Just thinking outloud about the Trinity and a Heavenly Mother.
Could a Heavenly Mother not be part of the Trinity, but have a holy roll of some sort in heaven?
Obviously, some Christians think that is possible. What do you think?
What would this "heavenly mother" be? What class of being would it be?
Orthodox Christianity recognizes two fundamental classes of existance:
The Uncreated and the Created.
God alone is the Uncreated. And therefore all qualities, attributes, and concepts of divinity belong uniquely to the one God.
Since there is only one God, and God is one, divinity is the property of not a class of beings, but the property of the one-and-only Divine Being: God.
"Shema Yisrael YHVH Eloheinu YHVH echad" (Deuteronomy 6:4)
"Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one"
"See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no god beside Me;" - Deuteronomy 32:39
"Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me," - Isaiah 46:9
"I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides Me there is no god; I equip you though you do not know Me," - Isaiah 45:5
All other things are creatures, made by the one and only God YHVH, the "I AM that I AM" who condescended to speak to Moses through a burning bush.
Thus there is the Uncreated, God and God alone. Who is one, His Being undivided, inseparate, the one and only. Without beginning, without end. One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity. For the Godhead of the Father, the Godhead of the Son, and the Godhead of the Spirit is one. The one uncreated Essence, the one Uncreated Being. That Is before all things, and is after all things, First and Last, Alpha and Omega.
All else, again, is mere creature. Whether things visible, such as the observable universe and all which it contains--all matter of all kinds and all things subsisting of matter. Or things invisible, for example the angels, about which Scripture calls "ministering spirits".
As such a "heavenly mother" could only be of the latter class of existence: a mere creature. It could not be divine, for only God is Divine. It must therefore be a creature, a mere creature, brought into existence from non-existence by the power and word of God as part of the creation.
Further what would "mother" even mean here? We know why the Father is called "Father", not because He has sired, not because He has produced offspring through seminal vesicle, but because this One is the One whom Jesus Christ refers to as His Source and Origin. For He is not the Father of creatures, but the Father of the Son, for God has begotten God. The Uncreated has begotten the Uncreated. The Eternal Generation of the Son from the Father is not a birth as we understand it, but a divine mystery of the eternal relationship of the Son to the Father, of the Logos to His Eternal Source.
The Father is not male, for there is no meaning of sex, chromosomes to That Which is Eternal, Uncreated. He is called Father not because the One whom Christ refers to as His Origin has gonads, or organs of any kind, for God, being the Uncreated and Eternal is without form, without body, without appearance, but Ineffable in His Eternal Uncreated Being. We speak using anthropological and anthropomorphic terminology because of the poverty of the finite in speaking of the infinite.
And we call this One, the One of whom Christ calls "Father" our own Father because Christ has given His own the grace of adoption, for having been joined to Christ by grace we share in Christ's Person and if we share in Him and are in Him, then what He has is ours as gift. And that is why St. Paul says that God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts by which we can cry out "Abba! Father". Christ has given us the privilege to call His Father (and He alone has that right, as He alone is the only-begotten, the one and only Son of the Father, which He has known from all eternity), which is why when we speak the name "Father" we speak the name which is unique to Christ's own special and eternal relationship with His Father. Christ has made us children of His Father, by grace, and so we can say, with Him, "
Our Father in heaven"
So what then would "mother" mean? For as creatures we are the product of the Uncreated God, who in the beginning established all things, setting in course this cosmos, this universe of matter, of which we are part of, of which we arose into existence through the consummation of our parents to produce us.
Who is this "mother" the mother of? In the Eternal Inter-Divine Life of God there is no place for "mother" because such is nonsensical. There is only the Three Divine Persons, of one Essence, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So within this Inter-Divine Life there can be "mother".
Now Christ will gain a mother, when in the fullness of time the Eternal Son, the Divine Logos, the only-begotten of the Father will condescend to join to Himself human nature, becoming human, in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And so this mortal, lowly, human woman will be granted the unimaginably beautiful privilege to become the very mother of Christ-God. For which reason all generations will call her blessed. So Christ has gained a mother, in time, a human mother by His becoming human through her, by the power of the Holy Spirit. And she will be named, for this reason, Theotokos (Bearer-of-God) and the mother of God; for God the Son has become man through her; the flesh and blood baby which she conceives and gives birth to and cradles in her arms is the Eternal and Uncreated God.
So, in the Incarnation, there is a mother; the human woman named Mary.
But we have already addressed that in the Inter-Divine Life of the Trinity there is no place for a "mother". Since there is only God who is Divine, there can be no divine mother. There is no place for a creature-mother with God, since God is not male and no siring has ever taken place, either in the Inter-Divine Life of the Trinity or in the Economy of God's engagement with creation.
So we can have no "divine" "mother". And so all is left is a creature-mother, but there is no room for such a creature within the Divine Life or in the Divine engagement with creation.
As such the only thing we have come reasonably close to a mother, as it pertains to the things of God, is the Virgin Mary, a mere human woman who, by God's plan, became the mother of Christ in time.
Now, she is the mother of Christ, and since as the mother of Christ she is therefore the mother of God, though she is not mother to the Father or the Spirit, only of the Son who became flesh.
And she is in heaven, along with the rest of God's saints. Not as a specially exalted being of any kind, but as a holy and blessed saint of God, along with Abraham, Moses, St. John the Baptist, or St. Paul.
One could, I suppose also think of her as a mother to the Church, since we have been adopted as children of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ; thus in perhaps some sense because of our union to Christ by the grace of God we can think of Christ's mother as our own mother. So perhaps Mary can be thought of as a mother to the Church, even though she is not above the Church but part of the Church.
So we have, perhaps then, an adopted heavenly mother in the figure of St. Mary, the mother of our Lord Jesus.
And this is as close to a "heavenly mother" that we could ever hope to have here. And while I am perfectly fine with this sense of St. Mary Theotokos being seen as a kind of adoptive mother of the Faithful in her Son; there is still a part of me that wouldn't be all that comfortable calling her a "heavenly mother".
Let's be clear, however, that at this point other things are also to be held as true: St. Joseph would likewise become a kind of adoptive parent to us, just as St. James Adelphotheos and Jesus' other siblings would become a kind of adopted siblings of ours. So this analogy and language can be carried on into all the various earthly relationships of the Lord Jesus.
So, at this point. Maybe a "heavenly mother" in the person of Jesus' mom, the Virgin Mary. And also a "heavenly stepdad" in St. Joseph. Our "heavenly stepbrothers" with James and Jude et al. Which would also mean our "heavenly grandma and grandpa" St Anna and St. Joachim, the parents of Mary.
At that point it just seems a bit much though.
So I think maybe it will be simplest to just go ahead and say, no, no there is no room for a "heavenly mother" in orthodox Christianity.
-CryptoLutheran
Belief in a heavenly mother is more than just "a little different". ViaCrucis has an excellent post explaining why.
