The Gender of God (note: WWMC forum)

St_Worm2

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[FONT=Georgia]@The Liturgist[/FONT]I don't accept any of these three analogies.
Hello again @PloverWing, you say that you don't accept analogies like the ones above, just like you've also said that you do not accept that God the Father has self-identified as male/masculine in the Bible, and/or that the Lord Jesus has identified both God the Father and God the Holy Spirit as "male/masculine" (or do you accept that Jesus has done so?).

What you haven't told us (unless I've already missed it?) is "why" you believe what you do about all of this.

So, when you get around to talking about it, would it be possible for you to PM me at that point and let me know (as I do not want to miss what you have to say).

Thanks :)

--David
 
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PloverWing

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Hello again @PloverWing, you say that you don't accept analogies like the ones above, just like you've also said that you do not accept that God the Father has self-identified as male/masculine in the Bible, and/or that the Lord Jesus has identified both God the Father and God the Holy Spirit as "male/masculine" (or do you accept that Jesus has done so?).

What you haven't told us (unless I've already missed it?) is "why" you believe what you do about all of this.

Sorry to be cryptic -- I didn't mean to be. :) Here are my own views:

The Bible tells us that God is spirit, and that God precedes all creation. Apart from the Incarnation, God does not have a physical body that is part of the creation.

Maleness and femaleness are properties of organisms that produce offspring through sexual reproduction. God does not produce offspring in this way, and thus is neither male or female.

Masculinity and femininity are traits that the males and females of a species -- let's limit ourselves to humans, for simplicity -- that male and female humans have. The definitions are a bit fuzzy, and very culture-dependent, but it's something like: masculine traits are the ones that men have more often than women, and feminine traits are the ones that women have more often than men. We haven't yet precisely quantified "more often than" -- is a trait masculine iff all men have it and no women have it, or do we just require many men to have it and few women to have it, and then what do we do with the outliers? But it's something in that ballpark. Masculinity and femininity are descriptions of the psychology and assigned societal expectations of male and female humans. And again, God is not a human; God does not have a human biological body and is not a member of human society.

I do not accept that God has self-identified as male or masculine, because I do not accept that God has self-identified as human (again, apart from the Incarnation).

I do not accept that Jesus identified God as male or masculine, because I do not accept that Jesus identified God the Father as a human being.

I do see metaphors of many kinds being used in the Bible, by Jesus and by others, to describe God. Metaphors are useful, and they are limited. God is like a refiner's fire (Malachi 3), for example. This tells us that God purifies us, removing our clutter and our sin. But the image can't be pushed too far; it doesn't mean that God is physically hot. God is like a father: God is a being more powerful than us, who also cares deeply for us. But it pushes the metaphor too far if we see God's fatherhood as including maleness.

As for the analogies, they seem self-evidently false to me, but I'll give it a go. Men and women are both created beings. In the first and third analogies (holy:created and deity:humanity), men and women are both firmly on the "created" and "humanity" side of things. As for the second analogy, some ancient and medieval people did see human reproduction as planting the male seed in the female garden, with all the genetic information coming from the male side, but we've known that to be false for quite some years now. Both men and women are on the "seed" side of that analogy.

The tl;dr is that I truly don't see how "masculine" and "feminine" are defined without referring to human biology and psychology. The Bible is emphatic that God is not a human being.
 
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The Liturgist

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@The Liturgist : I think I'm hearing in your latest post some analogies:

The holy : The created :: Masculine : Feminine
Seed : Earth :: Masculine : Feminine
Deity : Humanity :: Masculine : Feminine

I'm really not trying to misrepresent you, so please correct me if I've misunderstood, but this seems to be what's in post #38.

God is, of course, on the side of the holy, the seed, and deity, so these analogies would place God on the side of masculinity. And this does help give meaning to God being "masculine". But I don't accept any of these three analogies.

This will require much more explanation, because no. 1 and 3 are not analogies; there is a dichotomous mode of theology you’ve doubtless encountered and the masculinity characteristic of the relationship of God with himself and with us is predicated on a relationship that is non-dichotomous. No. 2 is an analogy, but its not one that I made; rather I alluded to a scriptural parable, Christ as vinedresser.

However, there is also the wheat and tares in Matthew, although this parable can be misread in a hyper-Calvinistic or even a Gnostic-dualist way, with a Valentinian arguing the tares are physicals and the wheat is Gnostic and the barn is the Pleroma, and the villain who planted the tares is the incompetent demiurge. This is obviously to be rejected, but one can see where the misreadings that led to Gnosticism came from, which was a neo-Platonic misreading of the parables of Christ coupled with Zoroastrian ideals of Simon Magus, whose name indicates he was a Zoroastrian priest, but he was Mesopotamian, which makes me think, based on his character, that he was probably a charlatan. Although since magi, or mobeds as they are properly called, are paid to perform Yasnas, and I have seen an Parsee (Indian endogamous Zoroastrian) mobed warn that some mobeds are hypocrites, it is a possibility that he was legitimately ordained.
 
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The Liturgist

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Sorry to be cryptic -- I didn't mean to be. :) Here are my own views:

The Bible tells us that God is spirit, and that God precedes all creation. Apart from the Incarnation, God does not have a physical body that is part of the creation.

Maleness and femaleness are properties of organisms that produce offspring through sexual reproduction. God does not produce offspring in this way, and thus is neither male or female.

Masculinity and femininity are traits that the males and females of a species -- let's limit ourselves to humans, for simplicity -- that male and female humans have. The definitions are a bit fuzzy, and very culture-dependent, but it's something like: masculine traits are the ones that men have more often than women, and feminine traits are the ones that women have more often than men. We haven't yet precisely quantified "more often than" -- is a trait masculine iff all men have it and no women have it, or do we just require many men to have it and few women to have it, and then what do we do with the outliers? But it's something in that ballpark. Masculinity and femininity are descriptions of the psychology and assigned societal expectations of male and female humans. And again, God is not a human; God does not have a human biological body and is not a member of human society.

I do not accept that God has self-identified as male or masculine, because I do not accept that God has self-identified as human (again, apart from the Incarnation).

I do not accept that Jesus identified God as male or masculine, because I do not accept that Jesus identified God the Father as a human being.

I do see metaphors of many kinds being used in the Bible, by Jesus and by others, to describe God. Metaphors are useful, and they are limited. God is like a refiner's fire (Malachi 3), for example. This tells us that God purifies us, removing our clutter and our sin. But the image can't be pushed too far; it doesn't mean that God is physically hot. God is like a father: God is a being more powerful than us, who also cares deeply for us. But it pushes the metaphor too far if we see God's fatherhood as including maleness.

As for the analogies, they seem self-evidently false to me, but I'll give it a go. Men and women are both created beings. In the first and third analogies (holy:created and deity:humanity), men and women are both firmly on the "created" and "humanity" side of things. As for the second analogy, some ancient and medieval people did see human reproduction as planting the male seed in the female garden, with all the genetic information coming from the male side, but we've known that to be false for quite some years now. Both men and women are on the "seed" side of that analogy.

The tl;dr is that I truly don't see how "masculine" and "feminine" are defined without referring to human biology and psychology. The Bible is emphatic that God is not a human being.

So, let me just first say I don’t think you’re being Chalcedonian enough; communicatio idiomatum surely means that God is a human being, and the New Testament makes it quite clear that God has become man; there are limits which I recently discussed elsewhere on the forum that can be applied to communicatio, but it is absolutely Chalcedonian or Chalcedon-compatible Ephesian Oriental Orthodoxy to say that God is human.

In fact, Fr. John Behr, the protege and now, after a long stint as dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York, the successor to Metropolitan Kallistos Ware at Oxford, has summarized the Passion and Resurrection of Christ as “God died to show us what it means to be human.”
 
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The Liturgist

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By the way @PloverWing while inadequete compared to The Orthodox Way, these three catechtical blog posts I wrote might at least serve to put us on the same page, and are considerably shorter. If you can grasp these you should be able to understand my initial concept and then accept or reject it on its own terms, and if you can’t grasp them, I beyond any doubt made some humiliating error in composing them. Which is not an inherently bad thing, for the error can be corrected and the humiliation will preserve my humility:

A Supplementary Catechism For Forum Members

I am at times attracted to the vocation of a fool for Christ, like St. Basil, not St. Basil the Great of Caesarea, but St. Basil whom the splendid cathedral on the Red Square in Moscow is named for, enduring intentional humiliation as a means of theosis. It is an ascetic path most documented in the East, but I think some Western court jesters may have been fools for Christ privately, and I know someone at Disneyland who when he performs exhibits attributes of this vocation, and is extremely devout in his Christianity.

You do realize @Mark Quayle I was being completely serious in that post? There is a whole category of Orthodox saints venerated as Fools for Christ, and it is considered one of the most difficult vocations. I think the only more difficult ascetic vocation is being a stylite (living your entire rest of your life on top of a pillar or compact elevated platform, with no way down, dependent on others to raise supplies up to you on poles or with a rope, for example, St. Symeon the Stylite). St. Theodore had an open sore infected with maggots, but was unharmed by them, and indeed, people would visit his pillar and he would bless them by dropping some of the holy maggots on them, which cured the diseases of several pilgrims, while his wisdom was sought by several Byzantine archons. This is not a joke. Saintly maggots are a thing in Christianity. @GreekOrthodox can link you to a hagiography of one of the stylites; St. Symeon Stylites the Elder was the one with the maggots in the event you wish to avoid that extreme.
 
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Andrewn

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From the Catholic Catechism:

239 By calling God "Father", the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God's parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood,62 which emphasizes God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard:63 no one is father as God is Father.
 
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The Liturgist

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From the Catholic Catechism:

239 By calling God "Father", the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God's parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood,62 which emphasizes God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard:63 no one is father as God is Father.

Yes, this is good.
 
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Mark Quayle

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You do realize @Mark Quayle I was being completely serious in that post? There is a whole category of Orthodox saints venerated as Fools for Christ, and it is considered one of the most difficult vocations. I think the only more difficult ascetic vocation is being a stylite (living your entire rest of your life on top of a pillar or compact elevated platform, with no way down, dependent on others to raise supplies up to you on poles or with a rope, for example, St. Symeon the Stylite). St. Theodore had an open sore infected with maggots, but was unharmed by them, and indeed, people would visit his pillar and he would bless them by dropping some of the holy maggots on them, which cured the diseases of several pilgrims, while his wisdom was sought by several Byzantine archons. This is not a joke. Saintly maggots are a thing in Christianity. @GreekOrthodox can link you to a hagiography of one of the stylites; St. Symeon Stylites the Elder was the one with the maggots in the event you wish to avoid that extreme.
No thanks! (I've avoided that extreme for 66 years, and don't seem likely to need to learn more about it.) But that is very interesting. And, (sorry, but), funny!

Your earlier post I thought was funny because it seemed to do well something I have always admired in 'early' writers --the ability to render an opponent foolish without condescension and without even sounding like that is what they are doing, unless the reader follows closely what they said. Some of the most delicious sarcasm was written in Shakespeare's day. But you have educated me, and I have enjoyed it! Thanks!
 
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PloverWing

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So, let me just first say I don’t think you’re being Chalcedonian enough; communicatio idiomatum surely means that God is a human being, and the New Testament makes it quite clear that God has become man; there are limits which I recently discussed elsewhere on the forum that can be applied to communicatio, but it is absolutely Chalcedonian or Chalcedon-compatible Ephesian Oriental Orthodoxy to say that God is human.

If, when you say that God is male, you mean that the human being Jesus was male, and the communicatio idiomatum has us speak of Jesus' attributes as being also God's, then we have no disagreement. I agree that God is male in the same sense that God has brown hair, and is 5'10" tall, and gets tired and needs to take a nap after talking to crowds for a long time. But I thought you were saying more than that.

[ Yes, we don't know what Jesus' actual hair color and height were. I'm using some plausible guesses to make a point. We do know that Jesus took naps, though. ]

When you say this:

God is masculine because we, represented and interceded for by our mothers and the mother of God herself, the blessed Virgin Mary, the holiest of humans born from sexual intercourse, are feminine. And these properties carry over into the human experience, in that humans and animals, male and female, both have female and male characteristics, but a primary identity, and while I reject platonic idealism, one could say these identities reflect the divine image and most specifically the relationship. So there is not a masculine Form that defines Godhood, but a masculine relationship, of fatherhood between the father and the son, and God and us.

it sounds like you're saying that God is masculine and humankind is feminine, because of some aspect of the relationship between the two. However, I still don't see what "masculine" and "feminine" mean to you here, or how the relationship between the Creator and the created connects to gender.

This will require much more explanation, because no. 1 and 3 are not analogies; there is a dichotomous mode of theology you’ve doubtless encountered and the masculinity characteristic of the relationship of God with himself and with us is predicated on a relationship that is non-dichotomous. No. 2 is an analogy, but its not one that I made; rather I alluded to a scriptural parable, Christ as vinedresser.

The proposed analogies were merely an attempt to understand your ideas, and I'm happy to discard them if they don't represent your thoughts. Can you explain the dichotomy and non-dichotomy that you have in mind?
 
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PloverWing

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Here, maybe, I can focus in on part of what I'm not understanding. Let's step away from God's relationship with humankind for a minute, and look at "masculine" and "feminine" relationships in themselves.

If you say "A has a masculine relationship with B", what is it that you are saying about A and B?

Or, to focus it even further, if we clarify that X and Y have no sexual or romantic elements in their relationship, and then you say that "X has a masculine relationship with Y", what does that mean? What are you saying about X and Y?
 
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Andrewn

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it sounds like you're saying that God is masculine and humankind is feminine, because of some aspect of the relationship between the two. However, I still don't see what "masculine" and "feminine" mean to you here, or how the relationship between the Creator and the created connects to gender.
While I reject the idea that God is either masculine or feminine. It is clear that He is relationally masculine. I say this because He is the one who pursued the Church and betrothed her from the very beginning of history. He is the one who provided for her salvation and became her head. And He is the one she's waiting for to announce the date of the wedding supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:6-9). Also refer to the Song of Songs and the story of Ruth about the romantic love of the Church and her redeemer גואל. All these are traditionally masculine roles.
 
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The Liturgist

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While I reject the idea that God is either masculine or feminine. It is clear that He is relationally masculine. I say this because He is the one who pursued the Church and betrothed her from the very beginning of history. He is the one who provided for her salvation and became her head. And He is the one she's waiting for to announce the date of the wedding supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:6-9). Also refer to the Song of Songs and the story of Ruth about the romantic love of the Church and her redeemer גואל. All these are traditionally masculine roles.

Indeed this is a major component of my argument, although there is another aspect that is harder to explain without falling into the trap of cataphatic theological error via misattribution of attributes or crypto-neo-Platonic mysticism, as opposed to Christian mysticism, which is the safe kind.
 
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PloverWing

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While I reject the idea that God is either masculine or feminine. It is clear that He is relationally masculine. I say this because He is the one who pursued the Church and betrothed her from the very beginning of history. He is the one who provided for her salvation and became her head. And He is the one she's waiting for to announce the date of the wedding supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:6-9). Also refer to the Song of Songs and the story of Ruth about the romantic love of the Church and her redeemer גואל. All these are traditionally masculine roles.

Thanks, this helps.

I think I might say it this way: In many cultures, men are expected to take a leadership role in choosing and caring for their romantic partners. In these cultures, men pursue their prospective brides, and men are the ones to propose marriage. Once married, the men provide for their wives, and they act as the leaders in the marriage. Wives submit lovingly to their husband's leadership.

The role that men play in these cultures provides a good metaphor for the way that God pursues us, cares for us, provides for us, and leads us.

I'm still insisting that it's a metaphor, and that this view of masculinity is culture-dependent, but I can see it as giving us insight into God's relationship to us.
 
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Andrewn

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I'm still insisting that it's a metaphor, and that this view of masculinity is culture-dependent, but I can see it as giving us insight into God's relationship to us.
I think it is a metaphor but it may be near-universal rather than culture-dependent. Perhaps women can assume that role under certain circumstances but still it is a masculine role.

The other metaphor is feminine but is far less prevalent as in the following:

Luk 13:34 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones to death those who have been sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you people were unwilling! (also Mat 23:37)

This is also expressed in several psalms, e.g. Psa 17:8 & 91:4.
 
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PloverWing

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I think it is a metaphor but it may be near-universal rather than culture-dependent. Perhaps women can assume that role under certain circumstances but still it is a masculine role.

Since I see an "Agree" from @The Liturgist , I have both of you in mind as I reply.

I have worked for an egalitarian view of gender, and worked in opposition to restrictive and hierarchical views of gender, for my whole adult life. And the work is not without hope. Things have been more egalitarian for me than they were in my parents' generation, and I am seeing even more signs of hope in my children's generation. I am not willing to compromise on this.

You explanation has, however, been very helpful to me as I work to understand your view of gender, and thus your view of God's gender. I think we're at an agree-to-disagree point here, but I think I understand you a little better than I did before.
 
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The Liturgist

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Since I see an "Agree" from @The Liturgist , I have both of you in mind as I reply.

I have worked for an egalitarian view of gender, and worked in opposition to restrictive and hierarchical views of gender, for my whole adult life. And the work is not without hope. Things have been more egalitarian for me than they were in my parents' generation, and I am seeing even more signs of hope in my children's generation. I am not willing to compromise on this.

You explanation has, however, been very helpful to me as I work to understand your view of gender, and thus your view of God's gender. I think we're at an agree-to-disagree point here, but I think I understand you a little better than I did before.

Respectfully before we do the full John Wesley approach, I would like to complete my response which does materially differ from that of our friend Andrewn; I agree with what he says in principle, but he omitted an important theme I alluded to earlier, which is non-dichotomous thinking; a systems analysis approach. Egalitarianism is worth supporting and this does not infringe on it but if anything enables it.

I also radically differ from the consensus the two of you may have formed that the relational attribute of divine masculinity is metaphorical. I regard it as an integral function of the relationship between deity, and the biological-sociological construct that one might very loosely call “human civilization”, or indeed the lack thereof. Indeed, insofar as this is an intrinsic relationship, it could be regarded as a defect resulting from the degraded human condition which is being corrected by divine grace and which will vanish in the eschaton, as St. Paul hints at in Galatians (“neither make nor female”).
 
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