This thread is branching off from a discussion that I was having with
@The Liturgist about whether it is meaningful to speak of God having gender. We didn't want to derail the original thread (which was about the NT Apocrypha), so here is a separate place for the gender discussion. In the other thread, here (
New Testament Apocrypha), The Liturgist stated that God is, in some sense, masculine:
I replied that the categories of "masculine" and "feminine" are not meaningful to me outside of the context of species that produce offspring through sexual reproduction:
I intend this thread to be a place where we can continue our discussion in a civil and respectful manner. Others are welcome to join in. However, please note that this is the WWMC forum, and misogyny does not belong here. If you post the view that women are inferior to men, I will report you to the moderators. From the SOP for WWMC:
Okay, that should set the context. The Liturgist, can you clarify what you mean by "non-sexual masculinity"? What "quality of relationships" do you have in mind?
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I begin a dialogue not to seek polemical debate but mutual wisdom, and pray now that we will together find edification, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
So this is really exciting, because the real question is, what does God mean by identifying Himself as the Father, the Son, and the Lord, the Holy Spirit? There are three answers which I see as not working: firstly, while communicatio idiomatum can be used to say God is male because Jesus Christ is male by virtue of His full humanity, which he partook of through His fully human mother, Our glorious lady Theotokos and ever virgin Mary, who conceived without sexual intercourse due to the operation of the Holy Spirit, who caused somehow the fertilization of an ova, resulting in cellular division and an embryo.*
This is because there is something that might hypothetically be described of as reproduction in the Godhood which is not sexual, that being the eternal generation of the Son by the Father, that is to say, he is begotten, not made, begotten of the Father before ages. In Christianity, there is not a Mother Goddess with whom the Father reproduces, contrary to the claims of the Mormons. Likewise the Holy Spirit, who is no less a person than Christ, eternally proceeds from the Father (as you might expect, I personally reject the filioque).
Secondly, we cannot claim that God is male simply because we are made in the image of God, for the obvious reason that men and women both are equal bearers of the divine image, and women are not male.
Thirdly, we cannot use the revelation of the Father in the Son to say God is male, because this revelation confirms that we are created in the image of God, indeed, we are recreated in the image of Christ Jesus, God the Son, the Incarnate Logos, who became incarnate the same way any human is born, but nis mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is regarded by the early church and by traditional Christians as the most exemplary of the saints, the one saint worthy of hyperdoulia (extreme veneration), to quote an Eastern Orthodox hymn, we believe her to be “Thou the more honorable than the cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim, who without corruption gavest birth to God the Word, thou the true Theotokos, we magnify thee.” She is venerated even more than St. John the Baptist, who Christ our God declares to be “the greatest...of those born of a woman.” Therefore, it is obvious that we are created in the likeness of God, but since the most venerable human is female, this is not the answer.
Rather, I believe that Scripture reveals God to us in a masculine identity based on the specific relationship He has with us, and the relationships in the trinity. The relationship between the heavenly God and us is paternal rather than maternal; the relationship between the first and second Persons of the Trinity is the relationship of a Father to a Son, even though both are coequal, coeternal, and together with the Spirit, solely and uniquely entitled to veneration.
This takes us to the question of why, which I believe to be epistemologically unknowable by us at this stage in our existence, but we can perhaps speculate. Given that God is pure love, and the most loving relation most children experience with another parent is with their mother, and given that I believe in salvation through synergism rather than monergism, I believe our mothers are possibly intended to represent, when they are as wonderful as my mother, at least, and it is very sad indeed when one of a neglectful mother; whereas tragically we have almost come to expect there to be neglectful fathers, there seems something existentially horrifying about mothers who do not love their children (I am not referring to those who put their children up for immediate adoption, or, seized by post-partum depression, commit in a state of temporary legal insanity infanticide; this is a mental health issue rather than a existential crisis of morality.
But to the extent that mothers more often than not are loving, they embody the human principle in our salvation, and represent, in a sense, us, since Christ is described as the bridegroom, so all humans are in a spiritual sense, somewhat feminine, even when we are fully masculine males whose conduct and grooming is in no respect effeminate. And furhermore, our mothers iconigraphically represent our Lady Theotokos, who I believe from accounts of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox saints will, if asked, intervene to be a mother to those who are deprived of their mother or lack a loving mother; for this reason we venerate her as Joy to All Who Sorrow. A particularly moving story of this is that of the Coptic Orthodox monk Lazarus el Antony, which I would share, but it would make me sob, so I suggest googling him; he is somewhat famous for hosting in his cave, which is near that of St. Anthony the Great, now a chapel where he celebrates the Divine Liturgy at midnight, the Anglican priest Fr. Peter Owen Jones in the three part documentary series Extreme Pilgrim, which aired in the late noughties on BBC Two, and which I greatly enjoyed, along with Around the World in 80 Faiths, an 8 part follow up series for the same network.
His documentary on New Testament apocrypha however I found very disappointing, which might seem strange when one considers my other thread, unless one remembers that critical caveat I have been conpelled to repeat four times so far, and may have to repeat again, that I believe in and do not wish to change the Athanasian Canon. Indeed I have a personal devotion to St. Athanasius the Great and believe all Christians should venerate him as the Pillar of Orthodoxy, and venerate St. Anthony the Great as the first of those who died to the world through the holy institution which became Christian religious life. Indeed I wrote an article about it in my Christian Forums blog (
Why You Should Read The Life Of Anthony ), and if you don’t mind I would like to mirror this post on that blog.
I look forward to a loving and mutually edifying dialogue, free from polemical debate, but rather conducted using the Socratic method, to search for the Truth, for Christ is Truth incarnate, and I pray we shall be mutually edified through His gracious Light, together with that of His majestic Father and the Holy Spirit, our Comforter Paraclete, to whom belong all honor, glory and worship, now and ever and unto the ages of all ages.
*Christian women and men I know opposed to abortion from the time of conception, which is a belief I share except in the horrible tragedy of an ectopic pregnancy which is both non-viable and lethal for the mother (but perhaps in the future we might be able to transplant ectopic pregnancies into a safer position in the uterus), and any related condition where the pregnancy poses an unacceptable risk to the life of the mother, derive our reverence for the embryo from this moment in human history, which in my case extends even to embryos from, for example, ectopic pregnancies which must tragically be ended; these embryos are human beings and in my opinion should be buried normally. And in my experience both as a pastor working with couples who have suffered a miscarriage, and as the son of a woman who miscarried on her first attempt my older brother, I can attest the grief is real.
