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Ray · 09-23-2007, 01:50 AM

To add to the debate, here is another angle:

Quote:

Why Feminizing the Trinity Won't Work

A Metaphysical Perspective

The Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, Ph.D.

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In recent years it has become increasingly fashionable in liberal theological circles to envision the third person of the Trinity as feminine. For many reasons both linguistic and archetypal this designation seems to fit. It can be argued that the Holy Spirit is really identical with Sophia, the wisdom of God, personified as female in the Old Testament; that the "spirit" words in our Biblical tradition tend to be feminine; and that in its intuitive, indwelling perceptivity, the Spirit embodies a "feminine" way of knowing and being which counterbalances the more "masculine" knowing and being of the Logos, or "Word made flesh" in the male personhood of Jesus Christ(1).

Certainly, from a practical standpoint, this gender corrective yields tremendous gains. If, as seems sadly true, the Church's exclusively male representation of the inner life of God laid the theological groundwork for an exclusively male political hierarchy which has systematically devalued the place of both the feminine and women in Christianity, then an authentic female representation among the persons of the Trinity would seem a graceful way to redress the grievance and correct the imbalances that have distorted so many areas of the Church's life.

But while, as a woman, I wish it could be done so simply, I am more and more convinced that it can't. It is "doing the right thing for the wrong reason." For in this case, the extremely shortsighted metaphysical thinking it introduces is likely to do a lot more damage than the short-range good accomplished. However laudable the attempt to secure a feminine presence in the Trinity, the present strategy leads to a serious confusion of metaphysical systems whose long-range effect will be to leave Christianity adrift in a post-Jungian archetypal sea, its own intuitive genius fatally blunted, and divine revelation itself compromised.

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