As I have considered the unity and diversity of the Trinity reflected in male and female, I always felt the incompleteness of male and female being only two to the Trinity's three. You have fully satisfied that "blank space" in your explication of the Trinity being reflected in God the Father standing outside of his creation; the male begotten of him as was the Son; and the female proceeding from God and the male as does the Holy Spirit. In addition, you fill in the meaning of the woman as the image of God. I am so excited about your work, and so gratified to be among this generation of women who is shining light into the dark, blank spaces which, perhaps, only we were equipped to see. That's some good "ezering" there!
Thank you so much, Donna. I so appreciate all your encouragement and the benefit that I reap from your hard work in this same area. What I have found in my work on the Trinity is that when we get the trinity wrong, we will inevitably get ourselves wrong. For example, I really benefit from the work of Meredith Kline, who was an advisor and mentor to your friend Howard (and forever Dr. Griffith to me). Kline has a *patriarchal* trinity. He makes a foundational trinitarian error by saying that the Father is the source of the divine essence for the Son (and Spirit), which is a form of subordinationism. Calvin made a major correction to that Thomistic view in his doctrine of autotheos (God-of-himself.) The Son has the divine essence from himself (a se). We say that the Son has aseity. The Spirit likewise has the divine essence from himself. The Father is not the source of divinity for Son and Spirit. Rather, the Father is the source or starting point of the *personal processions.* Likewise the Spirit does not derive his divinity in proceeding from the Father and the Son. This is when it gets interesting. When Kline gets to male and female, he says that when the man and the woman are juxtaposed, the typology at work is that of the *male representing the Creator* and the *female representing the creature.* So you see, Kline's hierarchy began in his trinity and then finds its way into anthropology through typology. The correct view of the Trinity (autotheos) leads to a right anthropology. Eve bears God's image as from God, not from Adam. Obviously Adam could not give Eve God's image. He couldn't even offer his rib. He is asleep from beginning to end. God causes the woman to proceed from Adam, *building* her apart from Adam according to his purposes, and then God brings her to the man. She is God's image as from him, and yet her beginning is in Adam. All that to say, that it is fascinating to see how wrong understanding of the trinity can cause us to derail when it comes to "theanthropology" (a new term from me from an article passed on by Aaron Hann). Thanks for commenting, Donna.
I was just reading in Mary Coloe, Dwelling in the Household of God, how Mary’s hair in the anointing of Jesus (John 12) echoes/reflects the women of Exodus 35 who spun the goat hair for the tent that covered the tabernacle (Ex 25:4, 7; Ex 35:26; Ex 36:14). Is this related to the imagery in Song 4:1 and 6:5, “your hair is like a flock of goats” (and 4:1, “behind your veil”)? Maybe you’ve written about this before and I forgot. Does that Spirit/veil typology also fit with Mary’s act: anointing the temple-body of Jesus (a Spirit type), as well as covering the temple-body of Jesus (also a Spirit type)? Also, have you studied other theologians/theological traditions that connect the Spirit to Eve/Woman? As far as I can remember, I haven’t encountered that in reformed theology, but it seems more common in Eastern traditions (and at least one Catholic theologian with strong Eastern influence, Bruno Barnhart). Sorry for all the questions! I just love what you’re doing to challenge us to love our neighbors as ourselves by rooting our significance as male and female in the Triune God. I agree that reformation and renewal in this area is going to take “a conscious, concentrated and sustained effort.”
Wow, thank you, Aaron. I have not thought about all the hair/veil connections, but what a great study that would be. The woman who anointed Jesus's feet would be a great thing to reflect on in light of the typology. And yes, the mention of hair in SoS, I think especially of her beloved caught in her tresses. I wonder also about the Nazarite vow and what light that would shed on the hair/veil/sacred space/heaven connection. I don't know much about the Eastern or Western traditions views on the Spirit in relation to the woman. I have come to the association of the woman with the Spirit through Vos and the "Deeper Protestant Conception" rooted in Gen. 2:1-4 (the Sabbath principle). Thanks for all your encouragement, Aaron. I love what you are doing too.
I'm excited to find that when I wrote, "Any creation will be a reflection of its creator, whether it is a work of visual or performance art, a structure, a functional item, or even a theory," I was groping toward the representation principle of Van Til and the replication principle of Meredith Kline. In fact, that is the symbolic thesis of my blog: Fractals. Fractals are "...made up of similar patterns repeating on different scales." In other words, like the heavens and the sky, all of creation continually declares the glory of who God is--the shape, the identity, the personality, the reality of who God is, especially those specifically made in his image. Even though Scripture is definitive, there is value in detailed exploration of the book of nature, validated by the commission of God to have dominion over ever facet of creation.
Yes, I think we are hard-wired to root our identity in nothing less than God as our source. The Greeks could not do this; they did not know the triune God of the Scriptures. They had excuses that we as the New Testament church can never claim. Though Greek natural anthropology was never rooted in the true God, it was forwarded by the early and medieval church and made an enduring fixture by Aquinas in the 13th century. When the Westminster Assembly came to the purpose of marriage in Chapter 24, they had nothing new to say to dignify the woman other than what the Catholic church had been saying about marriage for centuries: preventing uncleanness, procreation, mutual help. Ephesians 5, however, says the union of man and woman points to a mystery. Augustine referenced that spiritual mystery among his purposes for marriage in his tract ‘On the Good of Marriage’ in 401, but the Assembly made no mention of it in their wording of Chapter 24. It seems to me that in order to get rid of entrenched wrong conceptions of ourselves as male and female, we will need to make a conscious, concentrated, and sustained effort. But it will be worth the work because when we consider our identity as male and female, our meditations turn to God whom we love, and we will reap the joy that comes from knowing him better.
I've seen it in the following tiers (which maybe I've learned mostly from reading along here!):
1) Lowest feminine Imago Dei anthropology- Adam is the truest Imago Dei, women help him in HIS mission as prophet,priest,king, and are technically Imago Dei but it isn't clear how they are. These types see the Triune God as "three he's", and can't really fit femininity into their conception of the divine life. Fully Greek, as you said.
2) One step up- Adam/men represent Christ, Eve/women represent church.
In other words, this group only has categories of "Christ/church" typology, and no other real frameworks for the feminine motif.
The church/women are brought into equality with Christ/men, but stopping at this tier tends toward "patronising paternalism" where women are supposedly valued as equals, but often their gifts are undervalued. I think this is where most of Complementarianism lives.
3) Fully formed- Women as the image of the Spirit, who are less "helpmeet" and more "telic deliverer".
This isn't what the term "complementarian" was invented to capture unfortunately... so I'm interested in what comes next!
Wow, yes, you are really seeing it. I see lowest and one step up as related. The "biblical" manhood and womanhood movement perhaps heeded the impulse and rooted our differences in the Trinity, but in doing that, couldn't help but introduce subordinationism (either essential or economic or both) into the Trinity. They tied the Father to male (authority) and the Son to female (submission). The Presbyterian/Reformed churches platformed the ethical inferiority of women (All women by their fallen nature desire is to usurp the authority of their husbands but the husbands must rule over them if they can [Susan Foh]) and George Knight's "role" theory (all women are by nature equal to men but because of being born female, they must take the "role" of submission in relation to men). Both Knight and Foh came through Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), but I suspect that CBMW's ESS/EFS/ERAS was more broadly evangelical.
I have come to suspect that those in the stream of Old School southern Presbyterianism (OPC, PCA, etc.) were not interested in CBMW's complementarianism because among them the understanding of women as naturally inferior was firmly rooted in Greek natural law, Aquinas's natural theology, and Reid's Scottish common sense realism. Knox's view of women is clear in his "First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women." The word "monstrous" used by Knox comes from Calvin's commentary on 1 Timothy 2. The natural inferiority of women was firmly entrenched in Old School Presbyterianism (Dabney) and there is clear evidence of it in the writings of Charles Hodge. It is part of the tradition and reflects the culture of the South where the Scots and Scot-Irish settled. According to Aristotle, the natural inferiority of the woman requires that she be ruled. Her being ruled is a *moral* obligation on society. In Old School Presbyterianism, she is ruled in all spheres --- home, church, and state. I think that much of conservative Presbyterianism is (1). What has surprised me is that Meredith Kline (OPC) finds support for patriarchy in typology. For Kline, when the man and the woman appear together, the man represents big circle Creator and the woman represents little circle creature.
Broader evangelicalism (CBMW) grounds the necessity of the man's rule in a hierarchical trinity, but there is an even more radical distinction grounding conservative Presbyterian patriarchy, the difference between the Creator and creature. And by the way, both Meredith Kline and Douglas Wilson see the Creator-creature distinction in your number 2 "complementarianism." They get there by making the headship of Christ in Ephesians 1:20-23 the headship of Christ in Ephesians 5:23. They equate the exalted Son, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, above every name (Eph 1), with the humiliated Christ as head of his body, laying down his life for the church (Eph 5). Then they proceed to find the husband as a blending of both heads. In this scenario, the woman-wife becomes a blending of "all things under his feet" (Eph. 1:22) and his bridal church (Eph 5:23-25). The husband-wife distinction of Eph 5 becomes the Creator-creature distinction of Ephesians 1. Though the husband is never told to rule his wife in the Scriptures, through the term "headship," they find the difference between the man and the woman as reflecting the Creator-creature distinction from which comes the mandate to rule your wife. Actually, Doug Wilson goes beyond your 1) and 2) by rooting patriarchy in a radical trinity. For Wilson, God the father IS pure masculinity and authority. He is the *only purely masculine person of the Godhead* because the Father is never said to submit to anyone. Submission for Wilson is the essence of femininity. Bizarrely, Wilson implies that the Son becomes feminine when he lays down his life by submitting to his Father's will.
All that to say, I think the tradition can have a blinding effect. Many simply cannot see that the way that they view the woman beside them violates the basic, simple commands of love and esteem for our neighbors as better than ourselves. Patriarchy is the air that is breathed day in and day out in many circles. It's essential to "order" and the structure of the institutions, and it is largely assumed, not questioned or analyzed.
The thesis that the divine feminine motif from above is represented by "submission" has fully failed, but I haven't seen any attempts from the CBMW side to replace it.
The more reasonable parties pretty much just said "don't make connections between gender and Trinity" as a sort of ceasefire agreement after the failure of ESS stuff and haven't tried again.
This is why I think what you writing is so important, b/c there really is a theological blank space in that world that needs to be filled with a better answer.
It is ironic that part of our creed as Reformed people is "ever Reforming," and yet we are loathe to let go of our traditions, instead focusing on defending the status quo to the death. We stick our fingers in our ears and squeeze our eyes shut to the notion that something might be wrong, or even that there is more treasure to mine.
Wow again, John. Exactly, they have nothing to fill it with because if they fill it with the right conception of the trinity, what we have agreed upon as the church for almost two millennia and Calvin's seminal and needed correction in autotheos, then it will be the death of their project. As one of my professors lamented in his book on the trinity, if the trinity is the basis for our understanding of ourselves as male and female, then feminism wins. By "feminism" he means any efforts to reform anthropology that might undermine patriarchy and a hierarchical view of ourselves as male and female.
I would love for this all to be developed into a book, Anna. It's an anthropology that helps us to see and leads to such wonder and praise of the triune God!
Thank you for this great essay, Anna! This is the first time I have seen these connections made!
I come from an Armenian Pentecostal tradition where women wear head coverings. However, I have been doing some light studying of 1 Corinthian 11:2-16 for the past year and continue to struggle with how the passage connects together. The Son-Spirit/male-female paradigm will be helpful as I wrestle with this passage, especially since 1 Corinthians speaks so much about the Holy Spirit, the body of Christ, the Temple/tabernacle, etc.
Do you have any other articles or essays that address the 1 Corinthians 11 passage? I am curious to see how this passage can be seen in a different light through the Son-Spirit/male-female paradigm.
You have me in theological waters well over my head here, which is so good for me and I love the parts I am able to grasp!
1 question- as the woman represents the Holy Spirit, why is the HS referred to with masculine pronouns in the Scripture? Is that a translation error or a translator prejudice coming through? Or is somethings else going on?
Thanks, Delton, for reading and thinking with me. As I understand it now, the woman represents the Holy Spirit not generically but very specifically. She is a "replication" pointing to who he is in himself as proceeding from the Father and Son *and* and to the Spirit as the temple-tent dwelling of God. In my thinking, God is neither masculine nor feminine as he is spirit, outside time and space, and yet filling time and space with his presence, exalted and preceding in every way the Genesis 1 male and female. So as I think about God in relation to gender, the question for me becomes --- what is he telling me about himself through gender. And as I see it, the masculine pronouns correspond with God as the triune Creator, the starting point or origin for all of created reality. All three persons are tied to creation. We confess the Father as "Maker of heaven and earth." The Bible explicitly and repeatedly refers to the Son as Creator as well. And we confess that the Holy Spirit is "the Lord and the Giver of life," which is what he seems to be doing in Genesis 1:2 as he hovers over the waters. So Adam's maleness reflects something true about all the persons of the Godhead as the alpha or beginning of all things, visible and invisible. At least that is where the masculine pronouns for all three persons lead me when I think about them. Father and Son are masculine, and "Spirit" (ruach) in the Old Testament is feminine in gender (all nouns have gender in the Hebrew) with corresponding feminine verbs beginning with Genesis 1:2. And in Greek, pneuma is neuter with corresponding neuter verbs in John 1:32 and 1 Peter 1:11. But we cannot deny that when the personhood of the Holy Spirit comes into clear focus in John 15:26, God gives us a male pronoun. I see that as pointing to the triune God as source, without detracting from the woman and Eve's representation of the Holy Spirit and last things pertaining to us. Unfortunately, there are some out there who will take the masculine pronoun for the Spirit in John 15 and use it to exalt themselves over their neighbor. I think they would be better off considering what God is saying about himself as the Beginning of all and being drawn into the mysteries of what God is revealing by creating us female as well as male. What do you think, Delton?
"what is he telling me about himself through gender." that is a very helpful question. I love the call to "being drawn into the mysteries of what God is revealing by creating us female as well as male." The use of religion to exalt ourselves over our neighbor seems to be the bent of humanity though it is blatantly contrary to the example of Christ and the message of the Gospel.
As I have considered the unity and diversity of the Trinity reflected in male and female, I always felt the incompleteness of male and female being only two to the Trinity's three. You have fully satisfied that "blank space" in your explication of the Trinity being reflected in God the Father standing outside of his creation; the male begotten of him as was the Son; and the female proceeding from God and the male as does the Holy Spirit. In addition, you fill in the meaning of the woman as the image of God. I am so excited about your work, and so gratified to be among this generation of women who is shining light into the dark, blank spaces which, perhaps, only we were equipped to see. That's some good "ezering" there!
Thank you so much, Donna. I so appreciate all your encouragement and the benefit that I reap from your hard work in this same area. What I have found in my work on the Trinity is that when we get the trinity wrong, we will inevitably get ourselves wrong. For example, I really benefit from the work of Meredith Kline, who was an advisor and mentor to your friend Howard (and forever Dr. Griffith to me). Kline has a *patriarchal* trinity. He makes a foundational trinitarian error by saying that the Father is the source of the divine essence for the Son (and Spirit), which is a form of subordinationism. Calvin made a major correction to that Thomistic view in his doctrine of autotheos (God-of-himself.) The Son has the divine essence from himself (a se). We say that the Son has aseity. The Spirit likewise has the divine essence from himself. The Father is not the source of divinity for Son and Spirit. Rather, the Father is the source or starting point of the *personal processions.* Likewise the Spirit does not derive his divinity in proceeding from the Father and the Son. This is when it gets interesting. When Kline gets to male and female, he says that when the man and the woman are juxtaposed, the typology at work is that of the *male representing the Creator* and the *female representing the creature.* So you see, Kline's hierarchy began in his trinity and then finds its way into anthropology through typology. The correct view of the Trinity (autotheos) leads to a right anthropology. Eve bears God's image as from God, not from Adam. Obviously Adam could not give Eve God's image. He couldn't even offer his rib. He is asleep from beginning to end. God causes the woman to proceed from Adam, *building* her apart from Adam according to his purposes, and then God brings her to the man. She is God's image as from him, and yet her beginning is in Adam. All that to say, that it is fascinating to see how wrong understanding of the trinity can cause us to derail when it comes to "theanthropology" (a new term from me from an article passed on by Aaron Hann). Thanks for commenting, Donna.
I was just reading in Mary Coloe, Dwelling in the Household of God, how Mary’s hair in the anointing of Jesus (John 12) echoes/reflects the women of Exodus 35 who spun the goat hair for the tent that covered the tabernacle (Ex 25:4, 7; Ex 35:26; Ex 36:14). Is this related to the imagery in Song 4:1 and 6:5, “your hair is like a flock of goats” (and 4:1, “behind your veil”)? Maybe you’ve written about this before and I forgot. Does that Spirit/veil typology also fit with Mary’s act: anointing the temple-body of Jesus (a Spirit type), as well as covering the temple-body of Jesus (also a Spirit type)? Also, have you studied other theologians/theological traditions that connect the Spirit to Eve/Woman? As far as I can remember, I haven’t encountered that in reformed theology, but it seems more common in Eastern traditions (and at least one Catholic theologian with strong Eastern influence, Bruno Barnhart). Sorry for all the questions! I just love what you’re doing to challenge us to love our neighbors as ourselves by rooting our significance as male and female in the Triune God. I agree that reformation and renewal in this area is going to take “a conscious, concentrated and sustained effort.”
Wow, thank you, Aaron. I have not thought about all the hair/veil connections, but what a great study that would be. The woman who anointed Jesus's feet would be a great thing to reflect on in light of the typology. And yes, the mention of hair in SoS, I think especially of her beloved caught in her tresses. I wonder also about the Nazarite vow and what light that would shed on the hair/veil/sacred space/heaven connection. I don't know much about the Eastern or Western traditions views on the Spirit in relation to the woman. I have come to the association of the woman with the Spirit through Vos and the "Deeper Protestant Conception" rooted in Gen. 2:1-4 (the Sabbath principle). Thanks for all your encouragement, Aaron. I love what you are doing too.
I'm excited to find that when I wrote, "Any creation will be a reflection of its creator, whether it is a work of visual or performance art, a structure, a functional item, or even a theory," I was groping toward the representation principle of Van Til and the replication principle of Meredith Kline. In fact, that is the symbolic thesis of my blog: Fractals. Fractals are "...made up of similar patterns repeating on different scales." In other words, like the heavens and the sky, all of creation continually declares the glory of who God is--the shape, the identity, the personality, the reality of who God is, especially those specifically made in his image. Even though Scripture is definitive, there is value in detailed exploration of the book of nature, validated by the commission of God to have dominion over ever facet of creation.
"Adam is in the image of the Son; Eve is in the image of the Spirit."
A nice summary of your central thesis, and a truth that I'd love to see become more widespread within Evangelicalism!
Yes, I think we are hard-wired to root our identity in nothing less than God as our source. The Greeks could not do this; they did not know the triune God of the Scriptures. They had excuses that we as the New Testament church can never claim. Though Greek natural anthropology was never rooted in the true God, it was forwarded by the early and medieval church and made an enduring fixture by Aquinas in the 13th century. When the Westminster Assembly came to the purpose of marriage in Chapter 24, they had nothing new to say to dignify the woman other than what the Catholic church had been saying about marriage for centuries: preventing uncleanness, procreation, mutual help. Ephesians 5, however, says the union of man and woman points to a mystery. Augustine referenced that spiritual mystery among his purposes for marriage in his tract ‘On the Good of Marriage’ in 401, but the Assembly made no mention of it in their wording of Chapter 24. It seems to me that in order to get rid of entrenched wrong conceptions of ourselves as male and female, we will need to make a conscious, concentrated, and sustained effort. But it will be worth the work because when we consider our identity as male and female, our meditations turn to God whom we love, and we will reap the joy that comes from knowing him better.
Yes well said!
I've seen it in the following tiers (which maybe I've learned mostly from reading along here!):
1) Lowest feminine Imago Dei anthropology- Adam is the truest Imago Dei, women help him in HIS mission as prophet,priest,king, and are technically Imago Dei but it isn't clear how they are. These types see the Triune God as "three he's", and can't really fit femininity into their conception of the divine life. Fully Greek, as you said.
2) One step up- Adam/men represent Christ, Eve/women represent church.
In other words, this group only has categories of "Christ/church" typology, and no other real frameworks for the feminine motif.
The church/women are brought into equality with Christ/men, but stopping at this tier tends toward "patronising paternalism" where women are supposedly valued as equals, but often their gifts are undervalued. I think this is where most of Complementarianism lives.
3) Fully formed- Women as the image of the Spirit, who are less "helpmeet" and more "telic deliverer".
This isn't what the term "complementarian" was invented to capture unfortunately... so I'm interested in what comes next!
Wow, yes, you are really seeing it. I see lowest and one step up as related. The "biblical" manhood and womanhood movement perhaps heeded the impulse and rooted our differences in the Trinity, but in doing that, couldn't help but introduce subordinationism (either essential or economic or both) into the Trinity. They tied the Father to male (authority) and the Son to female (submission). The Presbyterian/Reformed churches platformed the ethical inferiority of women (All women by their fallen nature desire is to usurp the authority of their husbands but the husbands must rule over them if they can [Susan Foh]) and George Knight's "role" theory (all women are by nature equal to men but because of being born female, they must take the "role" of submission in relation to men). Both Knight and Foh came through Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), but I suspect that CBMW's ESS/EFS/ERAS was more broadly evangelical.
I have come to suspect that those in the stream of Old School southern Presbyterianism (OPC, PCA, etc.) were not interested in CBMW's complementarianism because among them the understanding of women as naturally inferior was firmly rooted in Greek natural law, Aquinas's natural theology, and Reid's Scottish common sense realism. Knox's view of women is clear in his "First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women." The word "monstrous" used by Knox comes from Calvin's commentary on 1 Timothy 2. The natural inferiority of women was firmly entrenched in Old School Presbyterianism (Dabney) and there is clear evidence of it in the writings of Charles Hodge. It is part of the tradition and reflects the culture of the South where the Scots and Scot-Irish settled. According to Aristotle, the natural inferiority of the woman requires that she be ruled. Her being ruled is a *moral* obligation on society. In Old School Presbyterianism, she is ruled in all spheres --- home, church, and state. I think that much of conservative Presbyterianism is (1). What has surprised me is that Meredith Kline (OPC) finds support for patriarchy in typology. For Kline, when the man and the woman appear together, the man represents big circle Creator and the woman represents little circle creature.
Broader evangelicalism (CBMW) grounds the necessity of the man's rule in a hierarchical trinity, but there is an even more radical distinction grounding conservative Presbyterian patriarchy, the difference between the Creator and creature. And by the way, both Meredith Kline and Douglas Wilson see the Creator-creature distinction in your number 2 "complementarianism." They get there by making the headship of Christ in Ephesians 1:20-23 the headship of Christ in Ephesians 5:23. They equate the exalted Son, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, above every name (Eph 1), with the humiliated Christ as head of his body, laying down his life for the church (Eph 5). Then they proceed to find the husband as a blending of both heads. In this scenario, the woman-wife becomes a blending of "all things under his feet" (Eph. 1:22) and his bridal church (Eph 5:23-25). The husband-wife distinction of Eph 5 becomes the Creator-creature distinction of Ephesians 1. Though the husband is never told to rule his wife in the Scriptures, through the term "headship," they find the difference between the man and the woman as reflecting the Creator-creature distinction from which comes the mandate to rule your wife. Actually, Doug Wilson goes beyond your 1) and 2) by rooting patriarchy in a radical trinity. For Wilson, God the father IS pure masculinity and authority. He is the *only purely masculine person of the Godhead* because the Father is never said to submit to anyone. Submission for Wilson is the essence of femininity. Bizarrely, Wilson implies that the Son becomes feminine when he lays down his life by submitting to his Father's will.
All that to say, I think the tradition can have a blinding effect. Many simply cannot see that the way that they view the woman beside them violates the basic, simple commands of love and esteem for our neighbors as better than ourselves. Patriarchy is the air that is breathed day in and day out in many circles. It's essential to "order" and the structure of the institutions, and it is largely assumed, not questioned or analyzed.
This is a great summary!
The thesis that the divine feminine motif from above is represented by "submission" has fully failed, but I haven't seen any attempts from the CBMW side to replace it.
The more reasonable parties pretty much just said "don't make connections between gender and Trinity" as a sort of ceasefire agreement after the failure of ESS stuff and haven't tried again.
This is why I think what you writing is so important, b/c there really is a theological blank space in that world that needs to be filled with a better answer.
A theological blank space! Yes!
It is ironic that part of our creed as Reformed people is "ever Reforming," and yet we are loathe to let go of our traditions, instead focusing on defending the status quo to the death. We stick our fingers in our ears and squeeze our eyes shut to the notion that something might be wrong, or even that there is more treasure to mine.
Wow again, John. Exactly, they have nothing to fill it with because if they fill it with the right conception of the trinity, what we have agreed upon as the church for almost two millennia and Calvin's seminal and needed correction in autotheos, then it will be the death of their project. As one of my professors lamented in his book on the trinity, if the trinity is the basis for our understanding of ourselves as male and female, then feminism wins. By "feminism" he means any efforts to reform anthropology that might undermine patriarchy and a hierarchical view of ourselves as male and female.
I would love for this all to be developed into a book, Anna. It's an anthropology that helps us to see and leads to such wonder and praise of the triune God!
Thanks, Aimee! We have worked on this side by side. You are a gift to me! I love learning from you.
Thank you for this great essay, Anna! This is the first time I have seen these connections made!
I come from an Armenian Pentecostal tradition where women wear head coverings. However, I have been doing some light studying of 1 Corinthian 11:2-16 for the past year and continue to struggle with how the passage connects together. The Son-Spirit/male-female paradigm will be helpful as I wrestle with this passage, especially since 1 Corinthians speaks so much about the Holy Spirit, the body of Christ, the Temple/tabernacle, etc.
Do you have any other articles or essays that address the 1 Corinthians 11 passage? I am curious to see how this passage can be seen in a different light through the Son-Spirit/male-female paradigm.
Thank you again for this great essay!
You have me in theological waters well over my head here, which is so good for me and I love the parts I am able to grasp!
1 question- as the woman represents the Holy Spirit, why is the HS referred to with masculine pronouns in the Scripture? Is that a translation error or a translator prejudice coming through? Or is somethings else going on?
Thanks, Delton, for reading and thinking with me. As I understand it now, the woman represents the Holy Spirit not generically but very specifically. She is a "replication" pointing to who he is in himself as proceeding from the Father and Son *and* and to the Spirit as the temple-tent dwelling of God. In my thinking, God is neither masculine nor feminine as he is spirit, outside time and space, and yet filling time and space with his presence, exalted and preceding in every way the Genesis 1 male and female. So as I think about God in relation to gender, the question for me becomes --- what is he telling me about himself through gender. And as I see it, the masculine pronouns correspond with God as the triune Creator, the starting point or origin for all of created reality. All three persons are tied to creation. We confess the Father as "Maker of heaven and earth." The Bible explicitly and repeatedly refers to the Son as Creator as well. And we confess that the Holy Spirit is "the Lord and the Giver of life," which is what he seems to be doing in Genesis 1:2 as he hovers over the waters. So Adam's maleness reflects something true about all the persons of the Godhead as the alpha or beginning of all things, visible and invisible. At least that is where the masculine pronouns for all three persons lead me when I think about them. Father and Son are masculine, and "Spirit" (ruach) in the Old Testament is feminine in gender (all nouns have gender in the Hebrew) with corresponding feminine verbs beginning with Genesis 1:2. And in Greek, pneuma is neuter with corresponding neuter verbs in John 1:32 and 1 Peter 1:11. But we cannot deny that when the personhood of the Holy Spirit comes into clear focus in John 15:26, God gives us a male pronoun. I see that as pointing to the triune God as source, without detracting from the woman and Eve's representation of the Holy Spirit and last things pertaining to us. Unfortunately, there are some out there who will take the masculine pronoun for the Spirit in John 15 and use it to exalt themselves over their neighbor. I think they would be better off considering what God is saying about himself as the Beginning of all and being drawn into the mysteries of what God is revealing by creating us female as well as male. What do you think, Delton?
"what is he telling me about himself through gender." that is a very helpful question. I love the call to "being drawn into the mysteries of what God is revealing by creating us female as well as male." The use of religion to exalt ourselves over our neighbor seems to be the bent of humanity though it is blatantly contrary to the example of Christ and the message of the Gospel.