Polar Opposites or Poles

The Anthropological Axis

Photo by Christophe Ferron on Unsplash

Is there polarity within God? Could the Son be called the “privation of the Father”? Or could the Spirit be referred to as the “privation of the Father and the Son”? As much as I now understand, we speak of distinction, incommunicable personal properties, patriation, filiation, and spiration, but that is not polarity. Divine unity and inseparable operations preclude that we speak about the divine persons in terms of opposition. In his personal distinction, the Son is called the image of God, the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful Word. Similarly, as Richard Gaffin and others have pointed out, there are times when the functional unity of two divine persons removes their personal differences from view altogether, although we would never deny that those are present. For example, Gaffin writes of the unity of the resurrected Christ and his Spirit in 1 Corinthians 15:35 and 2 Corinthians 3:17 being “of such intimacy and inseparability that it is captured most adequately, as . . .  Christ has become and so now is and remains in his activity the life-giving Spirit.”¹ I suggest that nearly all of God’s functional activity in the Old Testament is regarded with such “intimacy and inseparability.”  When we speak of the personal Elohim who created the “heavens and the earth” in Genesis 1:1, revealed as the covenanting Yahweh who made the “earth and the heavens” in Genesis 2:4, we are speaking of that intimacy without regard to distinctions.  In fact, we must stay alert to find personal distinctions in the Old Testament, corroborated by the fact that Judaism rejects them to this day. When we do find them, we are enriched with a better understanding of the tripersonal God revealed more clearly as Father, Son, and Spirit in the New Testament. 

Perhaps we could take a moment to consider whether this has any relevance to anthropology. In other words, does mankind made like God, an unity as one mankind and a diversity as male and female, and the tribes and tongues and nations in them, preclude speaking of each other as opposites? Would not our unity of essence as image-bearing mankind and our “inseparable operations,” beginning with multiplying and sustaining life, preclude polarity?  As we think, we should keep in mind that Aristotle’s polarity, rationally deduced from brute facts, has held sway historically in how our differences have been perceived.² Whether we call it “natural law” with the Greeks, or “common sense” with the Scots, Aristotle’s views perhaps go with the grain of fallen mankind at enmity with God and his neighbor. Nevertheless, I fear Aristotle continues to get recycled with new content, most recently a hierarchical view of the three divine persons. 

I may mention at this point that Aristotle’s sex polarity is not always explicit and can be cloaked with the language of complementarity. For example, modern evangelicals talk about gender “roles,” often contrasting what men are called to do with what women are called to do.³ Men are said to face outward, oriented to the world, while women are oriented inward to the home, a polarity of spheres determined by our sex. Some would attribute polarized spheres to polarized desires, which the most consistent admit is rooted in our constitution as male and female — what we are (biology), what we want (psychology), what we should do (behavior and ethics), and how and where we do it (sociology) are all polarized. Douglas Wilson is a great modern example of this sort of comprehensive polarity. For him, man and woman are said to be complementary by their polarity. In other words, their polarized existence is essential for taking world dominion, subduing and ruling their unbelieving neighbors in the name of Christ as King. It might help us to consider whether we are ever commanded to take dominion after sin enters the world in Genesis 3. If not, then perhaps finding the meaning of our differences such an ideology is unwise. The matter might also be settled by asking whether dominionist anthropology helps or hinders us from setting our minds on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, uniting all things in himself (Eph 1:10).

I suggest that God speaks of our differences as male and female not as opposites but indeed as poles. I have come to believe that from the absolute beginning in Genesis 1, God progressively reveals image-bearing male and female not in terms of biology or psychology or ethics or sociology, but in terms of representation. Male and female are not polar opposites, but rather represent poles on the heaven-earth axis. The Bible speaks of his throne (the invisible heavens) and his footstool (the visible heavens and earth) not in terms of opposition but compatibility. They are together in Genesis 1:1, and as the canon unfolds, we come to see that Genesis 1:1 foreshadows the great confluence of Revelation 21:1-2.  A biblical-theological understanding leads us to see that the heavens and earth of Genesis 1 are betrothed from the beginning through the eternal Son by the Spirit. From the Father and Son proceeds the Spirit, the arrabon of their union. In other words, I see the Spirit as God on the ground guaranteeing this great future union of heaven and earth at the climax of history.

Another reason not to think of heaven and earth, and ourselves as male and female in our distinct representation, as polar opposites is that we are the offspring of both. We come from the dust of the cosmos that God loves and we are born from above, where our triune God has known us and written all our days before we lived one of them (Ps 87:5; 139:16; Ecc 12:7). Heaven and earth have incommunicable properties, but their operations are inseparable. Heaven above and earth below are true complements, a divine match if ever there was one. All we need to do is to look to the visible heavens above us, representing the invisible heavens, which complement the earth, reminding us of this axis. Living plants and trees bring this to mind as well, all things that spring up and reach upward toward the visible heavens. Mountains also direct us there, reminding us of the invisible ladder conjoining heaven and earth upon which God’s angels descend and ascend administering God’s loving care to his people.

For the next several weeks, I hope to write about these poles that we represent. I have spent many months looking at Zion as mother and daughter, seeking to account for her redemptive-historically as a place and a people of God. If we believe in the progressive unfolding of revelation, we believe that the last pages of our Bible shed light on all that comes before. There is a city above found in Revelation with a people born from above. They are given the female identity of Zion. She is mother and daughter and bride, with a glory that belongs forever to all of God’s people. I hope it will lead us to this question: Could it be that we who share a common origin below and a common end above, signify promises that sustain our souls in our trials now and cause us to reach for the joys that await us then?

1. https://journal.rts.edu/article/the-life-giving-spirit/

2. The Roman Catholic scholar Prudence Allen wrote a three-volume work tracing how women have been viewed throughout history. Her Concept of Woman repeatedly returns to Aristotle’s “sex polarity," because it keeps getting recycled. In Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, 737a. 28, he calls women deformed male seed, mutations of nature.  In the same book, he relates her behavior to her misgottenness, "Wherefore women are more compassionate and more readily made to weep, more jealous and querulous, founder of the railing, and more contentious. The female also is more subject to depression of spirits and despair than the male. She is also more shameless and false, more readily deceived, and more mindful of injury, more watchful, more idle, and on the whole less excitable than the male” In Politics 1.1254b, Aristotle applies his theory that the woman is the deprivation of man, a mutated male seed, writing, "the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject." Even when we call women the weaker sex, polarity often is in view because we do not call men “the weak sex.” Actually, what we are saying is that men are strong and women are weak. This is just one example of common ways polarity is expressed. In contrast, Karen Jobes connects the woman’s “weakness” in 1 Peter 3:7 to her physical vulnerability and degraded status in Greco-Roman society. See 1 Peter, p. 209.

3. Perhaps the evangelical preoccupation with gender “roles” goes with the grain of our misplaced cultural ideas about gender as a social construct. How have we come to this language? My guess is that with the cultural changes of the last half of the 20th century, women have had more opportunities, and they have shown themselves to be competent where previously they were thought to be naturally inept. One exception would be work that requires extraordinary physical strength and endurance. This required a new paradigm for speaking about our differences as male and female, and we began to use “roles,” popularized by George Knight’s 1989 book Role Relationships of Men and Women: New Testament Teaching.