The FAMILY OF GOD!

Namaste-

Could you hammer out some the Trinitarian ontology behind this? I think getting into that will help highlight where I’m not quite sure about things.

We’re probably right on where the ‘father’ counts. The ‘father’ is the source, origin, and fount of divine life. The ‘son’ is eternally begotten. The analogy that has best expressed this for me is in Edwards (and more fully in Greg). The ‘father’ self-perceives. The perception, the reflection of the father, takes on all the attributes of the ‘father’, including life and personhood. This is the ‘son’. The exact representation of the ‘father’.

So far so good? In this case the ‘son’ is begotten in the sense that the father is the source and fount of the ‘son’s’ existence. The ‘son’ depends for his existence and life upon the ‘father’, not visa versa. It’s an asymmetrical relationship.

Consequently, the ‘father’ and ‘son’ both self-dispose in love toward one another and this mutual inter-relatedness involves a communication of love; the ‘father’s’ giving himself in love to the ‘son’ and the ‘son’ giving himself in love to the ‘father’. This ‘mutual communication of life in love’ takes on a life of its own, a social disposition if you will, a person in his own right, the ‘spirit’. Where two or more self-dispose in relationship to each other, a social disposition is created.

That’s how I’ve been doing it in my head. But in this case, the Spirit proceeds from the inter-relating of ‘father’ and ‘son’. This means the ‘father’ is logically prior (source, fount), the ‘son’ depends for his existence upon the ‘father’, while the ‘spirit’s’ existence depends upon both ‘father’ and ‘son’.

This is what’s making it difficult for me to get with spirit as ‘feminine’. I’m not sure where to fit it in. Is the ‘spirit’ feminine in the maternal sense? So it’s ‘father’, ‘son’, and ‘mother-Spirit’? The problem with this arrangement is that it makes the ‘son’ dependent for his existence upon ‘spirit’, whereas it seems to me this is not the case. The ‘son’ is the self-perceived ‘father’. The ‘spirit’ consequently issues from the relating in love of ‘father’ and ‘son’. That makes it difficult to then say ‘son’ is ‘begotten’ by ‘father’ & ‘spirit-mother’. I think that’s where ‘begotten’ has its limits. Where my being ‘begotten’ requires a ‘father’ and a ‘mother’, the ‘son’s’ requires only a self-perceiving source. THAT is what’s aimed at by the term ‘begotten’, not something that requires a ‘co-begetter’.

True, it’s impossible to think of ‘mother’ without thinking of TWO others (father and offspring). I know you’ve been on this a bit. But consider, the SAME THING is true of ‘father’ and ‘offspring’. It’s just as impossible to conceive of a ‘father’ apart from a ‘mother’ and an ‘child’. Likewise, it’s impossible to conceive of a ‘child’ apart from two others—‘father’ and ‘mother’.

It’s the dispositional approach that’s got me questioning HOW the ‘spirit’ is he/she who gets uniquely imaged by woman. If the ‘spirit’ is the social-disposition that proceeds from the mutually self-disposing in love of ‘father’ and ‘son’, then ‘son’ can’t also be son in the sense of being the offspring (‘begotten of’) BOTH ‘father’ and ‘spirit’ (mother). Or where you not grounding the ‘feminine’ that is ‘spirit’ in our sense of ‘mother’?

Tom

THINK THIS WAY:  Take the expanded lingual expressions of SOMETIMES the Spirit refered to for the Spirit's (avoiding pronoun here ) reminding us of human graces we know to be feminine. Be grateful for that diversity. But purpose from the start to be so balanced that neither you need worry, nor need you worry about those who might peek at the ideas you are studying.

7.  “The Fathers were smarter and gooder: we should trust them more than we trust ourselves.”

POW: Let me read this a bit. If I ONLY read Tom's post here I'd be REALLY worried.  ( Deprogram anyone who says: 'Son' as begotten of by 'Father' and 'Mother-Spirit'.)

Tom: I understand. But I was questioning this view, not advocating it. I hope you got that!

POW: There is SOME patristic ussage (or so I've heard) of feminine references. BUT, I'd say that has to be kept in perspective with all the others. BALANCE!

Tom: So what’s on the other side of the balance that betokens ‘femininity’? I’d like to see the patristic evidence.

POW: There is also that "Sophie" stuff, that Serge Bulgakoff (sp?) is still formally declared heretical. Warning to all that footing is not easy when you go too close to the edge.

Tom: Probably so! But the best views are had from there!

POW: “The Fathers were smarter and gooder: we should trust them more than we trust ourselves.”

Tom: Doesn’t sound like something the Fathers would have said. I wonder if they made the advances they did by trusting what others had said before them and left it at that. Seems to me they trusted themselves a good deal! Aren’t we more or less like them when we trust ourselves as well?

Tom

I think we need to see what genderless/asexual realities (territories) are mapped by the terms 'father', 'son', and 'spirit' and what divine realities we as male and female bear the image of AS OPPOSSED TO reading off our gender distinctions a strict one-for-one correspondence to something in God. 

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more...

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2065/is_n3_v49/ai_19786537

http://constantlyreadingfourquartets.blogspot.com/2006/06/evdokimovs-brilliance.html

,

http://www.orthodoxwomensnetwork.org/storydetail.cfm?ArticleID=39

quote:    

The starting point for both theologians is the notion of the transcendent femininity of the Holy Spirit. They came by the idea through a few ancient Syriac texts. In Syriac, the term for Spirit is feminine. Aphratus, one of the Syrian Fathers, addresses the Spirit as “Our Mother.” Evdokimov sees in this a special connection between the Spirit and women and with it the parallel notion of a privileged relationship between men and the Son of God. The result would be a differentiation between the charisms of men and women, predisposing them to different ministries.⁶ Through her connection to the Spirit, Evdokimov claims, and through the silent radiance of holiness, woman is called to the salvation of a world in danger of being dehumanized by an excess of male techno-scientific thinking. Sacramental priesthood is not among these charisms. It falls to man as connected with the Son, both active and creative. “Through his essential bond with the Priestly Christ, by means of his priestly function, man sacramentally penetrates the elements of this world in order to sanctify them. He acts by virtue of his masculinity. He is the “violent one” referred to in the Gospel, who takes the Kingdom by force […]. And this treasure is a revelation of holiness, the holiness of being represented by woman […]. Connected to the Holy Spirit by her very essence […] woman is Eve-Life who safeguards, vivifies and protects every parcel of a male creation.”⁷ Paul Evdokimov’s speculations were both daring and reassuring, to all appearances a gratification for women—did they not introduce a transcendent feminine principle in God?—and were well received in Orthodox circles intent on maintaining the traditional structures of ecclesial ministry while at the same time removing any possible suspicion of misogyny from the Orthodox rejection of the ordination of women.

Nevertheless, several questions arise: does the theologically and anthropologically dualistic dichotomy expressed in these theologoumena not represent a contradiction on certain points to the trinitarian theology and the theological anthropology—both universal and personal—expressed by the Fathers? In the actual practice of the historical Church, doesn’t this theological and anthropological dichotomy amount to upholding the institutional structures bearing the stamp of patriarchal cultures by means of a theological justification, even by endowing them with a sacred character?

These questions are also meant for the arguments against women’s ordination to priestly ministry presented by my highly respected friend, Fr Thomas Hopko. Much like Paul Evdokimov, Fr Hopko does not appear in the least to be defending a rigid traditionalism. His arguments against the ordination of women are part of the far broader project discernable in “the signs of the times”—the context for a profound cultural transformation—to develop a theology of sexuality, or rather of gender distinction. A distinction willed by God according to his creative plan. “If it has not been specifically explicated and articulated in the past, it is the present task to show clearly that human community, as the created epiphany of the uncreated Trinity, is made male and female so that it can realize and achieve the divine life given to it by its uncreated Archetype.” So says Fr Thomas in his contribution to the collection entitled Women and the Priesthood (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983; p 100).

This is the perspective of his thesis, similar to that of Paul Evdokimov, according to which “there is a direct, analogical, symbolic and epiphanic relationship between Adam (as genuine human being) and the Son of God, and between Eve and the Spirit of God. As Adam is the typos of him ‘who was to come’ as the first Adam, the ‘high priest of our confession’ and as the ‘pastor and bishop of our salvation,’ so Eve is the typos as the ‘mother of all living’ of the ‘life-creating Spirit,’ who ‘proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son’” (p 106). What follows from this typology, for Fr Hopko, is that the participation of women in the life of the Church must follow the example of the Holy Spirit resting upon Christ, invisibly and silently, to the exclusion of any public, sacramental ministry (p 111). It marks a vision, a projection onto God of stereotypes and “conventions” concerning women in patriarchal societies, a vision that is in fact foreign to—or at least quite far removed from—a theological anthropology inspired by faith in the One God who exists in a total communion within a distinction, not of gender, but of Persons, of Hypostases, each mysteriously unique and totally open to the Other. I shall return to these questions in my conclusion.

 

 

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 11/14/2006 11:32:07 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Namaste) : 11/15/2006 12:59:03 AM (GMT-6)