The Anglican bishop said, "But recognising the motherly role of God has an honoured place within Christian spirituality". Which honoured spiritual writers discussed "the motherly role of God?
"Meanwhile, back at the New Testament, Jesus said, 'When you pray, say, "Father"'". If only Jesus had been married he would have known better. But wait. Dan Brown has revealed that he was.
ahem....
(trying to be polite)
have we forgotten the words of the last Pope John Paul II "The hands of God hold us up, they hold us tight, they give us strength. But at the same time they give us comfort, they console and caress us. They are the hands of a father and a mother at the same time."
and of course Pope John Paul I, who in 1978 remarked that God was "the Father, but is also the Mother."
But most of all Julian of Norwich - a Grade A, topclass, medieval mystic (English, as it happens) - I only thought of her recently in the context of the pain of one of Mark's commenters who was having great difficulty in accepting God's love in his feelings of unworthiness.
sorry, folks - this is pretty mainstream, even old hat, stuff...
sorry, folks - this is pretty mainstream, even old hat, stuff...
Yep. And let's see if Mark acknowledges his mistake anywhere.
And let's not ignore the stereotypical queer joke of his title line. So funny. So original. Where oh where did he get his wit!
All the same, that "Jesus is our mother" bit is the one thing in Julian of Norwich that I can't relate to. I'm a woman & I love Julian's _Shewings_, but that part just strikes a sour note with me. Mary is my Mother. The Church is my mother. Do I need another mother??? Jesus' tenderness is all the more attractive for being masculine tenderness.
"Yep. And let's see if Mark acknowledges his mistake anywhere."
Mark doesn't need to, Michael. Please re-read the post. He said:
"The key word here is 'counter'."
Not to speak for our bloghost but the point I took away from the article linked was that the role of God as Father must be "countered" & "corrected" which denotes "diminished" to me. Anything to change God from what the Bible actually say He is, right?
The difference between this & what JPII said is that JPII never pushed the "motherly" aspects of God by demanding the fatherly aspects be corrected or countered because, darnit, they're just too "dominant" &, in doing so, appease those who are uncomfortable with the fact that the Trinity & the historical Church (the one Christ founded, remember?) is patriarchical & heirearchical.
If one is uncomfortable with the God of the Bible, one will create a god in one's own image to replace it. That's what's happening here.
And, Michael, I'd respond to your sarcasm (so funny, so original) with some of my own if I'd not given it up for Lent. (I've started early - I need the practice!)
+J.M.J+
Any regular reader of this forum should know that Mark does not object to all feminine/maternal images of God. In fact, he just recently defended Dr. Scott Hahn's theory that the Holy Spirit plays a "maternal" role in the family of God. He pointed out that Hahn quoted from orthodox Catholic sources, therefore his speculations - when properly understood rather than characatured - are not outside the pale of orthodoxy.
So I don't see where he made a "mistake". He doesn't deny that the Catholic Faith uses a small number of feminine images for God. He just objects to the idea that those must be used to "counter" the overwhelming masculine images for God in Tradition.
In Jesu et Maria,
Michael:
Gene gets me. I'm perfectly familiar with Julian, with the Pope's remarks, and with the ocassional likening of God to a woman in Scripture ("The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who lost a coin..."). That's not what this guy is about, which is why I focused on the word "counter". The simple fact is, the overwhelming preponderance of revelation points us to our *Father* in heaven. Revelation is not an affirmative action program.
When you pray, say, "Father".
I once heard a priest homilize that the title Our Lord most preferred for Himself was Friend and he quoted from the Last Supper discourse. I really like the thought. "Friend" is just friend. It carries no baggage, no transposed biological imagery.
I pray "our Father" but I know father is only an image. Images are good, fine, useful, unavoidable, but also restrictive. And restrictions are OK too as long as one recognizes them for what they are.
It's almost funny, this fighting about imagery.
Caroline -
Jesus was a man. Male. That's not an "image," that's reality.
I had a student assistant who came to me very upset. She was a freshman and taking The New Testament, and in the class the teacher began to browbeat one of the students - a preacher's son - asking him: How do we know Jesus wasn't Black? How do we know Jesus wasn't a woman? How do we know Jesus wasn't gay? and so on.
I wish I had been there. I'm old enough and crusty enough not be intimidated by a PhD, and I'd have said: Jesus was a male and a Jew. He wasn't Black, he wasn't Asian, he wasn't a woman and he wasn't a blue-eyed blonde. Sorry if that offends you.
The original news story related to God's motherly love and not the gender of Jesus Christ. Yes, God became incarnate as a Jewish man in a specific place and time - but God is neither male nor female - God is not human - that's kinda the point of the incarnation - the sheer impossibility of it! And Jesus as both God and man is both fully human (and so male) and fully divine (and so transcends gender). So Caroline is absolutely correct talking about the image of God as Father.
It's so cool being a Catholic - the better you know your Faith, the more it wrecks your head!
My experience of God is both father and mother, unequivocally. Mark says "The simple fact is, the overwhelming preponderance of revelation points us to our *Father* in heaven". I'm afraid I don't see any such preponderance of revelation anywhere in the Tradition. But I do see a preponderance of human expressions of God as Father. So in the interests of orthodoxy, it would seem to me obligatory on sound teachers to "counter" those expressions.
And I don't know any dialect of English where counter=diminish. It's about balance - trying to (and inevitably failing to) understand God is not a zero sum game.
My reading of the story is that it is one of the fruits of the seismic shift in Anglicanism, towards its Catholic heritage, represented in the recent ARCIC communication on the role of Our Lady - a refeminization of the Anglican Communion away from its (very Protestant) masculine tendencies.
Oh, and where I come from, the Anglican Communion is very definitively overrun with burly men - ever heard of Rugby football - y'know like American football but without the wimpy body armour? 
Jesus was a man. Male. That's not an "image," that's reality.
Stephen |
Well, of course, Stephen. But Brother, Father, Spouse, Mother, those are images. Beautiful, useful images which people need, some more than others. If you need to think of God as mother and are able to do so, fine; if you need to think of God as Father, which most people do, fine. If you need to think of Jesus as brother, fine. If you need to think of Jesus as Spouse, fine, or even as mother. Whatever works. But all images.
Of course Jesus was a human male. I never suggested that was a mere image.
RayOL,
OK, the rugby pitches of the countries historically associated with the Anglican Communion are overrun with burly men. How many of them went to Evensong last week?
I was actually talking about the fact that the Anglican clergymen I am aware of tend to look and sound like big burly rugby players (e.g. Robin Eames or Paul Colson), not the religious habits of rugby players...sorry for the lack of clarity!
Colton, not Colson!
That's not what this guy is about, which is why I focused on the word "counter".
Mark, how can you possibly know what this guy is about? That article had exactly 112 words in and two quoted sentences. "Counter" was the word the reported used. There is nothing substantative in this article to say that this bishop meant anything substantially different than JPII. I can only assume that it is an inherent prejudice against Anglicans based on their stance on homosexuality which is clearly evident from the extremely poor attempt at faggot humor.
For someone who is so quick to jump down the throats of the media for portraying Catholicism wrong, I'm surprised you give so much credence to a 112 word blurb from the telegraph...
OK, the rugby pitches of the countries historically associated with the Anglican Communion are overrun with burly men. How many of them went to Evensong last week?
Well, I'm reminded of one of P.G. Wodehouse's Mulliner stories, where Mr. Mulliner mentions that when he was young there was a song with the line "he was a pale young curate," but that most of the curates you meet nowadays, far from being pale, look like they belong in a rugby scrum. Of course, that was 50 years ago if it was a day, but surely there must be a few Anglican curates who still adhere to the old ideal of muscular Christianity?
+J.M.J+
>>>I pray "our Father" but I know father is only an image.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, "Father" is the proper Name of the First Person of the Trinity:
Whether this name "Father" is properly the name of a divine person?
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1...umma/
103302.htm
So it is clearly more than a mere image. According to Trinitarian theology, God the Father eternally begets God the Son from His own essence. This is called the Divine Paternity, and it is *a true and literal fatherhood*, the paternity from which all other paternity gets its name (Eph 3:14-15).
When we speak of God as the "Father" of all creation, however, that is a metaphor. So you are partially right in saying that fatherhood is an image - but only re. God's relationship to creation, not the First Divine Person's relationship to the Eternal Word.
>>>My experience of God is both father and mother, unequivocally. Mark says "The simple fact is, the overwhelming preponderance of revelation points us to our *Father* in heaven". I'm afraid I don't see any such preponderance of revelation anywhere in the Tradition.
Well, if we begin with Sacred Scripture, we find God called "Father" about fifteen times in the OT - and that's not counting the times he is said to be "like a father" (which are additional paternal images). In the NT, He is called "Father" well over 100 times (if I remember correctly, that divine title occurs 117 times in the Gospel of St. John alone). Yet never once, in either Testament, is God ever addressed as "Mother"! I've studied extensively the feminine images of God in Scripture, and can tell you that there are very, very few compared to the number of masculine images.
The same thing goes for the Church Fathers. Some of them use an occasional maternal/feminine image for God, but most of the time it's "Father... Son... Lord... King... etc." all the way. The same thing goes for Magesterial statements: in them, God is predominantly called "Father" and by other masculine titles
(BTW, the speeches and encyclicals of popes aren't necessarily dogmatic Magesterial statements, so please don't quote to me all the places where the last two popes compared God to a mother. I am well aware of them; I compiled a list many years ago.)
While the current Catechism does mention feminine images for God, it only does so twice in passing, while it calls God "Father" over and over again throughout the book.
I think that could safely be called a "preponderance of revelation."
Then we have to contend with arguments in Catholic writings against God being called "Mother", offered by such theological heavyweights as Sts. Augustine of Hippo, Anslem of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas. I have to go look those up right now; God willing I will post them soon.
In Jesu et Maria,
+J.M.J+
St. Augustine's argument is found in On the Trinity Bk XII ch. 5-7. It's a bit long and complex, but here is the link to an online copy if you want to plod through it:
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers...hers/
130112.htm
St. Anselm's argument, in contrast, is short and sweet. Here is its core:
At any rate, it is more consistent to call the supreme Spirit father than mother, for this reason, that the first and principal cause of offspring is always in the father. For, if the maternal cause is ever in some way preceded by the paternal, it is exceedingly inconsistent that the name mother should be attached to that parent with which, for the generation of offspring, no other cause is associated, and which no other precedes. It is, therefore, most true that the supreme Spirit is Father of his offspring. But, if the son is always more like the father than is the daughter, while nothing is more like the supreme Father than his offspring; then it is most true that this offspring is not a daughter, but a Son.
(Anselm, Monologium, ch. XLII)
Thomas Aquinas also argued against calling God "Mother" in his Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk VI ch. 11. I could not find the full SCG online, only "selections" of it posted at CCEL (which omit the very chapter I want). But here are two quote fragments from that chapter (I used them in a paper I once wrote):
One should, of course, note carefully that the fleshly generation of animals is perfected by an active power and by a passive power; and it is from the active power that one is named "father," and from the passive power that one is named "mother."... Since, however, the procession of the Word has been said to be in this: that God understands Himself; and the divine act of understanding is not through a passive power, but, so to say, an active one; because the divine intellect is not in potency but is only actual; in the generation of the Word of God the notion of mother does not enter, but only that of father....
The things which belong distinctly to the father or to the mother in fleshly generation, in the generation of the Word are all attributed to the Father by sacred Scripture; for the Father is said not only "to give life to the Son" (cf. John 5:26) but also "to conceive" and to "bring forth"
That might give you a sense of his argument, though it would be better if I could post the whole chapter. He's essentially saying that God cannot be called "Mother" because motherhood is passive generation, and God is Pure Act with no passivity.
What, then, of Julian of Norwich and others who called Jesus "Mother"? They were speaking metaphorically and devotionally, not theologically. Christ can be compared to a mother in various ways, but He's not really a mother. God is not "Mother" in the same sense that He is Father.
In Jesu et Maria,
+J.M.J+
Correction: the Gospel of St. John actually uses the title "Father" for God 127 times. The other three Gospels use it a total of 66 times, and it appears 79 times in the rest of the NT.
So the total times "Father" is used for God in the NT is 272, and the fifteen uses in the OT bring it up to 287 in the entire Bible.
So the total score is:
God called "Father" in the Bible = 287
God called "Mother" in the Bible = 0
Preponderance? You decide....
(The Bible Gateway is such a neat resource....)
In Jesu et Maria,
Then again, the Old Testament refers to God in feminine terms slightly (only) slightly more often than in masculine.
It's not a big deal, really.
Robert Anton Wilson, of all people, had something salient to say about that. In "Right Where You Are Sitting Now", I think.
+J.M.J+
>>>Then again, the Old Testament refers to God in feminine terms slightly (only) slightly more often than in masculine.
With respect, that's news to me! I've read the OT and extensively studied feminine images of God, and can tell you that the masculine images outnumber the feminine ones.
This is so even if one counts the figure of personified "Wisdom" in the Sapiential books as divine - and her exact identity is in dispute. Is she Christ "before" His Incarnation? the Holy Spirit? God's foreknowledge of Mary? a personification of Torah? a mere personification of a divine attribute? the personification of the created order of the universe? Church Fathers, Saints and theologians have proposed all these explanations and more.
(I am ignoring such heterodox interpretations as the Gnostic "Mother Sophia," the "biblical goddess" of Christian feminism and the theories of Eastern sophiology.)
In Jesu et Maria,
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