Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus: part V: Male and Female

Male and Female He Created Them. The Liberal and Conservative Allegory of the Garden of Eden.

This is an article in a series:

Church History: What Went Wrong? part 1
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part II
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part III: Allegory
Liberal Madness, Conservative Treachery, and Jesus: part IV: Allegory
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus: part V: Male and Female
Liberals, Conservatives, and Jesus, part VI: Politics and Religion

If there was ever a passage that was screaming out for meaning, it’s this one.

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

It’s a given that the male and female gender are indicated is a given, but is that all? It is no more illuminating than that? The making of male and female, according to this text,  is supposed to be a description of the image of God. The Holy image is split into two parts. How then is male and female the image of God, and how then would we conceive his divided image?

Let’s not try to minimize this problem in Genesis by saying that this speaks of two completely separate clauses, one about the Image of God and the other to man and male and female, and then say that physical male and female gender is adequate to cover that part. These two genders representing man and God’s nature are tightly linked together here. Male and female is the image of God in man. If you don’t make the symbol like the signification, you destroy the real signification. In theology, we speak continuously about God in terms of an idea, an ideal, ana abstract, a promise, and the God of action, of creation and revelation, but we refuse to integrate femaleness and maleness into his image of the Imago for Man.

There are consequences to this kind of dissimulation, whether intentional or not, of pretending that there is no symbolism when there is an obvious call for it. If we don’t confront the meaning of the symbol male and female in the Image of God, then we will certainly not know much about God’s essential nature. The only way we can know anything about intangibles is through their comparison to something else.

If we think that we might be able to determine that Male and Female mean something beyond biology by knowing the nature of God directly and then applying it back to the symbol, it can only fail because this is only speculative theology, not revelational theology. Revelation is through the revelation, not through the idea.

To illustrate, here are some examples of our illuminating, scintillating, revelational, incredible insights into the Imago Dei that come from working back from speculation on God to the Imago:

• To Irenaeus, the Imago was a spiritual image, that we each share the capacity of free will and reason.
• Or, to Augustine:

“Because man is able to participate in Wisdom through the inward man, it is according to the latter that he is said to the credated ad Imaginem, in order that he might be fully formed by this image with nothing intervening and in such a fashion that nothing could be closer to God. Thus he would truly know, and live, and be. No created thing could be greater.” – Augustine, from De Diversis Quaestionibus ¹

• Aquinas merely says that the emphasis on the Image is on knowledge between man and God. We don’t know precisely what this knowledge is, only by analogy and the distinguished by proportion.
• Barth wants to make the Imago a relational thing, that it means that, like God,  we have very complex relationships spiritually and physically.

We could go on, but why? Read and search for the rest of your life, and you won’t get anything more penetrating. Of course, I have paraphrased these considerably, but I have not done them any injustice. These encapsulations represent the overall thought of our theologians in all of their work with any biblical subject.

I want the reader to acknowledge not only that the meaning of Imago Dei is substantially a mystery to theology, but that we are hopelessly lost on the subject, and don’t have a clue what it means from the ground up. And one of the reasons is that of the way we are using language to flatten our presupposition of the extent of meaning possible from revelation, which includes Male and Female.

Can you detect what is missing from the examples above? Revelation, which is a disclosure of God’s knowledge, is engineered from the start as concepts with no particular revelatory content. “Relationship” is a concept of no particular kind that goes further than  “spiritual” and “physical.”. “Knowledge” is “spiritual knowledge,” or “free will” is the free will to do anything, or free will to “sin” or do “righteousness.” While we complain about and long for particular and transformative insight into the great mysteries, we complain and we continue to desire to know them without satisfaction because we insist upon limiting our concepts to their own ability to self-reveal. They never can without qualifying them by a particular kind of revelation and divine information.

We downgrade the potential of revelation and spiritual knowledge because we don’t want “allegorizing” and what appears as its uncontrolled aspect, another purely artificial construction meant to put even more distance between us and the Revelation we hold in our hands. The warning against interpretative chaos is good, but all symbolic signification is verboten if we have the wrong aim in mind for a signification. All meaning is forbidden if we have no consistent biblical rule to use in rendering that signification.

What makes allegory illegal is crummy results and crummy, anti-revelational rules that produce those results, but this includes all orthodox and liberal hermeneutics. Denying any attempt to fix meaning that comes demonstrably beyond the appearance of matter, space and time, instead of only by ideational philosophy,  are to create one mystery on top of another, with the one that we create being the top one and un-crackable. We deny the possibility of obtaining results that are truly illuminating something real about God and insightful into his mysteries because of the gratuitous denial that there exists no such rule except something like “if the natural sense makes more sense then don’t seek another sense.”

But I propose that the rule for symbolic signification must be as equally insightful into the nature of the divine mysteries as the disclosure of the mystery itself.

The Rabbi’s of old started to get close:

If I create him of the celestial elements he will live [for ever]
and not die, and if I create him of the terrestrial elements, he will die
and not live [in a future life]. Therefore I will create him of the up-
per and of the lower elements: if he sins he will die; while if he does
not sin, he will live’ and not live [in a future life]. Therefore I will create him of the up-per and of the lower elements: if he sins he will die; while if he does not sin, he will live. – Midrash Rabbah on Genesis 14:3

Here, male and female are about higher and lower “elements.” An intangible and moral quality in a person. One, the lower, alone results in death, the other to life. If God makes man from the lower, he dies without any chance of future redemption.

I don’t agree, but they are on the right track. I would not take “higher” and “lower” as good and bad moral qualities. I would take them as two necessary moral qualities since man was made male and female before the fall. After the fall, they are still necessary moral qualities, but that the higher necessary moral quality would be the one responsible for throttling the lower necessary one, and the lower one serving as the emotional conscience and helper of the higher.

Male and Female, Right and Left

Here is where the rubber meets the road on the meaning of Male and Female. Let’s think about them as “right” and “left.” We are also going to speak of make and female and conservatism and liberalism.

Why right and left? Because its the operational knowledge paradigm of the world, more narrowly represented by male and female.

Even down to the most fundamental atomic particles, there is the Chiralism of right-handedness and left-handedness. In right-handed particles, the spin is the same as the direction of motion. In left-handed particles, the spin is in the opposite direction to its motion². They are mirrors of each other except in their spin vs. motion. Take it this way as relating to male and female: Males are simple. What is on their minds is what they are doing and what they intended to do. Their spin, or their orbital attitude, is in the same direction as their motion. With females, it’s different because they are idealists, not realists. Their plans, thoughts, emotions, impressions, their inner world is often independent and at variance with a directional priority. This is why, with respect to the operations of the world, they are led by men, the people of the operations of the world. Women are of the operations of the subjective realm and serve men’s consciences with their subjective priorities for people, not things.

Is this imaginary or coincidental? That is the $60,000 question about allegorical interpretation. This is an application of meaning from the world back into it instead of to the world outside of it, however. It’s not explaining the mind of God, but the mind of man by things which as more fundamental. If this works one way, it works the other. If it shows a design and a designer behind the appearance of those things which are common, its obligatory, not a product of illusion, for us to conclude that there is the same for spiritual things. Let me establish that this right/left is then not a coincidence, but extends from the smallest particle up through the widest possible transcendent reality.

Please go to the next page…

1. Robinson, Dominic. Understanding the Imago Dei: The Thought of Barth, Balthasar and Moltmann. Ashgate Publishing, 2013. ↩

2. https://neutrinos.fnal.gov/mysteries/handedness/ ↩

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