GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE TRINITY
Rev Professor James Torrance

An issue widely discussed in many churches throughout the world is the question, raised not least by the feminist movement, about the language we use for God. When we talk about God as Father and Son and speak about the Son of God becoming Son of Man that we "sons of men" might become "sons of God by grace," is this not the result of projecting male, sexist, patriarchal language onto God? Is this not the product of a male-dominated culture, both in the Bible and down the centuries? If we may use masculine language, it is asked, can we not also use feminine language and feminine images of God and add the concept of motherliness to express more fully the love and compassion in the heart of God? Also, there is the proper concern to use inclusive language in our worship.

As I have lectured and preached in different parts of the world in recent years, I have seen churches and colleges very deeply divided on this issue in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA. In November 1993, a conference was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as part of the Decade of the Church in Solidarity with Women, on the subject of "Re-Imagining God, Community and the Church," with the explicit call for new images of God to express the concerns of women in our male-dominated society. Over two thousand people from 27 countries attended, including most of the major denominations -Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Baptists, Roman Catholics. The largest number (409) came from the Presbyterian Church, USA, which contributed some $66,000 to run the conference. Such extreme statements were made at that conference, calling into question so much traditional trinitarian language for God, that it roused widespread concern and indignation across the USA. As a result, $11 million were withheld from central Presbyterian Church funds, largely by evangelical churches. It is not my concern here to comment on the details of that conference, but only to note that it raised the whole question of the adequacy of trinitarian language for God. The result was that, when the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA, met at Wichita in Kansas in June 1994, it received overtures of complaint from over 50 presbyteries and sessions with thousands of letters of protest. In response the Assembly acknowledged that: so many members of churches were offended, dismayed, hurt and angered because they believe that the P.C. USA) either no longer adheres to its traditional theological moorings or is afraid to say that it does. Our response to these presbyteries is to affirm joyfully and gratefully our Presbyterian confessional standards, particularly those standards which were criticised and ridiculed at the conference:

We affirm the one triune God.

We affirm the uniqueness of God's incarnation in Jesus Christ.

We affirm the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for our salvation.

We affirm that the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit, are the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ.

We affirm again and again the faith once delivered and historically expressed in the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds and the other historic confessions of our church.

We reject teachings that deny the tenets of our faith. Let there be no doubt that theology matters, that our Reformed tradition is precious to us, and that we intend to hand it down to the next generation, to our children and our grandchildren.

This statement was passed by 98.9 per cent in favour with only four dissenting voices. It was a very powerful and important statement in the contemporary situation of the church, affirming the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the trinitarian nature of our faith and worship.

But I would make two comments. Firstly, it seems to me it is not enough to assert these great doctrines without being concerned to understand them and to help our churches, not least our lay members, to realise their importance in an age when both the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the trinitarian nature of our faith and worship are so under attack. Yes, theology matters! Secondly, the church must bring out into the open the theological issues which are at stake, lay bare the presuppositions of those who are attacking them and reply to those. The issues will not go away, as I have heard some leading church people say. We cannot dismiss the opposition and push the issues under the carpet. The church in all ages has had to contend for her faith. The doctrine of the Trinity is the grammar of the church's faith and worship.

The subject is a vast one, and all we can do here is to show some of the theological issues which are at stake. These must be raised if our churches are not to be deeply divided, and if we are to contend for the gospel of grace and for the trinitarian nature of our faith and of the Church as a worshipping community, called to participate by the Spirit in the Son's communion with the Father and the Son's mission from the Father to the world.

The Arian-Nicene Debate Today

Not long ago I was lecturing on the theology of worship in a college which was deeply divided theologically, partly because certain members of the teaching staff were extreme liberal feminists. A male student in the class asked me. "Are you not being sexist in believing in the Trinity and speaking of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and asserting that the Son of God became Son of Man?" I replied by saying that, first of all, he had asked me a very important question. How do we use any language for God - how can we call him good, loving, faithful, or just? This raises all the questions of analogy, metaphor, simile, parable, allegory, etc., which have been discussed down the centuries and which are more important today than ever. Secondly, the subject he had raised was discussed in depth in what was perhaps the greatest debate in the history of the church - between the Nicene Fathers and the followers of Arius - leading to the Nicene Creed, the most important ecumenical creed ever formulated.

What was that debate all about? The Arians denied the doctrine of the Trinity and the deity of Christ. Arius asked the question, "What do we mean by 'father' and 'son'?" I explained to the class that I have a son called Alan. There was a time when I was not a father. Then my wife conceived and Alan was born. I became a father. Likewise, there was a time when my son was not. He came into existence when my wife conceived and he was born. If you define "father" and "son" in those biological, sexual terms and then project them onto God, as Arius did, then you will argue quite consistently that there was a time when God was not Father. He only became Father when he created the Son. Likewise, there was a time when the Son was not. He only came into existence when God created him. So Arius denied the doctrine of the Trinity and, in fact, rarely spoke of God as Father. Likewise, he argued that the Son of God was a creature, so denying the deity of Christ. The Nicene Fathers replied, "That is not what we mean by Father and Son. He is eternally Father, eternally begetting and the Son is eternally the Son, eternally begotten, not made" - as in the words of the Nicene Creed. Athanasius said to Arius, "You are a mythologizer (mythologein), projecting your own images on to God. We do not engage in mythology, but in theology (theologein)."¹

What did Athanasius understand the task of theology to be? In Matthew 23:8, Jesus is recorded as saying to the disciples. "Do not call anyone on earth 'father', for you have one Father, and he is in heaven.... The greatest among you will be your servant." What is our Lord saying? He is recognising that the word "father" is a patriarchal, sexist one in a culture where men dominate women and often use them simply as servants or sex objects. Jesus is saying that God is not like that! He is evacuating the word of all male, sexist, patriarchal connotations in calling God "Father." He says elsewhere: "Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9). "All things have been committed to me by my Father." "No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Mt 11:27). Jesus alone truly knows the Father, and his mission from the Father is to make the Father known. He does so by taking the form of a servant and by living a life of loving obedience, going to the cross. Fatherhood is then defined for us by Jesus on the cross. We are not thrown back on ourselves to project our biological, sexist images of "father" onto God - to "mythologize." The Christian church has never simply called God "Father," but always "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," and he is "the Father from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name" (Eph 3: 14ff.). In theology our knowledge of God as Father is derived from his self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The danger of certain extreme liberal feminists is that they evacuate the word "Father" of all the content Jesus has put into it and then want to dismiss the word as sexist and patriarchal - in effect accusing Jesus of being a mythologizer. To return to the question in class, I then said that, if they accused me of being sexist in talking about the Trinity were they not accusing me of being an Arian? But perhaps they were the Arians if they insisted that the word is a patriarchal, biological, sexist one. Far from being sexist, the doctrine of the Trinity is the opposite. The ancient church hammered out the doctrine, as in the Nicene Creed, against any sexist notions. They were clear that there is no gender in God; but, in revealing himself, God has commandeered human language and named himself as "Father." It is a name, not just a human metaphor and certainly not one we project on to God. But as such it has to be interpreted analogically in comparing it and contrasting it with human fatherhood. and doing so in the light of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. This is the task of theology.²

The Nicene debate seems to me to be of fundamental importance today in the light of accusations that talk of God as Father. Son and Holy Spirit is sexist, with male images projected onto God by a male-dominated, sexist culture.³ The contention. therefore, is that we need new images of God, for example, female images. This was the basic theme of the Minneapolis Conference on "Re-Imagining God, Community and the Church," and behind the proposal that Sophia (the Greek feminine word for wisdom) be used to describe the object of our worship, and prayers be offered to her as our Mother.

The presupposition behind this extreme liberal approach is that God is unknown. We must explore the depths of our own experience and spirituality to find images and language with which to describe God or to account for moral and religious experience. This was the basic presupposition of Arius in the ancient world, and of Immanuel Kant and his successors today from Schleiermacher to Bultmann and to the antirealism of Don Cupitt. We might express it summarily in a diagram as found in figure 1 - what I have called the Protestant liberal model.

Figure 1. The Protestant Liberal Model

Right and Wrong Roads in the Feminist Debate

Behind this contemporary demand by many feminists for new images of God, there is a very genuine legitimate protest and a cry for justice. There is the fact that for centuries - from the very beginning? - the church has been largely male-dominated, patriarchal, hierarchical. Women have been excluded from the ordained ministry and from holding certain offices. The false argument has been used that only a man can represent a male Jesus. But this portrays an inadequate understanding of the incarnation. The Son of God, in assuming our humanity, became a man, not to sanctify maleness, but our common humanity so that, be we men or women, we can see the dignity and beauty of our humanity sanctified in him.

Furthermore, so many women have been used, abused, discarded, hurt, divorced, exploited economically and sexually by men down through the centuries, that there is a rising tide of resentment, anger, bitterness and even hatred of men, with a legitimate demand for justice and equality. So many women have had unfortunate experiences in their own homes that the word "father" conjures up ugly images. So often, tragically, the only dad some children know is an alcoholic or one who has abused his wife and family. This makes it all the more important that we allow Jesus Christ to interpret true fatherhood for us, both human and divine. We think of the Pauline injunction: "With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable to him. Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but let God remold your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves toward the goal of true maturity" (Rom 12:1-2, J. B. Phillips). We need to let God remold our concepts of Father and Son as we contemplate the mystery of the Father-Son relationship given to us in Jesus Christ in the New Testament witness.

As we reflect on the history of Christian thought, we can see that the word "Father" has been wedded often to wrong concepts of God as the unmoved mover, the impassible God, a static substance with impersonal attributes, or as the lawgiver understood in terms of the concept of lex, the law of contract, of Western jurisprudence and politics, with its roots in Stoicism - the contract - God who will only be gracious if there is human merit. No wonder highly unsatisfactory images of God as Father can arise! What is so often wrong is not the word 'Father" but the baggage that can be put into it. Hence again the call of so many contemporary theologians and churches to recover "the forgotten Trinity." Theology matters. If the church neglects this task, we shall witness a sweeping wave of neo-Arianism, with the unitarian, human-centered worship which goes with it at the altar of the "unknown God."

It seems to me that the right approach for the church to adopt in seeking women’s liberation is to take a stand on the incarnation. To hold out Jesus Christ to the world is not only to hold out personal salvation and eternal life in our evangelism, but it is also to give all people their humanity. Whatever else the incarnation means, it is that all people and all races - Jew or Gentile, black or white, male or female - are meant to see their humanity assumed by Christ, sanctified by his life in the Spirit of unbroken communion with the Father, by his death and resurrection, offered to the Father "without spot or wrinkle," and given back to them in the mission of the church. There should be no divorce between evangelism and humanisation in the church's witness to Jesus Christ. Women are meant to find in Christ and receive from the church the all dignity and beauty of their humanity, equally with men. Tragically the church has been so often "molded," not by Jesus Christ, but by the patterns of a patriarchal culture.

Likewise, we are meant to interpret our humanity, our male-female relations, in the light of the Trinity. God is love. Love always implies communion between persons, and that is what we see supremely in God. The Father loves the Son in the communion of the Spirit. The Son loves the Father in the communion of the Spirit in their continuing mutual "indwelling" (perichoresis was the Greek word used by the fathers of the church). The Spirit is the bond of communion between the Father and the Son and between God and ourselves. The Spirit is God giving God's self in love. The Father and the Son and the Spirit are equally God (autotheoi). But there is differentiation within God - personal distinctions in the Godhead. There is unity, diversity and perfect harmony. It is this triune God who has being-in-communion, in love. who has created us as male and female in that image to be "co-lovers" (condiligentes in Duns Scotus's expressive word⁴), to share in the triune love and to love one another in perichoretic unity. "Then God said, 'let us make man in our image, in our likeness.'. . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him: male and female he created them" (Gen I :26-27).⁵ These purposes of God in creation find their fulfillment in redemption. Therefore, to understand what it means to be in the image of God, one must look at Christ and the new creation in him. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:28). This does not mean that it does not matter, therefore, whether we are male or female. We do not become unisex. If so, what would be the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality? There is unity, diversity and harmony which should be reflected in the church. The gospel does not eliminate our gender identity. But as men and women we find our masculine and feminine identity and fulfilment in Christ, our true being in mutual communion.

In the first epistle of Peter we read: "Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters. . ." (2:18). Further on we read: "Wives, in the same way, be submissive to your husbands" (3:1). It took the church over eighteen hundred years to get rid of slavery, to recognise the significance of that other text that in Christ there is neither slave nor free. It is apparently taking two thousand years to recognise that in Christ there is neither male nor female and to give to women their full equality with men. To understand what it means to be in the image of God, we must look at Jesus Christ, not at fallen humanity. In the beginning it was after the Fall that God said to the woman, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing: with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you" (Gen 3:16). Great misuse has been made of that text. It is descriptive of the tragic results of the Fall. It is not prescriptive for God's good purposes in creation. As we look together as men and women to Jesus Christ, the one by whom and for whom we were all created, we know we are one in him, subject to one another in him, and are equal in him. This is particularly important in any discussion of the ministry of women in the church. Our starting point should be the sole priesthood of Jesus Christ. There is only one true priest in the church, in the one body. In Christ there is neither male nor female. Christ calls men and women into his royal priesthood. the church, to participate by the Spirit in his ministry - the one prophet, priest and king - and gives spiritual gifts to every member of his body, to women as well as men, for edifying the body. The church derives her structures from Christ, not from isolated texts of Holy Scripture taken out of context, nor from a male-dominated hierarchical tradition. As I see it, a proper doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation, the sole priesthood of Christ, our understanding of the new creation in Christ commits us to radical feminism, carefully defined.

Gender, Sexuality & the Trinity (Part 2 of this paper)