Gender Bending: God, The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit, and Jesus

Neodude brought this up in a thread previously, and I will continue this train of though in here. Gender issues.

Firstly, does God have a gender. Even when not being refered to as Father, or son, God is a "him". Why? Does God possess a cosmic penis, or is it merely a linguistic occurence.

How about the first person of the Trinity: The Father. Does this point to a masculine God? When Jesus calls God Father/Abba, does he mean literally, or is it a metaphor for a model relationship? Similarly posed for the Son (the person of the trinity, not nessecarily Jesus the man).

How about the Holy Spirit. Not quite as "in-your-face" as the first two in masculinity. Does the holy spirit represent some sort of feminine aspect to the divine?

What of the gender and sexuality of Jesus? Jesus was surely male sex wise, but was he masculine? feminine? or both, did he possess both male and female qualities (ie, Paul in Galatian, just as in Chrsit there is not free slave, male or female). What about Jesus sexuality, did Jesus have sex, what about ejaculation, did Jesus have wet-dreams (if he was fully human, he sure did---but then how is he pure).

Any other issues are full game here.

 

hoo boy. lot's to think about from a single post.


firstly let me say that i have always thought of God as a father figure, and Mother Earth was the feminine side of the equation. the two things that are required to give us life, just like you need a father and a mother to have a baby. Earth has always been known for it's beauty and grace.

I think Jesus was beyond any earthly temptation, so i dont think he falls into the "wet-dream" catagory lol. at any rate, people weren't bombarded with sex back then as they are today.

I have some serious issues with the trinity, but i will save that for later after other people have had a chance to comment on the topic at hand.

 

I think is is pretty standard that most people think that the Godhead is genderless, and that the usage of pronouns like He, Him etc are merely linguistical conventions. I think it is interesting that in the other thread it was noted that Hebrew has no neuter hence the masculine attribution. I wonder if any translations use a neuter gender in relation to the Christian God, or god in general (Ukrainian, and i am pretty sure most Slavic languages use masculine because the word is boh [bog] which ends in a consanant and therefore is masculine in most cases)

I again do not think that even the father has a gender, or even represents a mode of gender (although i think some modalists might argue otherwise). I think that Jesus used the term Abba as a metaphor for the model relationship with god. God is our father. It is shame that God as our mother is often forgotten, although the image of a mother hen covering her Chicks is used in the NT as an image of God. I think that this is a similar explanation for the term Son used for the Word of God, and Jesus. son is merely a metaphor for the relationship. That is why the son is also called the Word of God (so all those who say the bible is the word of God, technically it is wrong because the word of god is a part of the godhead)

Again, the holy spirit is genderless...etc etc.

I think although Jesus was sexually a man, because he was god incarnate there must have been somethign transgendered about him. Unless of course you hold to the idea that Jesus forsake all divinity and was truely all man (and all of his iracles were God working through him). This idea would also account for the need of baptism by John.

Believe it or not, wet dreams we an issue in the midieval church. That is what I have a small likeing for the Chrsit presented in Nikos Kazantzakis' Last Temptation where Jesus is tempted constantly by sin, and does have a sexuality and therefore would have "nocturnal emissions" as one of my religion proffs loved to call them...

 

I don't think God has gender.
God the Father is used in a symbolic sense. Father here equates with origin.

Jesus is a man and a woman too. The 15th c English mystic Julian of Norwich wrote a book entitled 'The Motherhood of God' in which she speaks of Jesus as 'our sweet, kind and ever loving mother'.

If we think of the human Jesus, he was a man, no doubt about that. But on a spiritual level Jesus has no gender. 'Son' was probably intended to indicate an active side of the Godhead.
It is unforunate that Christianity has often been, and often still is, male dominated. There is only the figure of the Virgin Mary, and the female saints to counterbalance the common understanding of the maleness of God.
Some say God 'made man in his own image' so God is like a man. Personally, I think this refers not to the body, but to the soul. God is said to be 'a spirit' not a body.
I'd say God is beyond gender in essence, but can be concieved of as having both genders.

Some gnostic sects believed in an androgyne Christ, perhaps including the Knights Templar.

 

I believe the masculine references relate back to Christ's time (and earlier) of patriarchal society- how would early man claim superiority when their "God" was female?

I do not believe "God" is an all powerful entity, but rather, the "Tao" (for lack of a better term) that exists within everything, that is everything- it encompasses both the masculine and feminine and therefore neither gender but both at the same time. Kind of paradoxical, but I don't think it can be intellectually understood.

Peace and love

 

Yahweh-Elohim is certainly an alpha male, as one would expect in the patriarchal society of the Hebrews. They also had no use for a triune deity. But they did come to refer to feminine aspects of God: the Shekinah (Divine Presence) and Chochma (Wisdom), which were both feminine words. Some writers see these as precursors of the Christian "Holy Spirit", conceptualized as a distinct "person" within the Trinity. Some of the early Christians, especially the variety called "Gnostics", rejected the Judaic traditions in favor of Hellenistic (Greco-Persian) concepts. Some of these envisioned God as a Trinity including a feminine personality. For example, God in the Gnositc Secret Book of John says: "I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Child." Others emphasized the role of Sophia, a feminine "emanation" of God (Gnosticism is really complicated, especially when it comes to these "emanations", i.e., aspects of God which come to live lives of their own). The Sophia of Jesus Christ, says that masculine and feminine energies united to create "a first-begotten androgynous son", who is called Christ, by "First Begetress Sophia, Mother of the Universe". The Gnostics were put in their place at the Council of Nicea, where the Hebrew feminine term for spirit, ruah, was replaced by the Greek neuter term pneuma.

 

One further thought. Jesus was really radical for his day in calling for gender equality, or more accurately, not recognizing gender at all as a relevant distinction. By stressing that for a man to divorce his wife was tantamount to adultery, he was challenging a double standard that was one of the basic tenets of Jewish patriarchy. Mohammed also did a lot to advance the status of women. Two instances where there was obviously a lot of reversal and backsliding by the followers after the deaths of the respective religious leaders!

 

Yes, Muhamed did a lot for women, one evidently as young as 12 (Aisha).
You can see in today's Islamic culture how they've benefited, esp under sharia law.

 

the middle east hasn't done a whole lot for me when i consider studying islam. i've never read a single thing about it, but looking at them....geez. do they all have a chemical imbalance or something?

then again, i read somewhere that like 50% or more of the people over there are illiterate, so i guess they just believe w/e someone tells them and have no way of finding out for themselves.

 

Actually Aisha was promised to him at 6 or 7, and the marriage consumated at age 9.

She stayed married to him until his death, and became a leading scholar of early Islam afterward.

Modern Islam is a perversion of some well meaning rules.


x

 

We all possess male and female qualities, in the sense we are sometimes masculine and sometimes feminine, therefore your question about whether God is masculine or feminine makes sense because you are affected by these things. However God- he is above that, he is the creator of both masculine and feminine, he is in fact both masculine and feminine and more. Therefore, masculinity and femininity maybe just very small portions of what God may possess in his domain. So your question about gender and God is invalid.

 

You have to have a grasp on US policy in the ME to understand why things are the way they are. We structured our entire ME foreign policy to the tune of oil, totally ignoring the people themselves. We've done much to keep them pushed down and powerless. This has now come back to bite us in the face.

The isolation of the sexes flies in the face of the genderless God.

Its not what God wanted, its what man wanted.


x

 

I agree, the situation in the Middle East is too complex if you don't have a grasp on the history of Islam, American involvement, and an understanding about the basics of Islam- not the version that we see on TV as radicals. Basing a view on Islam off radical groups is like basing your view on Christianity solely on what Pat Robertson says- he isn't an accurate representation of it.

Peace and love

 

not really. that's your opinion. that's what i wanted to hear, but it's your opinion. you dont know any better than I do, so what is invalid about my question.

 

Are you saying that the United States is the source of violence is the Middle East? I believe that the source of violence is strife between themselves, seeing as how the United States is only 232 years old, and they've been fighting for much much longer than that.

can't blame america on everything....

 

It is pretty much the same thing (i can imagine) Jewish people went through when in exile.

Islam is supposed to be the last and greatest revelation of God to man, so why did they get conqured. Most modern movements in Islam deal with this issue. "Why are we like this, and what do we do?"...

 

that still doesn't explain endless violence, which frankly, there is no excuse for. i dont think blowing someone up is ever the answer.

 

By definition "God" = Creator, especially in christianity. In the sense that he has created everything, he is also the source of masculinity and femininity. Hence, if he has created them, he transcends them , that is, he was there before they even existed.

Hence, a question that asks whether God is male or female, as if God is subjected to the same conditions as mankind is invalid, because it is not applicable to God------> because God existed before these conditions were put in place.

 

Yes.

Not by itself, but the US is directly responsible for the lion's share. For the reasons I've already explained plus the creation of a American sponsored Jewish state right in the middle of it all.

Can't blame America on everything? No I can't, but I can do it better than most.

Putting Muslim people down for their sexist religion is no different than the pot calling the kettle black. We have no lack of our own homegrown discriminations when it comes to race, economics, etc.

Women don't have to cover themselves here, but they still have second class status.



x

 

that is a logical circle that leads to nowhere. he doesn't necessarily "transcend" masculinity and femininity. wouldn't it make perfect sense that our condition was modeled by the creator, after the creator? It is a mirror of God. A reflection of him. masculinity and femininity. everything has a balance. light and dark. good and evil. there can be nothing else.