we should be thinking of our own delight in feeding upon God's Word every time we see a baby feeding at a mother's breast. Instead of this wholesome image, we've allowed the central component of this illustration to become so corrupted in our minds that we send women to hide away in "cry rooms" and toilet stalls instead of encouraging them to display this living portrait of God's nurture openly in our church congregations and public squares. Our behavior in this respect is Scripturally shameful and theologically inappropriate.
Christians ought to honor the Creator by returning to the sound perspective found in Scripture, instead of supporting an ungodly, worldly view of women's breasts. If Christian mothers glorified God by breastfeeding their infants openly, their exposed breasts would be a public demonstration of the true purpose for which they were divinely designed. That practice would be treating breasts realistically, as normal features of a woman's personality, not as sexual commodities in the vain imaginations of a misled culture. In many other countries, the openly visible breast in breastfeeding is the norm. The church in our culture, by calling visible breasts "obscene," helped turn them into sexualized objects, and consequently, surrendered them to the objectifying exploitation of pornography. God wants women to be treated with respect as persons and their physical features as integral parts of their feminine identity. To allow breasts to be defined in terms of body shame is to perpetuate America's dysfunctional and toxic obsession with them. The only attitude worthy of the name "Christian" is to see breasts as God does and to gratefully praise Him for creating them, whenever and wherever they are displayed in socially wholesome ways.
