SEPARATION FROM GOD

 

One concept that is stressed within the Reformed Baptist community is the transcendence of God. The Christian understanding of the word “transcendence” is that God is separate from and above His Creation. Unlike the god of some other religions, our Judeo-Christian God is not Himself a part of His creation. This concept is softened and balanced somewhat by the companion term “immanence”, which essentially means “God with us”.

Transcendence is an important notion. It should remain in the Christian’s vocabulary. The separation of our transcendent Judeo-Christian God from His creation emphasizes His superiority over it. Creation didn’t make God, but rather God made creation.

The emphasis sometimes made by preachers of transcendence over immanence, however, needs to be curbed. When it is not, the transcendent nature of God is used to contrast God’s greatness, His magnificence over mere humanity. We all know that to be the case; we don’t need to be hammered on the head over its truth.

We do need to know our place in God’s scheme of things. We don’t need to go off the reservation by thinking of ourselves more than we ought. We don’t need to play god by attempting to decide on our own what we think represents truth in Scripture, or whether God embraced evolution as a working tool, or whether our science is more authoritative than His Word, or the like. The notion of God’s transcendence helps us realize that we ourselves are beneath our God.

But we need balance in the matter. The beautiful wonder of what God desires in our relationship with Him is that despite His magnificent greatness, He wants to have a loving connection with us, and in the process to actually elevate us to a level closer to His. We don’t need to wag our tails in self-serving abject sycophantic fawning. God doesn’t want His boots licked. He doesn’t want His ego stroked. He wants to love us, and for us to love Him back, as Jesus told us in Matthew 22:37 and 38, repeating Moses’ exhortation to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:5:

“Jesus said unto [the lawyer], Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.”

As John said in 1 John 4:8: “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”

It’s just as simple and profound as that: God is love. Even the negatives that are thrown our way, properly interpreted, are intended to develop our capacity to love Him back.

Transcendence over-emphasized stands in direct opposition to the love of God. It does nothing but separate us from Him with the feeling that if we are so very different (read “lower”) than Him, we have nothing in common with His nature. Consequently, He is alien to us. How in the world are we supposed to love an alien Being? He might as well drive a UFO and we might as well bury ourselves underground so He can’t reach us with His impossible (read “alien”) demands on our lives.

UFOs CHAPTER 3

CONTACT, COMMUNION AND CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER 3

Chapter 3: The Historical Alien Presence – Or Was It Something Else?

Among the most spectacular of extraterrestrial accounts from the past is the collection of religious beliefs of the Dogon tribe in Mali, West Africa. It is an astonishing story of information this tribe possesses that should never have been available to them in their isolation and primitive state of existence. As related by Scott Alan Roberts in Chapter 5 of his book The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim, French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen extracted from their religious mythology a wealth of information regarding the star Sirius and its associated system the accuracy of which is simply beyond the tribe’s powers of observation. A brief summary of Roberts’ account of their incredible customs and the information they represent is given below.

The Dogon people have a tradition, reaching into the unknown past, of worshiping beings they call the Nommos. These froglike creatures aren’t local to the area, but reside somewhat farther away, within hailing distance of the star Sirius B. They recognize Sirius B as one member of a dual-star system, and depict in their drawings the two stars, Sirius A and Sirius B as rotating about each other in an elliptical pattern. Western society figured out elliptical orbits only after the pioneering work of German astronomer Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century. The Dogons probably beat him to the concept as there was no known modern interaction between the Dogons and the Western world until the 1920s.

The Dogon legend describes the Nommos as having lived on a planet that orbits Sirius B. They arrived on Earth in a craft that we would describe as an ark, which descended in a spin and landed with a big commotion.

The Nommo furnished information to the Dogons; eventually, one of them was crucified on a tree, was resurrected, and returned to the Sirius star system.

A more detailed view of the Dogons and their strange religion is presented by Robert Temple in his 1998 book The Sirius Mystery.

As explained by Temple, there’s a mystery indeed about the Dogon knowledge of the Sirius star system. Sirius A is visible, but Sirius B is much smaller, being a dwarf star, and is invisible to the observer on earth, even with a decent telescope. Yet, as it is very dense, it possesses an appreciable gravitational field. The Dogons know that it is comparably tiny, because they named the star after the seed of an indigenous plant, the botanical name of which is digitaria. The seed of the digitaria is minute, being the smallest seed of which the Dogon are aware. Yet the Dogon consider the much larger star Sirius A to be unimportant to them next to their home star of Sirius B.

Moreover, the Dogons have the orbital period of Sirius B, which is fifty years, pegged with precision to its actual period, and understand that it rotates about its own axis, a common characteristic of stars.

The Dogons are also aware of planetary features within our own solar system. For example, they know that the moon is dead, that a ring encircles Saturn, and that Jupiter possesses four major moons. As for the Earth, it is understood to turn on its own axis and to make a great circle around the sun.

Temple’s book includes other knowledge possessed by the Dogons. This additional information is simply too extensive for the scope of this book. Temple also apeculates, like Zecharia Sitchin who published The Twelfth Planet in 1976, that the evidence of the aliens’ visitation is encoded in the traditions and literature of the ancient Mediterranean region, from which the Dogons, as well as the Greeks and Romans, borrowed from a common source.

Other societies, considered by us to be primitive, also worshiped what we like to label as “alien”. Erich Von Daniken was the earlies of the modern investigators to popularize this practice. In his book Chariots of the Gods? Published in 1976, the same year that Sitchin published The Twelfth Planet, he cites many artifacts of unknown antiquity which don’t fit into mainstream assumptions of man’s history, noting that these oddities are either ignored by scientists or suffer the application of unsatisfactory reasons for their existence. Among these artifacts scattered about the world are structures of sophisticated design and immense proportions, the components of which are of equally impressive size. There are also, in widely scattered locations, structures, objects, and patterns on the ground with evident links to air or space travel.

The enigmatic straight lines in Nazca, Peru are quite ancient. Yet investigators can comprehend no useful purpose for them other than aircraft runways. There are also huge figures cut into the surface in the vicinity which are not recognizable on the ground, but are readily understood for what they are from an aerial perspective.

An abundance of enormous stone structures can be found high in the Andes Mountains of Peru and Bolivia and elsewhere in South and Central America. Von Daniken describes monolithic stone blocks weighing 10, 20, and 100 tons, with precisely defined edges, used in the construction of these structures. Some of the blocks are engraved with figures. Other figures are themselves carved out of stone. But the figures aren’t quite human. Some have four fingers; others wear what appear to be helmets. Still others are depicted as flying.

In addition to artifacts which display a sophistication quite beyond what mainstream archaeologists are willing to attribute to the peoples of antiquity, there is an apparent knowledge itself that runs counter to our perception of ancient man and his lack of sophistication: maps, calendars and astronomical tables, texts, and even artifacts which demonstrate a knowledge of electricity and electro-chemical processes.

Maps of world scope found in the possession of 18th Century Turkish Admiral Piri Reis were not only amazingly accurate but depicted the Antarctic Continent as if it was ice-free, showing land boundaries and mountain ranges in their proper relative locations, although such boundaries were not known in modern times until the middle of the twentieth century. As Von Daniken pointed out, some of the maps appeared to researchers to represent data taken from aerial photographs. Believed to be of still greater antiquity than the sea captain to whom they belonged, the originals from which they were copied were probably created long before the time when the world thought that the earth was flat.

A calendar of impressive sophistication was found in Tiahuanaco. This device gave the equinoxes, seasons, and hourly positions of the moon. Halfway around the world, archaeologists digging at the Mesopotamian site of Nineveh found a mathematical calculation carried out to 15 digits, when, as Von Daniken pointed out, mathematicians of the much-later Greek civilization couldn’t count above 10,000.

Artifacts found in the Middle East and China whose fabrication required a knowledge of electricity and electrochemistry include batteries and battery electrodes, crystal lenses which we can make only with the electrochemically-produced cesium oxide, and objects fashioned of platinum and aluminum.

Where did this enigmatic ancient knowledge come from? Von Daniken asserts that it came from visitors to Earth from space. He speculates briefly at one point that these visitors may have come from the planet Mars before its surface was destroyed by some cosmic event. Elsewhere he places their origin farther afield, among one of the star systems in our Milky Way Galaxy. He claims that we can see depictions of these beings in ancient artwork, from cave drawings scattered throughout the world to Sumerian cylinder seals and South American stone carvings.

But above all the mute artifacts we find scattered about the earth, we have the ancient literature that brings these visitors to life. All we have to do, Von Daniken asserts, is to discard the mundane, inaccurate interpretation of these tales that was first initiated by scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when the technology to which they pointed was simply inconceivable. Less than two centuries ago, the notion of traveling about the Earth in flying vehicles was considered an absurdity by all but a few visionaries. The thought of traveling among the planets in space vehicles was at the far end of science fiction well into the last century.

Now that we ourselves possess much of the technology described in the ancient literature, however, we can see these texts as representing potential truth rather than necessarily depicting flights of fancy. In line with a more technically-orientated interpretation of these ancient tales, flights of the ‘gods’ in aircraft and space vehicles appears to have been a common theme.

Von Daniken notes that the Bible itself is a part of that ancient literature which describes flying machines driven by ‘gods’. He refers to the multi-winged, multi-wheeled flying vehicle described by the prophet Ezekiel as what modern man would call a ‘UFO’. The prophet Elijah may have ascended to heaven in a similar vehicle. Whatever these vehicles were, they certainly represented a technology far in advance of what we consider the peoples of that day to have possessed. The only other alternative to the physical reality of those vehicles described in the Bible is that they were dreams or visions of Ezekiel and others. But if that is the case, from whence did these highly-detailed visions come? It is absurd to think that they were simply figments of active imaginations. To deny that the vehicles actually existed is equivalent to asserting that the visions came from God. Consequently, in either case there is some truth to their existence.

[to be continued]

UFOs CHAPTER 2 (CONTINUED)

CONTACT, COMMUNION AND CHRISTIANITY CHAPTER 2 (CONTINUED)

Some secularly-oriented UFO spokespersons are fence-sitters. While they either explicitly or indirectly equate their extraterrestrial visitors with the Biblical God, they almost invariably follow a mechanistic mindset for which the Biblical God is demoted to the status of a mere extraterrestrial. In the most fundamental sense, the Judeo-Christian God is obviously and unequivocally a space being: by common understanding, as Creator and Master of the universe, He owns it. Space is a large part of His turf. But that is not the sense in which the UFO fence-sitter implicitly defines the Judeo-Christian God. The alien deities as depicted by these authors differ substantially from that God with respect to capabilities, morals, and, above all, intent. These alien beings may have come from a distant planet, and they may have possessed a superior technology, and perhaps even a more highly-developed intellect. They may have created man as a hybrid of their own genetic material and that of some subhuman species extant on earth at the time. Nevertheless, they appear to be remarkably similar in their nature and temperament to mankind itself. This is especially true with regard to their moral character, which included venality, uncontrollable sexual urges, and petty jealousies. Nor are these beings omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent. As pilots of spacecraft, mine supervisors, and genetic manipulators, they were subject to the same limitations in time and space as humanity. They are perceived as a plurality, not as a Triune Godhead but as a number of individuals who belonged to some other planet and relied on vehicular devices to arrive on the Earth. From that perspective, they were much too small to come even close to representing the Judeo-Christian God, both in their moral stature and capabilities, and in their self-serving natures. Instead, it is stated in all seriousness with no intent of mockery, the god who comes to mind in their writings is very much like the Wizard of Oz. This Cosmic Wizard is endowed perhaps with a superior intellect, certainly possesses a superior technology, and is capable of putting on a good dog-and-pony show to impress us less sophisticated earthlings with his divine attributes. But in the end he his much like us, having a mixture of good and bad qualities. This extraterrestrial had the same potential as man to strive for nobility and to fail in the attempt.

A ‘god’ of such limited attributes would be more like a cousin to humanity than a God. He would certainly lack the moral authority to exercise absolute control over our lives. His motives toward mankind would be limited as well, in all probability being directed toward self-service, as Zecharia Sitchin suggests in his Twelfth Planet series regarding his supposition that man was created for utilitarian purposes. In that context, Sitchin’s explanation of our origins as being motivated by the need for labor in the aliens’ mines is entirely consistent with his view of ‘god’ as a construct of man inspired by his utilitarian interaction with visitors from another planet. But to carry this consistency of thought to its logical conclusion would not only force us to deny the strong theme of sacrificial love that runs throughout the entirety of Scripture; it would also require us to consider our Judeo-Christian Scripture to represent myth more than truth. The mythical elements might indeed be based on factual events, but the mythical would have to be invoked to blow up the main player(s) to the status of godhood. It indeed appears that secularists prefer to view the Bible in a mythical context. In developing their own picture of god, those of the alien presuppositions also refer to the Bible, but not in the same way as the traditional Christian community. While they, like Christians, consider it to be a valuable historical document, it is just that to them and nothing more. It is treated as no more inspired than other ancient literature and is usually regarded as a Hebrew version of an earlier (and therefore supposedly more accurate) original.

Moreover, a mythical interpretation of the Bible which the secular UFO believers appear to favor of itself requires a corresponding ‘god’ to be of limited abilities and probably (although not necessarily) less than selfless intent. This viewpoint not only opens the door to the selective acceptance and rejection of arbitrary portions of Scripture, but also leads directly to the interpretation of any specific creative acts noted therein as being of limited scope and probably originating from self-serving motives. A good example of this is found on page 191 of Sitchin’s Divine Encounters, where Sumerian king Gudea is commanded through visions from the deity Enlil to build a temple. The detail of construction he is given through the series of visions is highly reminiscent of the Biblical instructions God gives to Moses and, later to David, regarding the construction of the places of worship and the artifacts that are to be used therein. But with respect to intent the similarity ends. Whereas Gudea’s temple has a utilitarian significance for the deities, God’s temples were intended as models to communicate God’s relationship with mankind and especially to instruct man on the nature of the Messiah to come.

The general lack of humanity associated with Sitchin’s beings is common to the viewpoint of the secular UFO buff: the beings are irretrievably alien, a notion that carries with it a strong element of fear. To many people, the intrusion of anything into the physical world not perceived as compatible with it as defined by current science is a very scary thought. It is perhaps this fear of control more than any other that separates the Christian from the secular UFO buff. A popular theme, around which a number of recent movies and television serials have been based, is the alien takeover. Through the use of superior technology, the alien race indwells the bodies of selected humans. From that beachhead, the aliens push outward in their diabolical attempt to make their conquest complete. The situation is made all the more terrifying by the fact that to outward appearances the infected, traitorous humans are indistinguishable from the normal remnant.

Given their common insistence on treating the Bible in the same manner as other ancient documents, it is inevitable that the proponents of the alien thesis should come to regard it from a mythical perspective, even while placing a literal interpretation on many of its passages. Sitchin and other writers of the alien visitation genre develop their theses from an interpretation of ancient texts that is driven by the alien notion. While their interpretations may be literal, the orientation remains secular with a rational, causal flavor. Sitchin, for example, follows precisely the same standard with respect to his interpretation of Hebrew Scripture as he does with the Sumerian texts. This approach may be justified with respect to the Sumerian literature, which seems to possess, to a large degree, an intrinsically secular, sometimes even a technical or social, basis. Scripture, on the other hand, has a different orientation. While its ultimate Author claims to have created the physical universe and everything within it, and while Scripture furnishes essential background information relating to secular matters, its emphasis is not on the secular but on God and His relationship with mankind. When a materialistic concern is presented at all in Scripture, it is usually included only when such background is necessary to provide an appropriate setting for its major theme, which is the presentation of God to man. While Sitchin is to be commended for the consistency of his approach, it may be suggested that perhaps the specifics of the approach to interpreting text should take this difference in orientation into account. There is no question but that a literal interpretation of Scripture is justified in all cases by the richness of the corresponding information it produces. But whereas it would also be appropriate to apply a strictly rational, technical, and causal approach to the exposition of secular material, an interpretation of Scripture should recognize in the omniscience of God His ability to transcend our ideas of causality, limited as we are in time and space. In this context, the possibility of miracles should be recognized, as should the ability of God, through the Holy Spirit, to influence man in both the writing and the interpretation of Scripture. When we attempt to interpret His Word, Scripture itself implies that we should recognize the influence of our own limitations as well as the power of God in the successful execution of this endeavor.

Zecharia Sitchin demonstrates that a strictly secular interpretation of Scripture can lead to a radically different outcome than that of historical understanding. On pages 30 through 33 of Divine Encounters, Sitchin discusses the rift between Cain and Abel, attributing it to their rivalry over the legal heirdom of the patriarchy and paralleling the rivalry between the gods Enlil and Enki. Christians, on the other hand, in the light of a different understanding of the intimacy of God’s interaction with man, see an entirely different cause of the animosity, one that is clearly implied in the Book of Genesis and which is fundamental to their faith. Cain was a farmer, whereas Abel was an animal husbandman. When they brought offerings to the Lord, they each did so in the context of their respective functions: Cain offered the fruits of the harvest, and Abel offered an animal. God viewed these offerings for how they represented man’s attempt to regain His favor after the expulsion from Eden. Whereas Cain offered the work of his own hands, Abel offered the blood of an innocent victim, acknowledging his own inability to please God and foreshadowing the work of Jesus Christ on the cross on behalf of mankind. Cain’s subsequent jealousy over God’s preference of Abel’s sacrifice led to his murder of Abel. Interestingly, on page 40 of Divine Encounters, Sitchin implies, in direct opposition to the Scriptural account, that the farmer enjoyed Enlil’s favor over the herdsman.

This radical difference in interpretation necessarily leads to the perception of inconsistencies throughout the Bible, self-fulfilling the initial assumption that Scripture is less than inspired. The inevitable conclusion that one might make from this viewpoint of the Judeo-Christian Scripture, and especially its regard for the Bible as less than inspired of God is that our ancient forebears were duped into submission, even slavery, to other beings of perhaps superior intellect but less than honorable motives. Our inferior society, according to this view, went along with their functional imprisonment out of their lack of sophistication. To this very day, according to the adherents to this alien genre, the less intellectually endowed among us who attempt to follow the teachings of their religions remain trapped in subjugation to an evil fable.

The result of this trend toward the self-reinforcement of entry presuppositions is that the group of secular believers in UFOs, unlike those who deny their existence, will tend to stand firm in their particular visions of what UFOs represent. If they maintain an assumption of Scriptural errancy, however, their reasoning about the relevance of God to the UFO situation will tend to be circular: they will take out of their mental exercises with respect to God exactly what they came in with. There is thus a rather extreme and irreconcilable divergence of views between the Christian believer in UFOs and their secular counterparts regarding any link between so-called aliens and God. The net outcome of this difference is an implacably dark assignment to UFO occupants of either evil intent or alien indifferene.

This outlook, in turn, has heavily influenced the ongoing government policy of inhibiting the public awareness of UFOs to maintain control over the human population while seeking a better understanding and control over the phenomenon itself.

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #33

Chapter 14: Implications for the Future

I’d very much like to say that our family was a decent representation, at the human level, of what the Family of God is all about. But, given the dysfunctional nature of our particular grouping, I most certainly hope that God does a better job of it than we did. It would be great to blame the disorder on mother’s constant disappointment in us and as a result of that on dad’s pretty constant wrath.

Truth be told, however, that’s just not the whole truth. If mom and dad were incessantly on our tails, it’s because we richly deserved it. The three of us, our sister, my brother and myself, are very close now. But that wasn’t always the case. In our teen years we were a bad lot. My brother and I were shifty and were given to frequent bouts of anger toward each other, almost always involving physical conflict, most often hitting and choking. The rancor only intensified as we grew older. On one occasion it so happened that we both were home for the weekend on 72-hour liberty and sharing a bedroom. Late that night after returning from our dates I decided to take a shower, which in itself, given the lateness of the hour, was thoroughly inconsiderate to my brother. I made it infinitely worse by singing loudly in complete disregard of his well-being.

He didn’t take it lying down. He arose from the covers and, knowing that I’d eventually have to open the door next to his bed, he stood on the mattress and assumed a posture that would bring his tight-knuckled fist downward into my belly with maximum impact. He waited there a long time, as I was in no particular hurry, and as he did so, his adrenaline level kept mounting.

I eventually opened the door, whereupon the fist connected with my stomach so abruptly that I was on the floor almost unconscious before realizing what happened. That was just one little event among a long string of sordid episodes where we both participated with equal fervor.

Our sister wasn’t clean in all this. Oh, no. One evening when I was twelve she had a party at our house with several friends from her all-girl school. Our parents were gone, having left her to baby-sit, as, for good reason, they didn’t trust us to be on our own. The girls had so much fun together that my brother and I were completely forgotten. One of the girls opened a bottle of rum and the party went into overdrive. Somebody mentioned how sad it was that there was no dog in the house. It would have been so much fun to get it drunk. While they were dwelling on that, with the imaginary dog on their minds, I came down the stairs in my pajamas to see what the noise was all about. That’s when the light bulb clicked on in my sister’s head. “We don’t need a dog!” she screamed in hilarity. “We have my brother!”.

Whereupon she invited me to sit and poured a very large dollop of rum into a glass and handed it to me. Not having any idea of the consequences, I thought it was a pretty good idea myself and proceeded to down the contents. I looked at them with a silly grin, held out the empty glass, and said “More!”

They were only too happy to oblige. Judging from the screaming that followed, I guess that I did pretty well as a drunk dog. But then the room began to spin. “I don’t feel so good,” I told them, and staggered back up the stairs to my bedroom. The bedroom spun around too, and continued to spin when I lay down. I hurriedly opened the window overlooking the flat-roofed garage and hurled out my guts. After a lengthy time of misery, I managed to fall asleep, but the next thing I knew my nose was being assaulted with the disgusting odor of pancakes. “Breakfast is on the table!” dad shouted. “Geddown here now!” My stomach continued to ripple with suppressed retching as I reluctantly emerged white-faced to the breakfast table, which was laden with nauseating objects that, somehow, I managed to force down my throat without puking back up. Dad looked at me strangely, wondering if I was coming down with the flu. When I left the table greatly relieved that the ordeal was ending, I discovered to my horror that another one was just beginning. There, right in front of dad’s desk through the glass door that led to the roof of the garage, was an enormous pile of barf. I can’t remember how I managed to get rid of it without attracting my dad’s attention and subsequent wrath, but somehow I was able to do so.

I quite clearly remember harboring bad thoughts about my sister for quite some time.

Bad as we were toward our parents, they do need to assume some of the blame. Dad had a desk job, which was truly mundane. At least he thought so. To him his job was so tediously commonplace that he sought excitement elsewhere. The open road fit that need nicely. Before the world reached mid-twentieth century, the highway patrol was not so large in presence, lacked sophisticated detection equipment, and, best of all, maintained a culture of generosity. Behind the wheel, dad became, in his imagination, a race-car driver, or at least a cop in hot pursuit of a wicked criminal. The way he shook his fist at others who had the audacity to usurp his personal highway, every other motorist in the country had a shady past. Sometimes they’d lash back at him. I remember once in my late preteens raising up from my sickbed in the back seat upon a curse and a burst of acceleration to witness a 15-mile road chase with dad close on the tail of someone who had gravely offended him. When I questioned mom about the cause of this outrage, she pursed her lips and responded with a terse statement of his ugly crime: “He made an obscene gesture to your father.” We children knew full well that the unfortunate driver in the car ahead of us had simply replied to his bullying with a one-finger salute. We silently applauded the poor fellow, whoever he was.

I would have thought that if he would have tried to pull off such tactics in a more recent setting, he would have been jailed for attempting to commit a hate crime, or at the very least, for aggressive driving. But no. He was still driving in his 90s just a few years back. Carolyn and I made a mistake, almost a terminal one, when we agreed to sit in the back seat of his Buick Century for a drive to the pharmacy. We should have jumped out of the car while he attempted to locate the shift lever, removing his foot from the brake in the process and allowing the car to drift into the side of the garage. But no. Accepting the new dent with aplomb, he finally found the lever, backed up from the scene of his latest accident, and emerged onto the roadway, where he was astonished to find that he had to share it with other cars. Within ten seconds he had his window down and his fist pumping away at the first offender he’d happened upon. Of course it was also the first car that he met on the road.

Thankful to have emerged from that trip with all of our body parts intact, we asked for his car keys with the intent of leaving his car in the garage forever after. He didn’t need the car. They lived in a very nice senior development that was well-equipped with shuttles and other help, even to the extent that volunteers were available either to take them shopping or do the shopping for them. But no. His pumping fist turned in our direction for our brazen attempt, causing us to fall back to Plan B, which was to contact the local police. We weren’t prepared for the levity with which the police treated the situation. They laughingly referred to the senior development as “Death Valley” and told us that the denizens of the area, being well aware of the hazards posed by drivers like dad, had learned to “run out of the way”. We left feeling like Alice in Wonderland. But then we realized that we were in California, which explained everything.

Most highways also were two-laners back then, which gave dad an opportunity to display his prowess at passing. Coming around a bend to find a car in front of him, he’d quickly assess the distance to the next curve, taking into account various factors like his current speed, the ability of his engine to accelerate to passing speed, and the risk of coming into the upcoming bend with insufficient braking distance. Almost invariably, his computations gave him to green light to proceed, whereupon he’d jam his foot onto the accelerator pedal, swerve out into the oncoming lane, and urge his steed forward into the fray. Sometimes, if an oncoming car came around the bend ahead at speed, he’d be forced to swerve back into his lane, sometimes (but rarely – he was pretty good behind the wheel back then) forcing the vehicle he’d passed to brake hard to let him back in. All I can say is that we had a lot of close calls involving speeding, braking and swerving, and we were pretty much occupied full-time either being sick or terrified.

His cars were all top-of-the-line. One day while we were still in our pre-teen years, mom was real excited. She told us that dad had gone to get a new horse, and when he returned home we saw what a champion he’d picked up. It was a powder-blue Pontiac convertible. At that time the horsepower race of the mid-‘50s hadn’t begun. Most of the garden-variety cars of that era, the Fords and Chevys, were way underpowered by today’s standards.   But the big straight-eight in that Pontiac was ahead of its time. By that time dad had taken a sales engineering job, which dovetailed well with his love of driving. Once in a while he would take one of us on a trip with him. I remember falling asleep in the car between Bakersfield and the grapevine as we headed south on Highway 99 toward Los Angeles. The screeching wind woke me on the downhill slope. I sat up in the seat and observed us rushing past other cars like they were parked. Glancing over at the speedometer, I saw that we were doing 105. Dad had a smile on his face. He was in his element.

I will say this about him, though. Despite his flaws in wisdom-judgment that prevented his passengers from ever relaxing, his racing judgment was superb. His reflexes were those of a cat, almost as good as Beltre at third base. When the time came for my brother and me to learn to drive, his capability as an instructor was as good as it gets. For that particular task he was surprisingly patient, and rather quickly passed on his advanced skills to us.

The downside of all that is that in the process of teaching us to drive, he unleashed his progeny onto the unsuspecting public after thoroughly embedding in them his faults. He paid for it, though. Until we bought our own cars we used his. Within three months he had to put his beautiful ’52 Merc into the shop for a new clutch and rear tires. I don’t understand how the U-joints and the rear end held out. We didn’t tell him, but we wouldn’t have given two cents for the rest of the drive train. I think he finally figured that out, because within a year he bought a beefier vehicle, a Packard Patrician. I think its engine was the one that kicked off the horsepower escalation – it was huge, one of the first 400 cubic-inch engines to grace a standard car. Despite its size and weight, propelled by that mill as we eagerly verified, the car was a rocket. Its only drawback was its brakes, which were wholly insufficient for the car’s performance. As I remember, whichever one of us who had the car on a date would have to allow an extra half hour before returning it home to let the brakes cool off enough that the stink of the asbestos compound wouldn’t alarm dad or the neighbors. It went to the garage for new brakes at intervals not anticipated by either the manufacturer or dad.

As I said, I sincerely hope that God does a better job of this family business than we did. Thankfully, we have every reason to expect that to be the case.

Given an understanding of the Holy Trinity as a divine Family, one is naturally led into a consideration of its role with regard to a primary family function: procreation and reproduction of kind. Scripture itself suggests that the Church, as the spiritual Bride of Christ, will also be the daughter-in-law of the divine Father and the Holy Spirit, enlarging the Godhead from a Trinity to a divine Four. There is a beautiful Scriptural passage, Romans 8:14-17, that openly suggests this very notion of Family continuity in the spiritual realm:

“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God; and if children, then heirs – heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ – if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.”

 

In the context of our future marriage with Christ, the entire book of Ephesians reads like a marriage manual, or a prenuptial marriage counseling session. Ephesians 5:1 also expresses the notion of the Church’s inclusion into the Family of God:

“Be ye, therefore, followers of God, as dear children.”

These passages, in turn, suggest that just as the union of Father and Spirit resulted in the Son Jesus Christ, the Church Herself will assume the same role in the spiritual realm as the Holy Spirit in uniting with Jesus to produce another divine Child, further enlarging the Godhead from a divine Four to a divine Five.

In contrast with a vague, rather static, understanding of heaven as encouraged by the prevailing gender-neutral view of the Godhead, the spiritual realm may be a place of excitement, action and adventure. I touch on that possibility in Part 2, Chapter 2 of Family of God:

“Regarding our own union with Jesus, the book of Revelation clearly states that His Church will be raised up on the seventh day, to reign with Jesus for a thousand years on earth. Our reign with Jesus will resemble the function of our Divine Mother the Holy Spirit as we furnish the means that, in union with the Will of our Lord Jesus, gives birth to a new Creation. It will be a marriage of great joy, as specifically confirmed by our Lord in the second Chapter of John. As John recounts, Jesus reserved the first miracle that He performed on earth to demonstrate this to us by turning water into wine at the wedding ceremony in Cana.

“The implications of this possibility are large. It confirms the nature of the Holy Spirit as diffuse, and explains why our God has discouraged us from falling into the worship of a female deity. For to worship this entity would be dangerously close to worship of self, or at least to self as it might exist in the future next to Jesus, our Lord and our Husband. Even now a false, arrogant, and self-serving form of this hope is manifest in the New Age belief that we ourselves are gods.

“In the context of Jesus as the Husband of His Church, an interesting topic for further speculation is this as the Jewish procedure for divorce is recalled: in thrice denouncing the Pharisees, did Jesus annul His relationship with the religious leaders? And in His threefold request of Peter to feed His sheep, was He in effect betrothing Himself to His Church? We do know this: when Jesus in John 14 gave us the promise of a place in heaven, he was speaking according to the custom, current at that time in that society, of the preparations that the bridegroom makes for his wife:

‘Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.’

 

          “We also see in viewing Jesus as Husband the potential for a union that bears fruit. In Part One we arrived at the fascinating notion, albeit speculative, of the Godhead as a dynamically continuous Family process, a recursive drama in which the human pattern of one generation receiving the scepter of activity from its predecessor and passing it on to its descendents is truly an image of its Godly counterpart. There may be large differences, of course. The original God must still be active in an open and expanding universe rather than lying dead in some heavenly grave. But the essential functional passing of the torch, at least with respect to earth, yet may be a reality.

“One very happy corollary to this view of our eventual relationship with Jesus is a picture of heaven that is more substantial and infinitely more interesting than the usual diaphanous place of clouds, harps, and a rather boring stasis. To the contrary, our future time with Jesus appears to be a busy one, full of creative effort, quite possibly rich in adventure, and certainly with love.”

Will there be an eighth day of God, one in which we, the Church, are intimately involved?

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #27

Chapter 9: Some Christian Churches that Appreciate the Feminine Nature of the Holy Spirit

 

I sometimes wonder what would have become of my understanding of God had my parents, grieving over my misbehavior as I noted in Chapter 4, marched me from the police station to a better Church than the sorry excuse that I was forced to attend. They certainly had other opportunities, for that particular incident was but one among many such sordid episodes in our coming of age.

For a few years during our preteens our neighborhood was embroiled in open warfare. It began inadvertently by our parents, who armed us with BB guns, which we promptly turned on each other. Usually my brother and I were pitted against Dave and Jeff. As such things inevitably do, the warfare engendered an arms race. Unknown to our parents we’d hold back on the Fourth of July fireworks, hoarding them for our more sinister pursuit. Away from their watchful eyes we’d tear apart the firecrackers and save the powder in a jar. We’d also dig in the backyard for clay and mold ourselves very realistic grenades. We’d poke a hole in the top, and after they dried hard we’d fill the hole with powder and stick in a fuse. Now, along with the flying BBs, we’d have exploding shrapnel filling the air. We also made a pipe cannon. Capping one end of a section of galvanized water pipe, we drilled a hole near the cap into which we’d insert powder and a fuse, and pop a marble into the muzzle. We tried it out against the stucco wall of our house one day the minute our parents left for the store. It worked great, so good that a neighbor lady called the police.

We continued to load it up and fire away, starting to go through military aiming procedures when a police officer, who had been sneaking down the side of the house, suddenly jumped into the open to confront us. Unfortunately, we already had lit the fuse. We stared at him helplessly as he began his harangue, not knowing that he was inside the target circle. I made a surreptitious effort to redirect the pipe, but he shouted to get my hands off it. I still remember his expression and his pointing finger as the glass round whistled past his arm to strike the wall beyond.

We paid for that debacle with an involuntary arms reduction move by our parents. Fortunately, it was temporary. Somewhat subdued, my brother and I used that hiatus to construct our next war machine: a tank. Built atop an old four-wheeled coaster, it was absolutely impregnable. There was even a turret and a hatch atop it for entry. Our house was located at the top of a steep hill and after issuing a challenge to our enemy who awaited us on a level stretch of pavement below, we climbed in, poked a BB gun out of the turret, and headed off to the fray.

We hadn’t thought our tactics through. The tank, being unpowered, stopped when it reached the level stretch. The enemy simply approached behind the turret and turned the tank upside down, trapping us inside as they peppered us with BBs and grenades. My brother and I, finally appreciating the stupidy of the whole skirmish, took it out on each other. It was awful.

If I had been marched into a better Church after an episode of miscreancy, would I have become a Christian right then and there? If I did, would I have been less skeptical of Church dogma and therefore more open to the acceptance of it as irrefutable truth? In brief, would I have been a more docile (and shallow) member of the Church as a whole?

There are other alternative scenarios of my becoming a Christian: perhaps I would have questioned less at the outset and rejected it at the first hint of a contradiction. Or maybe I would have rejected the Gospel for other reasons.

But that kind of speculation leads nowhere, because there are an infinite number of possibilities to speculate upon, and, in the end it doesn’t matter anyway. It is what it is. Here I stand, deeply committed to my Christian faith after having been distanced by God from my earlier rejection, with a number of slipups and chastisements along the way, and burdened now with a system of belief that doesn’t quite square with the thinking of the Church.

But if that makes me a heretic to the main body of the Church, at least I don’t stand as alone as I had originally thought.

I categorize the Church that opposes my viewpoint as Western, both Catholic and Protestant, because many Eastern Churches, particularly those among Churches of Egyptian Coptic and Syriac roots, do indeed acknowledge the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit, as did the Jewish religion. Of the Western Churches, a substantial component of the Messianic Jewish community also considers the Holy Spirit to be feminine.

It was with this welcome understanding that I pursued my research on other theologians and Churches within the community of Western Christianity, following which I posted the article below on my blog site friendofthefamily.wordpress.com:

I’m Not as Alone as I Thought

“As I learn more about the early Christians and the Church Fathers, I’m beginning to appreciate that there have been more sheep than I first thought who have been feeding in my little field.

“Not long ago my pastor loaned me a little paperback book entitled Creation out of Nothing, written by Paul Copan and William Lane Craig and published in 2004. The primary issue for Drs. Copan and Craig is the question as to whether God created the heavens and earth from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) or whether He did so from pre-existing matter (creatio ex materia). Admittedly, I hadn’t given the matter much thought because I had simply assumed that God, being God, wouldn’t have the need to start with something already at hand. I found the topic fascinating, however, and was intrigued with the necessity of addressing it, which, it seems, began with the Gnostic view of matter as evil and thus out of the realm of God’s creative effort. I was also intrigued with the arguments that the authors presented in favor of creatio ex nihilo, which covered a range of source material from the Old and New Testaments, as well as information from extrabiblical sources, including religious texts and scientific data. The source that most impresses me is John 1:3:

“’All things were made by him, and without him was nothing made that was made.’

“As far as I can see, that statement pretty much covers it all. That, and the fact that if God had to rely on pre-existing material to perform His creative work, He couldn’t exactly be called omnipotent.

“Interested as I became in the main theme of the book, what really grabbed my attention was a side issue, one almost but not quite confined to the footnote region. On page 23 of the book, the church father Irenaeus is said to have essentially equated Wisdom with the Holy Spirit. Nor was this association trivially presented, for on page 24 Wisdom is described by Copan and Craig as a Craftsman at God’s side, with a reference to Proverbs 8:27 and 30:

“’When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth. . .Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;’

 

“The association of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit immediately exposes a gender issue, for Wisdom in Proverbs is identified as a female personage. It is precisely the same issue that led so many “experts” to pasteurize their attempts to offer “explanations” of the Holy Trinity into cold and ultimately empty logical sophistries. One can only conclude that such “explanations” are products of self-interest and fear. Irenaeus, on the other hand, seems not to have been so burdened with socio-political concerns; apparently, he seriously entertained the thought of associating the Holy Spirit with a female function.

“The reference to Proverbs 8:27 and 30 again associates Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, and this time it sets the record straight as to whom this passage refers. The prevailing preference is to associate this passage with Jesus, despite its obviously being out of context for that identification, as I noted in Family of God. I was most happy to note that the authors of Creation out of Nothing understood this and properly associated the passage with Wisdom. I think that the authors understand the unstated implication of attributing the verses to Wisdom: again, that the Holy Spirit and Wisdom are one and the same, and in the context of the nature of Wisdom presented in Proverbs, the Holy Spirit thus possesses a female functionality.

“The authors go further, noting on page 25 the self-sufficiency of an intra-Trinitarian love relationship. Love relationship indeed, and one that we can readily identify with on an intuitive level.

“I’m more than happy to share my little turf with others. I just wish that they’d come on in, rather than just poking their heads through the fence.”

Over the course of the history of the Church, there indeed have been people who have spoken up regarding important aspects of the true nature of Christianity in contradiction to the mainstream viewpoint, and some have even managed to be heard over the tumult of the opposing voices of highly respected but blind and shallow theologians. As I noted in Chapter 7, one of those few who understood better than his peers was the writer of the introduction to the Song of Solomon in the 1967 edition of the Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible, edited by C. I. Schofield, D.D.

The writer of this introduction was lacking in one important association, that the Song of Solomon may well have been an allegory of the intra-Godhead relationship as well as representing the relationship between Christ and His Church. Perhaps, like his peer from the Reformation Reference Bible who wrote the comparable introduction to the Song of Solomon, he was tempted to do so, but was forced to back off from such a direct contradiction to the teachings of the Church, despite its harmony with Scripture.

In the Catholic canon, as I noted in Chapter 7, Chapter 9 of the Book of Wisdom describes Wisdom in a context that virtually declares this female Persona to be the Holy Spirit. No other Biblical personage, human or God, harmonizes so fully with the descriptive material of that chapter.

I was tempted to include the Nag Hammadi documents, buried in Egypt and uncovered in 1945, as material supportive of a feminine Holy Spirit. What held me back from this was my reading of the Gospel of Thomas which was found among these ancient writings, from which I took away the strong sense that the writer of this document was clueless as to the true nature and character of Jesus, whom he presented as entirely at odds with the selfless, noble and spiritually-inclined Jesus of the canonical Gospels.

Well after I had pieced together the information I have presented above, I came across, through a search of books offered by Amazon, two authors whose views closely paralleled my own. One was written by a woman, Patricia Taylor, to be specific, entitled The Holy Spirit: The Feminine Nature of God, published by iUniverse, Inc., and the other entitled Sophia The Holy Spirit and published through the organization La Ermita – The Hermitage, Inc. The publication date of Mrs. Taylor’s book is 2009, while that for the other is 2010.

Like my books, they both employ logic similar to my own to justify the femininity of the Holy Spirit, and they both view the primary consequence of this feminine Presence within the Godhead as supportive of a loving Divine Family.

Their books both differ from mine in their adamant claims that the use of masculine pronouns to refer to the Holy Spirit was never inspired by God and, furthermore, was not in the original versions of the texts but rather was a deliberate alteration performed in later translations in an attempt to distance their Christianity from its Gnostic and pagan rivals. Regardless of the purity of this intent on the part of the early clergy, it represents a gross violation of the sacredness of Holy Scripture, something on the order of a layperson entering the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple.

These authors possess sound backup for their claim, perhaps the most significant of which is the Siniatic Palimpsest discussed in Chapters 4 and 7, in which in the original Jesus is recorded in John 14:26 as referring to the Holy Spirit with feminine pronouns.

As I had noted in several places in my books, I consider this “he” issue to represent the most substantial of the objections to a feminine Holy Spirit. If these authors are indeed correct, as I think they are, those who insist upon either the masculinity or the gender-neutrality of the Holy Spirit have some very spindly legs to stand on.

The timing and similarities in what the three of us have had to say about a feminine Holy Spirit leads me to believe that the Holy Spirit Herself is taking an active part in our understanding of God. An observation made by one of the authors, Mr. Meisner, is that over the past decade or so the Internet has seen a substantial increase in the number of people interested in the possibility of a feminine Holy Spirit. This, too, indicates an active involvement of God.

But then there’s that thing about my marching to a different drummer. It continues to haunt me. After all is said and done, maybe my momma was right.

But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about the Holy Spirit.

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #23

 

Chapter 7: (continued) Reconciling Claims Against a Feminine Holy Spirit

 

 

 

 

 

Being in Bad Company

As for my conviction regarding the gender of the Holy Spirit seemingly being shared with other not-so-conservatively-Christian individuals such as Koresh and Winfrey, I ask the objector to go back and read my book with a little more understanding of the positions each of us have taken on the subject and of the obvious differences in our perceptions. Winfrey’s goddess theology is not even remotely connected with my notion regarding the gender of the Holy Spirit. The same might be said about Koresh as an individual and his self-serving beliefs, despite the fact that there was a woman in his organization, Lois Roden, who was an outspoken adherent to the view of the Holy Spirit as a feminine Persona and taught the same.

Actually, being told that one is among bad company and that being alone are so closely related that they’re pretty much twins in meaning. Both connote being outside and looking in. Words and phrases of similar meaning that apply to both situations would include “outcast”, “shunned by polite society”, “not to be trusted”, and “let’s not be judgmental, but – – -“. The person who got on my case for being in bad company might just as well have said to me “I told you to stay in the car!”

Accordingly, my response is identical to that eventually given to the charge of being out there alone: please refer to Chapter 9, thank you.

But before I dismiss this topic completely, I must offer the suggestion that others who eventually have been highly regarded had to suffer both the accusation of being out there alone and of being in bad company. Among these individuals was Jesus Himself, against whom the religious leaders of the Sanhedrin hurled numerous accusations of advocating theological views contradictory to theirs. Jesus was further chastised for consorting with people considered to be of less than sterling character, including a hated tax collector, lowly fishermen and a woman of the streets, according to some whisperers. There is a long list of martyrs, fully Christian, who lost their lives, some in horrible ways, because the tenets their faith at the time didn’t match those of the prevailing understanding.

As a matter of fact, in James 2:1, the writer specifically tells us that:

“May brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons.”

Taking Lightly the Responsibilities of a Teacher of the Word of God

Maybe the intent is to intimidate, but here again, the implication is that one who holds to my particular views is not to be trusted, a judgment that is confirmed by the absence of a PhD in my Curricula Vitae. The issue really isn’t about my irresponsibility in teaching a dubious speculation. Whether or not it’s dubious is a presumptive judgment, based on my lack of authority to teach, being, as I am, a member of the Great Unwashed Masses rather than a scholar in the field recognized for his advanced degrees. This is exactly the same kind of situation that got Galileo into hot water with the Pope. As we all know, Galileo’s heliocentric view of the solar system was right, and the Pope’s opposing geocentric view was wrong. But that wasn’t the actual issue.

Galileo wasn’t a champion of science against religion, as our schoolchildren are being taught. He was a devout Christian, so committed to God that he acquired a Bible and made the effort to read and understand it. Knowing Scripture, he challenged the Duchess of Tuscany’s view that the geocentric position was Biblical by pointing out that it was a secular Greek notion that the Church held to as an extra-Biblical theme and which had nothing to do with Scripture.

What angered the Pope in this was Galileo’s audacity as a Church layperson to presume to understand the Bible, a position granted only to the Church elite. In this, the Pope adhered to the same egocentric mindset as the Pharisees in Jesus’ day. The Gospels quite plainly convey the opinion that Jesus held regarding the religious movers and shakers.

I am fully aware of the fact that in publishing my perceptions of the Holy Spirit and other matters having to do with my understanding of Scripture, I have assumed the responsibilities of a teacher. Despite my comment in the dedication of my book Family of God that I have more freedom than those in a pastoral position to engage in speculation, I have and continue to take that responsibility seriously. What I had written in Family of God was not hastily or shallowly formulated; to the contrary, it was the result of many years of pondering and reviewing Scripture. To any caution that may be directed to me regarding responsibility, I respond with Jesus’ Parable of the Talents. Furthermore, I would say that if a person happens to chance upon a breathtakingly beautiful picture, is he right to be so cautious as to deny sharing it with others? To me that would fall short of the exercise of love, as Jesus commanded of us.

I would suggest instead that it is also the responsibility of a teacher, if he is committed to some particular understanding, to share it with the certain knowledge that God is fully capable of propagating or cutting off a thought. I might add, tossing this intellectual grenade back in the lap of its originator, that the burden of responsibility is equally on the shoulders of anyone who might be tempted to make a too-hasty objection to the associations that I have made, thus denying this potential insight to the Christian public at large.

The bottom line regarding this discussion is that the objections that I have received to date give me no compelling, Scriptural-based reason to alter my perception of the female nature of the Holy Spirit from that which I presented in Family of God.

There also is a practical side to my view of the nature of the Godhead. To my thinking, the association of a female function with the Holy Spirit furnishes a firm basis for the Christian objection to homosexuality that otherwise could not be made. Without rancor for individuals who are afflicted with that practice, I firmly believe that homosexuality is a sin, but for a more basic and profound reason than that it is spoken against in Genesis (Sodom) and in Leviticus and Romans. I believe that it is a sin because it is a violation of type, being contrary to the intrinsic nature of the Godhead. I also believe that the only viable alternative to considering the Holy Spirit to be functionally female is to consider the Godhead to be void of gender. I say that because if gender was involved in the Godhead and it was all male, then homosexuality would not represent a violation of type. God may just as well have populated the Garden of Eden with Adam and Steve rather than Adam and Eve; after all, it would then more closely correspond to the nature of the Godhead itself. But if gender is not involved in the Godhead, God being above that kind of thing, we would end up with a passionless God incapable of experiencing for Himself that which He fashioned in His creation and asks of us to respond toward Him. That would give us an experiential edge on God as well as to suggest hypocrisy in His nature, something that I would consider to be close to a truly blasphemous notion.

The problem that underlies the reluctance of many to resolve the gender paradox is the misunderstanding of sexuality to be morally impure, something that belongs in the material world only and has no place in heaven. This misapprehension, which actually is part of the Gnostic belief system despite the conviction of numerous Gnostic adherents that the Holy Spirit possesses a feminine gender, was fostered by the excesses of the ancient religions, which themselves represented a garbled form of the understanding of God imparted to the first humans. The garbling itself was a product of man’s descent into primitive conditions and the continuous plague of terror from the skies above him.   There is nothing whatever in Scripture that associates normal sexual activity within the marriage of a single man and a single woman with immorality or impurity. The only suggestion of the negative about sexuality in marriage offered in the New Testament is Paul’s notion, particularly in 1 Corinthians 7, that marriage competes with a devotion to God, as I explain elsewhere herein. The Song of Solomon’s inclusion in the canon of Scripture suggests the exact opposite of the association of immorality with marital sex, as did Jesus’ honoring of marriage with His first miracle, as noted in John 2, and, of course, the references to His followers as His Bride.

A marriage is a unique institution that connotes mutual ownership. Mutual ownership in love reaches beyond joint ownership to encapsulate the state of intimate belonging. Within a family, its members belong to each other; they own each other. Within the Godhead, this mutual ownership is an unbreakable bond. It is in this context that Jeremiah 10:10-13 should be interpreted: God speaking of wisdom, understanding and power in a possessive sense, claiming ownership of the female Holy Spirit whose attributes God describes. It is in this same sense that the female Arm of the Lord, another term for the Holy Spirit, is described in Isaiah 51:9 and 10, wherein the original “she” in this passage was deliberately replaced by the gender-neutral “it” by translators who lacked understanding. Here is how it should have been translated:

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not she who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not she who hast dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”

I expand in Chapters 10 through 12 on my views as to why early Christianity linked sexuality with moral impurity. It is my heartfelt conviction that if the Church requires a correction in its teachings, among the most urgent would be the topic of sexual conduct and its relationship to godly purity. With regard to this item, it is I who might appropriately be judgmental of the current religious teaching standard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #22

Chapter 7: (continued) Reconciling Claims Against a Feminine Holy Spirit

 

 

[Note to the reader: Marching to a Worthy Drummer is now available through Amazon in paperback and ebook (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble in ebook (Nook).  The book is also available through my publisher, Signalman Publishing.  Order by both title and author, i.e.  Marching to a Worthy Drummer by Arthur Perkins.]

 

 

 

Being Out There Alone

 

I can’t help but smile ruefully at the suggestion that there might actually be a good reason why I’m ‘out there alone’.  The suggestion smarts because it carries a lot of truth.  I have to agree with that, wondering myself why such a profoundly beautiful concept has been ignored by the vast majority of Christians for millennia.  I don’t have an answer to that.  It still bothers me.  Yet the problem doesn’t give me a Scriptural reason that justifies my abandoning the concept.  I can only say that all of our understanding of Scripture, even collectively, is progressive.  Why me?  Who knows?  Maybe it’s because I – and others of my persuasion – are such small potatoes that the introduction of this concept may be hardly noticeable and therefore quite gentle.

In the introduction to her delightful little book entitled The Holy Spirit: The Feminine Nature of God, Patricia Taylor expressed something akin to that sentiment when she wrote “I am not a theologian, pastor, evangelist or formally trained in any way.  I am not even an author.  I have never seriously considered taking on the daunting task of writing a book.  As far as credentials go, I am a nobody.  This is an aspect of God’s nature that is so refreshing.  He loves to use nobodies to carry out His plan for mankind.  When He told Gideon He would use him to save the Israelite people from the oppression of the Midianites, Gideon said his family was the weakest of his tribe and that he was the weakest of his family.  David and Joseph were both the youngest and weakest, in a worldly sense, in their families.  And, of course, Jesus came as a carpenter’s son from a small, insignificant town.  He chose uneducated fishermen and other unimportant people in society to carry His message to the world.  Paul said, “. . .I am a nobody: (NAS, 2Corinthians 12:11).  [Bold in the original.]

Sometimes I wonder whether there are a lot of little people like me in churches throughout the world who perceive as I do that the functional gender of the Holy Spirit is essentially female, but say nothing to anyone about their perception because they’d rather not rock the boat.  Perhaps I’m not nearly as alone as even I think.  If I am, what of it?  This is more of an ad hominem attack than a Scripturally-based objection.  And even if I’m wrong, I’m sure that God Himself is more than capable, if He should so desire, of negating any potential influence I may have toward anybody without involving another human being in the process.

Actually, the Mariology tradition of the Catholic Church gives me reason to suspect that a large number of thoughtful Christians over many centuries have inferred from Scripture that the Holy Spirit has had a female function or nature.  Rather than submitting themselves to the expected reactionary abuse for their thoughts, they simply transferred attributes belonging to the Holy Spirit over to Mary, who herself, according to Scripture, provides us with a vivid type of the Holy Spirit.  Mary’s typification of the Holy Spirit is even more pronounced in the Catholic Church due to this transference of attributes.  In my opinion, the Catholic Church is less in error in this matter than the Protestant denominations, which have made no effort whatsoever to reconcile Scripture with their insistence upon making the Holy Spirit either entirely male or genderless.

I expressed my feeling in my blog friendofthefamily.wordpress.com with respect to the loneliness of having a viewpoint of God that doesn’t fall in line with mainstream opinion.  That particular posting is repeated below:

Sometimes I’m Lonely

“I have a lovely wife to whom I am devoted.  We spend most of the day together and, of course the night too, because we’re also the best of friends.  We have a wonderful pastor whose sermons delve into Scripture quite deeply, and we belong to a small church where everyone is a friend of everyone else.

“Our pastor loves Jesus, and it shows in the manner that he conducts his life.  He reveres Scripture as the Word of God, and that is plain from his preaching.

“Because of these benign circumstances, I am almost happy.  But not quite.  As a Christian I lack the fulfillment of being able to share openly some insights into the nature of God that I consider to be of the most fundamental importance.  The insights, while I understand them to originate with God, are personal, which makes me a bit of a stray.   As one of Jesus’ sheep, I suppose that I should have been content to graze with the rest of the flock, but I saw a greener pasture elsewhere.  I’d very much like to think that Jesus opened the gate for me and led me into it, but a number of Christian brothers and sisters are bleating that I jumped the fence.  My pastor knows where I am, but he has the rest of his flock to care for and so he must remain noncommittal about my situation.  The upshot is that despite the richness of the grass nobody’s coming in to share it with me, and I’m starting to get real lonely.

“My situation began innocently enough.  I love to read, and when I was born again, I picked up a Bible and read it.  Having done that, I simply took Scripture at face value.  When I arrived at Matthew 22, I read this:

“’Then one of [the Pharisees], which was a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question, tempting Him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?  Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.’

 

“Having taken this Scripture to heart, I attempted to be obedient of this greatest of commandments.  To do so, I continued to read Scripture, this time in greater depth, in order that I might more intimately know this Person who commands me to love Him with all my being.  Almost immediately a problem was encountered: God the Father is understandable in Scripture, and so is Jesus the Son, but the Holy Spirit, in the context of how we have been taught to view this Person, is not.  Nor, because of the vagueness surrounding this Third Person of the Godhead, is the Holy Trinity.

“How then, given this vagueness of knowledge, could I be obedient to the greatest commandment of Jesus?  Somewhat frustrated, I set the matter aside as I continued to pore over Scripture.  Then, when I happened upon Ephesians Chapter 5, I was delighted to discover the plainly-delivered answer to my earlier question.  It was noted in the previous posting that, in the fullness of time according to Ephesians 5:31 and 32, Jesus shall leave His Father and Mother to wed the Church:

“’For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.  This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.’

 

“It is conspicuous in this passage that in the process of marrying His Church, Jesus will leave his Father and Mother to do so.  This, statement, of course, implies that He has both a Father and a Mother to leave.

“Oh, my, what a lot of information is packed into those two verses!  One must understand that even if the verses stand alone in the entire Bible as suggesting that the Godhead Itself is a Divine Family, they are unequivocal with regard to that implication. The only way that one can deny the family attribute of the Godhead in the face of those words is to deny that all of Scripture is inspired of the Holy Spirit.  I’m certainly not willing to do that, for that constitutes an error infinitely graver than any controversy regarding the nature the Godhead.

“In my previous posting, I described the implications of our future spiritual marriage to Jesus, ending with mention of the dichotomy between redeemed mankind’s masculine aggregate designation and the obviously female nature of our role as Bride of Christ.  I then asked whether this dichotomy exists elsewhere in Scripture.

“I’ll answer that emphatically in the affirmative, and add that in its broader form this dichotomy is so profoundly important that I find it difficult to understand how anybody can fully love his God without appreciating its significance.  It has to do with another marriage, one that was consumated long ago at the beginning of time.

“As noted before, when thinking of the substance of the Church in terms of redeemed mankind, we apply the male gender.  We do that because when we use a pronoun to refer to an aggregate composed of both sexes, we always apply the one associated with the dominant gender, which is male.  Sorry, ladies, but that’s just the way it is, political correctness notwithstanding.  But you still get the last laugh, because Scripture openly describes the Church as female in Her relationship with Jesus.  A good example of this is Paul’s description of the Church in Ephesians as Jesus’ future Bride.  That makes the menfolk spiritual females, a fact that you can goad your husbands with when they make you angry.

“What I’ve written about the Church is not controversial with regard to basic theology.  Being in full agreement with mainstream Christianity, I’m still grazing in the big pasture along with the other sheep.  Now, in turning to the topic of the Holy Spirit, things begin to get dicey: the rest of the flock is staring at me and I can see the whites of their eyes.   Nevertheless, I shall now assert that the gender situation with regard to the Holy Spirit may be very similar to that regarding the church in Her functional role as Bride of Christ: just as the masculine pronoun is used when referring to the Church constituted of redeemed mankind, Scripture uses the masculine pronoun when referring to the Holy Spirit.  But redeemed mankind is also the Church as Bride of Christ, and just as the masculine pronoun in reference to redeemed mankind does not contradict a functional reference to the Church as female, I would say that here we have Scripture itself paving the way to considering the Holy Spirit to have a feminine function in the face of a masculine reference.  Therefore, the masculine pronoun in reference to the Holy Spirit need not contradict a functional reference to this Comforter as female.  But there is a big difference between an implication by similarity and an actuality.  Do I make that leap?

“I do, and it places me alone in the small pasture.  But this pasture is rich in nourishment, for the notion of Godhead as Divine Family fully agrees with Scripture, specifically Ephesians 5:31 and 32 as noted above, whereas any other possible understanding of the Godhead cannot enjoy that same agreement.

“In the case of the Holy Spirit, the male designation simply may connote that this Member of the Holy Trinity, while possessing a unique functional identity that may be of either gender, is composed of the same Divine Substance as the Holy Father who is male.  Then, as in the case with the church, the male pronoun would be used because male is the dominant gender, which also applies to the Holy Spirit for having an essence of which both genders consist.  As I note in Family of God, the answer to this apparent gender  inconsistency may be as simple as attributing it to a common lack of perception in reading the Bible, and that from the very beginning.  In Genesis 5:1 and 2 the creation of man as first presentedin Genesis 1:26 and 27 is recapitulated, but with a significant addition:

          “’This is the book of the generations of Adam.  In the day that God created man,, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.’

 

“Note in this passage that both Adam and Eve were named Adam.  We don’t usually think about the implications, but that same practice is maintained to this day.  When a woman marries a man, she takes his name.  This is quite significant, for it implies, beyond the notion that God considers the male and female to be one flesh, that the woman (and the man also) was never intended to live apart from her spouse, but to assume his identity as an unbreakable partnership.  Therefore, the reference to the Holy Spirit as ‘he’ may simply and quite logically imply that the Holy Spirit is of the same Divine Substance as the Father as well as being indivisibly joined to Him.

“But in an alternative interpretation the male designation also may suggest a very wonderful promise to us: it may mean that the Holy Spirit is also an aggregate of many components, one that in our future spiritual form we actually may be privileged to join, possibly as a Divine Daughter.

“This implication was brought out in Family of God.  It was noted there that the reason for the use of the male ‘he’ in reference to the Holy Spirit may be identical with the reason why the church, with specific reference to its aggregate nature as redeemed mankind, is described as masculine when, in fact, it is functionally feminine.  The possibility was raised there that the use of the male gender may represent a promise that the church and the Holy Spirit may have a closer relation than mere similarity of gender.  In this suggestion, redeemed mankind may, in fact, while being a masculine aggregate, become intimately related to the Holy Spirit by assuming a functional role as a new Divine Means with Jesus serving as a new Divine Will.  Is that why Jesus (John 5:17), in performing what the Pharisees considered as work during the Sabbath, said ‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I work’?

“In Family of God, I emphasized the following line of reasoning in attributing a female functionality to the Holy Spirit:  Judeo-Christianity is generally assumed to be a monotheistic religion; yet, our Godhead is also assumed to be Trinitarian.  The basis of our monotheism is expressed in Deuteronomy 6:4: ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.’ On the other hand, Christianity deifies Jesus as well as the Holy Spirit; together, all God, they comprise the Trinitarian Godhead.  Adam’s statement regarding Eve, repeated by Jesus and Paul, reconciles two back into one: ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.’ Extending this unity of family to the offspring of this union permits the full Trinitarian Godhead to be perceived as one, justifying the monotheism implicit in Deuteronomy 6:4.

“In this posting I have added further justification for a female Holy Spirit by noting in particular in that same reconciliatory statement that in joining with his wife a man shall leave his father and mother.  When this notion is applied to Jesus as in Ephesians 5:31 and 32, it becomes obvious that Jesus had to have had a Holy Mother to leave in joining with His wife.  This can’t apply to Mary because the unions that we are addressing are spiritual and because, according to numerous references throughout Scripture, for example Micah 5:2, and John 1:1 and 14, Jesus existed long before His sojourn in the flesh.  On top of that, Scripture and nature both emphasize the sterility associated with any union other than between a male and a female.  How, then, could Jesus be the Son of God without a female forbear?  Why would Jesus take a Bride if His Father did not?

“I’m not simply attempting to justify a pet thought here.  In my opinion, the prevailing notion of an all-masculine Godhead is intrinsically blasphemous, representing no less than a repudiation of Scripture itself.  I sincerely believe that Paul and other Bible greats knew the truth about the functional gender of the Holy Spirit.  If there are just a few who share the little field, remember these words of Jesus in Matthew 7:13 and 14:

‘Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’

After I wrote this piece, I began to learn of more people who shared my view of the Holy Spirit.  I discuss this happy situation in Chapter 9.

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #21

Chapter 7: (continued) Reconciling Claims Against a Feminine Holy Spirit

 

Attributing Passion to God

 

As noted in Chapter 4, the Church appears to have been heavily influenced by medieval theologian Jerome Zanchius and his pseudo-rigorous development of a concept of God in which He is said to be void of passion. It was in reference to this source that I was told that God is generally not assumed to possess passion, certainly not of a nature that would admit of a romantic union between Father and Holy Spirit. This false perception that God lacks passion is most distressingly evident where God’s attributes of power and majesty are emphasized during worship at the expense of His most important attribute of love.

But Scripture portrays God as possessing passion. The notion that God is above love of a passionate nature violates Scripture, the most obvious case being the ardor and passion intricately woven into the Song of Solomon, otherwise known as the Song of Songs or the Canticles. At least two Bible commentaries (in the Reformation Study Bible, New King James Version and in the New Schofield Reference Bible, both as introductions to the Song of Solomon, consider the Song to be an allegory of the future union of Jesus Christ with His Church.

My perception of the glory of God in all three Persons of the Godhead is far more the quality of their selfless willingness to give up the majesty than the grandeur of their possession of it. Connected with that perception I view the Members of the Godhead as capable of experiencing love with intensity and passion, which to me includes love of the romantic kind. The manner in which Jesus’ first miracle at Cana (John 2) reaches my heart would be difficult if not impossible if I couldn’t relate it to Jesus’ future relationship to the Church. The same could be said regarding the Song of Solomon, which would seem to be a wholly gratuitous insertion into Scripture of material extraneous to the Word if it didn’t speak either of Jesus’ future relationship with the Church or of the inter-Member relationship within the Godhead or both. Even more telling in this regard is the Shema of Moses, which Jesus presents as the greatest commandment in Matthew 22:36-38, and which demands a passionate commitment to the Lord. In light of the fact that Jesus, as a superlative Leader, never asked of His disciples anything that He wouldn’t do of Himself, it would seem to be contradictory to His character for Him to ask of us a passion that He Himself was incapable of exercising or even possessing.

The Song of Solomon raises issues in that regard that are worth addressing in detail. A host of Christian authorities readily acknowledge that it speaks of marital love in terms of passion and ardor. The same authorities admit even the erotic nature of some of its verses. The 1995 Reformation Study Bible (New King James Version), for example has this to say of the subject matter of the Song of Solomon:

“The beauty and worth of sexual love is affirmed at the beginning of the Bible, where the difference and relationship of the sexes is associated with the creation of humanity in God’s image (Gen. 1:27; cf. 2:19-25) If sexual love were evil in itself, it would be inappropriate as an allegory of Christ’s love for His church.”

Here Editor R. C. Sproul and his associates not only acknowledge the sexuality of the topic, but link it to both the nature of the Godhead and with the relationship between Christ and His Church. Indeed, in their same introductory commentary, the editors make the following statements:

“The Song of Solomon reveals three qualities of love between a man and a woman: self-giving, desire, and commitment. In all these ways love reflects the greater love of God our Creator. God delights in us and gives Himself to us. . . Christian marriage, according to Paul, should be modeled on the most perfect expression of such love, the self-giving love of Christ for His church and its willing response (Eph. 5:22, 23). The climax of the Song of Solomon is the praise of vehement and faithful love (8:6,7). The Song of Solomon. . .looks back to the gift of love in creation, and forward to the perfection of love in One greater than Solomon, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

The editors, after implying a gender attribute of Jesus and the Godhead Itself, back off from openly declaring a sexuality of God:

“Although it is not proper to attribute sexuality to God, there is an analogy between the love we experience in marriage and the love that God has for us.”

While I would have wished that the editors, after having stated here what easily could be interpreted as the essential opposite of what they presented elsewhere in their introductory remarks, might have explained to us what they meant by the words ‘not proper’ and ‘sexuality’ and how they might justify using these words, their comment here may be reconciled with their other insinuations while leaving intact the notion of gender in the Godhead. This reconciliation may be realized by considering the word ‘sexuality’ to refer to the human-specific form in which the function of gender has been implemented. If that indeed is what the editors had in mind, then I would be somewhat in agreement with them (while, with one eye fixed on the Song, wondering if they hadn’t been a bit hasty themselves in this declaration) and be tempted to applaud their discernment in declaring ‘sexuality’ to be an inappropriate attribute of the Godhead.   As I noted in Family of God, the human manifestation of sexuality may have little or nothing to do with the function of gender in the spiritual realm, about which we are unable to perceive anything, nor because of our limitations should it occupy our interest either negatively or positively except as brought out in Scripture.

I can’t help but note here that I, too, in Family of God, stop short of explicitly linking sexual activity as we are familiar with it with the Members of the Godhead, as my gender references are far more modest than those implied in Song of Solomon. (I do, however, come closer to making that link in my novel Buddy and herein.) The Bible in that regard appears to be significantly bolder than me regarding sexual passion in the spiritual realm.

Obviously I perceive an intimate connection in the Song of Solomon regarding the relationship between the Father and the Holy Spirit as well as that between Jesus and His Church. Connected with that perception is my belief that the Holy Spirit essentially forms the subject matter of the Book of Proverbs. The commentary on the Song of Solomon in the Reformation Study Bible hints of this same connection in its acknowledgement of the Book’s emphasis on marital love:

“Many interpreters, both Jewish and Christian, have regarded the Song as an allegory of God’s love for Israel or the Church. The association of the book with Solomon, however, points us in the direction of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. Wisdom literature is distinguished, among other things, by its focus on the common sphere of human relationships. The Book of Proverbs uses language similar to that of the Song of Solomon in talking about marital love (Prov. 5:15-19), the subject of the Song. This love must finally be seen in the context of the even greater love of God.”

The commentary on the Song of Solomon presented in the New Schofield Reference Bible (1967 Edition edited by C. I. Schofield) echoes, but even more forcefully, that given in the Reformation Study Bible:

“Nowhere in Scripture does the unspiritual mind tread upon ground so mysterious and incomprehensible as in this book, whereas saintly men and women throughout the ages have found it a source of pure and exquisite delight. That the love of the divine Bridegroom, symbolized here by Solomon’s love for the Shulamite maiden, should follow the analogy of the marriage relationship seems evil only to minds that are so ascetic that marital desire itself appears to them to be unholy.

“The book is the expression of pure marital love as ordained by God in creation, and the vindication of that love as against both asceticism and lust – the two profanations of the holiness of marriage. Its interpretation is threefold: (1) as a vivid unfolding of Solomon’s love for a Shulamite girl; (2) as a figurative revelation of God’s love for His covenant people, Israel, the wife of the Lord (Isa. 54:5-6; Jer. 2:2; Ezek. 16:8-14, 20-21, 32, 38; Hos. 2:16, 18-20); and (3) as an allegory of Christ’s love for His heavenly bride, the Church (2 Cor. 11:1-2, refs., Eph 5:25-32).”

As there appears to be a general agreement among established Biblical authorities regarding the relevance of this openly passionate Book to Christ and His Church, and there appears to be a similarly general agreement among established Biblical authorities regarding the Diety of Jesus Christ, an inescapable observation must be made: At least one Member of the Divine Godhead is openly acknowledged to be fully capable and willing to (passionately) exercise His male gender. That said, why would one Member of the Godhead be endowed with such an attribute while the other two would not be? That utterly confusing and contradictory state of affairs could be acceptable only to an avowed ascetic, an attribute which I concur with the editors of the Schofield Bible to be a profanation of God and His Creation.

The Song of Solomon itself establishes, if somewhat indirectly, a female gender of the Holy Spirit by associating in no less than three verses (2:14, 5:2 and 6:9) the nature of the (eminently female) Shulamite with that of a dove. Actually, where a dove is noted in Scripture (KJV) and associated with a specific gender, that gender invariably is female. The particular verses where gender is described are: Genesis 8:9, 11; Psalm 68:13; Song of Solomon as noted above; and Jeremiah 48:28. The dove, of course, is a well-known symbol of the Holy Spirit as presented, for example, in Matthew 3:16:

“And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water; and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.”

After I produced several of these rebuttals to his understanding of God that He is without passion as we know it, the person who took me to task for attributing such passion to God offered the suggestion that while God Immanent might be endowed with passion, God Transcendent does not. Because the argument is somewhat complex, I include it herein as Appendix 2: Transcendence vs. Immanence on the Nature of God. (The reader may wish to refer also to Appendix 1 as a prequel to Appendix 2.) The bottom line is that God exhibits passion regardless of whether He is viewed as God Immanent or God Transcendent.

As a general response to the objections raised to Family of God, I repeat below some justifications for my position that were not fully developed in that book and were subsequently presented in some of my blogs that I had posted in friendofthefamily.wordpress.com.

Excerpt from posting entitled “A Deficiency”: If God commands us to love Him with all our hearts as indeed He does (Deuteronomy 6, Matthew 22), I would suggest that such would be easier to fulfill in a full family context than otherwise. Furthermore, it is difficult to reconcile the oneness of God in a Trinitarian setting without perceiving the unitizing force as love of the intimacy that we understand in marriage and family.

Excerpt from posting entitled “Friend of the Family”: It is obvious that the expression of gender in a family setting is among the most fundamental characteristics of our nature as humans, as well as the driving force behind our ability to love each other with a selfless fervor. In Scripture God simply asks us to expand upon the family-based element of this love, extending it as well to Him and our neighbors. The centrality of gender to our being, as presented in Scripture, strongly suggests that gender is a quality possessed by God.

Excerpts from postings entitled “Isaac’s Marriage to Rebekah” and “Rebekah’s Counterpart: In Genesis 24, Isaiah 54 and Ephesians 5, Scripture depicts the Church’s future marriage to Jesus in terms not only of romance, but of bearing creative fruit. It also sets a Scriptural precedent of identifying a masculine aggregate (spiritual mankind) as functionally female. Given that identification, there is no Scriptural justification for insisting upon a male functionality of the Holy Spirit just because the substantive identity is male.

Excerpts from postings entitled “Sometimes I’m Lonely” and “The Gender of the Holy Spirit”: Given that Scriptural references to the office of the Holy Spirit, such as ‘Comforter’, seem to connote a female function, it seems confusing and awkward to identify the Holy Spirit with a neutral or male gender. I know from reading and from face-to-face conversations that I’ve had with several Christian ‘authorities’ that they are indeed confused by their lack of understanding of the Holy Spirit. Yet they are terribly uncomfortable with any attempt to perceive the nature of the Holy Spirit, preferring instead to label this nature as a mystery. I cannot presume to doubt that such persons, in the face of this incomprehension of at least one Member of the Godhead, find it within themselves to love God with the fervor that the Shema of Moses suggests. I only know that for me such a mental gymnastic would be difficult. An additional comment: while being alone with a notion does suggest that one may be going off the deep end, it is not definitive in that regard. History is replete with examples of persons who have been alone with unpopular notions, only to have those same notions embraced as common knowledge at a later date. On the other hand, I suspect that in fact I may not be as alone as I implied in the earlier blogs, a point that I attempted to clarify in a later posting entitled “I’m Not As Alone as I Thought”. In that post I noted that in the book entitled Creation out of Nothing, which was published in 2004 and which was loaned to me by my friend and pastor, authors Paul Copan and William Lane Craig remarked that Church father Irenaeus fully associated Wisdom with the Holy Spirit. In their writing, the authors appear to show some sympathy with that connection. This association itself implies at least two items: first, that Wisdom is identified in Scripture, in Proverbs to be specific, as a female Persona; second, that despite a comment that I had received to the effect that theologians normally don’t associate Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, this very connection within the clergy was made very early on.

Excerpt from posting entitled “The Marriage of God With God”: Here again I noted how much more readily, in the context of family, one can love our Trinitarian God as He commanded. How can such an idea be out of the question when Scripture itself tells us that at least one Member of the Godhead will be married in the future?   Furthermore, this context is information-rich, allowing one to identify with ease the primary functions assumed by the Members of the Godhead.   Information richness is a hallmark of truth. Finally, the treatment of Mary by the Catholic Church demonstrates how much the Church has struggled with the issue of Jesus’ spiritual Mother, and how much confusion has entered into the issue in the process. Given that persistent state of confusion, I consider it my obligation, as I noted in this post, to attempt to present a reasonable alternative picture of the Godhead.

The bottom line is, of course, what Scripture has to say about the notion that the Godhead might Itself be a family, a characteristic that would make sense only if God the Son had a Holy Mother, a functionally feminine complement to the Holy Father. Can this notion be found anywhere in Scripture? Indeed it can, in Ephesians 3:14 and 15:

“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, . . .”

Finally, I wish to address herein a recently-acquired understanding of Jewish tradition that supports my viewpoint regarding the female functional nature of the Holy Spirit from a fresh perspective. That is the practice, as mentioned in the Wikipedia reference to the feast of Shavuot, of singling out the Book of Ruth for reading on that Jewish holy day. We know Shavuot, of course, as Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out upon the new Church. It is interesting to note that a feast that ultimately honors the Holy Spirit focuses on a Scriptural Book in which the central character is a female. I would think that most reasonable people would consider that to be more than a coincidence. In searching the Internet with the key word ‘Shavuot’, we also came across an article published by thewatchman.org that notes a close connection between Shavuot and the marriage union between YHWH and His people. Another coincidence?

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #20

Chapter 7: (continued) Reconciling Claims Against a Feminine Holy Spirit

 

 

Conferring Godhood on a Female

Is it really appropriate, I was asked, in the light of Paul’s comments regarding female participation in church activities, to confer Godhood on a female? The implication was that it is not.

Personally, I think that the reason that Paul, in 1 Timothy 2, expressed the desire to limit the role of females in the Church is that he wished all of us, given our future hope of participating so intimately in the Godhead, to remain suitably humble regarding the nature of that future participation. In that sense, he would have had no interest in lessening the position of the female in the present church; to the contrary, his interest would have been to keep all of us, male and female, in our places. Most interestingly, God Himself, when men fail to step up to the plate, puts women in positions generally thought to be reserved for men.

One can readily discern in the account of the prophetess Deborah in Chapter 4 of the Book of Judges that God didn’t categorically deny to women the exercise of leadership. Deborah was the fourth in a line of fifteen judges over Israel following the death of Joshua and before the institution of kings over the nation. The situation was extreme, to be sure, and apparently the men at that time had turned so far away from God that He not only handed over the prophetic role to a woman, but also made her a judge and a military leader. Given that the Israelite men at that time apparently failed to shoulder their responsibilities, Deborah’s actions should not be considered to be usurpations of authority as Paul admonished against in 1 Timothy 2:12. According to the account in Judges 4, Deborah served as a military leader only when Barak refused to confront the Canaanites without her. That certainly can not be construed as a usurpation of the man’s role, and it is apparent from what followed that God was there all the way with both Deborah and the woman Jael, who slew Sisera.

The scene is set for the story of Deborah in Judges 2:13-19:

“And they forsook the Lord, and served Baal and Ashtaroth. And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he delivered them into the hands of spoilers who spoiled them, and he sold them into the hands of their enemies round about, so that they could not any longer stand before their enemies. Whithersoever they went out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil, as the Lord had said, and as the lord had sworn unto them; and they were greatly distressed.

 

          “Nevertheless, the Lord raised up judges, who delivered them out of the hand of those who spoiled them. And yet they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them: they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments of the lord; but they did not so. And when the Lord raised them up judges, then the Lord was with the judge, and delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge; for it repented the Lord because of their groanings by reason of them who oppressed them and vexed them. And it came to pass when the judge was dead, that they returned, and corrupted themselves more than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them, and to bow down unto them; they ceased not from their own doings, nor from their stubborn way.”.

The full account of the exploits of Deborah and Jael in Judges Chapter 4 is given below.

“And the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord, when [the third prophet] Ehud was dead. And the Lord sold them into the hand of Jabin, king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor, the captain of whose host was Sisera, who dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles. And the children of Israel cried unto the Lord; for he had nine hundred shariots of iron; and twenty years he mightily oppressed the children of Israel.

 

          “And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, judged Israel at that time. And she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in Mount Ephraim; and the children of Israel came up to her for judgment. And she sent and called Barak, the son of Abinoam, out of Kedesh-naphtali, and seid unto him, Hath not the Lord God of Israel commanded, saying, Go and draw toward Mount Tabor, and take with thee ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali, and of the children of Zebulun? And I will draw unto thee, to the river Kishon, Sisera, the captain of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his multitude; and I will deliver him unto thine hand.

 

          “And Barak said unto her, If thou will go with me, then I will go; but if thou wilt not go with me, then I will not go. And she said, I will surely go with thee: notwithstanding, the journey that thou takest shall not be for thine honor; for the Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman. And Deborah arose, and went with Barak to Kedesh. And Barak called Zebulun and Naphtali to Kedesh; and he went up with ten thousand men at his feet: and Deborah went up with him. Now Heber, the Kenite, who was of the children of Hobab, the father-in-law of Moses, had severed himself from the Kenites, and pitched his tent unto the plain of Zaanaim, which is by Kedesh.

 

          “And they showed Sisera that Barak, the son of Abinoam, was gone up to Mount Tabor. And Sisera gathered together all his chariots, even nine hundred chariots of iron, and all the people who were with him, from Harosheth of the Gentiles unto the river of Kishon. And Deborah said unto Barak, Up; for this is the day in which the Lord hath delivered Sisera into thine hand. Is not the Lord gone out before thee? So Barak went down from Mount Tabor, and ten thousand men after him. And the Lord routed Sisera, and all his chariots, and all his host, with the edge of the sword before Barak, so that Sisera lighted down off his chariot, and fled away on his feet. But Barak pursued after the chariots, and after the host, unto Harosheth of the Gentiles: and all the host of Sisera fell upon the edge of the sword; and there was not a man left.

 

          “Howbeit Sisera fled away on his feet to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber, the Kenite; for there was peace between Jabin, the king of Hazor, and the house of Heber, the Kenite. And Jael went out to meet Sisera, and said unto him, Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not. And when he had turned in unto her into the tent, she covered him with a mantle. And he said unto her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water to drink, for I am thirsty. And she opened a bottle of milk, and gave him drink, and covered him. Again he said unto her, Stand in the door of the tent, and it shall be, when any man doth come and inquire of thee, and say, Is there any man here? That thou shalt say, No.

 

          “Then Jael, Heber’s wife, took of nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground; for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died. And, behold, as Barak pursued Sisera, Jael came out to meet him, and said unto him, Come,and I will show thee the man whom thou seekest. And when he cam into her tent, behold, Sisera lay dead, and the nail was in his temples.

 

          “So God subdued on that day Jabin, the king of Canaan, before the children of Israel. And the hand of the children of Israel prospered, and prevailed against Jabin, the king of Canaan, until they had destroyed Jabin, king of Canaan.”

The bottom line is that God is not so rigid that He unconditionally prohibits a female from serving in a role usually reserved for a male. Where in Scripture outside 1 Timothy 2 is there even a suggestion that He should categorically deny a female from sharing Godhood with Him? Furthermore, it is a reach to extrapolate that notion from Paul’s letter to Timothy. Even in that passage, Paul notes the cause of the proscription against women teaching as Eve’s deception in the Garden of Eden. It is more likely that Paul’s proscription came about through his perception that Eve had usurped her role as Adam’s wife in acting independently without his lead, perhaps in so doing violating her creation in the image of the Holy Spirit. This likely scenario, then, far from precluding a female Holy Spirit, actually supports the notion.

The nation of Israel has had another female leader much more recently, one whom God also used to save the country. The following story, while somewhat redundant to the general theme of the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit, serves to underscore the fact that Paul’s comments regarding the service of women in the Church has little or nothing to do with their capability of performing roles, with God’s blessing, more commonly associated with males.

Born in 1898 in Kiev, Russia (Ukraine), Golda Mebovitz immigrated to the United States at the age of 8. She grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She married Morris Meyerson in 1917 and with him she immigrated once more in 1921 to Israel, her homeland for the rest of her life.

Culminating a career in government service, Golda Meir was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1969, becoming the fourth P.M. of the new nation. (There may be a prophetic implication here between Deborah’s being the fourth judge – and effective leader – of Israel and Meir’s being the fourth modern leader.) Mrs. Meir served in that capacity until she resigned in 1974 at the age of 76, partly because of failing health.

In the year previous to her resignation she played a major role in extricating Israel from near-defeat in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Faced with terrible attrition in the coordinated Egyptian-Syrian assault, Israel was on the point of annihilation. Golda flew to the United States to plead with then-president Richard Nixon for support in the form of weaponry with which to resupply her troops.

Amazingly, Nixon’s Quaker mother had told him when he was a child that some day he would be in a position to help the Jews. When that happened, she said, he must do everything in his power to provide that help. Her message to her son was prophetic, and when Golda Meir approached him with her plea for help, he remembered his mother’s admonition. Accordingly, he embarked on a massive resupply operation for Israel. The action saved the day, and with that help Israeli soldiers turned the near-defeat into victory.

This modern incident supports the Scriptural suggestions that God doesn’t mind if a lady takes over the reins once in a while. While it’s rare, it’s obviously not forbidden. Paul’s comments in 1 Timothy 2 related to Eve and her female offspring, not to the Holy Spirit. Nor do they have anything to do with women’s future post-resurrection roles.

If one wants to find a mindset that really represses females, all one has to do is go to China or India or visit a Mosque, talk (in depth) to a Muslim, or digest the tenets of Shari’a law. Interestingly, Islam, while treating women as greatly inferior to men, also denies the deity of Christ and the existence of the Holy Trinity, and advocates the murder of Christians and Jews. Jesus is there, to be sure, but as a mere prophet who subordinates Himself to Mohammad, denies that He died on the cross and supports the Muslim antipathy toward Christians and Jews. I personally think that God’s view of womanhood, as gleaned from Scripture, is vastly different than that promoted in the anti-Christian Muslim faith.   The odd fact, as noted above, that whereas Deborah was the fourth judge over ancient Israel, Golda Meir was the fourth leader of the modern nation of Israel, might be repeated in the context of demonstrating God’s continuing hand over His people.

Even if one would insist upon a Godhood reserved exclusively for males, I suggest only a female function for the Holy Spirit, not a female substance. I would remind the objector that my view of the Holy Spirit is as a compositional male (substantively) as well as a functional female. In that capacity the Holy Spirit would indeed be capable of assuming a male role, notably the exercise of Will belonging to the Father. That the Holy Spirit has not assumed this lofty position to date is simply one of obedience to a functional role that is complementary to the Father’s will given the continuing presence of the Father. This brought the disobedience of satan (Isaiah 14) to mind, which was of that nature. The issue also raised the companion issue of subordination of one Member of the Godhead to another, which appears to many as a heretical stance. In that regard, the specter of the old Arian heresy rears its ugly head. Here again, I had addressed the Arian heresy in Family of God, noting how it had no application in my thinking. The Arian heresy, in placing Jesus below the Father as lesser than God, is nowhere close to what I propose about the Members of the Godhead, which is more a voluntary and time-specific functional subordination, not one of intrinsic capability. Scripture itself endorses my stance. In John 14:28, for example, Jesus declares the Father to be greater than Him, which makes no statement whatsoever regarding either His Godhood or His capability of assuming the Father’s role. Regarding the issue of precedence between the Father and Jesus, I cite Revelation 3:14, wherein Jesus names Himself “the beginning of the creation of God”. I don’t think this departs greatly from the Westminster definition of the Godhead, but to those who would claim that it does, I remind them that the Westminster Confession is extra-Scriptural.

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #19

Chapter 7: (continued) Reconciling Claims Against a Feminine Holy Spirit

 

 

 

Linking the Holy Spirit to Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs

 

 

I was chided for making a “hasty” connection between the Book of Proverbs and the Holy Spirit. The person who said this to me himself spoke somewhat in haste, knowing nothing about the amount of time I had spent on the subject before committing my thoughts to writing.

The connection that I have made among the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom and the Holy Spirit was not made in haste. It developed over a period exceeding a decade. I could construe his remark about my hastiness to be a bit on the arrogant side in contradiction to his usual gentle demeanor, but instead I shall give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming instead that he honestly thought that it would take only a modicum of reflection on the subject to convince oneself that the Holy Spirit and Wisdom are not one and the same. Allow me, in the following commentary, to demonstrate otherwise.

Along with his comment regarding the haste of my connection between the Wisdom presented in Proverbs and the Holy Spirit, the individual who took me to task added, regarding the prevailing understanding of the Book of Proverbs, that the personification of Wisdom is simply a literary device and was never intended to represent an actual Person. But in opposition to this view, Wisdom in the original Greek has a name of a person, and that name is Sophia. Sophia has a history of being linked, in the Jewish and early Christian religions, with the Personhood of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Himself, in Luke 7:35, associates Wisdom with motherhood, an eminently personal attribute.

“But wisdom is justified of all her children.”

 

While that verse possibly could be interpreted as being merely a figure of speech, Jesus in Luke 11:49 and 50 more emphatically personifies Wisdom:

“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute, that the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation.”

Regarding the connection that I presented in Family of God between the Holy Spirit and the Book of Proverbs, I emphatically confirm my claim as to that connection, citing Proverbs 3:13-20 (particularly verse 19 in light of Genesis 1:1-5) and 8:22-36, in which Wisdom acquires a distinct Personhood and is cast in the role of complementary companion to the Father in the act of creation, which I take as a distinctly female role. I disagree with the prevailing Protestant presupposition that Proverbs 8 refers to Jesus Christ, as well as the prevailing Catholic presupposition that Proverbs 8 refers to Mary, because in both cases the presuppositions simply don’t fit the context of that chapter. I also could cite Proverbs 9 and 31 in that regard, and Psalm 104:30 which links creation with the Holy Spirit. (Job 26:13 is similar in that regard.) Although I prefer to remain entirely within Scripture in my responses, I also could cite Benjamin Warfield’s commentary in page 122 his book The Holy Spirit that “In both Testaments the Spirit of God appears distinctly as the executive of the Godhead [italics in the original].” This reference is particularly appropriate, in that the person who made the objection and I both agree as to our high opinion of Warfield. I also point to Warfield’s more lengthy discussion on pages 124 and 125 that elaborated on the role of the Holy Spirit in the act of creation. I wholeheartedly agree with the person who made the objection on the correctness of linking the Holy Spirit with an executive role, which I consider to be purely responsive (to the Will of the Father), and therefore represents a female role as noted in my Introduction above.

The linkage given in Proverbs with Wisdom in an executive role, as well as its personification of Wisdom as a complement to God the Father amply justifies the inclusion of the Holy Spirit in that linkage. Furthermore, the whole tenor of Proverbs identifies the Holy Spirit as a functional female.

Beyond those comments, I note that other passages in Scripture besides Proverbs, as well as the context of Scripture in its entirety, strongly suggest a female functionality for the Holy Spirit, which adds weight to my entire argument as well as to my connection of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit as presented in Proverbs. As examples I cite Jesus Christ (John 3:3-8) and Paul (Ephesians 5:31 and 32).

In John 3, Jesus explicitly links the Holy Spirit with (Spiritual) birth, an undeniably female function, while in Ephesians 5, Paul declares the spiritual marriage between Christ and the Church, implicating God (we wholeheartedly agree on the deity of Christ) in the role of marriage partner. If God as Jesus is involved in romance, isn’t it possible (I would say probable) that God the Father and God the Holy Spirit are involved in romance as well? Surely, given the Scriptural certainty of the marriage between Jesus and His Church, the notion of a genderless and therefore passionless and fruitless nature of such a union would not only be incomprehensible, but runs counter to the whole tenor of both Scripture and Creation.

Furthermore, in Ephesians 5, Paul repeats Adam’s words to the effect that a man shall leave his father and mother and join his wife, and they two shall become one flesh. In applying this entire passage to Jesus, does not Paul imply that Jesus had a Mother to leave? As there is a general consensus that Jesus existed long before He came in the flesh, we also must agree that here Paul is not speaking of Mary as Jesus’ Mother.

It may be the case that most theologians don’t perceive any compelling reason to equate Christ and the Church to Adam’s words regarding leaving father and mother and joining unto his wife to become one flesh. But Jesus Himself as quoted in Matthew 19:4-8 appears to attach a significance to Adam’s words that transcends a mere man-woman relationship. In addition, there are other passages in Scripture, including Genesis 24 and Isaiah 54, that tend to confirm the notion that in the spiritual realm the Church shall indeed serve in a female role as the Bride of Christ.

In further support of my equation of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, I cite Isaiah 11:1 and 2:

“And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots; And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord,. . .”

Another item that presents itself in a reading of Proverbs with an eye to the Personhood of Wisdom is the implied intimacy between mankind and Wisdom in the warning given in Proverbs 8:36: he that sins against Wisdom wrongs his own soul. Could this imply that our own purpose and function in the spiritual realm might actually parallel that of the Holy Spirit? There may well be a correlation between this caution and the one expressed by Jesus in Matthew 12:31 and 32:

“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

These are strong words, and they make a strong connection between Wisdom and the Holy Spirit. Perhaps theologians instinctively sense this correlation. Perhaps also not wishing to shoot themselves in the foot and instead of attempting to truly understand what is being said here, they duck away from presenting anything controversial regarding the Holy Spirit. Historically, that has certainly been the situation with numerous theological expositions regarding the Holy Spirit, all of which end up complicating an extremely simple understanding of the nature of the Trinity by claiming that ultimately man is unable to grasp it.

I must express my disappointment with all such expositors for allowing this unjustified fear to prevent them from furnishing a richer, more love-inducing understanding of their God to the Christian community. How can we possibly fulfill God’s greatest commandment to us to love Him with all our hearts if we cannot understand Him? How can we truly worship God if we turn our hearts away from His own Word? I assert with the Revised Westminster Confession that the three Persons of the Trinity have but one substance – that of the Father, shared among them, and three distinct Personalities, or roles. I identify those roles as Father, Mother, and Son, wherein the Three constitute one God in the context of Family, by virtue of the love intrinsic to that structure which, of course, is idealized in its application to God. This identification I make does not represent any cleverness on my part; rather, its very simplicity gives me cause to suspect that many followers of God would do well to actually follow God in love tempered by fear instead of fear tempered by love, and to follow God Himself instead of adhering so stubbornly to the traditions of man.

Moreover, I would suggest that in a functional sense an all-male Godhead represents a model that can be construed with little difficulty to support homosexuality, in opposition to God’s detestation of that practice, as may be found in Genesis 19, Leviticus 18 and Romans 1.

As a final comment regarding my association of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, I note that Irenaeus, commonly accepted as a respected Church Father, also directly equated Wisdom with the Holy Spirit, and he did so a number of years before I (and others of my ilk) did. It may be said in response that Irenaeus as a human had his problems, one being his belief in Apostolic succession. I thoroughly agree that such should not be revered, pointing to another Church great, Martin Luther, who not only was a rabid anti-Semite, but was devoted to scatological quips and who, by the way, thought that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ consort. On the other hand, Irenaeus’ peccadillos, like those of Luther, should not lead one to reject everything that they said or believed.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church, by elevating Mary as she did, did not completely deny the family of God the balancing femininity it so badly needs, so maybe Irenaeus should be respected a bit more in the Protestant community. Another thing the Catholic Church did for the feminine which the Protestant Church did not was to include the Book of Wisdom within the body of canonical, and therefore considered to be inspired, Old Testament books. This beautifully-written book furnishes several interesting passages suggestive of the identity of Wisdom as the feminine Holy Spirit. Selected passages are presented below:

“And in your wisdom have established humankind . . .Give me Wisdom, the consort at your throne . . . Now with you is Wisdom, who knows your works and was present when you made the world; Who understands what is pleasing in your eyes and what is conformable with your commands. Send her forth from your holy heavens and from your glorious throne dispatch her that she may be with me and work with me, that I may know what is pleasing to you. For she knows and understands all things, and will guide me prudently in my affairs and safeguard me to her glory . . . Or who can know your counsel, unless you give Wisdom and send your holy spirit from on high?

– Wisdom 9:2, 4, 9-11, 17

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #18

Chapter 7: (continued) Reconciling Claims Against a Feminine Holy Spirit

Ignoring Biblical References to Gender Neutrality

Galatians 3:28 was cited as Scriptural proof that heaven will be genderless. The verse reads as follows:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

Regarding the verse cited above, I could go further. I also could quote Matthew 22:29 and 30:

“Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven.”

Neither of these passages remotely suggest that heaven is a gender-neutral domain. Properly interpreted, they say anything but that. Instead, they refer to individuals rather than the Church, which, in a collective sense, is strongly identified in Scripture itself as possessing gender.

The answer to this objection has been given in numerous places in the Bible, wherein Paul in great detail describes individuals in the spiritual realm as components of a greater body, the Church, and goes on to describe the Church as a feminine entity. An example of the aggregate nature of the Church is given in Ephesians 4:11-16:

“And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers. For the perfecting of the saints for the work of the ministry for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive; but speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, who is the head, even Christ; from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.”

1 Corinthians 12:4-27 also represents a passage describing the Church as an aggregate of individual persons, and is even more detailed in its depiction of our individuality as parts of a greater and different whole than the passage in Ephesians 4:

“Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences in administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit. For to one is given, by the Spirit, the word of wisdom; to another, the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; to another, faith by the same Spirit; to another, the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; to another, the working of miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, discerning of spirits; to another, various kinds of tongues; to another, the interpretation of tongues. But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Greeks, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it, therefore, not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it, therefore, not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members, every one of them, in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, are necessary: and those members of the body, which we think to be less honorable, upon these we bestow more abundant honor; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness. For our comely parts have no need; but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to that part which lacked, that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”

As Jesus retains His masculinity and the Church assumes her femininity in the spiritual realm, gender quite obviously applies to the Body as a whole rather than to individuals. The Church as a Body is a composite rather than a single redeemed human individual. Obviously, given the mystery that Paul explained in Ephesians 5, Jesus was referring in Matthew 22 to the relationship between redeemed humans rather than the relationship the Church as a whole will enjoy as Wife of Christ. The exact same comment applies as well to Galatians 3:28: Paul spoke only regarding the inter-human relationship which, in the spiritual realm, apparently won’t include individual human sexuality. That says precisely nothing about the human-God relationship.

Perhaps it is this kind of mistaken understanding riding on the back of shallow thought that led Catholic theologian Father Macquarrie and a host of other would-be expositors of Scripture throughout the centuries, in recognizing gender-based traits within the Godhead, to attribute facets of both genders to each of its Divine Members.

We visited Father Macquarrie earlier in Chapter 5, noting there the difficulties associated with his viewpoint of shared gender characteristics, wherein the gender identification of each is so weak as to be safely asexual.

There is an interesting confirmation in Psalm 34:2 regarding the gender of our souls in the spiritual realm:

“My soul shall make her boast in the Lord; the humble shall hear of it, and be glad.”

This particular quote came from the King James Version of the Bible. While some other versions substitute “it” for “her” and still others manipulate the grammar to avoid the gender issue altogether, the Young’s Literal Translation uses the word “herself”, which agrees with the KJV as to gender. In order to avoid a conflict with Galatians 3:28, David’s words here may be interpreted as his viewing his soul as functionally integrated into the Church as a whole.

The attempt to use these passages to demonstrate a lack of gender in the spiritual realm exposes an inability to differentiate between our individual selves and our collective self. While it is apparently true that as individuals we will not partake of gender in the spiritual realm, it is equally clear from Ephesians 5:31 and 32 that our collective spiritual attribute will be of the female gender:

“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”

If, now, we revisit the passages noted above dealing with the lack of gender in the individual spiritual person, we see the basic shallowness of an attempt to claim, on that basis, that there is no gender in the spiritual realm. For what would a gendered ear look like? Or how would a sexual foot accomplish that function? At the very least, it would impart a brand new meaning to the term “playing footsie”. Would one have to make special provisions, for the sake of modesty, toward prohibiting the practice of walking barefoot? Shoe salespersons would have to be watched very carefully – perhaps making them submit to licensing. Of course, it would open an enormous market for suggestive footwear.

But as to the Church as the composite spiritual Bride of Christ, that’s an entirely different story.

What do Christians think this marriage will involve? An unconsummated, virginal union basically empty of the natural meaning of union itself? A union in name only, incapable of bearing fruit, as suggested by the natural generation of offspring by almost every life form on earth, including humanity?

Ignoring Passages in Which the Father Appears to Claim that Attributes of the Holy Spirit Belong to Himself

The specific passage for which I was taken to task for ignoring was Jeremiah 10:10-13, in which the Father claims possession of attributes such as wisdom and discretion that are usually attributed to the Holy Spirit:

“But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God, and an everlasting king; at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation. Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heaven and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens. He hath made the earth by his power; he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion. When he uttereth his voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens, and he causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out of his treasures.”

I respond, in the first place, by asking whether God here was speaking as the Father alone, or whether He was speaking on behalf of the Trinity. But since the person taking me to task presupposed that the Father was speaking only for Himself, I shall, for the sake of argument, assume that he was correct in this presupposition.

In the context of my view of the spousal relationship between Father and the Holy Spirit, I already have noted that a major characteristic of this union, particularly if it is a perfect one, is that it necessarily involves mutual possession. The divine Partners in a spousal setting own each other. In that context, it is logically sound to view the passage in Jeremiah quoted above as the Father describing features and deeds of His Holy Spirit in a possessive sense.

It is only if the relationship between the Father and the Holy Spirit is seen in the far looser context of a committee relationship, as would be appropriate to the prevailing viewpoint, that the Father speaking in a possessive sense about the Holy Spirit doesn’t seem to fit, and the more likely interpretation would be that the Father was speaking of Himself instead of the Holy Spirit.

It’s all in the presuppositions. My own ones continue, at least, to be self-consistent.

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #17

Chapter 7: (continued) Reconciling Claims Against a Feminine Holy Spirit

 

 

The “He” Issue

As to the proliferation in Scripture of a masculine pronoun in reference to the Holy Spirit, I addressed that issue in detail in Family of God. As my argument there fully acknowledged the Scriptural use of a male pronoun for the Holy Spirit, the number of repetitions in that use is meaningless to the argument: just one would have sufficed.

Basically, I said in Family of God that the Holy Spirit, while performing an essentially female function in the context that I have defined in the introduction above, could also legitimately be considered to be male with respect to substance, or essence or composition. I went on to speculate that the Scriptural emphasis on the male substance as opposed to the female function may actually be a promise to mankind regarding his future spiritual participation in the Godhead as the Bride of Christ. This viewpoint, however, applies to the entirety of redeemed mankind who constitute the Church, and not to redeemed individuals, who simply comprise components of that Body.

A paradox stands in the way of internalizing this new and welcome information. This inconsistency first must be resolved in order that we may fully accept it. The issue is this: we, redeemed mankind, are collectively treated as masculine whereas in Scripture we are given to understand our spiritual role in relationship to Jesus as feminine. This conflict requires us to differentiate between our gender as an aggregate of individual elements and our gender in a functional application. Thus, regarding our future spiritual identity, as an aggregate we shall be male whereas functionally we shall be female.

I expanded on this thought in my blog friendofthefamily.wordpress.com by noting that as Bride of Christ, redeemed (spiritual) mankind itself, while being designated as male in composition (mankind is a male descriptor), will obviously be performing a female functional role that is harmoniously complementary to Jesus Christ.

A conflict of much the same nature exists in our understanding of the Holy Trinity: Among the Members of the Trinity, the First and Second Persons, as Father and Son, are naturally considered to be male in gender. Regarding the Third Person, the Holy Spirit, however, there is no small amount of gender ambiguity. Obviously, if future mankind can legitimately be male in composition and female in function, the same attributes may apply in an equally non-contradictory manner between the other two Members of the Godhead. Scripture as most of us know it, however, attempts to remove that ambiguity by routinely applying the pronoun ‘He’ to the Holy Spirit. In doing so without explanatory or qualifying remarks, Scripture automatically assigns only the male gender to this Divine Person. It has often been commented, however, by respected theologians, that Scripture elsewhere seems to develop an image of the Holy Spirit that is female in nature. We saw this in the review in Chapter 4 of some Christian authors who attempted to describe the nature of the Holy Spirit. To the Holy Spirit are regularly assigned the attributes of comfort, nurturing and compassion, supported by statements made by Jesus Himself. These female attributes are functional descriptors, whereas the pronoun ‘He’, when applied to the Holy Spirit in Scripture, refers to the Divine Person in the sense of object. There is a striking parallelism here with the object/function gender differentiation of the Church. It is tempting to point to that parallelism to claim the same object/function gender differentiation of the Holy Spirit: male in substance, but female in function.

Could it be, then, that the use in Scripture of the pronoun ‘He’ in reference to the Holy Spirit, instead of constituting a gratuitous introduction of confusion, is related to this parallelism? Despite that possibility, the mainstream Christian Church is committed to its view of the Holy Spirit as being gender-neutral, masculine or sometimes even hermaphroditic in basic nature.

After having said all that regarding the gender distinction between substance and function, I now will address a little-known but very significant complicating factor in this ‘He’ business that may well settle the issue in favor of a fully feminine Holy Spirit without the necessity of making an object/function differentiation. It turns out that while we may still be able to claim that Scripture is inerrant in the original, the Scripture to which we have ready access isn’t the original. It’s been tampered with, probably at some time after Constantine made Christianity a state religion in the early fourth century A.D.

It is an undeniable fact that with regard to Scripture, “Church authorities” did indeed engage in a sexual cleansing operation, for not only were the Godhead and Mary stripped of their sexuality, but there is indisputable evidence that Scripture itself was altered to sexually mutilate the Godhead by substituting a weak all-male congress for what always was perceived by the Jews and also by the earliest Christians as a Divine Family consisting of Father, Mother and Son.

In Isaiah 51:9 and 10, for example, the King James Version reads:

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it who hast dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”

It didn’t always read that way. The original read as follows, and some Bible scholars assert that the neutering was deliberate:

“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not She who hast cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not She who hast dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”

According to a noted scholar, retired Methodist minister, theologian and Greek language scholar, the earliest Hebrew Christians had access to Scripture that presented the Holy Spirit as a feminine Persona; this feminine persisted within the Syriac branch of Christianity and within the Gnostic sect as well. A prime example of this is the Scriptural passage known as the Siniatic Palimpsest (a palimpsest is a recycled writing medium, wherein a second layer of writing was applied over the original, the original usually consisting of more important information) uncovered toward the end of the nineteenth century by Agnes Lewis. The original writing included portions of the Gospel of John of which a quote from Jesus Himself in John 14:26 asserts the following (translation attributed to Danny Mahar):

“But She – the Spirit – the Paraclete whom He will send to you – my Father – in my name – She will teach you everything; She will remind you of what I have told you.”

This scholar indicates that Paul, among the numerous early Hebrew Christians, used the version of John’s Gospel from which this passage came. References to the Siniatic Palimpsest may be found on the Internet. Unfortunately, many of the translations into English found under the search phrase “Siniatic Palimpsest” apply without justification the more conventional “he” rather than the “she” of the original language. Some Internet references, however, do acknowledge the proper “she”.

The identification of the Holy Spirit as feminine in the Siniatic Palimpsest is no small matter, for this document is the oldest of all copies of the Gospels, being dated to the second century A.D. It is a recognized principle of textual interpretation, even by the most conservative of Biblical scholars, that the older the text, the closer it is thought to be to the original Scripture. This is particularly important in light of the fact that there are no other Scriptural texts between it and the oldest Greek text dated to the fourth century A.D. One can only surmise that between the second and fourth centuries Scripture had been altered to substitute “he” for “she” in references to the Holy Spirit. Even then, at least one reference to the Holy Spirit as “she”, apparently having been overlooked in the switch, was allowed to remain. As Romans 9:25 reads in our King James Bible,

“As he saith also in Osee [Hosea], I will call them my people, who were not my people; and her beloved, who was not beloved.”

Despite the overt mistranslation of the pronoun “She” to “It” or “He” in modern English translations of Scripture, these modified versions still provide sufficient evidence of the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit to convince all but the most reactionary of individuals. Among the most assertive in that regard is the Glory of God, the Hebrew feminine Shekinah, who indwelt the temples at their dedication. The Shekinah is discussed in detail in Chapter 8.

Why would Church authorities be so boldly heretic as to deliberately alter Scripture as to mislead the Church regarding the gender of the Holy Spirit and to remove all traces of sexuality from God? A number of possibilities have been raised by multiple scholars, among which two stand out as particularly plausible candidates. First, the Gnostic Christian community, which adhered to a feminine Holy Spirit, went overboard on some of its misunderstandings of Christianity, and was considered to be a dangerously heretic sect; in its attempt to stamp out this notion of God, the community that eventually came to represent mainstream Christianity engaged in a wholesale rejection of its precepts, in effect throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Second, the presence of femininity within the Godhead came perilously close to pagan theology, which involved the worship of divine families consisting of father, mother and son, and was often given to lewd ritualistic behavior, as lamented by Augustine among others. Here again, in her attempt to separate herself from these other religions, mainstream Christianity rejected the notion of a divine family out of hand, once more tossing the baby out with the bathwater. I will offer a third and more basic possibility when I revisit this issue in Chapter 11.

The explanation for the use of masculine pronouns in reference to the Holy Spirit may be simpler yet than those that I have given above: that in marriage the male and female members are components of a greater unity than either of them alone and as one, they would rightly be addressed by the gender of the dominant Member, the male.

In both the book and the blog my implied definition of ‘female’ was ‘complementary other’. In neither venue did I connote in that description anything physical or overtly suggestive of a link between the spiritual gender that may be applicable to the Godhead with the manner in which sexuality is applied to humans, as such attributes that God may have in that realm are completely beyond our understanding. In no case was I attempting to contradict Scripture or to suggest that Scripture might possibly contradict itself. The reasons that I have presented above for a male reference to the Holy Spirit imply no such contradiction.

Undoubtedly the most influential objection to the view of a functionally feminine Holy Spirit has been the numerous references in Scripture to the Holy Spirit in terms of masculine pronouns, representing the big “He” issue, although less frequently the neuter pronoun “It” is also used.  A partial listing of references to the masculine ‘He’ or ‘Him’ includes John 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7, 8 and 13-15, and Hebrews 3:7 and 10:15.

But it wasn’t always that way. In the Hebrew Old Testament, the Holy Spirit, as the Ruah or Shekinah, was viewed as feminine. The switch to masculinity occurred in the New Testament.

For the sake of argument, suppose that the gender switch from a Hebrew to a basically Gentile Holy Spirit is ignored and that the use of male pronouns for a functional female Entity is logically justified. If we were to summarize the possibilities what would that justification consist of? It turns out that there are several plausible reasons, all of which permit a male descriptor to apply to a functionally female Holy Spirit. As I had noted in my Christian nonfiction work Family of God and in my novel Buddy, I had explained the various ways that Scripture may have quite logically referred to the Holy Spirit in terms of “He” within the context of a functionally female gender. One possibility is that the relationship between Father and Holy Spirit is so perfectly close that the Holy Spirit is considered to be One with the Father, as suggested by the wife’s use of her husband’s surname in our own society. There is justification for that in Genesis 5:1 and 2, wherein the perfection of unity in love carries with it an implication with respect to the name of the female partner.

“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.”

This is a love kind of thing. God never intended either a man or a woman to remain as an individual. Instead, He created them to be in union together, one man and one wife. This unity is emphasized by His calling them both by the name of the male, a custom that is practiced to this very day. In that context, the “He” associated with the Holy Spirit is intended to convey the unity between Father and Holy Spirit, wherein the Holy Spirit is always considered not as separate, but united in everlasting love with the Father.

The significance of this passage to the view of the Holy Spirit as a Complementary Other to the Father is that it justifies the use of a male pronoun in referring to a basically female Holy Spirit. It implies that the bond between Father and Holy Spirit, representing the image upon which the bond between Adam and Eve was based, is so perfectly close that they can truly considered to be one. In that context, the male pronoun applied to the Holy Spirit would represent the perfection of that bond.

Another, as has been detailed above, is that the male appellation suggests a male composition of an otherwise functional female Entity, referring back to the origin from the Father of the Holy Spirit’s substance. If indeed, as I believe, the Holy Spirit was originally part of the Father and came out of His out of a loving desire on His part to share, then She possesses the substance of the masculine Father. Perhaps also the Holy Spirit, like the Church, comprises a multiplicity of components, which, in the aggregate, may be considered male in the same sense as the humanity that comprises the Church.

Yet another is that the Holy Spirit was sent to us in Jesus Christ’s name, which, of course, is male.

Finally, the male pronouns may represent the promise to us that the Holy Spirit is a gendered model prophetic of our own future state wherein we, collective humanity and therefore masculine in the aggregate, will in the spiritual realm as the Bride of Christ assume a functionally feminine role.

The obvious connection between the feminine Shekinah described in Exodus 40 and 1 Kings 8 and the indwelling Holy Spirit described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and referred to by Paul is, of itself, overwhelming evidence of the feminine gender of the Holy Spirit. The link between the Holy Spirit and the Shekinah Glory will be discussed at length in Chapter 8.

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #16

Chapter 7: Reconciling Claims Against a Feminine Holy Spirit

 

My high school trigonometry teacher, the one who entertained lascivious thoughts toward Lorelei, wasn’t the first teacher with whom I had an odd encounter. In the ninth grade, I had Mr. Edwards as my teacher in earth science, a man I remember quite vividly for the disturbing information he hurled in my direction after class. The bell had rung and the other students had dashed for the door, which was our usual mode of exit. I hung back that day, because a large wall map of the world caught my attention. I had walked up to the map and was studying it intently when Mr. Edwards verbally accosted me.

“Don’t even think about it!” he shouted from behind his desk. Red-headed and red-faced, he was Irish to the core and way beyond, and he had a voice to match his brash demeanor. That’s all he had to say. I remember being amazed that he knew exactly what I was thinking, and that in that one short sentence I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew.

“They don’t fit!” he continued. “It’s just an accident of geography. Chance, if you will. Africa and South America were never joined; science now knows without a doubt that they were separate continents from the beginning of the world billions of years ago.” He dismissed me from his mind and went back to the papers he was reviewing. I kept looking at the map, not sure what to believe. It seemed so basic, so obvious, and yet here was a man of science, an expert in the field, an authority telling me different. I finally shrugged my shoulders, accepting the fact that Mr. Edwards knew far more about the subject than I did.

Many years later I got wind of the fascinating new theory of plate tectonics, and the collateral damage it did to Mr. Edwards’ understanding of geology. His authority, at least as far as I was concerned, was overthrown in an instant, my only regret the time I had wasted accepting his pronouncement. But at least I learned something: don’t accept everything that “experts” say as truth.

That new understanding about authorities and truth was reinforced in college, where I learned that respected scientists had declared around the beginning of the twentieth century that virtually everything knowable about the universe had been uncovered; all that remained was the calculation of certain physical constants and other rather mundane cleanup work. That pronouncement was made, of course, before Einstein had arrived on the scene, development started on atomic physics and quantum mechanics, the Van Allen radiation belt was discovered, exploration had begun of our solar system and the uncovering of the vast intricacy of the molecular machinery of life had not yet borne its amazing fruit.

Several years after college I became fascinated over the controversy between Immanuel Velikovsky and Carl Sagan regarding the visitation on earth of catastrophes of planetary scope. Sagan, as a member in excellent standing of the scientific community, was the expert, whereas Velikovsky was an interloper who was daring to trespass on the intellectual property of the evolution/uniformitarian-oriented community. What really stuck in Sagan’s craw was that Velikovsky was basing much of his innovative theory of enormous catastrophes that occurred within the memory of man on the Bible, specifically the accounts of Moses around the fifteenth century B.C. regarding the Exodus, and, about fifty years later, of Joshua’s long day (and America’s long night) and of Isaiah in the eighth century B.C. How dare the man contaminate science with notions of God, Sagan fumed. But Velikovsky had predicted certain things on the basis of his thesis, like his certainty that when man was able to measure the surface temperature of Venus, he would find the planet to be so hot that it wouldn’t support human life. Sagan scoffed at the notion, asserting on the basis of his own spectroscopic studies of Venus that the planet was earthlike in temperature. We all know how Sagan’s notion worked out in that regard. In fact, Sagan and others within their scientific clique were continually surprised by what our space probes were finding, all of which confirmed Velikovsky’s predictions and negated Sagan’s sneering, intellectually empty rebuttals. Most profoundly, Mars was found to have suffered immense damage, which was a revelation that would have been unthinkable to the mainstream scientific community back when.

Then along came the father-son Alvarez team, who managed to toss the mainstream uniformitarian notion into the intellectual trash heap, regardless of the fact that the scientific community continues to dig for it among the rest of their intellectual garbage, attempting to somehow resurrect it and restore it to its former glory. Nat Geo is doing its best to help out, but so far the collective IQ of the population that it and the media are managing to convince is steadily progressing downward to zero.

More recently, the biological sciences are making amazing strides, all of which are undercutting the theory of evolution.

The bottom line is that a revolution has been taking place within the scientific community for several years now. Not much is being said about it to the public at large; nevertheless, a good many scientists who have been venerated over the last several decades as “experts” and “authorities” have been uncovered as entertaining embarrassingly obsolete and downright wrong views on the subjects on which they had so arrogantly held forth.

Can the same be said about our religious theological “authorities”? I’ll give you an example and let you decide. For starters, there are Catholic Christian authorities and Protestant Christian authorities who are theologically separated by a very large intellectual fence. While Protestant “authorities” pronounce their Catholic brethren to be entirely wrong about their veneration of Mary, their papacy, and the Eucharist, to name but a few items of contention, their Catholic counterparts are equally vehement in pronouncing their Protestant brethren lacking in their understanding in these same areas. What does this say about the objective truth of these matters? Hint: both sides can be wrong, or one side can be wrong and the other right. But both sides cannot be right, which requires that at least one very large group of theological “experts” be wrong.

Aw, I’ll just come out and say it without beating around the bush. Both sides are burdened with some very wrong theology. To back that up, I’ll first address a few glaring difficulties with the Catholic Church. A big one is the Catholic insertion of the papacy between us and our One Mediator, Jesus Christ, in open contradiction to Scripture, not only in Hebrews, but in general throughout the Bible. Another big one is the Catholic near-deification of Mary, wherein the Church laity is called upon to communicate with Mary at the expense of praying to Jesus or the other Members of the Godhead. A third is the Catholic insistence on Mary’s perpetual virginity, despite the fact that the virgin birth of Jesus was a functional necessity that allowed Him to be both God and man, free of Adam’s original sin and carried with it no connotation that moral purity involved sexual abstinence. A fourth and fifth are Mary’s immaculate conception and bodily assumption into heaven, which are extra-Biblical assumptions. A sixth is the continuing corruption within the Church leadership, its latest manifestation being unthinkable sexual misconduct, a difficulty that was preventable under a more perfect understanding of God and what He is looking for in mankind. And then there’s the issue about the opulence of the Vatican and its treasures of art, gold and precious jewels, and of the pomp that accompanies all these physical assets in spite of the clear Scriptural teaching that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this earth.

Now, as to the equally grave difficulties associated with the Protestant Church. First, there is the overabundance of discord from one sect to another, indicating the same kind of theological error associated with the discord between the Catholic and Protestant Churches. While I have applauded such differences of opinion in the past as indicating that some Christians care enough about their faith to think about the issues, this unresolved squabbling also indicates a murky understanding. Much of this discord has to do with issues that are, at best, connected indirectly with Scripture, and, while at first glance that may seem to be somewhat trivial, most actually are quite important. Among these are the controversy over free will vs. election (Calvinism vs. Arminianism), infant baptism, the gifts of the Holy Spirit in modern Christianity, the meaning of prosperity, the almost complete indifference toward Mary and the denial, in open contradiction to Scripture (particularly John 3 and Ephesians 5), of feminine motherhood in the economy of God, and the sterility of the Godhead. And what’s going on with all this falling away of the mainstream Churches from Scriptural truth, such as the popularity of the Chrislam movement, the ordination of Gays and the widespread ignorance of the Bible? To top off this list of ills is the odd indifference of some branches of the mainstream Protestant Church to the magnitude and nature of the love intrinsic to the Godhead and how this love harmonizes with and moderates the Godhead’s other attributes.

We thus approach our attempt at reconciliation with the understanding that while Scripture itself is inerrant in the original, the interpretations of it associated with mainstream theology are every bit as susceptible to human error and misunderstanding as other human endeavors.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

 

• Genesis 1:26, 27

From this passage we get the idea that the gender separation is intrinsic to the Godhead itself. Are we reading too much into this? If this passage stood alone as supportive of that idea, we might be. But there are other passages like the following that dovetail well with that same interpretation:

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.

• Genesis 2:23, 24

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul presents to the Church a remarkable mystery of great importance. It is to be treasured not only for its contribution to our future hope and expectation, but also to clarify our understanding of our God. This mystery is encapsulated in Ephesians 5:25-32:

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.

 

          “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth it and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.

 

          “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”

In dwelling upon this wonderful notion, we experience not only joy in understanding that our future spiritual role shall be as the Bride of Christ, but catch a glimpse of the true Trinitarian nature of God Himself. With that vision in mind, I’ll enumerate and then address the several objections to it that have been lobbed in my direction by my theological betters.

Nine Objections

Without a doubt the most serious objection to a feminine Holy Spirit is the use in Scripture of masculine pronounce in reference to the Holy Spirit. The “He” issue, however, while being the most obvious, is not the only one that Church authorities use to support their claim that the Holy Spirit lacks a strong femininity. Several others, both Scriptural and extra-Scriptural, are brought to bear as well, including the following, for which I personally have been charged in discussions regarding my intellectual malfeasance in assigning the feminine gender to the Holy Spirit:

Scripture specifically claims in Galatians 3:28 that (in the resurrection) there is neither male nor female. Therefore, the spiritual realm is gender-neutral.

I have ignored Scriptural passages, such as Jeremiah 10:10-13, in which the Father claims as His own some attributes generally associated with the Holy Spirit.

I have been cautioned regarding what appears to be a hasty connection between Wisdom, as presented in the Book of Proverbs, and the Holy Spirit. It was noted in that regard that in the common interpretation of the purpose and nature of Proverbs, which is contained in the ‘prologue’ summary (Proverbs Chapter 1), there is no compelling reason to make that connection.

It seems inappropriate, in the light of Paul’s restrictions on the role limitations defined by Paul of females in the Church, of conferring Godhood on a female.

There are many within mainstream Christianity who perceive God as being above passion. This particular notion of God being greater than our feelings of romantic love was expressed by the medieval theologian Zanchius, who to this day enjoys a considerable following.

As I noted in my blog friendofthefamily.wordpress.com, I felt pretty much alone in my perception of the female nature of the Holy Spirit. It has been suggested to me that there usually are pretty good reasons for ‘being out there alone’.

An objection was made that I may not be alone as I think: I seem to share my conviction with a collection of individuals who are not well-regarded in the conservative church, including thoroughly discredited Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and notoriously new-age adherent Oprah Winfrey.

In making my claims, I am assuming the responsibilities of a teacher of the Word of God, which should not be taken lightly.

In all, these nine objections represent a collection of all reasons advanced to me by those more theologically knowledgeable than me for rejecting the association of the female gender with the Holy Spirit. These objections will be rebutted below:

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #15

 

Chapter 6: The Benefits Associated with an Understanding of the Holy Spirit as a Fully-Gendered Female

 

 

 

 

Clarity of thought, unlike its opposite, confusion, is generally benign. Good things happen when straight thinking is engaged. Problems are solved. Things get done.   Happiness prevails.

Back in the somewhat distant past, cars were a lot simpler, so they were understandable. I remember driving our car up a mountain highway when the engine suddenly died. I lifted the hood, did some basic trouble-shooting and identified the problem as a faulty fuel pump. With a basic wrench I undid two bolts and lifted off the fuel pump. Then I unfastened the top with a screwdriver, whereupon the problem immediately became apparent as a torn diaphragm. Hitching a ride to the nearest town (another thing that was a lot more commonplace back when), I bought a new diaphragm from the local auto supply store and, after hitch-hiking back to my car, was back on the road in another ten minutes. Several years later, but when vehicles were still on the simple side and when attempting to return home after fishing with my new family in a mountain lake, the car failed to start. Basic troubleshooting procedures identified the problem as a bad starter solenoid. Being near a rural junkyard that I knew well from previous outings, having flown into it in the evenings when thermal activity had died down and the only flights to be had were sled rides, I hiked over to it, and within a quarter hour had a solenoid in my hand. Again, we were on the road in less than an hour.

Cars are so complicated these days that when opening the hood, I can’t even find a fuel pump. I can’t even find the spark plugs in the maze of pipes and tubing. There’s just no way that I could even begin to sort out a problem with my engine. Even if I could manage to identify what component had failed, I’d never be able to find it. And even if I did find what may have been the cause of the problem, I’d probably need to have an electron microscope to inspect the offending circuitry, along with, of course, PhDs in a number of scientific fields to interpret the microscopic rat’s nest in the field of view. And then, even if, by some miracle, I was correctly able to diagnose the problem, it’s highly doubtful that an appropriate fix would be available at the local auto parts store. Give me simple and readily understandable any day over complicated and confusing.

 

Scripture portrays both the Father and Jesus as eminently masculine, so masculine they must remain. Scripture, however, is far more ambivalent as to the gender of the Holy Spirit. If indeed the Holy Spirit is functionally feminine, this situation immediately introduces romance into the intra-Godhead relationship. Romance, in turn, elicits an appreciation of fervent, passionate love, as directly expressed in the Song of Solomon, as well as the notions of mutual ownership, complementary otherness in harmonious partnership, the transcendence of family over individuality, and strength of gender. All these notions are fully compatible with the following attributes of God as described in Scripture:

Fervor of love, both within the Godhead and by the observer toward the Godhead

Heterosexuality: in this context, homosexuality is seen as a violation of type, since strong and full gender pertains to the Godhead Itself (keeping in mind the numerous other sexual transgressions other than monogamous male-female marital unions that also represent violations of type)

A full reconciliation of unity and Trinity: unity is perceived in the family nature of the Godhead, whereas individuality is seen within the Members of the Holy Family

Selfless nobility: selfless devotion to the complementary Other leads to the elimination of self-absorption and narcissism

Gender differentiation supports an understanding of the Godhead and the Holy Spirit that is both intuitive and logical

In brief, a gender-differentiated view of the Holy Spirit is intuitively easy to grasp and is quite beautiful and harmonious with the Scriptural portrayal of God as well, while in its self-consistency it permits the viewer to hold fast to his perception of Scripture as inerrant in the original and inspired by the Holy Spirit. A viewpoint of the Godhead as a divine Family causes the confusion to evaporate rather abruptly, answering all the intellectual difficulties instantly at the levels of both the mind and the heart. Not only does it address the confusion head-on, but with it the Godhead Itself becomes open-ended with the awesome prospect of expanding to admit the Church, as the Bride of Christ, as an additional Member.

The notion of the spiritual Church becoming a Member of the Godhead raises some interesting possibilities about the nature of heaven. At the very least, heaven in this context becomes an exciting, dynamic entity wherein we, as members of the Church, are busily involved at Jesus’ side in whatever loving business He may be engaged in, which may well involve creative activity.

In the context of this gender differentiation, wherein the Church stands alongside Jesus as His Partner, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians displays a concept of the Church’s marriage to Christ that is breathtakingly beautiful in the richness of its imagery of a spiritual marriage which represents the best, and more, that an earthly marriage can offer. Described here is not a partial marriage that is never consummated, but rather a marriage in which the partners belong to and complement each other in perfect harmony. Here also is a partnership in love that is anything but barren: our expectation is that it will give birth to something yet to be understood, but to which the Church in the spiritual realm can endow her love in union and joint ownership with her divine Husband. Moreover, it is a marriage that presents Father and Holy Spirit to us as adoptive In-Law Parents wherein the Trinity is anything but static, itself morphing into a Quaternary union. It is a view of God where it is easy and natural to love with ardor in a spontaneous manner and one in which Jesus Christ belongs to us in a way that would be inconceivable under the traditional view.

Paul E. Billheimer captured the essence of this relationship between Jesus and His Church in his book Destined for the Throne, which lived up to its cover billing as “A Remarkable New Perspective on the Eternal Destiny of the Bride of Christ”, and which Billy Graham claimed to have been inspired in his forward to it. Excerpts from the Introduction and Chapter 1 are given below:

“The following chapters present what some consider a totally new and unique cosmology. The author’s primary thesis is that the one purpose of the universe from all eternity is the production and preparation of an Eternal Companion for the Son, called the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife. Since she is to share the throne of the universe with her Divine Lover and Lord as a judicial equal, she must be trained, educated, and prepared for her queenly role.”

“From this it is implicit that romance is at the heart of the universe and is key to all existence. From all eternity God purposed that at some time in the future His Son should have an Eternal Companion, described by John the Revelator as ‘the bride, the Lamb’s wife’ (Rev. 21:9) John further revealed that this Eternal Companion in God’s eternal purpose is to share the Bridegroom’s throne following the Marriage Supper of the Lamb (Rev. 3:21). Here we see the ultimate purpose, the climactic goal of history.”

“As in the case of Adam, God saw that it was not good for His Son to be alone. From the very beginning it was God’s plan and purpose that out of the riven side of His Son should come an Eternal Companion to sit by His side upon the throne of the universe as a bona fide partner, a judicial equal, to share with Him His sovereign power and authority over His eternal kingdom. ‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12:32). ‘To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame and am set down with my Father in his throne’ (Rev. 3:21).

“To be given a kingdom is more than to internalize kingdom principles and ethics. That is only one phase of it. To be given a kingdom is to be made a king, to be invested with authority over a kingdom. That this is God’s glorious purpose for the Church is authenticated and confirmed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:2-3: ‘Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? . . . Know ye not that we shall judge angels?’ This is an earnest of what Jesus meant when He said, ‘The glory that thou gavest me I have given them’ (John 17:22).

“This royalty and rulership is no hollow, empty, figurative, symbolical, or emblematic thing. It is not a figment of the imagination. The Church, the Bride, the Eternal Companion is to sit with Him on His throne. If His throne represents reality, then here is no fantasy. Neither joint heir can do anything alone (Rom. 8:17).

“We may not know why it pleases the Father to give the kingdom to the little flock. We may not know why Christ chooses to share His throne and His glory with the redeemed. We only know that He has chosen to do so and that it gives Him pleasure.”

Billheimer stopped short of asserting that the Church, in her spiritual form, may be integrated into the Godhead, nor did he directly imply that a feminine element exists within the Trinity. For example in his Chapter 2, page 37, he commented: “As sons of God [speaking of the individuals within the Church], begotten by Him, incorporating into their fundamental being and nature the very ‘genes’ of God, they rank above all other created beings and are elevated to the most sublime height possible short of becoming members of the Trinity itself.”

But Billheimer came very close to those two intimately related associations. Two pages earlier, on page 35, he stated “Thus, through the new birth – and I speak reverently – we become ‘next of kin’ to the Trinity, a kind of ‘extension’ of the Godhead.” Even more telling, in a footnote at the end of that chapter, he claimed “There is a clear and convincing implication in Genesis 1:27 that sex, in its spiritual dimension, constitutes an element of the image of God.”

Regarding Billheimer’s comment on not knowing “why it pleases the Father to give the kingdom to the little flock”, I do believe that Scripture supplies the answer to that question as to why Christ chooses to share: because, in harmony with the selflessness intrinsic to the Him, the Father Himself chose to share, as I noted in my novel Buddy:

“That night She was there, looking at him fondly when he awoke. ‘It’s time we got into some serious theology,’ She remarked as he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

“’Serious theology? What do you think you’ve been giving me?’

“’Just the basics of Jesus in the Old Testament. Beyond that, you’ll have to know how He came to be. You could get it yourself out of the Bible, but you don’t have time for that. After all, the vast majority of Christians never do get it.   Sadly, that’s the situation out there, so that’s one thing I’m going to take care of with you right now.   Earl, you’ve been blessed. You have a special mission in this life, something to add a splash of color to God’s grand tapestry. For that, you’ll need to be familiar with Jesus’ family roots. Then you’ll really understand who you’ll be in love with.’ She reached out to brush a wisp of hair from his forehead, but dallied with a lock, twirling it lovingly in her fingers.

“’Earl,’ She continued presently, ‘Jesus and I were always part of the Father, but at the very beginning there was no separation. We existed together as One, and that One was the Father, the Divine Will. Being alone and in full command of Himself, He had the choice to remain in that state and retain within Himself absolute power and authority over everything that He would subsequently create.’ A tear leaked out from her eye. She dabbed at it with a finger.

“’But then,’ She said, regaining control over her emotions, “the Father did something that was the essence of selflessness. It was of an order of nobility that transcends everything that came after.’

“’Even Jesus on the cross?’ he asked in wonder. ‘That was pretty painful. And humbling.’

“’Yes. Even that. The Father was first to humble Himself. He set the standard. And yes, it was painful too. Remember that He possessed everything that was and ever will be. He chose to give that up.’

“’What did He do?’

“’He chose to manifest an Other out of Himself, giving up part of Himself in the process and restricting His portion in everything that is or ever will be to that of one Member of a Partnership. He decided to share His exalted position with that Other. But here’s the great beauty of what he did: in relinquishing His singleness He added love into the mix. And through this love He again became One with His Other.’

This union between Father and Holy Spirit, as I also noted in Buddy, bore fruit in the begetting of Jesus Christ, the Son and the Word, at the point at which, in Jesus, time began:

“’For instance, in Revelation 3:14, Jesus describes Himself as the beginning of the creation of God. Now think about that, Earl. What does that imply?’

“’Well . . .yeh, it does suggest a beginning.’

“’Yes, and that contradicts the teaching that you brought up, doesn’t it? Which really means that the teaching itself leaves something to be desired. I’ll quote next from Genesis 1:

“’In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.’”

 

“’Earl, what was that light?’

“’Well, it must have been the sun.’ She made it sound like a trick question. What else could it be?

“’No no. You need to pay more attention to what you read. On what day was the sun made? Think, Earl.’

“’Oh. Yes. The sun and moon were made on the fourth day.’

“’That’s better.’ She made a frown, and then softened it with the tiniest of winks. ‘That light, Earl, was the first Word that God spoke, Jesus Christ. If you read the first few verses of Genesis 1 very closely, you’ll grasp that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, was moving in response to the Father, the Divine Will. He first willed Light, and the Light was also the Word. Listen to the Gospel of John. In the very first chapter, he says that

“’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any think made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

 

“’You see? Jesus is the Word, the Light and the Life. Awesome, isn’t it?’

“’Yeh. That means that He existed before He came in the flesh, all right. But not necessarily forever.’

“’Careful. With your dimensional limitation you can’t even perceive the meaning of eternity. You can simply say that He existed before time began, which is the meaning that Scripture intended to convey. In fact, there was a man by the name of Arius who was pretty popular around the fourth century. He started one train of thought by saying that there was a time when Jesus was not, and extended that to imply that Jesus was inferior to the Father. He equated that perceived inferiority with the notion that Jesus wasn’t God, or at least God of the same order. That notion was immortalized as the famous ‘Arian heresy’. Arius violated common sense. A human father naturally predates his son because both of them reside in the domain of time. But as Jesus as the preexistent Son of God represents all of creation, time itself began with Him. For that reason the question of whether Jesus sequentially followed the Father has no meaning. Even if the Son did follow the Father sequentially in time, it still wouldn’t imply inferiority. The same can be said of the Holy Spirit, who also existed with the Father when time began. The word “eternity” references time, so it is logically accurate to agree with the Council of Nicea which in 325 A.D. defined them to be coexistent with God for all eternity, although the council probably was being somewhat reactionary to Arius’ belief. But at any rate, as far as you humans are concerned, Jesus existed from eternity as you can comprehend it.’”

Given the view of heaven suggested by a fully-gendered Godhead, I’m rather excited about the prospect. When we get there, we’ll be dimensionally compatible with Jesus, which will give us the ability to intuitively understand the eternity issue as well as time in general. But not only will we understand more, we’ll be doing more, and in all we do there’ll be an abundance of love and intimacy in our relationship with each other and with our divine Spouse, Jesus Christ.

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #14

Chapter 5: (continued) The Benefits Associated with an Understanding of the Holy Spirit as a Fully-Gendered Female

 

A second comment elicited from the Catholic understanding of Mary relates to the mechanics of Jesus’ birth.  The primary information given in Scripture relating to the process is in Luke 1:30-35:

“And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary; for thou hast found favor with God.  And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.  He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father, David.  And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

 

          “Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?  And the angel answered, and said unto her, The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”

The Catholic Church views both the Father and the Holy Spirit as male.  Therefore she perceives Mary as the only female associated with the birth of Jesus.  Understanding Jesus to be the Son of the Father (the divine Will), the Church insists that the Holy Spirit is not the father of Jesus, and yet, noting that Luke involves the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ birth, the Church in some undefined and logically contradictory way also considers the Holy Spirit to be the divine Spouse of Mary in the creation of Jesus in the Flesh while claiming that the Father rather than the Holy Spirit was the father of Jesus.

In view of the functional femininity of the Holy Spirit there is nothing whatsoever contradictory or difficult to understand about Jesus’ birth.  Considering the union of Father and Holy Spirit as between the Will and the Means, it is readily understood that the Holy Spirit, responding to the Will of the Highest (the divine Father) fashions the seed of Jesus, perhaps in a rearrangement of the software code represented by Mary’s DNA, which is then combined with Mary’s egg in her womb.  The resulting Implementation represents another representation of the Divine Word, namely Jesus in the flesh.  This scenario, which is intuitively accessible, also enjoys the support of a passage in Genesis that is contradictory under the Catholic scenario.  According to Genesis 3:14 and 15,

“And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.  And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

 

It is generally understood that the man (seed) in this passage is Jesus Christ.  However, despite the fact that in general the seed is the male contribution to life whereas the female contribution is the egg, the seed in the Catholic scenario appears to belong to Mary.  Given a female Holy Spirit, the male seed, representing the will of the Highest but fashioned by the Holy Spirit, is indeed, in a perfectly natural sense, the seed of the Woman, the woman in this case being the Holy Spirit.

The Protestant Church, to its own credit, generally acknowledges that Mary had children in the natural way after the birth of Jesus.  However, as noted before, its indifferent stance regarding the issue which generally ignores the lack of femininity within the Godhead in the face of the strong Scriptural suggestion to the contrary is even more bizarre than that of her Catholic sister.

My third comment regarding the Catholic understanding of Mary pursues in more detail my praise to that understanding despite my opinion of it as a false viewpoint.  Although the primary attribution should be made to the Holy Spirit, Mary may well be a part of it.  This comment relates to the Catholic vision of Mary as representing the utmost in selfless nobility, a view with which I wholeheartedly concur.  This vision is beautifully encapsulated in two Catholic commentaries on Mary, the first from Dominican Father Gerald Vann in a book entitled Mary’s Answer for our Troubled Times, in which he addressed the hatred and suffering in the world during the Second World War.  Like the title suggests, he wrote about Mary’s own suffering while Jesus was on the cross, a theme which the Catholic Church frequently visits.  While Father Vann’s scenario may not be historically accurate, it certainly captures the essence of Scripture’s portrayal of Mary in a magnificent way.  It represents a stunning and deeply moving demonstration of nobility on Mary’s part, which is entirely consistent with Scripture’s portrayal of a major function of femininity, which is to evoke nobility from her masculine complement.

Father Vann talked of Mary’s concentration of gaze and rapt, exclusive focus on Jesus as He endured His suffering.  He contrasted the mutual sorrow-laden silence between her and Jesus with the noisier, more self-serving lamentations of the other women, developing a picture of Mary of stoic determination.  She had a task, Vann claimed.  This task involved the double sorrow of the mother as she watched the torments of the Son, and of the girl who flinched at the sight of naked evil and cruelty destroying innocence and beauty and love.  She remained silent, because it was not for her to find an emotional outlet for her grief, for she is here because of Him, to fulfill her vocation as mother by helping Him to fulfill His as Savior.  “In her,” Vann claims, “there are two conflicting agonies: the longing to save Him from His agony and the effort to help Him to finish His work.  It is the second that she must do, giving Him to the world on the Cross as she has given Him to the world in the stable.”

Another beautiful representation of Mary in Catholic lore is a historic incident that took place just outside Mexico City in the year 1531.  In that tale, as related by Father John Macquarrie in his book Mary for all Christians,  an apparition of Mary appeared to a peasant, one Juan Diego.  At the time,   Juan’s uncle was very ill, to the point of near-death.  He spent a day trying to relieve his uncle’s sufferings and left him only on Tuesday, to get a priest.  An apparition of Mary barred his way.  She told him,

‘My little son, do not be distressed and afraid.  Am I not here who am your Mother?  Are you not under my shadow and protection?  Your uncle will not die at this time.  This very moment his health is restored.  There is no reason now for the errand you set out on, and you can peacefully attend to mine.  Go up to the top of the hill: cut the flowers that are growing there and bring them to me.’

As Juan’s uncle was awaiting the priest, his room was filled with light.  A luminous figure of a young woman appeared.  He was indeed cured, but that’s not the essence of this story.  The main event occurs with Juan, who obeys the order to go to the flowers on the hill.

Juan Diego didn’t expect to see flowers on the hill because it was the middle of winter.  But he did indeed find flowers there.  They were Castilian roses.  He cut them as Mary had instructed and carried them back to her in his crudely-woven cape.  She spent some time arranging the flowers, and then tied the corners of the cape behind his neck to prevent the roses from falling out.  She told him to let only the bishop see the sign that she had given him.

When he reached the bishop’s palace several servants made sport of him, pushing him around and trying to snatch the flowers from his cape.  But the flowers dissolved when they reached for them.  Amazed, they let him go.  When he reached the bishop, Juan Diego untied the corners of the cape and as the ends dropped the flowers fell out in a jumbled heap.  The disappointed peasant became confused as to the purpose of his visit.  But then he was astonished to see that the bishop had come over to him and was kneeling at his feet.  Soon everyone else in the room had come near and they all were kneeling with the bishop.

Juan Diego’s cape now hangs over the altar in the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.  Over eight million persons were baptized there in the six years that followed this event.  Many millions more of people since that time have knelt before the two-piece cape, coarsely-woven of maguey fibers, for imprinted on it is an intricately detailed, beautiful figure of Mary.  In her graceful posture she appears kind and lovable.  She is surrounded by golden rays.  Fifteen hundred persons a day still visit the shrine.  The image is available on the Internet by Googling on “Juan Diego”.

Some items of interesting information have come to my attention regarding Our Lady of Guadalupe, as the Catholic Church has named this apparition.  Although I have yet to verify this information, I’ll pass it along.  First, She apparently never identified Herself to Juan Diego as Mary, but rather as Juan Diego’s Mother.  Second, Her image, as can be seen by Googling Juan Diego, matches that of the Aztec goddess.  Third, according to a Mexican theologian as referenced in http://www.laermita.org/spanish/articulos/senoraguad.htm, the indigenous converts to Christianity, in opposition to the Catholic insistence on perceiving the apparition as Mary, refused to worship Her as such and insisted themselves upon worshiping Her as God.

Of all the difficulties associated with failing to identify the Holy Spirit as female, the worst is yet to be noted: the falling away of the Church into acceptance of the forbidden practice of homosexuality while failing to respond firmly against the threat of Islam.  Here the issue is not intellectual but one of survival.

At present, despite the obvious fact that Scripture itself in Leviticus 18 and 20 and in Romans 1 describes homosexuality as an abomination, many mainstream Churches are accepting active homosexuals in their congregations, not only as laypersons, but as Church authorities.  And, if they take rather loose views of the authority of Scripture, why shouldn’t they?  The Godhead Itself, as they perceive it, is quite weakly connected to sexuality.  If God, then, resides some distance away from matters sexual, why should He care?

On the other hand, if human sexuality is somewhat representative, shadowy as it may be, of that aspect of the Godhead, wherein the Godhead itself represents a Divine Family consisting of Father, Mother and Son, then it can be readily perceived that homosexuality in the human domain rather openly violates the human representation of the Godhead.  This view cannot but elicit a firmer, logically-based stance against that practice among members of the Church, perhaps even help to lift her up from her present survival-endangering apathy.  (I should point out here that God frowns upon other sexual sins, including those committed by heterosexuals, such as infidelity to a marriage partner, and for precisely the same reason that they also represent violations of type.)

In fact, the growing issue of homosexuality within the Church is but a small part of the much larger problem of the variety of sexual perversions taking place within a significant portion of the Christian community, even among those who profess to be conservative in their outlook.  It’s not a minor problem.  It’s so enormous, in fact, that it overshadows the issue with gays, rendering hypocritical many of those within the Christian leadership who are outspoken with regard to homosexuality.  The real issue is this: given the denial of strong femininity within the Godhead, sexuality isn’t considered to be relevant to God, and the correlation of sexual deviation of any flavor with violation of type just isn’t on the table.  Under the current understanding of the Godhead, the problem isn’t limited to the denial of a role model for women, who constitute fully half the world’s population.  Serious as that particular issue is, the menfolk suffer too, for the present vision of God embraced by the Church denies them an appreciation of the importance of the feminine to God or even its relevance, placing both women and sexuality in the category of elements foreign to God.

The bottom line is that in the minimization of sexuality regarding our creation in the image of God, an extensive list of possible deviations from the standard of a monogamous male-female relationship is fair game – even for Christians.

Maybe even especially for Christians.  Quite recently in a Prophecy News Watch enews article, it was estimated that almost eighty percent of Christian men regularly indulge in the viewing of pornography.  It’s not difficult to imagine where that behavior leads.  The number of actual pornography addicts is about half of those.  That’s a very distressingly large portion of the Church.  In effect, the cleansing of God of sexuality has not led to the cleansing of Christians from sexual deviation.  To the contrary, it has had precisely the opposite effect.  Not only have women been degraded in this monstrous misrepresentation of the Godhead, but Christian men have allowed themselves to be degraded as well.  It doesn’t end there – degradation, whether or not it is perceived as relevant to God, leads directly to alienation from God.

Of perhaps equal danger to the Christian Church is the attempt to assimilate the Muslim faith into Christianity in the name of ecumenicism.  This can’t be done without destroying the Trinitarian essence of Christianity, as the Bible and the Quran are in sharp disagreement over some very basic issues.  Among the foremost of these incompatibilities is the Muslim monotheism, in which their god Allah is perceived as the Father alone, unencumbered with Jesus and the Holy Spirit as companions in Godhood.  To them, Jesus is not God, but merely a prophet.  Nor, to them, is the Holy Spirit a Person who shares Godhood with the Father.

In contrast to this view, Christians perceive God as one within a Trinitarian Godhead.  It is here that the mainstream Christian Church is weak and open to perversion by other, more man-centered and materialistic religions like Islam, for Christians themselves have such a vague understanding of the Holy Spirit that even they fail to comprehend how God can manage strict unity in the face of threeness.  They simply accept that it is what it is, but when threatened with intellectual attacks on this apparent inconsistency they have absolutely no answer.

On the other hand, as with the homosexuality issue, the Christian individual who perceives the Holy Spirit as feminine has no difficulty whatsoever in addressing the issue with Islam.  He merely extends that perception of the Holy Spirit’s femininity to one in which the Godhead is a Divine Family.  In that context, of course, the oneness of God is in the Family, its Trinity of Members being subordinate to that Entity.  Given that view, the Christian can readily and quite logically reject the Islamic perception of God.

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #13

Chapter 5: The Problems Associated with an Insistence Upon a Gender-Neutral or Masculine Holy Spirit

I love my brother Jon.  After all, we are twins.  But sometimes I get the suspicion that his placenta was bigger than mine and he hogged the incoming nutrients.  What’s worse, when I confront him with that, he readily agrees as he pats me on the head condescendingly.  He also smiles about it, which I find infuriating.  I’m not sure that this phobia of mine is a contributing factor, but we also are fiercely competitive.

When Jon became a licensed pilot, I followed suit.  When I took up SCUBA diving, so did Jon.  Same with the Marines.

When I took up hang gliding, Jon bought an ultralight, an Eipper Quicksilver MX-2 two-seater.  It was a beautiful craft.  My admiration for it won him over and he allowed me to take lessons in flying it.  We both were among the last to receive the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association pilot’s licenses for Ultralight Craft before AOPA got out of the business due to a rash of accidents and lawsuits.

Once in a while my brother and I would fly together, but we were somewhat on the heavy side, which tended to limit the performance of the craft and we were happier flying solo.  The time eventually came when we decided to fly together again, at a point where we had gained so much weight that the unfortunate vehicle was barely able to take off.

The problem with that was that the runway was short, narrow and primitive, which didn’t allow any margin for deviating from the runway heading.  Compounding that limitation was a huge tree that stood precisely at the end of the runway.  Further restricting our options was the performance of the engine, which, despite its mighty labors, was insufficient to the task of clearing the tree.

The biggest problem of all was that we were slow to appreciate the situation that we had gotten into until we were committed to taking off.  Our response was a reprise of the Stan and Ollie comedy act, wherein I shouted to Jon, “Look what you got us into now!”  His reply was a hurled oath, which included a command to shut up, and which elicited a like response from me.  We traded insults in that manner, bickering all the way to the expected point of impact, whereupon an updraft raised us just above the treetop.

That incident didn’t involve any confusion whatsoever; we both knew with certainly that our doom was approaching.  What we were doing was simply assigning blame for the debacle.

But there are indeed times while aviating that one can get confused, especially if that one happens to be me.  A good example, one that I recall with dread, is making a timed instrument approach under the hood to a new and strange airfield, in turbulence, with numerous background distractions.  Given my limitations in that regard, I consider myself to be quite fortunate to have acquired an instrument rating.  But at least I had the sense enough never to subject a passenger to the kind of situation where confusion of that brand could pop up.

But I had a flight instructor once who did encounter kind of a worst-case situation.  And he wasn’t flying under the hood, because he was flying in actual instrument conditions, complete with lightning, thunder, extreme turbulence, and no visibility out the windscreen.

And with a passenger.  An airsick woman, who hurled her ample dinner past his shoulder onto the instrument panel, obliterating his only sources of information.  He flew perfectly blind until he was able to wipe the goo off the instruments, a process that included the use of his undershirt while he was still wearing it, and while straining with all his might to prevent his own stomach from adding to the mess he was trying to clean up.

Judging from his eyeballs and the suppressed retching as he told the story to me, he’ll be telling it until his dying day.

Confusion is not good.  It bodes ill, the threat of something very wrong.  It can be dangerous.  In another sense, it can be harmful to the soul.

The overview presented in the previous chapter on the Church’s understanding of the Godhead indicates a rather continuously-held view from just a few hundred years past the beginning of Christianity to the present in which gender was associated with the Holy Spirit in one of two ways, both of which had strong followings that currently still exist among the various sects and factions within the boundaries of recognized Christian belief: some Churches insisted upon a gender-neutral God, including the neutrality of the Holy Spirit, while others asserted the masculinity, albeit asexual, of all three Members of the Godhead, again including the Holy Spirit in that categorization.  The difficulties attending either of these viewpoints, as we noted earlier, are both numerous and significant.

The first problem, and this applies to both the gender-neutral and all-male viewpoints, is one of confusion.  Two teachers of the Bible of my personal acquaintance, one of whom is a close friend and an excellent pastor in other respects, have at separate times while adhering to the gender-neutral view, personally confessed to me their inability to fully understand the nature of the Holy Spirit.  One of the teachers possesses a doctorate in Theology; the other was a respected long-time Bible Study lecturer.  The tenor of this incomplete understanding demonstrated an awareness of a confusing inconsistency within the little understanding that they did possess.  Their personal resolution of this problem was an admission that mankind was not given to fully understand God, and must wait until it sees God face-to-face in order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture of Him than it now possesses.  The logical inconsistency lurking in the background of both of their minds was associated with the necessity, given the gender-neutral or all-male viewpoints of the Godhead, of its differentiation into separate Entities without a clearly-defined functional distinction among them.  The most confusing aspect of this obscurity is the strength of the Godhead’s unity in the face of the vagueness of its Members’ respective roles. 

The second problem, which again applies to both the gender-neutral and the fully masculine viewpoints, is the inability, given the lack of clearly-defined differentiation among the Members of the Godhead, to reconcile their unity of being with the necessity of a Trinitarian nature.  This problem differs from the first in that while the first is merely confusing as to the importance and application of love in what appears to be a collegiate unity, this latter issue represents a sharp logical inconsistency.

One readily can grasp, given the nature of this apparent inconsistency, how the heresy of Modalism emerged.  Modalism views the Godhead as consisting of one God, as opposed to the three distinct Entities of mainstream Christianity.  This singular Individual, in the Modalist view, presents the three distinct attributes of Will, Power and Glory usually attributed to Father, Holy Spirit and Son as the situation and audience require.

The third problem is related to the first, extending the issue beyond mere intellectual confusion to the more significant one of loving God.  Adding to the confusing sense of incompleteness, the intra-Godhead love, being limited by this view to that of agape, does not connote the sense of common ownership of each other that a more romantically-driven relationship would elicit.  It is most difficult to love with fervor and passion a Godhead whose unity is seen to be based on commonality of thought and purpose, as in a corporate boardroom, than one whose unity is inextricably associated with a fervent, even possessive love akin to romance within its own Members.  Yet, in contradiction to this difficulty, Scripture commands us, as directly stated in Deuteronomy 6:4 and 5 and Matthew 22:37 and 38, to love God with fervor.

The fourth problem is the disassociation in those viewpoints from the family connection that exists within the higher forms of animal life in Creation, and with the Scriptural admonitions and laws associated with family and heterosexuality.

The fifth problem is the weakness of gender distinction among all three Members of the Godhead, which contradicts the Scriptural portrayal of strong masculinity of both The Father and Jesus, as well as the proscriptions in both the Old and New Testaments against weak masculinity and sexual impotence.  Among these are the following clearly-stated passages in both the Old and New Testaments:

“He who is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.”

 

• Deuteronomy 23:1

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?  Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

 

• 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 10

One of the more intelligent discussions of the Godhead that remains within the Church-imposed boundary of asexuality has been supplied by Catholic Father John Macquarrie in his book Mary for all Christians.  In his chapter entitled “God and the Feminine”, he acknowledges the incompleteness of male alone or female alone without its complement.  While touching on the all-important notion of complementary otherness, he goes on to other topics rather quickly, largely overlooking the most important aspect of otherness, which is its necessity in supporting the noble selflessness intrinsic to God as emphasized throughout the Bible.

Father Macquarrie also openly states, reminiscent of medieval theologian Jerome Zanchius, that God transcends sex.  How does he apply that concept that God is above matters of gender to his perception of the incompleteness of a single-gender Godhead?  He does so in distressingly extra-Biblical fashion.  Being well-read in psychology, Macquarrie turns to C. J. Jung and his concept of shared gender.  In that context, Macquarrie asserts, all the Members of the Trinity share both male and female characteristics.

Many Catholic theologians, perceiving despite the Church’s grand elevation of Mary that there were some elements of the feminine within the all-male Godhead, grasped onto the Jungian notion that each of the divine Entities possessed both male and female attributes.  Here again is a view that suggests gender weakness in contradiction to Scripture.  In addition to promoting a divine narcissism in distinct opposition to the general tenor of Scripture, this notion is logically untenable in the face of the pronounced masculinity of both the Father and Jesus Christ and the proscription against male neutrality in Leviticus 21:20 and against male femininity in 1 Corinthians 6:9.  That leaves the Holy Spirit alone as the possible embodiment of the female gender.

As if the direct problems associated with the gender-neutral or all-male viewpoints of the Godhead aren’t bad enough of themselves, they sometimes create collateral difficulties.  Among some Christian communities the ever-present threat that these viewpoints will inhibit ardor in worship has led to further misunderstandings that are intended to correct their deficiencies and restore the fervor suggested by Scripture.  One such compensating offshoot practice is the Catholic veneration of Mary as the primary female persona of our religion.  Despite protestations to the contrary from Catholic authorities from the Pope down to the pastoral level, this veneration, as was noted in Chapter 4, approaches actual worship to such a degree that it represents a de facto integration of Mary into the Godhead.  Indeed, Mary is endowed in the Catholic Church with a number of attributes that rightly belong within the Godhead, specifically the Holy Spirit.

Before proceeding further on the topic of the Catholic veneration of Mary, I wish to state at the outset that I consider the mistaken Catholic attribution to Mary of what rightfully belongs to the Holy Spirit to be far superior to the standard Protestant practice of overlooking these attributes altogether.  I suspect, moreover, that God Himself might not look all that unfavorably toward this perceived mistake of the Catholic Church, to the point that perhaps the Holy Spirit Herself has a name in heaven, that name being Sophia Mary, of which the earthly Mary was a type in the same sense that Joseph and Isaac and a host of other precursors to Jesus represented Him.

As was noted in Chapter 4, the highest Church authorities themselves name Mary as Co-Redemptrix, Queen of Heaven and Mother of God, insist upon her sinless birth, and claim that she was assumed body, soul and spirit, into heaven.  Yet, even Mary, although she was fully female, was stripped of her sexuality.  The Catholic Church’s assessment of moral purity as including sexual abstinence is amply demonstrated by her insistence on Mary’s perpetual virginity, meaning that her husband Joseph was himself subjected to sexual abstinence for the entire period of his marriage to Mary.

The Catholic teachings on Mary beg for a number of comments.  First, in opposition to the Catholic view on Mary’s virginity, Scripture itself, in Matthew 13:55 and 56, notes that Mary had children other than Jesus:

“Is not this the carpenter’s son?  Is not his mother called Mary?  And his brethren, James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas?  And his sisters, are they not all with us?  From where, then, hath this man all these things?”

 

The Catholic position that these “children” were actually cousins rather than siblings of Jesus is logically weak, given that Scripture suggests in Matthew 1:24 and 25 that Mary’s virginity was only temporary:

“Then Joseph, being raised from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife, and knew her not till she had brought forth her first-born son, and he called his name Jesus.”

The Catholic Church’s claims regarding Mary’s virginity involve a chain of attributions to both Mary and the Holy Spirit that manifestly lack Scriptural justification.  Indeed, with regard to this topic the Catholic Church displays a shockingly arrogant freedom of interpretation, all to justify a view that itself is at odds with Scripture.

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #12

Chapter 4: The Western Christian Church’s Understanding of the Nature of the Holy Spirit (continued)

A delightful feature of Dr. McGrath’s discourses, remarkable for its rarity, is a description of God’s loving relationship to mankind in romantic terms, a facet of God with which I wholeheartedly agree. Another feature of his presentation which I admire is his lengthy discussion of the necessities of Jesus’ essence as both man and God, and of His resurrection. Yet another interesting item that he presents in his chapter entitled A Personal God is his strong intimation of free will with respect to salvation in the face of his self-proclaimed deep interest in Martin Luther. Here he makes statements such as “In no way does God force us to respond positively to him.” He goes on to liken the notion of God’s exclusive influence over our salvation as akin to rape rather than love. This item is worthy of further exploration.

Unfortunately, Dr. McGrath appears to be on less stable ground in his discussion of the Trinity. In his presentation of this dogma he avoids delving too deeply into God’s intrinsic nature or attributes by substituting in its place a lengthy experientially-based account of Him in terms of His interaction with mankind. He is careful near the outset of his discourse, however, to distance himself from any notion that the Trinity includes a female Persona. He does so in his chapter entitled Thinking About God by noting that intellectual models are subject to misapplication through the improper assumption that every attribute of a model must apply to its counterpart in reality. As already noted, he cites as an example the wave characteristic of sound as a model for light, as was quoted directly from his work above.

But is the assumption of a Divine Mother in the economy of God necessarily a misapplication of the human parent model? It could be, but that’s a long way from must be. Nowhere does Dr. McGrath justify the necessity that he associates with that application. Instead, he elevates a mere illustrative example to the status of a law, which easily could be construed as either less than honest or less than brilliant. (Actually, I recognize my lack of qualification to cast such judgment on a man who possesses doctorates in both theology and science; indeed, I suspect quite strongly that he is neither dishonest or less than brilliant. Rather, I think that his presentation here is an overzealous attempt to distance himself from an extremely controversial topic.)

Moreover, and again as we have already noted, a short twelve pages further along, Dr. McGrath equivocates a bit regarding the possibility of motherhood in God’s economy, citing a number of Scriptural passages that describe God in a role more appropriate to motherhood than to fatherhood.

Almost at the end of his book it can be seen how Dr. McGrath rescues himself from this apparent inconsistency: as discussed in more detail below, he does not posit a distinct member of the Godhead who possesses the attributes of femininity; instead, he attributes this characteristic to the same Person as the Father. But rather than solving the problem of the feminine side of God, he comes dangerously close both to ultra-monotheism and modalism. Beyond that, he defines a God with gender characteristics indeed, but in the same Person. According to 1 Corinthians 6:9, 10, this suggests a model for a human malady known as hermaphroditism, which is contrary to Scripture, even to the extent of being labeled as unrighteous:

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

I find it hard to believe, given its treatment in Scripture, that in His own organization God would wish even to hint at sexual perversion, or even sexual difficulty.

The essence of McGrath’s description of Jesus may be encapsulated in this passage, found in his chapter entitled God as Three and God as One: “The difficulties really begin with the recognition of the fundamental Christian insight that Jesus is God incarnate: that in the face of Jesus Christ we see none other than the living God himself. Although the New Testament is not really anything like a textbook of systematic theology, there is nothing stated in the great creeds of the church which is not already explicitly or implicitly stated within its pages. Jesus is understood to act as God and for God: whoever sees him, sees God; when he speaks, he speaks with the authority of God; when he makes promises, he makes them on behalf of God; when he judges us, he judges as God; when we worship, we worship the risen Christ as God; and so forth.” Dr. McGrath goes on to characterize Jesus in his incarnate form as not actually comprising the fullness of God, but merely as a representative sample of God suitable for furnishing humanity with some comprehension, consistent with their limitations, of the far more complete spiritual God who resides in heaven. He claims in a similar vein that the Holy Spirit, like Jesus, is another manifestation of God, in this case one that indwells the believer, that furnishes another way by which redeemed mankind can encounter, or experience, God.

Dr. McGrath ends with this commentary:

“We can now see why Christians talk about God being a ‘three-in-one’. One difficulty remains, however, which must be considered. How can God be three persons and one person at the same time? This brings us to an important point which is often not fully understood. The following is a simplified account of the idea of ‘person’ which may be helpful, although the reader must appreciate that simplifications are potentially dangerous. The word ‘person’ has changed its meaning since the third century when it began to bed used in connection with the ‘threefoldness of God’. When we talk about God as a person, we naturally think of God as being one person. But theologians such as Tertullian, writing in the third century, used the word ‘person’ with a different meaning. The word ‘person’ originally derives from the Latin word persona, meaning an actor’s face-mask – and, by extension, the role which he takes in a play.

“By stating that there were three persons but only one God, Tertullian was asserting that all three major roles in the great drama of human redemption are played by the one and the same God. The three great roles in this drama are all played by the same actor: God. Each of these roles may reveal God in a somewhat different way, but it is the same God in every case. So when we talk about God as one person, we mean one person in the modern sense of the word, and when we talk about God as three persons, we mean three persons in the ancient sense of the word. It is God, and God alone, who masterminded and executes the great plan of salvation, culminating in Jesus Christ. It is he who is present and active at every stage of its long history. Confusing these two senses of the word ‘person’ inevitably leads to the idea the God is actually a committee, which, as we saw earlier, is a thoroughly unhelpful and confusing way of thinking about God.”

One certainly could not accuse Dr. McGrath of being a tritheist. On the other hand, despite his denial on the back cover of the book that he entertains the heretical notion of modalism, he’s on shaky ground there, being right on the edge or over it according to his own words.

Dr. Mcgrath is somewhat unique among other well-established theologians in that his scientific training has furnished him with an ability to be objective in his presentation and make use of useful intellectual tools such as models to make his points. Further, he at least addresses some notions that others avoid like the plague, as if they themselves might be infected by ideas they may have been taught were close to blasphemous. He has in common with the others, however, several notions regarding the Holy Spirit that are generally accepted within faithful Christendom: while all Members of the Trinity possess the same substance and are fully and equally God, they differ with respect to functional role; the role for the Holy Spirit conforms most closely to that associated with executive companion and motherhood; the Holy Spirit is a background Entity, more self-effacing than Father and Son; the Trinity (as confessed by the Church) is a mystery beyond man’s comprehension. The ‘others’ who share these particular view with Drs. McGrath and Ware include Dr. Peter Masters (The Faith) and James R. White (The Forgotten Trinity).

I agree quite thoroughly with all of these points except the last, regarding the mystery which appears to be beyond comprehension, with which I disagree quite thoroughly. To me, the incomprehensibility in understanding the Trinity is another typical case of man’s brain outsmarting his heart. What should be an extremely simple and intuitive understanding, man has turned into a riddle, in the process wrapping himself tightly around the intellectual axle.

A case could be made that in the many attempts made by scholars of Scripture to describe the Holy Spirit, they end up implying an association of the Holy Spirit with Wisdom. Wisdom, of course, is given a lengthy treatment in Proverbs, with a female gender association.

As I have noted, I appreciated Dr. McGrath’s extensive use of models. I believe that they are so effective, as a matter of fact, that I’d like to offer one of my own: that of a war ship. In this model the commanding officer, or CO, would be the functional counterpart of the Father. Under rigid shipboard discipline there is only one leader of the entire vessel, and that is the CO. He must make the tough decisions and live with the consequences; correspondingly, it is his will, and his alone, that must be instantly obeyed by the rest of the crew. The counterpart of Jesus in this model is the action that results from the CO’s orders. The next in the chain of command is the executive officer, or XO. The XO has the responsibility of executing, or carrying out, the CO’s commands; like the XO’s counterpart the Holy Spirit, it is the XO who makes the will of the CO actually happen. While the XO is subordinate to the CO, he is in an understudy mode, being in constant readiness to assume command should some misfortune befall the CO. Therefore, the XO is capable of being CO, but willingly assumes a subordinate position for the sake of the ship’s welfare. One can readily perceive that the CO and XO are an interdependent pair, each having different but complementary functions. It is in these complementary functions that the CO serves in a male role and the XO in a female role. One might well argue that on a warship, both CO and XO are eminently masculine. Both, to be sure, are cut from the same masculine cloth, just as (I perceive) the Holy Spirit is male with respect to substance, proceeding from the Father. On the functional side of things, however, one must be careful to note that the XO doesn’t initiate the basic commands, but rather responds to them in a subordinate manner by carrying them out in fulfillment of the CO’s will. This responsive characteristic, I would assert, is eminently feminine. Note in this context the synergy in the complementary interaction, which indeed is suggestive of a male-female relationship. The only thing that could bring it closer and more effective would be the level of communication intrinsic to a love-based relationship, i.e. the marital union, which for that reason, in my mind, remains a more representative model of the relationship between Father and Holy Spirit than the shipboard chain of command.

Maybe it’s not the case with God, but in the (human) marriage union, there is some functional ambiguity. I would love to visualize a well-groomed lawn, thus commanding my wife to mow it promptly, watching benignly from my deck chair as she executes my edict forthwith. I don’t do that, however, comprehending somehow that it’s not going to work out as I would wish. The end result would be that I would mow the lawn anyhow and work under the additional burden of having to peer out of black and swollen eye sockets. At any rate, I’d much prefer doing a little grunt work while enjoying a loving relationship with my life partner that points to the way we were made by God.

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #11

Chapter 4: The Western Christian Church’s Understanding of the Nature of the Holy Spirit (continued)

This view of Mary, as described by the highest Catholic authority and seconded by the entire Church, presents Mary with the warmth of humanity. But she, like the Godhead Itself, has been stripped clean of all sexual experience except for the pain of childbirth. In thinking about that rampant sexual housecleaning, it seems strange indeed that Peter, the iconic and revered founder of the Catholic Church, was himself married, according to Matthew 8:14 and 15, while his successors and the entire body of clergy were and continue to be prohibited from doing so:

“And when Jesus was come into Peter’s house, he saw that his wife’s mother laid, and sick of a fever. And he touched her hand, and the fever left her; and she arose, and ministered unto them.”

We all know how that worked out in practice: instead of taking wives and thereby participating in a relationship established and condoned by God, the clergy instead took the wives of other men, prostitutes and, ultimately, altar boys.

For the most part the Protestant Church, in contrast with her Catholic sister, simply accepts the lack of the feminine and ignores the issue altogether, treating it as beyond the pale of appropriate intellectual investigation. Despite this general official refusal of the Protestant Churches to address the void caused by the removal of functional gender from God, a number of interested theologians have attempted to explain the nature of the Holy Spirit in a way that, while conforming to Church doctrine, presents the Holy Spirit in a logical and, as they struggle to achieve, a warm manner.

Yet both Catholic and Protestant Churches have in common a view of the Trinity in which sexuality is at most a superficial feature even for birth and in which vital aspects of femininity are denied altogether. This view leads most investigators into the nature of the Trinity into an admission that the topic is very complex, to the extent that in the end they admit further that. like attempting to understand the duality of light or the logic behind quantum mechanics, they can’t comprehend it completely. This limitation has and continues to have a profound influence on the entire nature of Christianity. Didn’t any of these investigators grasp a hint in the wake of this inability to comprehend such an important topic that perhaps the standard view of the Trinity might need some revision?

Both the Father as the divine Will and the Son as Jesus Christ, the divine Word, are well-defined in Scripture as to their general natures and their functional roles. Of the three Members of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is by far the most enigmatic. It is the lack of understanding, or perhaps simply the misunderstanding, of the nature of this divine Member from which the confusion and apparent complexity of the Trinity has arisen. A substantial part of this confusion is the obviously apparent but discomforting feature of the Holy Spirit’s character as embracing specifically feminine elements in contradiction to the general view of the Trinity as being either gender-neutral or masculine. Because the Holy Spirit is the ultimate source of the Church’s difficulty regarding the nature of the Trinity, the present work will focus primarily on this Entity.

Many expositors of the Holy Spirit see in Genesis 1 the active participation of the Holy Spirit in the act of creation. This is the position taken by respected scholar of Scripture Benjamin B. Warfield, who describes this functional attribute of the Holy Spirit in Chapter Seventeen of his book The Holy Spirit:

“His offices in Nature – The ‘Spirit’ or personal ‘Breath’ is the Executive of the Godhead, as the ‘Son’ or ‘Word’ is the Revealer. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of chaos and developed cosmos (Gen. 1:2). Henceforth he is always represented as the author of order and beauty in the natural as of holiness in the moral world. He garnished the astronomical heavens (Job 26:13). He is the organizer and source of life to all provinces of vegetable and animal nature (Job 33:4; Ps. 104:29, 30; Isa. 32:14, 15), and of enlightenment to human intelligence in all arts and sciences (Job 32:8; 35:11; Ex 31:2-4).”

Dr. H. A. Ironside, in a little tome first printed in 1941 entitled The Holy Trinity, also interprets Genesis 1:2 as asserting that the Holy Spirit, in concert with the Father, was actively involved in creation. Interestingly, in referencing Isaiah 66 as an Old Testament reference to the Trinity he quotes from verse 13:

“As one whom his mother comforteth so will I comfort you.”

 

Although Ironside invariably interprets the Holy Spirit in terms of the masculine pronoun ‘he’, he also confesses a lack of full understanding of the nature of the Trinity. Yet the passage quoted above, by associating the word ‘mother’ with ‘comfort’, furnishes a key argument for the feminine function of the Holy Spirit. For Jesus, in John 14:16 and 17, directly links the Holy Spirit with the name (implying role) Comforter:

“And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.”

 

Could it be that the masculine pronouns in this passage, as well as elsewhere in Scripture, refer to the substance of the Holy Spirit rather than functional nature? Or is it even more likely that the original “she” was deliberately changed to “he” in opposition to the maintenance of Scriptural integrity, as indicated by John 14:26 in the original Siniatic Palimpsest. This issue will be revisited in Chapter 7, wherein both possibilities are discussed in greater detail.

Dedicated theologian Dr. Bruce A. Ware makes similar statements as Warfield regarding the executive (implementation of will) role of the Holy Spirit in his work Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. In fact, this executive role of the Holy Spirit is a general theme among theologians. In his own work, Ware encapsulates the roles of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as follows: Father – Grand Architect; Son – Submission to the Father in doing (displaying) His Will; Holy Spirit – Carrying out the work of the Father.

Alister McGrath, who wrote the work Understanding the Trinity, provides a representative viewpoint of this genre, yet also furnishes some remarkably fresh insights. He stands on what I humbly perceive as firm soil in his eloquent and moving descriptions of God and the incarnate Jesus in chapters 1 through 6. In reading it for a second time quite recently I realized afresh how his treatment of the Trinity had influenced my own work Family of God. It was Dr. McGrath, in fact, whom I mentioned on pages 24 through 26:

“Some theologians, having briefly noted the one intuitively satisfactory functional description of the Trinity, reject this particular answer quite abruptly, justifying their rejection on the basis of insufficient logic. They proceed from there to hammer out tortuously-derived and ultimately insufficient, emotionally empty alternatives. One such expositor, who otherwise paints with highly readable and insightful words a delightful description of God, mentions the Trinity with profound understanding and then quickly discards it as a misapplication of a familiar model in an attempt to apply too much of what is, after all, just a simplistic and imperfect model to the reality of God Himself. In his haste to reject that application, however, he violates the same logical guidelines which he carefully presented in the immediately preceding pages of his discussion.

“This same theologian, in viewing the Trinity in the uncontroversial terms of man’s encounters with God, explains it as different facets of His nature through which God has chosen to reveal Himself to man. God, he asserts, is altogether too vast for man, with his limitations in time and space, to acquire a complete picture of His entire nature. We can sample portions of this Divine Entity, however, and by thinking through the implications of the composite picture that He has given us through Scripture, we perceive His Trinitarian nature and the necessity for it. This experiential description is, I think, a valid one and has the advantage of being safely neutral with respect to gender. It is certainly the most intuitively satisfying characterization of the Trinity that I have seen to date. Yet such an exclusively man-centered description yields a disappointing poverty of information about God Himself, leaving the reader to ask why, if God does indeed have a Trinitarian nature, He is so reluctant to share a picture of that characteristic with us in terms of His intrinsic functional attributes. It would seem, after all, that a God-centered intuitive understanding would naturally lead to a greater appreciation of Him, and consequently a greater love toward Him on the part of His subjects. One might easily suspect, as a matter of fact, that those individuals in the past who were named in the Book of Hebrews, did indeed have personal insights into the nature of God beyond those which the usual churchgoer might have access to via his pastor or his reading of Scripture.”

The description of the Trinity that Dr. McGrath presented with profound understanding and subsequently discarded in haste begins on page 57 of Understanding the Trinity. An important continuation is presented twelve pages later, where the author appears to wish to tone down his rejection of the earlier model by presenting some qualifying remarks which suggest that perhaps he himself had some persistently lingering thoughts about the nature of the Holy Spirit that he didn’t wish to assert directly:

“It was therefore assumed that light also needed to travel through something [as was the case for sound, upon which light was modeled], and the word ‘aether’ was coined to describe the medium through which light waves traveled. If you read old radio magazines, or listen to old radio programmes, you’ll sometimes find people referring to ‘waves traveling through the aether’. But by the end of the century it had become clear that light did not seem to need any medium to travel through. What had happened was simply that the logical necessity of one aspect of the model (sound) had initially been assumed to apply to what was being modeled (light), and this assumption was gradually recognized to be incorrect as the experimental evidence built up.

“And so it is with models of God. For example, we often use ‘father’ as a very helpful model of God, emphasizing the way in which we are dependent upon God for our existence. But for every human child there is a human mother as well as a human father. This would seem to imply that there is a heavenly mother in addition to a heavenly father. But this assumption rests upon the improper transfer of the logical necessity of an aspect of the model (father) to what is being modeled (God), in just the same way as the necessity of one aspect (the need for a medium of propagation) of the model (sound) was transferred to what was being modeled (light). . .”

“. . . Although the strongly patriarchal structure of society of the time inevitably meant that emphasis was placed upon God as father (e.g., Jeremiah 3:19; Matthew 6:9), there are several passages which encourage us to think of God as our mother (e.g., Deuteronomy 32:18). We shall be considering these two images together, and ask what they tell us about God.

“The first, and most obvious, point is that God is understood as the one who called us into being, who created us. Just as our human parents brought us into being, so God must be recognized as the author and source of our existence. Thus at one point in her history, Israel is chided because she ‘forgot the God who gave [her] birth’ (Deuteronomy 32:18; cf. Isaiah 44:2, 24; 49:15).

“The second point which the model of God as parent makes is the natural love of God for his people. God doesn’t love us because of our achievements, but simply because we are his children. ‘The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you’ (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). Just as a mother can never forget or turn against her child, so God will not forget or gturn against his people (Isaiah 49:15). There is a natural bond of affection and sympathy between God and his children, simply because he has brought them into being. Thus God loved us long before we loved him (1 John 4:10, 19). Psalm 51:1 refers to God’s ‘great compassion, and it is interesting to note that the Hebrew word for ‘compassion’ (rachmin) is derived from the word for ‘womb’ (rechmen). God’s compassion towards his people is that of a mother towards her child (cf. Isaiah 66:12-13). Compassion stems from the womb.”

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #10

Chapter 4: The Western Christian Church’s Understanding of the Nature of the Holy Spirit (continued)

In opposition to Zanchius, Scripture paints a far more beautiful picture of God, depicting His majestic glory as His willingness to give up the majesty of greatness and power in favor of a love of great fullness and depth.  The Gospels appear to support this view, depicting Jesus Christ (as God) as a Being full of the attributes of love as we know it, including passion.  Examples that come to mind include His weeping over Jerusalem and Lazarus and His ordeal in the garden of Gethsemane.  It is difficult to picture the risen Jesus talking to His followers on the road to Emmaus in the context of Zanchius’ notion of God’s remote perfection.

Zanchius’ definition of God not only suppresses His most important attribute, but inhibits those to whom Scripture was written from loving Him back.  This is a serious issue because it runs counter to His Great Commandment to love Him with all our hearts, and our souls and our minds.

Leaving Zanchius behind for now, we return to a historical perspective of the Church in general, resuming at the Middle Ages.  By this time the Western Christian Church had thoroughly purged its God of all sexual connotations.  It understood the association of gender with the Holy Spirit in one of two ways, both of which had strong followings that currently still exist: some Churches insisted upon a gender-neutral God, including the neutrality of the Holy Spirit, while others asserted the asexual masculinity of all three Members of the Godhead, again including the Holy Spirit in that categorization.  The difficulties attending either of these viewpoints are many and varied.  These problems will be addressed later in this chapter and in Chapter 5.

From that time, through the turbulent years of the Reformation, and beyond into modern times, the basic removal from the human experience of this extreme cleansing of God increasingly became untenable.  Would-be worshipers drifted far away from the love of God demanded by Scripture but denied by the Church.  Theologians questioned the notion of a God without passion, which seemed to (and did) contradict the teaching of Scripture.

 

The Catholic Church responded in a unique way.  Having removed the female gender from the Holy Spirit, the Catholic Church, to her credit, understood that an unnatural gap was created in its perception of the Godhead.  She filled the perceived and all-too-real void of a genderless or all-male God with Mary, the mother of Jesus, whom she elevated to a superhuman status that fell just short of deity.  Henceforth it would be Mary upon whom the Catholic Church would place her love and devotion, restoring a semblance of the fervor of worship commanded by both Moses and Jesus.  To most Catholic laypersons, Mary’s position of subordination to diety is so miniscule as to be nonexistent, wherein the veneration of her is indistinguishable from worship.

The Catholic text Mary in the Church Today, a compilation by Father Bill McCarthy of papal pronouncements and other official Catholic teachings regarding Mary, mother of Jesus, is an excellent source book for the understanding of the Catholic position regarding Mary.  The teachings, from which the following entries are gleaned, speak for themselves.

“’For,’ the text [Lumen Gentium, 62] goes on, ‘taken up to heaven, [Mary] did not lay aside this saving role, but by her manifold acts of intercession continues to win for us gifts of eternal salvation.’  With this character of ‘intercession,’ first manifested in Cana in Galilee, Mary’s mediation continues in the history of the Church and the world.  We read that Mary ‘by her maternal charity, cares for the brethren of her Son who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until they are led to their happy homeland.’  In this way Mary’s motherhood continues unceasingly in the Church as the mediation which intercedes, and the Church expresses her faith in this truth by invoking Mary ‘under the title of Advocate, Auxiliatrix, and Mediatrix.’

“Through her mediation, subordinate to that of the Redeemer, Mary contributes in a special way to the union of the pilgrim Church on earth with the eschatological and heavenly reality of the Communion of Saints, since she has already been ‘assumed into heaven’.  The truth of the assumption defined by Pius XII, is reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council, which thus expresses the Church’s faith: ‘Preserved free from all guilt of original sin, the Immaculate Virgin was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory upon the completion of her earthly sojourn.  She was exalted by the Lord as Queen of the Universe, in order that she might be the more thoroughly conformed to her Son, the Lord of lords (cf. Rv 19:16) and the conqueror of sin and death.’  In this teaching Pius XII was in continuity with Tradition, which has found many different expressions in the history of the Church, both in the East and in the West.”

-exerpted from Redemtoris Mater, Articles 40 and 41

“In the light of Mary, the Church sees in the face of women the reflection of a beauty which mirrors the loftiest sentiments of which the human heart is capable: the self-offering totality of love; the strength that is capable of bearing the greatest sorrows; limitless fidelity and tireless devotion to work; the ability to combine penetrating intuition with words of support and encouragement.”

-excerpted from Redemptoris Mater, Article 46

“Subsequently, in 1962, on the feast of the Purification of Mary, Pope John set the opening of the Council for 11 October, explaining that he had chosen this date in memory of the great Council of Ephesus, which precisely on that date had proclaimed Mary ‘Theotokos’, Mother of God . . . “

“2. At the second session of the Council it was that the treatment of the Blessed Virgin Mary be put into the Constitution of the Church.  This initiative, although expressly recommended by the Theological Commission, prompted a variety of opinions.

“Some, who considered this proposal inadequate for emphasizing the very special mission of Jesus’ Mother in the Church, maintained that only a separate document could express Mary’s dignity, pre-eminence, exceptional holiness and unique role in the Redemption accomplished by the Son.  Furthermore, regarding Mary as above the Church in a certain way, they were afraid that the decision to put the Marian teaching in the treatment of the Church would not sufficiently emphasize Mary’s privileges and would reduce her role to the level of other members of the Church. . .”

• excerpted from the ninth of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“In the same context, the Council also calls God ‘most wise’, suggesting a particular attention to the close link between Mary and the divine wisdom, which in its mysterious plan willed the Virgin’s motherhood.

“3. The Council’s text also reminds us of the unique bond uniting Mary with the Holy Spirit, using the ‘words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed which we recite in the Eucharistic liturgy: ‘For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man’.

“In expressing the unchanging faith of the Church, the Council reminds us that the marvelous incarnation of the Son took place in the Virgin Mary’s womb without man’s cooperation, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

“The Introduction to the eighth chapter of Lumen Gentium thus shows in a Trinitarian perspective an essential dimension of Marian doctrine.  Everything in fact comes from the will of the Father, who has sent his Son into the world, revealing him to men and establishing him as Head of the Church and the center of history.  This is a plan that was fulfilled by the Incarnation, the work of the Holy Spirit, but with the essential cooperation of a woman, the Virgin Mary, who thus became an integral part in the economy of communicating the Trinity to mankind.

“4.  Mary’s threefold relationship with the divine Persons is confirmed in precise words and with a description of the characteristic relationship which links the Mother of the Lord to the Church: ‘She is endowed with the high office and dignity of the Mother of the Son of God, and therefore she is also the beloved daughter of the Father and the temple of the Holy Spirit.’  (Lumen Gentium, n. 53).

“Mary’s fundamental dignity is that of being ‘Mother of the Son’, which is expressed in Christian doctrine and devotion with the title ‘Mother of God’.

“This is a surprising term, which shows the humility of God’s only-begotten Son in his Incarnation and, in connection with it, the most high privilege granted a creature who was called to give him birth in the flesh.

“Mother of the Son, Mary is the ‘beloved daughter of the Father’ in a unique way.  She has been granted an utterly special likeness between her motherhood and the divine fatherhood.  And again, every Christian is a ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’, according to the Apostle Paul’s expression (1 Cor 6:19).  But this assertion takes on an extraordinary meaning in Mary: in her the relationship with the Holy Spirit is enriched in a spousal dimension,  I recalled this in the Encyclical Redemptoris Mater:  ‘The Holy Spirit had already come down upon her, and she became his faithful spouse at the Annunciation, welcoming the Word of the true God. . .’ (n. 26).”

– excerpted from the eleventh of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“The freedom ‘from every stain of original sin’ entails as a positive consequence the total freedom from all sin as well as the proclamation of Mary’s perfect holiness, a doctrine to which the dogmatic definition makes a fundamental contribution.  In fact, the negative formulation of the Marian privilege, which resulted from the earlier controversies about original sin that arose in the West, must always be complemented by the positive expression of Mary’s holiness more explicitly stressed in the Eastern tradition.

“Pius XII’s definition refers only to the freedom from original sin and does not explicitly include the freedom from original concupiscence [generally, the desires of the flesh in the Catholic vernacular].  Nevertheless, Mary’s complete preservation fromj every stain of sin also has as a consequence her freedom from concupiscence, a disordered tendency which, according to the Council of Trent, comes from sin and inclines to sin (DS 1515).”

-excerpted from the twenty third of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“In recounting the birth of Jesus, Luke and Matthew also speak of the role of the Holy Spirit.  The latter is not the father of the Child.  Jesus is the son of the Eternal Father alone (cf. Lk 1:32-35), who through the Spirit is at work in the world and begets the Word in his human nature.  Indeed, at the Annunciation the angel calls the Spirit ‘the power of the Most High’ (Lk 1:35), in harmony with the Old Testament, which presents him as the divine energy at work in human life, making it capable of marvelous deeds.  Manifesting itself to the supreme degree in the mystery of the Incarnation, this power, which in the Trinitarian life of God is Love, has the task of giving humanity the Incarnate Word.”

-excerpted from the twenty eighth of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“1. The intention to remain a virgin, apparent in Mary’s words at the moment of the Annunciation, has traditionally been considered the beginning and the inspiration of Christian virginity for the Church.

“St. Augustine does not see in this resolution the fulfillment of a divine precept, but a vow freely taken.  In this way it was possible to present Mary as an example to ‘holy virgins’ throughout the Church’s history.  Mary ‘dedicated her virginity to God when she did not yet know whom she would conceive, so that the imitation of heavenly life in the earthly, mortal body would come about through a vow, not a precept, through a choice of love and not through the need to serve; (De Sancta Virg. IV. PL 40 398).

“The angel does not ask Mary to remain a virgin, it is Mary who freely reveals her intention of virginity.  The choice of love that leads her to consecrate herself totally to the Lord by a life of virginity is found in this commitment.

“In stressing the spontaneity of Mary’s decision, we must not forget that God’s initiative is at the root of every vocation.  By choosing the life of virginity, the young girl of Nazareth was responding to an interior call, that  is, to an inspiration of the Holy Spirit that enlightened her about the meaning and value of the virginal gift of [sic, substitute ‘chasitity’] heresy.  No one can accept this gift without feeling called or without receiving from the Holy Spirit the necessary light and strength.”

-excerpted from the twenty ninth of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“2. It may be presumed that at the time of their betrothal there was an understanding between Joseph and Mary about the plan to live as a virgin.  Moreover, the Holy Spirit, who had inspired Mary to choose virginity in view of the mystery of the Incarnation and who wanted the latter to come about in a family setting suited to the Child’s growth, was quite able to instill in Joseph the ideal of virginity as well.”

-excerpted from the thirtieth of Pope John Paul II’s series of catecheses on the Blessed Virgin

“2. The Council stresses the profound dimension of the Blessed Virgin’s presence on Calvary, recalling that she ‘faithfully persevered in her union with her Son unto the Cross’ (Lumen Gentium, n. 58), and points out that this union ‘in the work of salvation is made manifest from the time of Christ’s virginal conception up to his death’ (ibid., a. 57).

“Mary Joins Her Suffering To Jesus’ Priestly Sacrifice

“With our gaze illumined by the radiance of the resurrection, we pause to reflect on the Mother’s involvement in her Son’s redeeming Passion, which was completed by her sharing in his suffering. Let us return, again, but now in the perspective of the resurrection, to the foot of the Cross where the Mother endured ‘with her only-begotten Son the intensity of his suffering, associated herself with his sacrifice in her mother’s heart, and lovingly consented to the immolation of this victim which was born of her’ (ibid., n. 58)

“With these words, the Council reminds us of ‘Mary’s compassion’; in her heart reverberates all that Jesus suffers in body and soul, emphasizing her willingness to share in her Son’s redeeming sacrifice and to join her own maternal suffering to his priestly offering.

“The Council text also stresses that her consent to Jesus’ immolation is not passive acceptance but a genuine act of love, by which she offers her Son as a ‘victim’ of expiation for the sins of all humanity.”

-excerpted from Pope John Paul II’s address to the General Audience on April 2, 1997

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #9

Chapter 4: The Western Christian Church’s Viewpoint of the Nature of the Holy Spirit (continued)

Two and a half centuries later Augustine experienced much the same revulsion as Justin did over the moral tawdriness of the Roman society in which he lived. Having become a Christian thirty two years after his birth in 354 A.D., Augustine had spent much of his dissolute pre-Christian years in the enjoyment of the depravity of the society in which he lived. The shame and regret of these early years served to drive Augustine into a passionate rejection of loose morality and unbridled lust. The strength of his feelings in that regard are demonstrated throughout his book City of God, an example of which is given in Chapters 4 and 5 of Book II:

“When I was a young man I used to go to sacrilegious shows and entertainments. I watched the antics of madmen; I listened to singing boys; I thoroughly enjoyed the most degrading spectacles put on in honour of gods and goddesses – in honour of the Heavenly Virgin, of of Berecynthia, mother of all. On the yearly festival of Berecynthia’s purification the lowest kind of actors sang, in front of her litter, songs unfit for the ears of even the mother of one of those mountebanks, to say nothing of the mother of any decent citizen, or of a senator; while as for the Mother of the Gods – ! For there is something in the natural respect we have towards our parents that the extreme of infamy cannot wholly destroy; and certainly those very mountebanks would be ashamed to give a rehearsal performance in their homes, before their mothers, of those disgusting verbal and acted obscenities. Yet they performed them in the presence of the Mother of the Gods before an immense audience of spectators of both sexes. If those spectators were enticed by curiosity to gather in profusion, they ought at least to have dispersed in confusion at the insults to their modesty.

“If these were sacred rites, what is meant by sacrilege? If this is purification, what is meant by pollution? And the name of the ceremony is ‘the fercula’, which might suggest the giving of a dinner-party where the unclean demons could enjoy a feast to their liking. Who could fail to realize what kind of spirits they are which could enjoy such obscenities? Only a man who refused to recognize even the existence of any unclean spirits who deceive men under the title of gods, or one whose life was such that he hoped for the favour and feared the anger of such gods, rather than that of the true God.

“5. The obscenities performed in the worship of the ‘Mother of the Gods’

 

          “The last people I should choose to decide on this matter are those who are more eager to revel in the obscene practices of this depraved cult than to resist them. I should prefer the decision of Scipio Nasica, the very man whom the Senate chose as their best man, whose hands received this devil’s image and brought it to Rome. Let him tell us whether he would wish his mother to have deserved so well of her country that she should be accorded divine honours. For it is well known that the Greeks and the Romans, and other peoples, have decreed such honours to those whose public services they valued highly, and that such people were believed to have been made immortal and to have been received among the number of the gods. No doubt he would desire such felicity for his mother, if it were possible. But let me go on to ask him whether he would like such disgusting rites as those to be included among the divine honours paid to her? Would he not cry out that he would prefer his mother to be dead, and beyond all experience, than that she should live as a goddess, to take pleasure in hearing such celebrations?   It is unthinkable that a senator of Rome, of such high principles that he forbade the erection of a theatre in a city of heroes, should want his mother to be honoured as a goddess by such propitiatory rites as would have scandalized her as a Roman matron. He would surely have thought it quite impossible for a respectable woman to have her modesty so corrupted by the assumption of divinity that her worshipers should call upon her with ritual invocations of this sort. These invocations contained expressions of such a kind that had they been hurled at any antagonist in a quarrel, during her life on earth, then if she had not stopped her ears and withdrawn from the company, her friends, her husband and her children would have blushed for her. In fact the ‘Mother of the Gods’ was such a character as even the worst of men would be ashamed to have for his mother. And when she came to take possession of the minds of the Romans she looked for the best man of the country, not so as to support him by counsel and help, but to cheat and deceive him, like the woman of whom the Bible says, ‘she ensnares the precious souls of men’. Her purpose was that a mind of great endowments should be puffed up by this supposedly divine testimony and should think itself truly exceptional, and therefore should cease to follow the true religion and piety – without which every national ability, however remarkable, disappears in the ruin which follows on pride. And thus that goddess should seek the support of the best men only by trickery, seeing that she requires in her worship the kind of behaviour which decent men shrink from even in their convivial moments.”

Augustine was enormously influential to the Christian Church at a time when Church doctrine was still being formulated and heresies were still emerging, to be debated upon and rejected. In his wake, the Church charted a course that polarized itself away from any hint of the depravities associated with the corrupt gods and goddesses of the world about her. This extremity of purification, for which purity was equated with chasitity, cleansed the Judeo-Christian God of any taint of sexuality.

A thousand years later, this insistence upon purity had not only remained, but had crystallized into a rigid perfectionism, enshrined by the medieval cleric Jerome Zanchius, a rigid adherent of the heavenly perfection envisioned by Aristotle and Ptolemy. I describe this attitude in the words of Earl’s wife Joyce in my novel Buddy:

“The sixteenth century was especially bad,” she continued. “The reactionary atmosphere at that time virtually ensured that perfectionists would enter the religious scene. Their theological precepts constituted a complementary philosophical companion to Ptolemy’s geocentric cosmology of perfection. God, they claimed, being the Creator of that perfection, was Himself of a like nature. Listen to these characteristics, Earl. To them, God was the Embodiment of simplicity, perfection, unchangeability and independency of being. These qualities, in turn, implied to them that God was above some of the defining characteristics of lesser beings such as the human race. Passion is included among these ‘lesser’ characteristics constituting the human nature that don’t belong to God.”

Zanchius, in his rather pretentious work Absolute Predestination Stated and Defined, included some Scripturally unjustified statements regarding the nature of God, of which the following excerpts are representative:

“VI.—I shall conclude this introduction with briefly considering, in the sixth and last place, THE MERCY OF GOD.

“POSITION 1.—The Deity is, throughout the Scriptures, represented as infinitely gracious and merciful (Exod. 34.6; Nehem. 9.17; Psalm 103.8; 1 Peter 1.3).

“When we call the Divine mercy infinite, we do not mean that it is, in a way of grace, extended to all men without exception (and supposing it was, even then it would be very improperly denominated infinite on that account, since the objects of it, though all men taken together, would not amount to a multitude strictly and properly infinite), but that His mercy towards His own elect, as it knew no beginning, so is it infinite in duration, and shall know neither period nor intermission.

“POSITION 2.—Mercy is not in the Deity, as it is in us, a passion or affection, everything of that kind being incompatible with the purity, perfection, independency and unchangeableness of His nature; but when this attribute is predicated of Him, it only notes His free and eternal will or purpose of making some of the fallen race happy by delivering them from the guilt and dominion of sin, and communicating Himself to them in a way consistent with His own inviolable justice, truth and holiness. This seems to be the proper definition of mercy as it relates to the spiritual and eternal good of those who are its objects.”

Zanchius continues as follows in his Chapter 1, entitled in grandiose manner “Wherein the Terms Commonly Made Use of in Treating of this Subject are Defined and Explained.”:

“HAVING considered the attributes of God as laid down in Scripture, and so far cleared our way to the doctrine of predestination, I shall, before I enter further on the subject, explain the principal terms generally made use of when treating of it, and settle their true meaning. In discoursing on the Divine decrees, mention is frequently made of God’s love and hatred, of election and reprobation, and of the Divine purpose, foreknowledge and predestination, each of which we shall distinctly and briefly consider.

“I.—When love is predicated of God, we do not mean that He is possessed of it as a passion or affection. In us it is such, but if, considered in that sense, it should be ascribed to the Deity, it would be utterly subversive of the simplicity, perfection and independency of His being. Love, therefore, when attributed to Him, signifies—

“(l) His eternal benevolence, i.e., His everlasting will, purpose and determination to deliver, bless and save His people. Of this, no good works wrought by them are in any sense the cause. Neither are even the merits of Christ Himself to be considered as any way moving or exciting this good will of God to His elect, since the gift of Christ, to be their Mediator and Redeemer, is itself an effect of this free and eternal favour borne to them by God the Father (John 3.16). His love towards them arises merely from “the good pleasure of His own will,” without the least regard to anything ad extra or out of Himself.

“(2) The term implies complacency, delight and approbation. With this love God cannot love even His elect as considered in themselves, because in that view they are guilty, polluted sinners, but they were, from all eternity, objects of it, as they stood united to Christ and partakers of His righteousness.

“(3) Love implies actual beneficence, which, properly speaking, is nothing else than the effect or accomplishment of the other two: those are the cause of this. This actual beneficence respects all blessings, whether of a temporal, spiritual or eternal nature. Temporal good things are indeed indiscriminately bestowed in a greater or less degree on all, whether elect or reprobate, but they are given in a covenant way and as blessings to the elect only, to whom also the other benefits respecting grace and glory are peculiar. And this love of beneficence, no less than that of benevolence and complacency, is absolutely free, and irrespective of any worthiness in man.

“II.—When hatred is ascribed to God, it implies (1) a negation of benevolence, or a resolution not to have mercy on such and such men, nor to endue them with any of those graces which stand connected with eternal life. So, “Esau have I hated” (Rom. 9.), i.e., “I did, from all eternity, determine within Myself not to have mercy on him.” The sole cause of which awful negation is not merely the unworthiness of the persons hated, but the sovereignty and freedom of the Divine will. (2) It denotes displeasure and dislike, for sinners who are not interested in Christ cannot but be infinitely displeasing to and loathsome in the sight of eternal purity. (3) It signifies a positive will to punish and destroy the reprobate for their sins, of which will, the infliction of misery upon them hereafter, is but the necessary effect and actual execution.”

I respond to this odd theology as follows, which I present in my novel Buddy in terms of Joyce’s continuing commentary to her husband Earl:

“Ouch. God above passion? That’s not what I get out of the Bible. Think about it. The consequence of a passionless God is a Deity possessing neither romance nor intimacy within or outside the Godhead. That would make the Godhead void of any gender-driven feelings, which is essentially equivalent to a genderless God. But if gender is not involved in the Godhead, God being above that kind of thing, we would end up with a passionless God incapable of experiencing for Himself that which He fashioned in His creation and asks of us to respond toward Him. That would give us an experiential edge on God as well as to suggest hypocrisy in His nature.

“I’m with you,” Joyce replied. “Beyond that problem, the perfectionists’ definition of God not only suppresses love, His most important attribute, but inhibits those to whom Scripture was written from loving Him back. This is a serious issue because it runs counter to His Great Commandment to love Him with all our hearts, and our souls and our minds.

“Their God was instead, in His perfection, of a remote grandeur. This notion gave rise to a God whose primary attribute is his majestic greatness. By defining God with majesty in mind, love became a secondary attribute, despite John’s emphatic identification of God as the very embodiment of love. They went too far. The perfection embodied in their eulogies renders them sterile.

“The perfectionists’ Pasteurization of God has led them to a view of God as residing in absolute flawlessness, so void of blemish that, like the smooth and featureless moon of their era, their statements of position approach the theological equivalent of Aristotle’s perfect cosmos, which was embellished upon by Ptolemy and published in his Almagest in 150 A.D.   They had nothing whatsoever to do with Scripture. In their application of Ptolemaic principles of perfection in the cosmos to their theology, the perfectionists’ God, then, is a perfectly round, gigantic, cold and opaque marble.”

In brief, Zanchius defines a God whose primary attribute is his majestic greatness. Had his mind access to expressions denoting higher level superlatives, he certainly would have included them. In defining God in this way, he automatically makes love a secondary attribute, despite John’s emphatic identification of God as the very embodiment of love. Zanchius’ passionless God, in fact, is alien to the God of Scripture. This is to be expected, as he assigns attributes to God without any reference whatsoever to Scripture itself.

Zanchius’ God, then, being positionally remote from and by nature very different from the mankind of His creation, is alien to it as well.

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #8

 

Chapter 4: The Western Christian Church’s Viewpoint of the Nature of the Holy Spirit

An essential item on our dogtags was our religious affiliation. In our boot camp entrance paperwork we were instructed to fill in the appropriate blank, which would then go onto the dogtags. As I had no religious affiliation at the time, I didn’t know what to put down. When I asked, a corporal supervising our assembly set me straight. “You’re either Catholic or Protestant, screw,” he explained. “What’s a Protestant?” I pressed. “A Protestant is someone who’s not a Catholic, dumbass,” he sneered. (His epithet actually was more colorful than that, equating me to a part of my anatomy that never sees the light of day.) I knew I wasn’t a Catholic, so I put down “Protestant”, and “Protestant” is what my dogtags read, although I didn’t know what a Protestant was.

I had no religious affiliation for the simple reason that I wasn’t religious. My parents weren’t religious and, in fact, often scoffed at those who were. But I did have some minimal exposure to the concept of God, as a few years previous my brother and I, along with a friend, decided to embark on a life of crime. We had acquired a taste for beer, but, not being old enough to buy it legitimately, we decided to steal it. When the inevitable happened, I was dragged out of the police station by very angry parents, who tossed me into a Methodist Church forthwith for sorely-needed instruction in morals.

That didn’t work out too well, because the Church itself offered no insight regarding God. On the third Sunday, after the pastor expressed his opinion from the pulpit that “nobody really expects Jesus to return again”, I went home and confronted my parents with the certain knowledge that God didn’t exist, even in the eyes of the pastor. “If there really is no God,” I told them, what good is moral instruction that comes from a lie?”

They were forced to agree, after which I didn’t darken the doors of a Church again until I was in my late thirties. Perhaps it was a good thing that when I did go back to Church after realizing that God did indeed exist and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord, I possessed some maturity of thought, including a certain cynicism regarding the plethora of differing doctrines associated with the various Christian denominations. It was this understanding of Church fallibility that led me to sample a number of different Churches before settling into a favorite. But even after finding a Church that we called home, I was well aware of the confusing number of issues over which the various denominations disagreed: infant baptism, free will, the identity of the elect of God, the stance regarding modern Israel, Mary’s immaculate conception, Mary’s perpetual virginity, Mary’s status in heaven, the role of the Holy Spirit in the modern Church, dispensationalism, etc. The list went on and on.

I soon discovered that among all the contentious issues there was one that nobody wanted to address: the nature of the Holy Spirit. Holy Father and Holy Son were well-defined, but the Holy Spirit was not, and it became apparent that this absence of comprehension was common to virtually all the Churches whose doctrines I was familiar with. I eventually came to my own understanding of the Protestant viewpoint regarding the nature of the Holy Spirit: there wasn’t a viable position. The typical position was that the Holy Spirit, like Father and Son, was truly and fully God, existed with Father and Son throughout eternity, and, like Father and Son, was to be worshiped and adored as a Member of the Trinitarian Godhead. There were accompanying relational words like “proceeding from”, but which were intuitively empty of substance. Beyond this common vague description, there was an essentially universal acknowledgement of confusion and incomplete understanding. I was to find out later that the Catholic Church suffered under the same vagueness of understanding, although she responded to that confusion in a strikingly different manner. The following is my take on the nature of that confusion and some preliminary thoughts as to how it came about. I go into greater detail on the “how” in Chapters 10 and 11.

From the very birth of Christianity at the first Pentecost following Jesus’ resurrection, there was a sweeping away from the Christian faith of the decadent and often lewd practices associated with the worship of the pagan gods. Gone was the old leaven, and, like a breath of fresh air, the Holy Spirit came to indwell, ennoble and thoroughly clean human temples. With the new faith came an urgent call to demonstrate its difference from the crassness and moral filth of the surrounding secular society.

The Church eventually trespassed beyond the bounds of loving worship, propriety and common sense in her effort to cleanse herself, even to the extent of corrupting Scripture. But that took more time, on the order of several hundred years.

The Church’s initial success in this endeavor generated a loathing for Christians among their secular associates that contributed greatly to the persecutions that followed, particularly as the rulers found it convenient to exploit this antipathy of secular society toward Christians for their own benefit. But the persecutions only stiffened the Christian resolve to stand apart from the surrounding society.

It was in this setting that the Christian faith itself developed the canon of the New Testament and established its structure and dogma as it confronted a number of serious heresies that threatened to undermine the character and teachings of Jesus and His Apostles. The canon of Scripture, always directed by the Holy Spirit, remained untouched by the human condition. But the Church and the formulation of her dogma were heavily influenced by the deep antagonism in the minds of the Christian leadership between the new nobility of spirit and the old darkness of self-absorption and lust.

Foremost in the minds of many of the new Christians were the lewd and disgusting bacchanalias associated with the devotions to the Greek and Roman gods, who themselves were prone to bouts of lust and sexual perversions. In sharp contrast to the gross depravity of these gods, Jesus stood apart, radiant in shining moral splendor. At a time of rampant sexual excess, Jesus’ Words sparkled like swords of righteousness and were taken deeply to heart. Among these were His own pronouncements of the place of sexuality within the Christian economy, which were immortalized in Scripture. His Words that are handed down to us in Matthew 19 must have been very important to the new Christians:

“The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read that he who made them at the beginning, made them male and female; and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore, they are no more twain, but one flesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to put away your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery; and whosoever marrieth her who is put away doth commit adultery.

 

          “His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, except they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, who were so born from their mother’s womb; and there are some eunuchs, who were made eunuchs by men; and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

 

The new Christians, in overlooking much of what Jesus actually was teaching, placed a heavy emphasis on the latter part of this saying by Jesus, the part that dealt with eunuchs. It may have called to mind a piece of Old Testament Scripture, verse five of David’s fifty-first Psalm, attaching to it a meaning that went beyond the words:

“Behold, I was shaped in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”

This passage was written after Nathan confronted David with a scathing rebuke over David’s murderous lust for Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, and was an expression of guilt, which very much included his own, over the baseness of motivation behind some sexual unions.

Paul, too, in support of the Christian desire for moral cleanliness and writing to a Church that was in danger of returning to the materialism of society at large, added his obviously conflicted opinion of the meaning of sexual purity and the role of women within the Christian economy, but questioning himself as he did so as to whether he was writing on behalf of the Holy Spirit, or whether his was doing so entirely on his own. In 1 Corinthians 7:1 and 2, 25-40, he said this:

“Now concerning the things about which ye wrote unto me, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. . . .

          “Now concerning virgins, I have no commandment of the Lord; yet I give my judgment, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful. I suppose, therefore, that this is good for the present distress, I say, that it is good for a man so to be. Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife. But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned. Nevertheless, such shall have trouble in the flesh; but I spare you. But this I say, brethren, The time is short; it remaineth that both they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it; for the fashion of this world passeth away. But I would not have you without care. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. There is a difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit; but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I speak for your own profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is comely, and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction. But if any man think that he behaveth himself uncomely toward his virgin, if she pass the flower of her age, and need so require, let him do what he will, he sinneth not; let them marry. Nevertheless, he that standeth steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power over his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin, doeth well. So, then, he that giveth her in marriage doeth well; but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better. The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to when she will, only in the Lord. But she is happier if she so abide, after my judgment; and I think also that I have the Spirit of God.”

 

Although Paul repeatedly noted that the union between man and wife is not sinful, it was his admonition that life as a eunuch was better, in that it permitted undiluted focus to the Lord. It was that sentiment which stood out in the early Christian mind as the golden standard of behavior.

That standard was expressed, for example, by Justin the Martyr in his first apology for (defense of) Christianity, as compiled in the book Early Christian Fathers, edited by Cyril C. Richardson. This commentary was written around the middle of the second century A.D., about a half century after the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation. In it, Justin echoed the sentiment of Paul regarding sexual circumspection:

“About continence [Jesus] said this: ‘Whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart before God.’ And: ‘If your right eye offends you, cut it out; it is better for you to enter into the kingdom of Heaven with one eye than with two to be sent into eternal fire.’ And: ‘Whoever marries a woman who has been put away from another man commits adultery.’ And: ‘There are some who were made eunuchs by men, and some who were born eunuchs, and some who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake; only not all [are able to] receive this.

“And so those who make second marriages according to human law are sinners in the sight of our Teacher, and those who look on a woman to lust after her. For he condemns not only the man who commits the act of adultery, but the man who desires to commit adultery, since not only our actions but our thoughts are manifest to God. Many men and women now in their sixties and seventies who have been disciples of Christ from childhood have preserved their purity; and I am proud that I could point to such people in every nation. . . But to begin with, we do not marry except in order to bring up children, or else, renouncing marriage, we live in perfect continence. To show you that promiscuous intercourse is not among our mysteries – just recently one of us submitted a petition to the Prefect Felix in Alexandria, asking that a physician be allowed to make him a eunuch, for the physicians there said they were not allowed to do this without the permission of the Prefect. When Felix would by no means agree to endorse [the petition], the young man remained single, satisfied with [the approval of] his own conscience and that of his fellow believers.”

In writing about the sexual purity of Christians, Justin intended to contrast this behavior with that associated with the false gods and the rampant and often cruel immorality that not only was involved in the worship of them, but which had infected secular life as well:

“Far be it from every sound mind to entertain such a concept of deities as that Zeus, whom they call the ruler and begetter of all, should have been a parricide (killer of a relative) and the son of a parricide, and that moved by desire of evil and shameful pleasures he descended on Ganymede and the many women whom he seduced, and that his sons after him were guilty of similar actions. But, as we said before, it was the wicked demons who did these things. We have been taught that only those who live close to God in holiness and virtue attain to immortality, and we believe that those who live unjustly and do not reform will be punished in eternal fire.”

“Secondly, out of every race of men we who once worshiped Dionysus the son of Semele and Apollo the son of Leto, who in their passion for men did things which it is disgraceful even to speak of, or who worshiped Persephone and Aphrodite, who were driven made by [love of] Adonis and whose mysteries you celebrate, or Asclepius or some other of those who are called gods, now through Jesus Christ despise them, even at the cost of death, and have dedicated ourselves to the unbegotten and impassible God. We do not believe that he ever descended in mad passion on Antiope or others, nor on Ganymede, nor was he, receiving help through Thetis, delivered by that hundred-handed monster, nor was he, because of this anxious that Thetis’ son Achilles should destroy so many Greeks for the sake of his concubine Briseis. We pity those who believe [such stories], for which we know that the demons are responsible.”

“That we may avoid all injustice and impiety, we have been taught that to expose the newly born is the work of wicked men – first of all because we observe that almost all [foundlings], boys as well as girls, are brought up for prostitution. As the ancients are said to have raised herds of oxen or goats or sheep or horses in their pastures, so now [you raise children] just for shameful purposes, and so in every nation a crowd of females and hermaphrodites and doers of unspeakable deeds are exposed as public prostitutes. You even collect pay and levies and taxes from these, whom you ought to exterminate from your civilized world. And anyone who makes use of them may in addition to [the guilt of] godless, impious, and intemperate intercourse, by chance be consorting with his own child or relative or brother. Some even prostitute their own children or wives, and others are admittedly mutilated for purposes of sodomy, and treat this as part of the mysteries of the mother of the gods – while beside each of those whom think of as gods a serpent is depicted as a great symbol and mystery. You charge against us the actions that you commit openly and treat with honor, as if the divine light were overthrown and withdrawn – which of course does no harm to us, who refuse to do any of these things, but rather injures those who do them and then bring false witness [against us].”

[to be continued]

MARCHING TO A WORTHY DRUMMER INSTALLMENT #7

Chapter 3: God’s Credentials (continued)

One morning a few months later something happened right out of the blue that changed my life the instant that I woke up. When I did awake it was to a strange peace and the certain knowledge – it wasn’t just a feeling, but a deeply rooted understanding – that on that day I would take Danny up to the big hill and we would jump off together. I had no idea how that might be done, but I was sure that it would, despite the fact that I had never flown in a glider with another person, even as a passenger, and had no idea what to expect. As a Christian I understood this knowledge and especially the peace regarding it to be a gift from the Holy Spirit. Every year that passes I am more certain of this fact. And very, very grateful.

The first thing I did after getting dressed was to call Harold, asking him to come with me and help to figure out how we were going to get Danny into the air. Then I went to the nursing home, told the staff what I intended to do, and picked up Danny. We met up with Harold on the big hill, where he was already attempting to figure out how the launch was going to take place. He had a rope slung over his shoulder when Danny and I arrived and was eyeing a big stump. He wrapped the end of the rope around the stump as I came up to him, and walked over to the edge. “I think this is gonna work,” he said as he wrapped the other end around his waist, cinching it tightly. “Go ahead and set up,” he continued as he tested it. He had just enough slack to get him over the edge at a 45 degree angle.

Harold was one strong guy. He was brave and compassionate as well, being exactly the person I needed for help. As I walked the glider to where I’d run off the edge, Harold cradled Danny in his harness. We hooked him into the keel, along with me, while he continued to hold Danny in his arms. When I signaled my intent to go, he ran with me to the edge and, just as he felt the tug of the rope around his waist, flung him away in front of the glider.

I felt a twist of Danny’s harness on the keel and, having not quite achieved flying speed, we momentarily dove in dubious control. But we had a thousand feet to sort things out, and eventually gained a semblance of normal flight. Danny’s excitement was extreme, his jaw dropping as he attempted to grin, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that this strange thing we were doing was being smiled upon by God. This feeling of euphoria continued after we landed, when Danny gave me a look of pure joy.

After our first landing Danny was totally pumped.   He flung his arms akimbo and strained to speak.   I understood him as clearly as if his speech was perfect. Harold and I were both pumped too. It probably was the most significant moment of my life. No bones were broken, Danny and I were alive, Harold hadn’t fallen off the cliff and we had acquired the experience of a successful venture. We could, in fact, do it again, and now without the fear of the unknown.

It’s best to wait until the adrenalin leaves the system before attempting something that demands logic. We didn’t and it was almost our undoing. Grinning stupidly at each other, Harold and I both said “Let’s do it again!”

We returned to the top of the big hill and set up the glider once more. Harold wrapped the rope around his waist, tugged on it, and took Danny and his harness in his arms. I signaled and began to run, and Harold followed and flung Danny off.

Oh-oh. It being later in the day, the wind had changed. I had checked it before launching, and knew about it but it’s hard to argue with invincibility. On the other hand, it’s also hard to ignore the laws of physics, as I now found out. It’s about the first thing that hang gliding instructors tell their students, usually expressing the importance of it by shouting: “Don’t launch downwind! It won’t work!”

Indeed. Human power is notoriously weak. The hang glider pilot needs all the help he can get to attain flying speed. Anything less results in a stall, which means that gravity rules over everything else.

So here we were, heading downward in a stall. Theoretically, we had a thousand feet to sort things out and recover. The cliff, however, had a prominent ledge a couple of hundred feet down. Trees resided on the ledge. Big trees, over a hundred feet tall. By the time Danny and I had attained flying speed, we found ourselves below the treetops and heading rapidly toward them. Most fortunately, the wing itself remained above the tops and our combined mass was sufficient to plow through them. We were through the gauntlet, and after that the flight was uneventful. But we didn’t fly any more that day.

The next flight didn’t work out too well either. The flight itself was fine, but my landing lacked perfection. I was too low in the flare-out, just about kissing the grass. Danny’s chin was lower yet. When he gets excited he drops his jaw. When we land he remains prone, thus making his jaw the lowest part of his body and, in actuality, the entire hang glider system. This would have been acceptable if the field contained nothing but grass. But it didn’t. Cows grazed there. They ate the grass. They did other things on it, too, so it was inevitable that Danny’s jaw would scoop up a cow pie.

It wasn’t as funny as it sounds. He was choking and I was terrified that he wouldn’t be able to breathe. As soon as I could I scrambled to clear his airway by poking my finger into his throat and pulling out the poop. His gasps reassured me that he was able to breathe, and I continued to kneel there, thanking God for His mercy in the face of my stupidity.

When we returned to the nursing home I felt compelled to tell the nurses about what had happened, because I wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t need a shot of something to immunize him against infection. The fact that Danny was there and he was alive and apparently in good spirits lightened up the situation considerably. They asked if there were flies on the poop. When I replied in the negative, they said that there was no real problem. Then they began to laugh. They were still laughing as I left the building.

We had four more flights together after that, three of which were made without untoward incidents. But the next flight was a real doozy.

To this point we had one very successful flight together, followed by two more somewhat marginal ones. The next flight was marginal too. In fact, it was the scariest of the lot. As before, Harold ran next to me with Danny, flinging him into the air as I reached the edge of the big hill. This time there was an added spin to the thrust, causing Danny’s right arm to loop around the left flying wire that ran between the left tip of my crosstube and the left tip of my basetube.

If Danny’s arm had been capable of flexing at the elbow, this wouldn’t have mattered. The arm simply would have slipped back down, allowing Danny’s harness to come back alongside mine when I went prone and put my hands on the basetube for control.

But Danny’s arm was quite rigid at both elbow and shoulder, causing him to remain where he was, on the left side of the glider rather far away from the basetube.

If hang gliders had control surfaces common to airplanes like rudders and ailerons, that might not have been so terribly important. But hang gliders are controlled in flight by weight-shift, making control surfaces unnecessary under most conditions. Therefore, most hang gliders don’t have control surfaces.

As didn’t we. There we were then, flying marginally above stall speed with the glider sensing Danny’s position as a rather stern command for a sharp left turn. A sharp left turn at that point would have brought us back toward our launch point. The problem with that, of course, is that now we were well below the launch point. As we began to turn, the cliff face came back into sight. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Although he was fully aware of the situation, Danny’s handicap prevented him from moving his arm. His frustration was extreme, matching the intensity of my terror. All I wanted then was my mama. I think that Danny wanted the same.

I had no choice. Tugging on the right flying wire, I pulled myself (scrabbled would be more accurate) out to the right to compensate for Danny’s position. We straightened out and I was then able to turn us away from the cliff and back into unobstructed airspace. But in that position my control was marginal, especially with respect to pitch. We were flying, but barely. Setting up for a landing and then executing it without compromising our health would be extremely difficult under those conditions.

When we had enough room to recover from a complete loss of control, I took a few deep breaths to calm myself and let go from my precarious but relatively stable perch, swinging over toward Danny. As the glider, under our combined weight on the left side, began a turn again to the left, this time more abruptly than the last, I reached out and attempted to unhook the arm. Failing to do it, I scrambled back to the right just as the glider began its entry into a spiral from which it may not have recovered.

Noting with dismay that we were closer to the ground and were approaching the point where we’d have insufficient altitude to recover from that kind of attitude, I took a few more deep breaths, prayed for God’s help and repeated the maneuver. Spurred on by desperation, I did so more boldly than during my previous attempt. This time we were successful. We returned to stable flight greatly relieved and breathing heartfelt thanks to God for getting us out of that situation. The landing turned out to be good.

Danny and I, with Harold’s continued help, had three more flights after that. They all were relatively uneventful. Then a number of significant events occurred in my life, all of which were unrelated to Danny, but which conspired against any further launches with him.

It was an experience that I’ll never forget, not for the scares, but for the joy of the doing. I don’t think Danny will, either. I suppose that I could feel guilty about having exposed Danny to such danger. But, given that he survived intact, his life ended up being far more meaningful than it otherwise would have been. I’m sure that Danny would agree to that also. Besides, God was in charge all the time.

As if that adventure with Danny wasn’t proof enough of the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, there was also the business of Her softly but insistently prodding me over a ten-year period of an on-again, off-again algebraic analysis of Jesus’ feeding of the multitudes, along with the like events of Elisha and Peter, to arrive at an understanding of what Jesus’ feeding events actually symbolized. This quest, driven by the Holy Spirit, led me into Scripture at a depth that I had no idea existed. It resulted in a profound understanding of the true meaning of His feeding events, complete with His signature. I share that information in my book Family of God. As I noted in an addendum to that book, the algebraic analysis presented in an appendix was necessary to lead me into an initial understanding, but once that understanding was attained, the entire process can be readily visualized by inspection without resorting to math. This ease of visualization extends to the numbers involved, including the means by which 5000 can be fed with 5 loaves and leave 12 baskets’ remainder, and 4000 can be fed with 7 loaves and leave 7 baskets’ remainder. In my novel Cathy, I describe the feeding process in narrative form. As far as I’m concerned, that understanding, like the flights with Danny, is a proof of God’s existence in the form of a gift, one that I’ll treasure forever.

 

After having experienced the direct presence of God in my life, whenever I’m in the vicinity of a doubter or scoffer, I’m tempted to scoff at the offender. But if I have the presence of mind to remember that I, too, was once a doubter. I offer a more gentle, albeit firm, response. Whatever my actual words turn out to be, however, I remember that experience told above as representing the ultimate proof of God’s existence and goodness – His credentials, if you will.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A RECOMMENDATION

Note to the reader: the series of articles entitled Background to Buddy were extracted from a Christian nonfiction work that formed the basis for the novel Buddy, which is available from either Amazon or Signalman Publishing. Directions are noted on the page entitled Buddy on this blog site. The purpose of this work was to explain the reasons why I consider the Holy Spirit to be functionally female. Adventure episodes and humor were added for the entertainment of both the reader and the author.

Having completed the Background to Buddy series with the posting of Background to Buddy #29, I am ready to move on to other topics. I plan to do so beginning with my next posting. For the present posting, however, I’d like to recommend to you a fascinating Christian book that I read just a few months ago, a classic, actually, that was first published back in 1975. I believe that it is still available on Amazon. The topic of the book intersects the theme of my novel Buddy as well as my earlier nonfiction work Family of God, which would make it useful to those who may find it difficult to accept without reservation my premises regarding the nature of the Holy Trinity.

The book Destined for the Throne was written by Christian author Paul E. Billheimer and published by Bethany House Publishers (Minneapolis, Minnesota) in collaboration with Christian Literature Crusade (Fort Washington, Pennsylvania). The edition in my possession includes the following forward by Billy Graham:

“I have just read the manuscript of Paul E. Billheimer’s book Destined for the Throne, and have been inspired and challenged by the insights and fresh interpretations of the Scriptures regarding prayer, praise, and the church’s place in the world. Every Christian who feels impelled to find a deeper dimension of Christian witness should not only read this book, but study it prayerfully, and apply its principles to his life.”

Theologically, Destined for the Throne focuses primarily on the implications, romantic and otherwise, of the Church’s future role as Bride of Christ. Therefore, the book doesn’t go quite as far as Buddy or Family of God in addressing the implications of that role with respect to the intrinsic nature of the Godhead Itself. But it comes very close, and in the way it approaches the topic of the Church it not only promotes a fresh and exciting view of the Christian’s natural relationship to his God but also fosters the kind of love between believer and God that approaches the ideal of Jesus’ description in Matthew 22 of the Great Commandment in the law:

“Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.”

To me, it’s a real tragedy that the Church has for so long generally neglected the implication of this one statement by Jesus as Paul Billheimer so skillfully brought to light. His preface is worth noting:

“No system of philosophy or theology is challenge-proof. The contending schools of theology, Calvinism and Arminianism, illustrate this point. Each has its sincere apologists as well as its equally sincere antagonists. Yet each is accepted in large circles as a viable system of truth with much to recommend it.

“In the realm of philosophy, no single system offers an adequate explanation of the universe. All fall short of advancing a fully satisfying cause for and interpretation of the meaning of existence. Science, with its tremendous contribution to mundane affairs and to the enrichment of life in general, is of little help here. Apart from the Bible, the universe is an incomprehensible mystery. The Bible alone offers the only satisfactory explanation for the age-old questions ‘Who is man?’ ‘Why is he here?’ “What is the meaning of life?’

“Many of the theses advanced and expounded in the following pages were, at first, so startlingly unconventional and sometimes so overwhelmingly astounding to the writer as to stagger his imagination and boggle his mind. It may, therefore, not be surprising if others find the viewpoints equally astonishing. Hence, may I urge the reader to carefully consider the insights presented in the light of both Scripture and reason.

“Wherever the messages which form these chapters have been given, whether from the pulpit or person-to-person, they have been received with appreciation. I believe the following pages contain a message especially pertinent to this end time. The book is offered to the Church with a sincere prayer that it will make a significant contribution to the spiritual life of the Body and Bride of Christ.

“The writer feels that many of the insights were given him by the personal ministry of the Holy Spirit through the Word. He therefore, relinquishes all claim to ownership. He wishes his ministerial brethren to feel perfectly free to use in their own ministry any material herein which the Spirit may quicken to them, subject only to the terms of the copyright. The truths were given by the Spirit. They belong to the Body.”

I enthusiastically endorse Paul Billheimer’s attribution of his insights to the Holy Spirit’s illumination of Scripture. For that same reason, for over a year now I have been purchasing copies of Buddy from my publisher and offering them free of charge to those individuals whom the Holy Spirit has moved me to gift them.

BACKGROUND TO BUDDY #29

Note to the reader: the series of articles entitled Background to Buddy were extracted from a Christian nonfiction work that formed the basis for the novel Buddy, which is available from either Amazon or Signalman Publishing. Directions are noted on the page entitled Buddy on this blog site. The purpose of this work was to explain the reasons why I consider the Holy Spirit to be functionally female. Adventure episodes and humor were added for the entertainment of both the reader and the author.

Chapter 14: The Benefits of this New Understanding

Truth

When I dare to delve into the details of my character, I realize that I’m only marginally qualified to discuss truth. I offer below a mild example of my own weakness in that area. You might as well accept it as my best shot at coming clean because you’re not going to get a more appropriate example, from me anyway.

There was only one time while we were in high school that I bought something other than a Ford, and I regretted it almost immediately. (Lest anyone get the feeling that I only like Fords, I should say that my present four-wheeled vehicle is a Dodge truck, which I’m very happy with.) It was a big Chrysler four-door sedan with an undersized engine and miserable performance. I got it on the cheap in a deal that I could hardly turn down, and it was roomy, which made it great on dates. Given that it accelerated at the rate of a freight train, it’s hard to imagine how the transmission could possibly wear out. Nevertheless, one time when leaving a store downtown on the way to a date the car somehow got stuck in reverse and no amount of shoving and cursing would get the shift lever to move. As a result, I had to drive the car seven miles in reverse, with much stopping at signs and turning of corners, to get back home. There was a lot of honking on the way, and much laughter from the occupants of those cars, many of whom were my peers. Can you imagine what it would be like to come upon the rear of a car at an intersection? Or having one facing you as you pull up to a stop sign? I pulled the transmission and eventually got the gears to mesh properly, after which I unloaded the unfortunate vehicle onto some other poor sucker who bought it on the cheap, thinking that he was getting a good deal from some poor sap who didn’t know the value of his possessions. That car passed through a lot of hands and became kind of an inside joke before it finally reached the junky’s. There must have been a host of us who laughed inwardly upon seeing it wobble down the street.

I should never have passed on a lemon like that to some unsuspecting innocent, aiding and abetting his own descent into bad-applehood like me. What’s far worse, even now I don’t cringe in self-disgust. I still laugh about it. I just can’t help it. True, I did it a long time before I became a Christian. Nevertheless, if I were to honestly examine myself now, I’d still find things hidden under rocks.

Please bear with me in my obvious hypocrisy. But regardless of my own character failings, truth is truth independent of any of us, and it is extremely important to God. When it comes to Scripture, it’s important to me also. That I don’t joke about.

It doesn’t take a theologian to figure out its importance. All one has to do is read one of the Gospels. I believe that my understanding of the Holy Spirit to be true, simply because of the weight of Scripture that supports it. If such is indeed the case, then it will necessarily end up being common knowledge regardless of who ends up convincing the Church at large. In the interim, because the prevailing opinion is not in accord with that understanding, one can expect that the issue will generate a lot of anger and turmoil. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing – it might be a good thing to have an aroused public, even if it turns into a fight over something, which would be a big improvement over the current lackluster and complacent public involvement in the Church, seeing as how today’s Church is a distressingly good fit for the Laodicean Church that Jesus spoke against n Revelation 3:14-19:

“And unto the angel of the Church of the Laodiceans write: These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot; I would that thou wert cold or hot. So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing, and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked, I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten; be zealous, therefore, and repent.”

Earlier (John 8:32), Jesus said of truth:

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Regardless of whether my contention is true or false, the issue itself deserves honest, in-depth discussion, wherein Scripture is the ultimate judge of each of the points I have raised herein in defense of my view.

A deeper understanding of the homosexual issue

The Christian shouldn’t have a hateful attitude toward a gay person. I believe that the practice of adultery is just as bad, if not worse, as it is listed in the Ten Commandments as a specific “Don’t”. Furthermore, most of us have our own failings that we’d like to hide from God if we could. Most Christians know this and refrain from practicing a holier-than-thou intolerance toward the individual. On the other hand, the Christian should see that person for who he is: an unfortunate, afflicted soul. Furthermore, should society itself attempt to claim that homosexual behavior is normal, the Christian should righteously condemn the society. It is not normal, and it is spoken against by God (see, for example, Leviticus 18 and Romans 1).

But why does God hate the homosexual practice? Because it is a violation of type, the same as adultery. This question itself demonstrates the importance of viewing the Holy Spirit as functionally female and the Godhead as a productive Family.

One implication of my view of the nature of the Godhead carries with it both a theological and practical side. Theologically, the association of a female function with the Holy Spirit explains God’s prohibition in Leviticus 18 of homosexuality not only as a practice alien to the manner in which we were created, but more importantly as a violation of the type of the Godhead and its Family basis. From a practical standpoint, this theological insight furnishes a firm basis for the Christian objection to homosexuality that otherwise could not be made, and adds a foundation for a firm resolve against accepting it as normal and avoiding those Churches that have accepted it as without sin.

Without rancor for individuals who are afflicted with that practice, those individuals who perceive the Godhead in family terms are capable by reason of logic to view homosexuality as a sin because it is contrary to the intrinsic nature of the Godhead. Such individuals would be far less likely than the less informed Churchgoer to succumb to the beckoning arms of the fallen Churches.

One could also apply this violation-of-type argument against the notion of an all-male Godhead for the reason that if gender was involved in the Godhead and it was all male, then homosexuality would not represent a violation of type. God may just as well have populated the Garden of Eden with Adam and Steve rather than Adam and Eve; after all, it would then more closely correspond to the nature of the Godhead itself.

The only viable alternative to a female or a male Holy Spirit, given the implication regarding degenerate sexual practice, is a genderless Godhead, as presented by the medieval cleric Jerome Zanchius1. But even the notion of a genderless Godhead, like that of an all-male one, seriously weakens the case against homosexuality as a corrupt practice.

Understanding the special proscription of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit

One encounters a passage in Matthew 22:31 and 32 that, on the surface, is difficult to understand:

“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

Its harshness is only one difficult-to-understand item. More perplexing is why Jesus would single out the Holy Spirit as the one Member of the Godhead to be so protective over. Only in the context of a female function in whose role redeemed mankind himself will be placed as the Wife of Christ does this make sense. In Proverbs 8:35 and 36, Wisdom touches on the same subject and clarifies it:

“For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favor of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.”

By interpreting Matthew 22:32 in the context of Proverbs 8:36, one reaches a perfectly understandable explanation: as Wife of Christ, redeemed (spiritual) mankind shall himself participate in the work of the Holy Spirit, which would mean that anyone who spoke against the Holy Spirit might just be speaking against his own soul.

A deeper understanding of who Jesus is

The functional role of Jesus within the Godhead has set Him apart in Creation not as one expression of the Father’s Will, but as the all-encompassing expression of that Will in every aspect. That makes Jesus more than a created being: He represents the totality of Creation. The specific implications of that role include:

Jesus Christ was uniquely begotten by the Father as the progressive expression in space-time reality of His Will. The essence of this Holy Will is pure love which is directed toward His Son, and through His Son to mankind.

As the perfect expression of the Divine Will, Jesus is at one with it.

As the Son of God, Jesus will assume His Father’s function as Divine Will with respect to earth. As foreshown by Jesus’ work on the Sabbath, this future assumption will occur on the seventh day of God with respect to events on earth.

A deeper understanding of humanity’s role with respect to God

Mankind, moved by the Holy Spirit to perform in the role of prophets and actors in a cosmic drama, gave birth in Scripture to the Jesus who came in the flesh by defining Him and His mission on earth.

As the perfect Son of Man, Jesus was faithful to the principle that every word He spoke and every deed He performed was in concert with the Scriptural words and deeds of His predecessors.

The Scriptural representation of Jesus as the Word of God was a gift from God to mankind as a means of permitting the incorporation of redeemed man into the Family of God.

In performing this role, men and women under the direction of God served as the means to implement Jesus in Scripture, giving them the additional role of representing the Holy Spirit to mankind. This role was a prelude to the future role of the Church as the Bride of Christ.

Even as Jesus was being defined by Old Testament individuals prior to His appearance on earth, He pre-existed as the Implementation of Creation itself. He also pre-existed as Jehovah God of Israel, having a special relationship with a particular tribe as the extension of family.

As Jehovah God of Israel, Jesus directly appeared to men such as Abraham and Moses and communicated with them. The transfiguration event was a commemoration of those times. At other times His nature was communicated to Israel under the direction of the Holy Spirit through the law and the prophets, and through the words, deeds, and lives of special people.

In His appearance on earth, Jesus explained the meaning of His self-applied label as the Great I AM by appending attributes to that label. These attributes, which include “I AM the Light” and “I AM the Door”, are invariably descriptive of the love of God toward Mankind.

The ability to love God with the strength of His commandment

The most profound implication of perceiving a female function of the Holy Spirit is that it adds the elements of romance and family to our understanding of God which, in turn, makes it much easier for us to honor God as He commands in the Shema of Moses and as Jesus labeled the Great Commandment in Matthew 22: to love our God with all our hearts, souls and minds.

I can only speak for myself, but I consider that commandment to be far more than a mental will. That kind of love could be programmed into a robot. I believe that obedience to it demands a yearning from heart and soul that approaches or even surpasses normal romance. I cannot conceive of the ability to demonstrate this love toward a Godhead that lacks a family structure. Most happily for me, my perception of a female Holy Spirit, and only that perception, permits me to experience that kind of love.

I see this perception as fully in accordance with Scripture. According to the Apostle in 1 John 4:8,

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”

Here John actually defines God as the embodiment of love. How can the very essence of love lack such an important element as a gender-driven family context?

A happy marriage

On a simple walk down the street I can marvel, as I observe other couples going about their business, at the fundamental importance of gender differentiation, how deeply basic is this feature to not only our survival, but the quality of our lives. Here we have the means not just of a continuation of our race, but a most intimate antidote to loneliness and a voluntary and harmonious means of carrying out those tasks that are common to the family welfare.

Having understood the Holy Trinity as possessing this same attribute, I appreciate the notion of “complementary other” in my own marriage. That appreciation, in turn, rewards me with its happy return by my spouse. I do not want of love in my marriage, and with that quality being so fundamental to happiness in every aspect of my life, I am very content.

Besides having to endure husband-imposed hardships and terrors, unintentionally of course but no less real for that, Carolyn is also content. We’ve slowed down somewhat on the adventures, but the memories remain and they’re a lot of fun for both of us. Just the other night I sat quietly and enjoyed listening to her bubbling enthusiasm, interspersed with bouts of laughter, as she was regaling our family with tales of mishaps and plans gone wrong. One of her fondest memories was of an experience that was anything but pleasant. On our first trip to New Mexico on Ol’ Betsy (the 750 Yamaha), we found ourselves heading southward out of Poncha Pass on Highway 17. The Sangre de Cristo Range was to our left and we were happily experiencing the romance of traveling by bike along newly-discovered territory when we were assaulted by hail. The pellets were, thankfully, small but they stung like bees. The hail turned into rain, and by the time we reached the town of Alamosa we were getting seriously wet. It was close to dark and we decided to turn into a commercial tent-camping park for the night. I’m reasonably sure that most of the parks in that popular chain are adequately staffed with friendly, helpful people. This wasn’t. Despite the many open spaces on higher ground, we were assigned a place on bottom land. It was still dry when we pitched our tent, but during the night the constant rain turned it into a swamp. Around four o’clock in the morning we awoke to find ourselves in a two-inch layer of water that had permeated our clothing and sleeping bag. Unable to sleep, we got up, dressed in the wet clothes, bundled our belongings up and tied them to the bike the best we could. We rode out of Alamosa looking like we were characters from the Grapes of Wrath and continued southward. Somewhere along the way we found a restaurant where we ate an acutely uncomfortable breakfast. We reached civilization again at Espanola, New Mexico, where we quickly obtained a motel room. There we spread out our wet gear, misting up the windows, and indulged in the luxury of baths and a dry bed. When we ventured out that evening we had a delightful meal in an authentic Mexican restaurant, made all the better by the contrast with the miserable conditions of the day before. Our time in New Mexico was happy and exciting. We saw a lot of beautiful country, especially in the mountains above Taos.

As Carolyn told that story to our house guests her eyes glowed and she laughed often. I could see her feel the richness of experience. Even the negative ones had contributed to this wealth. She is well-aware of the notion of “complementary other”, and supports my conviction regarding the gender of the Holy Spirit.

While I don’t wish unhappiness on anyone, I wonder if the atheist, or even the Christian who doesn’t perceive the Trinity in the manner that I do, is capable of experiencing to the fullest the benefits that a loving marriage has to offer.

NOTES

General Notes:

1. All bible references are taken from the King James Version
2. Only the first appearance in each chapter to an item to which a note is associated is subscripted.

Chapter 14

1. See Wikipedia re Augustus Toplady. Toplady, Anglican deacon and author of the Hymn Rock of Ages, was a vehement Calvinist and had many heated confrontations with John Wesley on the subject of free will. In 1769 Toplady translated Jerome Zanchius’ Confession of the Christian Religion, written in 1562. Toplady’s translation was entitled The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted. This work is available on the Internet.

BACKGROUND TO BUDDY #28

Note to the reader: the series of articles entitled Background to Buddy were extracted from a Christian nonfiction work that formed the basis for the novel Buddy, which is available from either Amazon or Signalman Publishing. Directions are noted on the page entitled Buddy on this blog site. The purpose of this work was to explain the reasons why I consider the Holy Spirit to be functionally female. Adventure episodes and humor were added for the entertainment of both the reader and the author.

Chapter 13: An Incomplete Resistance to a Female Holy Spirit (continued)

The Catholic Church embraces other traditions regarding Mary that don’t appear to follow Scripture, at least directly. Yet some traditions may capture the essence of Scriptural teaching. Some of these are quite beautiful. As we have already noted, Father Gerald Vann (1906-1963), in his little book Mary’s Answer For Our Troubled Times, illustrates quite convincingly an account of Mary wherein with an agony of the heart she supports Jesus in His suffering during His crucifixion. While the specific interchange between Mary and Jesus is not found in Scripture, the reader nevertheless senses that it is appropriate to the situation and is inclined to agree that other Scripture indirectly supports the reality of this presumed relational event.

In his chapter “Mary and Modernity”, John Macquarrie mentions an Aztec Indian by the name of Juan Diego3 who lived in the town of Guadalupe near Mexico City, experiencing an apparent encounter with Mary in the year 1531. Macquarrie remarked upon the strange contrast between the ancient and modern worlds: while Christians still flocked into the Shrine of Guadalupe to kneel beneath Juan Diego’s cape, the same cape was visible but irrelevant to the busy people who went about their business along a modern moving walkway just outside the shrine. In observing this dichotomy, Macquarrie questioned the place of Christianity itself in our post-enlightenment society.

I remember reading of Juan Diego in an entirely different context. The account was presented by Jacques Vallee in his book Dimensions5, in which he speculated on the spiritual, even religious side of UFO encounters. The story of Juan Diego is quite moving; I included it in my book Myths, UFOs and the Judeo-Christian God6 and present it below as being of interest with respect to Mariology. In demonstrating an ongoing supernatural association with Mary, it indicates God’s approval of her veneration by the Church. Of particular interest in this type of visitation are the apparent absurdities in the encounter, which, upon a deeper grasp of the event, turn out to be of real importance. Vallee himself commented in the narration of the story, that:

“Indeed, we cannot help but recall here the word of Hartland in his Science of Fairy Tales: ‘This gift of an object apparently worthless, which turns out, on the conditions being observed, to be of the utmost value, is a commonplace of fairy transactions. It is one of the most obvious manifestations of superhuman power.’”

Elements of the tale which evoked that response are repeated below:

“Juan spent the day trying to relieve [his uncle’s] sufferings and left him only on Tuesday, to get a priest. As he was running to Tlaltelolco, the apparition again barred his way. Embarrassed, he told her why he had not followed her instructions, and she said:

“’My little son, do not be distressed and afraid. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Your uncle will not die at this time. This very moment his health is restored. There is no reason now for the errand you set out on, and you can peacefully attend to mine. Go up to the top of the hill: cut the flowers that are growing there and bring them to me.’

“There were no flowers on the top of the hill, as Juan Diego knew very well. In the middle of December, there could be no flower there, and yet, upon reaching the place, he found Castilian roses, ‘their petals wet with dew.’ He cut them and, using his long Indian cape – his tilma – to protect them from the bitter cold, carried them back to the apparition. She arranged the flowers he had dropped in the wrap, then tied the lower corners of the tilma behind his neck so that none of the roses would fall. She advised him not to let anybody but the bishop see the sign she had given him and then disappeared. Juan Diego never met her again.

“At the bishop’s palace several servants made fun of the Indian visionary. They ‘pushed him around’ and tried to snatch the flowers. But when they observed how the roses seemed to dissolve when they reached for them, they were astonished and let him go. Juan was taken once more to the bishop.

“’Juan Diego put up both hands and untied the corners of crude cloth behind his neck. The looped-up fold of the tilma fell: the flowers he thought were the precious sign tumbled out and lay in an untidy heap on the floor. Alas for the Virgin’s careful arrangement!

“’But Juan’s confusion over this mishap was nothing to what he felt immediately after it. Inside of seconds the Bishop had risen from his chair and was kneeling at Juan’s feet, and inside of a minute all the other persons in the room had surged forward and were also kneeling.’

“The bishop was kneeling before Juan’s tilma, and, as Ethel Cook Eliot remarks, ‘Millions of people have knelt before it since,’ for it has been placed over the high altar in the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The tilma consists of two pieces, woven of maguey fibers and sewn together, measuring sixty-six by forty-one inches. On this coarse material, whose color is that of unbleached linen, a lovely figure can be seen, fifty-six inches tall.

“’Surrounded by golden rays, it emerges as from a shell of light, clear-cut and lovely in every detail of line and color. The head is bent slightly and very gracefully to the right, just avoiding the long seam. They eyes look downward, but the pupils are visible. This gives an unearthly impression of lovingness and lovableness. The mantle that covers the head and falls to the feet is greenish blue with a border of purest gold, and scattered through with golden stars. The tunic is rose-colored, patterned with a lace-like design of golden flowers. Below is a crescent moon, and beneath it appear the head and arms of a cherub.’

“Juan’s uncle was cured. As he was awaiting the priest, too weak even to drink the medicine his nephew had prepared, he saw his room suddenly filled with soft light. A luminous figure, that of a young woman, appeared near him. She told him he would get well and informed him of Juan Diego’s mission. She also said, ‘Call me and call my image Santa Maria de Guadalupe’ – or so the message was understood.

“In the six years that followed the incident, over eight million Indians were baptized. In recent times, some fifteen hundred persons still go to kneel before Juan Diego’s tilma every day.”

The interested person can see the image on the tilma for himself or herself by going on the Internet to http://www.sancta.org/juandiego.html and clicking on “pictures” at the top of the page. The pictures include a photograph of the actual image on the tilma and a close-up of the face. The detail is amazing; the image itself is awe-inspiring.

Other experiences that are sometimes placed in the UFO category seem to have religious connotations involving Mary as well. The well-known Fatima miracle, as Jacques Vallee relates, was connected with UFOs:

“The famous apparitions at Fatima7 offer a historical example of the religious dimension of UFO encounters. The case is a celebrated one, yet I am prepared to wager that few Americans know the full story of what happened in 1917 near the small Portuguese town. I suspect that even fewer realize that the entire sequence of observations of an entity thought to be the Virgin Mary had begun two years previously with a fairly classical sequence of UFO sightings.

“If we accept the interpretation given of Fatima by the Catholic Church, we are dealing with a phenomenon that cannot be explained either as a physical effect or as an illusion. In its decision of 1930, arrived at after thirteen years of painstaking investigation by many scholars, the Church stated that:

“’The solar phenomenon of the 13th of October 1917, described in the press of the time, was most marvelous and caused the greatest impression on those who had the happiness of witnessing it. . .

“’This phenomenon, which no astronomical observatory registered and which therefore was not natural, was witnessed by persons of all categories and of all social classes, believers and unbelievers, journalists of the principal Portuguese newspapers and even by persons some miles away. Facts which annul any explanation of collective illusion.’

“This ‘miracle,’ the reader will note, had been predicted several months before by three illiterate children after their vision of a woman ‘in a bright glow.’ She had not said that she was the Virgin Mary. She had simply stated that she was ‘from Heaven’ and instructed them to return every month until October, when a public miracle would take place ‘so that everyone may believe.’

“The events at Fatima involve luminous spheres, lights with strange colors, a feeling of ‘heat waves’ – all physical characteristics commonly associated with UFOs. They even include the typical falling-leaf motion of the saucer zig-zagging through the air. They also encompass prophecy and a loss of ordinary consciousness on the part of witnesses-what we have called the psychic component of UFO sightings.”

Vallee goes on to describe various messages given to selected individuals, the prophetic statements, and the several follow-on apparitions that comprise the Fatima miracle. He notes features of the events, like buzzing sounds experienced by some witnesses, which are characteristic of modern UFO sightings. Some prophesies are quite specific, as noted by Vallee:

“’The war is going to end, but if people do not stop offending God another and worse one will begin during the reign of Pius XI [note: he died in 1939]. When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light know that this is the great sign that God is giving you that he is going to punish the world for its crimes by means of war, famine, and persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father.

“’To prevent this I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia. . .If they heed my requests, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the world.’”

Vallee then makes a curious statement regarding this prophecy:

“The mixture of seriousness and absurdity that we have already noted in several contactee stories is an unmistakable characteristic of this statement. We will find the same thing to be true in Lourdes, where the alleged Virgin Mary instructs the little Bernadette to perform meaningless actions.”

Did the statement have absurd elements? World War II began the same year Pius XI died. Major events which precipitated it occurred during his reign. According to Christian (and Western) thought, Russia has indeed spread her errors throughout the world.

NOTES

General Notes:

1. All bible references are taken from the King James Version
2. Only the first appearance in each chapter to an item to which a note is associated is subscripted.

Chapter 13

1. For an overview of the Catholic Church and her beliefs, including Mariology (veneration of Mary) or Marian Devotions, a good starting place is The Everything Catholicism Book by Helen Keeler and Susan Grimbly, published 2003 by Adams Media Corporation. Excellent follow-on books dealing more specifically with Mary are Mary For All Christians by John Macquarrie, published 1991 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Group, and Mary’s Answer For Our Troubled Times by Gerald Vann, published 1950 by Sophia Institute Press.

2. See Wikipedia re “Carl Gustav Jung”

3. Family of God, Arthur Perkins, published 2004 Falcon Books, portions or all available on request to perkinsart44@yahoo.com

4. See Wikipedia re “Juan Diego”. Juan Diego Cuahtlatoatzin (1474-1548) witnessed an apparition of Mary in 1531 near Mexico City that ultimately led to the salvation of thousands, if not more. He was canonized as a saint in 2002 for his extraordinary experience. Also visit website http://www.sancta.org/juuandiego.html and click on “pictures” for a view of his cape.

5. See Wikipedia re “Jacques Fabrice Vallee” Dr. Vallee (1939 -) received a B.S. in Mathematics from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University. His achievements included a computerized mapping of Mars for NASA, as well as contributions to the development of the Internet. He was also a major researcher in the UFO phenomenon. He, along with Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Project Bluebook notoriety, eventually began to think of UFOs as having interdimensional capabilities.

6. Myths, UFOs and the Judeo-Christian God, Atthur Perkins, 2011, unpublished, portions available on request to perkinsart44@yahoo.com

7. See Wikipedia re “Our Lady of Fatima”. The Fatima episode was an apparition of Mary in 1917 that appeared to three children in Fatima, Portugal. Two of the children died in the great influenza epidemic following World War 1, supposedly with the full knowledge of and joyful anticipation of their coming death. The third, Lucia, lived to the age of 97, passing away in 2005. The children were given three secrets by the apparition of Mary. The first involved a vision of hell. The second involved a request to save souls and a command to consecrate Russia to Mary, with the warning that if Russia didn’t return to God, another, worse war would occur during the tenure of Pope Pius XI. This prophecy was fulfilled in 1939, the year that Pope Pius XI died. There is a bit of the cloak-and-dagger regarding the third secret of Fatima. Lucia had cautioned that it was not to be revealed until 1960, but the Catholic Church continued to hold it secret until 2000, when the secret was declared to have been a vision of a Pope climbing up a hill toward a cross, accompanied by many Church leaders and other Christians. Upon reaching the cross at the summit, they were gunned down by soldiers. Angels were said to have collected their shed blood. But there is still controversy regarding this third secret, with many claiming that the third mystery revealed more than the Church has been willing to disclose. At any rate, Popes Pius XII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have all strongly acknowledged their acceptance of the Fatima apparition and the secrets as supernatural fact. In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI repeated this conviction. Other apparitions of Mary have been witnessed, including eighteen appearances to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, France, and a number of events at Medjugorje, Bosnia beginning in June, 1981. A recommended Web site for the interested reader is “Apparitions of Mary”.

TRINITY INSTALLMENT FIVE

Having reviewed the opinions of several prominent Christian theologians regarding the nature of the Holy Spirit, we take away the following observations: first, that they differ among themselves with respect to their understanding of the Holy Spirit; second, that they all admit to uncertainty regarding that understanding; third, that some, in following their own logical development, come close to a recognition of the Holy Spirit as functionally female, and immediately retreat into confusion thereafter as if they were in danger of being burned; fourth, that in proposing alternatives to a female Holy Spirit some of them come right to the line of embracing the heresy of modalism, or actually cross over it; and fifth, given their common recognition that the Holy Spirit as presented in Scripture does indeed possess characteristics normally attributed to the female gender, their favored answer as to the nature of the Holy Spirit as well as of the other Members of the Triune Godhead is to suggest that they each possess facets of both male and female genders.

This last item, the suggestion that each Member of the Godhead possesses characteristics of both genders, is common to both Catholic and Protestant theologians. On the Catholic side, for example, noted scholar Father John Macquarrie presents this viewpoint in a direct, unequivocal manner. There are multiple problems with this viewpoint, the chief among them being that it runs counter to the generally masculine presentation of both Father and Son in Scripture. Almost as important is the suggestion in this viewpoint that the Members of the Godhead possess hermaphroditic characteristics, hermaphroditism being recognized as a sexual difficulty in the higher orders of creation, including man. Moreover, hermaphroditism violates the almost universal principle of gender differentiation in Creation which leads to the understanding of the value of the “complementary other” pattern in nature, which even extends to the plant kingdom. It also promotes a suggestion of the independence of each Member of the Trinity from the Others and violates the example of selfless love embodied in Jesus Christ. Yet further, it disagrees with the nature of the spiritual union of Christ and His Church as presented in Scripture. Finally, in contradiction to Scriptural proscriptions against homosexuality, the concept of shared gender furnishes no violation of type to the issue of homosexual conduct.

Scripture strongly suggests the existence of sexuality at the spiritual level, as defined as a union of complementary genders with a resulting propagation of type. In this model, spiritual mankind at the individual level need not unite sexually one to another, nor even possess gender at all. In the aggregate, however, Scripture boldly declares that collective spiritual mankind will indeed possess gender, that gender being female. In an equally certain manner, Scripture also declares not only that Jesus Christ will be fully male, but that He will be united in some manner with His Church. Scripture, then, thoroughly contradicts the notion proposed by some theologians that the Godhead does not possess the quality of gender, and of other theologians that each Member of the Godhead possesses qualities of both genders.

As I have noted before, my Christian nonfiction book Family of God presents an argument for considering the Holy Spirit to be fully female in a functional sense. My follow-on Christian novel Buddy develops this argument in more detail, as does my sequel to Buddy. This same theme is expanded upon in many of my blog postings, which have included excerpts of Buddy.

Based on viewer response to my blog, I am encouraged to continue with postings related to an exposition of the nature of the Holy Spirit, perhaps mixed in with my observations of Christianity in America and other topics. I not only thank you viewers for this positive response, but commend you as representing what appear to be members of a relatively small group within the modern Christian Church who make the effort to actually think about the nature of God apart from the distressingly common self-serving motives of many Churchgoers. You are rare and precious; I thank you even more for the character you have displayed in making that effort.

Before returning to the topic of the Holy Spirit, however, I plan for the next few postings to comment on the nature of our current society and the state of the Christian Church. I trust that you’ll find them interesting, relevant and supportive of your own Christian walk.