by Richard A. Norris, Jr.
From Pro and Con on Ordination of Women
Report and Papers from The United States Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation, Cincinnati, June 1975.
1.
Objection has been raised to the proposal to ordain women to the presbyterate (or episcopate) on the ground that such a practice is ruled out by the fact that Jesus was a male. The purpose of this paper is to consider this objection, and to suggest that there are good reasons why it need not be taken seriously — and, indeed, that it rests on premises which might well lead to distortion of basic Christian doctrine. Before that is possible, however, the presuppositions on which the objection rests must be identified and stated, so that they can be discussed.
2.
Argument in support of this objection normally rests in the first instance on the contention that a bishop or presbyter “represents,” “stands for,” “is an eikon of,” Christ. It is not necessary here to raise the question what each of these expressions might mean. It is plain that each of them is susceptible of differing interpretations; and it is equally plain that none of them necessarily means exactly the same as the others. Nevertheless, the general drift of the argument is plain. The suggestion is that a woman cannot “represent” or “stand for” someone who is a male, and hence that a woman is automatically disqualified from ordination.
Stated just in this bald fashion, however, the argument is not persuasive. At least in some senses of the word “represent,” it is clear that women can and do represent males, in ecclesiastical as well as secular business. Indeed it might be argued with equal persuasiveness (though the point is gratuitous here) that baptized women can and do in some sense represent Christ. Hence if the argument is to have force, more must be said to explain why, in this particular case, such representation is impossible. What are the premises which make the argument convincing?
Its first essential premise, clearly, is a conviction about the nature of ordained ministry. The argument assumes not merely that the ordained person in some fashion “re-presents” Christ, but more specifically that such representation occurs and can occur only in and through the reproduction in the minister’s person of at least one of the natural human characteristics of Jesus — i.e., maleness. Since (obviously) such a characteristic cannot be conferred by the grace of ordination, it follows that ordination must be limited to persons who naturally possess it.
In the second place, however, the argument can be seen to rest on a further assumption about the economy of salvation. For suppose we ask: Why is it that to represent Jesus is of the very essence of ordained ministry? The answer to this question, once it is raised, seems plain. The business of Christian ministry is the proclamation and actualization of God-with-us; and Jesus as the Christ is in his own person God-with-us. Consequently, it must simply be said: ministry represents Christ because he is the redemption it exists to minister. If this is true, however, and if it is also true that the redemption which Christ is and embodies can only be represented in a male, then a significant consequence seems to follow. It must be the case that it is not merely as a male, but at least partly in virtue of the fact that he is a male, that Christ is and can be God-with-us.
Thus, finally, the argument we are considering rests, in the last resort, on a Christological premise. It appears to assume not merely that Jesus was a male, but that male, as distinct from female, character was and is a necessary precondition of Christ’s being what he is and doing what he does. In other words, the reality of God-with-us is such that the natural (and necessary) means of its actualization is a male human being.
Before considering these ideas more or less directly, it seems important to make one or two preliminary points in order to focus the issues in this discussion.
First of all, it is crucial to say something about the relation of the argument we are considering to Christian tradition; and what needs to be said can be put in a single sentence. The argument is virtually unprecedented. It does not in fact state any of the traditional grounds on which ordination to presbyterate or episcopate has been denied to women. To accept the argument and its practical consequence, therefore, is not to maintain tradition, but to alter it by altering its meaning. It is to accord a quite new sense to the Church’s long-standing refusal to ordain women. This is not only, or even principally, because the idea that a presbyter or bishop somehow “images” Jesus in a special way is one which arrived rather late on the scene in Christian history. What is genuinely novel in it is the idea that Jesus’ maleness is at least one of the crucial things about him which ecclesial priesthoods must image. This novelty, furthermore, does not fall into the category of minor and peripheral products of pious musing. It touches ultimately, as we have seen, upon questions having to do with Christology and with the economy of salvation; and for that reason it demands the most careful and sceptical scrutiny.
But second, such scrutiny cannot proceed simply by the time-honored method of trying to see what the tradition has to say about this argument. Such a course is ruled out by the very novelty of what is being argued. The fact is that the tradition does not substantively consider the problem we are asked to discuss. To be sure, it may be possible, without resort to the method of argumentum e silentio, to show that there are reasons why this argument is not considered or propounded in the historical sources of Christian doctrine; for it may be that the direction which the development of doctrine took is one which by implication excludes emphasis on the maleness of Jesus as a constitutive factor in the redemption which he embodies and the ministry re-presents. Nevertheless, such evidence can only be indirect; and the problem cannot be solved simply by reference to explicit theological precedent.
In the third place, since this is the case, something must be said about the principles on which the problem is to be settled. What this means, in effect, is that the nature of the question itself must be clarified. It has been suggested, for example, by some proponents of the argument, that the real issue is simply one of fact. Was Jesus a male or was he not? If he was, then no woman can “image” or represent him. It is conceded that this conclusion may cause scandal; but the scandal, it is said, is a necessary one. It is an aspect of “the scandal of particularity, a result of the fact that the Infinite, in order to be ”with us,” must assume the reality of finite existence. Thus the simple datum that Jesus was a male settles the matter.
But can this analysis of the issue in fact stand?
Some confusion is occasioned for our discussion by the introduction at this point of the idea of “the scandal of particularity.” This expression — whose use is rooted ultimately in Kierkegaard’s musings on a sentence of Lessing’s(2) — is ordinarily employed to suggest that Christian faith is by its very nature a source of offence to both historical and speculative reason. Christianity makes saving knowledge of the universal and ultimate (God) depend upon a person’s relation to a particular and contingent historical event. The historically particular, however, is intrinsically opaque (so the argument runs) to reason, since its very nature is to be unique and unrepeatable (einmalig), and hence incapable of being captured in the abstract class-concepts which reason must employ. The Christ-event, therefore, occurs only for faith; and what historical reason can find out and say about Jesus is at best an irrelevance and at worst a concealment of the unique and paradoxical “happening” of God-with-us. On this view, therefore, the “maleness” of Jesus, being an abstract characteristic which he shares with approximately half of the human race, can in no way convey or embody his “particularity.” On the contrary, to know him as an ordinary male is to know only an incognito — to know him in a way inconsistent with that in which faith knows him.
It seems, then, that in the argument we are considering the expression “scandal of particularity” refers not to the Christ-event in its contingent uniqueness, but rather to an established historical description or classification of Jesus: i.e., to the “fact” that he was a male. What the statement of this fact is intended to make clear is Jesus’ likeness to the other members of a certain class, the class of male human beings. The question then becomes that of the significance to be attached to the fact that this (or some other) class-name can appropriately be applied to Jesus.
And that question cannot be side-stepped. For it must be apparent, even to Macaulay’s schoolboy, that there are quite a number of facts about Jesus. To be sure, he was male. He also had a certain complexion and a certain stature. He was Jewish. He belonged to a certain economic class. He was of a certain blood-type. Are we then to suppose that each of these characteristics must be “imaged” in every presbyter or bishop whom the Church ordains? Presumably not. In that case, however, there must be some reason why one (or more) of these characteristics of Jesus is essential in a minister, and the others, not. The mere fact that Jesus was a male settles nothing. The question – to repeat – is that of the significance of this or that characteristic of Jesus.
Questions of “significance,” however, must be answered within a specified frame of reference. One must ask, “Significance for what?” And this is the point at which the crucial issue arises. When the Church speaks – in proclamation, in praise, in theology – about Jesus, what in fact is the focal concern which defines its interest in him? With reference to what question do statements about Jesus appear as relevant or irrelevant, significant, or unimportant? Now the answer to this query seems clear enough. Indeed, by implication at least, it has already been given in this paper. The Church is interested in Jesus as the Christ — christologically. It is interested in him as the one in whom the right relation of humanity to God is, by God’s initiative, effected. To put the matter simply, the Church, unlike the historian, the would-be portraitist, the biographer, or the psychiatrist, is not interested as such in Jesu-ology, but in Christology, in Jesus as the bearer of God’s salvation. When, therefore, the question of the significance of Jesus’ maleness arises, “significance” means “importance in and for the salvific work of God in Christ.” To give a reason why the fact that Jesus was a male forbids the ordination of women is to show that the maleness of Jesus is not only something real about him, but something which is strictly constitutive for the fact that he is God-with-us. Is it?
4.
By way of finding an answer to this question, we must first of all ascertain, in a general way, what human characteristics of Jesus are accorded christological significance in the classical tradition of Christian theology. By “human characteristics” here we must, of course, mean primarily natural and not moral characteristics (such as obedience, faith, love, and the like); for clearly maleness is not a moral characteristic.
When the Church Fathers speak of the incarnation of the divine Logos, they speak in terms which emphasize his participation in the general human condition. This is a line of thought whose beginnings are to be sought in the New Testament itself. There the divine Son is said to become “flesh”(4), or to assume “the form of a slave”(5), or to taste death “on behalf of everyone”(6). Such expressions as these point not to any special natural characteristic of Jesus, but simply to the fact that in him the divine Word accepts the limitations, the weakness, and the suffering which are the common lot of humanity, Jewish and Greek, male and female. The same interest appears in later Christian writers. When Ignatius of Antioch sets out to describe the paradox of the incarnation, he does so in terms which suggest the importance of the divine Word’s involvement in human finitude: fleshliness, createdness, birth, death, and suffering(7). For Justin Martyr-to take another example — the point of the incarnation is conveyed by mention of the divine Word’s birth and crucifixion(8), as well as his death and resurrection(9) — all of which is summed up in the statement that he “became man” (anthropos) or “came among men as man.” Since in both classical and Hellenistic usage, the Greek word anthropos signifies primarily “human person” (as opposed to divine beings and lower animals) rather than “male person” (as opposed to female) — a fact further evidenced by use of the abstract anthropotes to mean not “maleness” but “humanity” —this language of Justin’s is calculated to call attention to the same truth as does that of the New Testament. What is important christologically about the humanity of Jesus is not its Jewishness, its maleness, or any other such characteristic, but simply the fact that he was “like his brethren in every respect”(10). “Oportebat enim eum qui inciperet occidere peccatum, et mortis reum redimere hominem, id ipsum fieri quod erat ille, id est hominem”(11).
In the age of the great christological controversies, the terms anthropos and anthropotes became the normative equivalents of the Johannine “flesh”(12). This usage is canonized in the Nicene Symbol where the verb enanthropein is used in effect to explain the meaning of “became flesh.” The growing prevalence of this usage gradually (and not indeliberately) excluded the employment of “body” as the equivalent of “flesh;” for the latter custom appeared to encourage, if not to require, an Apollinaristic truncation of Jesus’ humanity. The Fathers became sure that in speaking of the incarnation one must emphasize both the wholeness and (therefore) the inclusiveness of Jesus’ humanity. It was strictly necessary, for the sake of mankind’s salvation, that Jesus be integrally the same sort of being as those whom he saves. This is the ultimate implication of Gregory Nazianzen’s well-known assertion against Apollinarius: to…aproslepton atherapeuton — “What is not assumed is not healed” (13).
That this principle is indeed enshrined in the use of anthropos and its cognates to describe the humanity of Jesus is apparent from the way in which these terms are employed by the representatives of the two conflicting christological schools of the fourth and fifth centuries. The Antiochenes, as we are often reminded, emphasized the concreteness and integrity of the Lord’s humanity. For them, the incarnation took place in “a man.” The point of this stress, however, was scarcely to call attention to the maleness of Jesus. Rather the Antiochenes sought to insist on the authentically human character of the struggle with evil through which redemption was wrought, and by this means to show that it is a redemption in which other human beings can share. For the Antiochenes, in short, the reality of the human “person” of Jesus was necessary as a presupposition of his saving other human persons. For the Alexandrians, on the other hand, the humanity of Jesus was not “a man,” but the complete set of conditions which essentially characterize human existence. In their case, however, as in that of the Antiochenes, emphasis falls on what Jesus has in common with other human beings as human. Any other emphasis would appear to confine the significance of his work to one or another exclusive class of human beings, or to some part or aspect of human nature.
Thus we may say quite firmly in summary that the maleness of Jesus is of no christological interest in patristic tradition. Furthermore, it is possible to detect in the development of patristic ideas on the subject a logic which suggests why it never occurred to the Fathers to make any more play with Jesus’ sex than they did with his race. What the Fathers learned to understand by “incarnation” was the likeness of the Word of God in his humanity to all those who are included within the scope of his redemption. It is this likeness, expressed in the word anthropos, which for them explains the logic of the Word’s becoming flesh. “For he became human that we might become divine,” said one of them.(14) And presumably this “we” (and therefore this humanity) includes women. To make of the maleness of Christ a christological principle is to qualify or deny the universality of his redemption.
5.
It may be, however, that there is another line along which it can be argued that Jesus’ maleness is somehow intrinsic to his character as God-with-us. The Chalcedonian christology, after all, insists that the “person” or “subject” in Jesus is the Word of God himself. And is not the Word of God, the divine Son, to be conceived somehow as male? Might it not be argued that in the last resort the divine Son could only be incarnate as a boy?
The first thing which must be said in connexion with any argument of this sort is a word of preliminary clarification. It must be stated quite explicitly that what is being touched on here is not so much christology as it is what the Fathers called “theology,” i.e., the doctrine of God as trinity in unity. The assertion of the “maleness” of the divine Word raises the issue — prominent in the Fourth Century — of the nature of God in relation to the attributes which human thought and speech ascribe to him. It also raises, as we shall see, the question of the meaning of “person” in Trinitarian discourse.
For it must be asked, in the first place, whether the ascription of male character to the divine Son is intended to single him out in this respect from the other Persons of the Trinity. Is it being suggested, for example, that the Son is male while the Father and the Spirit are not? Or that Father and Son (say) are male, while the Spirit is female (or neuter)? If such a suggestion is being made, then by the canons of orthodox trinitarianism, it must be repudiated on at least two grounds, In the first place, the epithet “Son” as applied to the Second Person of the Trinity is acknowledged by the Fathers to be a metaphor whose uses are strictly limited. The point, or points, of the metaphor are two: to assert the likeness of Son to Father, and to assert that the Son is “from” the Father rather than “from” nothing (i.e., “created”). Beyond this the metaphor was not pushed. Certainly it was not pressed in such a fashion as to ascribe sexual characteristics to the Son. (So Ambrose of Milan: “Vir autem nomen est sexus: sexus autem non utique divinitati sed naturae deputatur humanae” (15.) In the second place, the developed doctrine of the Trinity insists that the persons are distinguished from one another solely by their mutual relations.(16) What sets the Son apart from the Father and the Spirit is the fact that he is directly generated from the Father, and nothing else. Indeed it is his absolute likeness to the Father in every respect save that of his “generation” which the use of homoousios by upholders of the Nicene faith was calculated to affirm. There is, then, no sexual differentiation among the persons of the Trinity.
Consequently, if the argument is to hold water, it must be intending to assert not that the Son (as distinct from the Father and the Spirit) is male, but that the divine Essence or Nature, common to the three Persons, is male. To the Church Fathers, however, such a proposition would seem not so much false as absurd. “What God is in essence and nature, no man ever yet has discovered or can discover”(17). “We.. have learned that His nature cannot be named and is ineffable. We say that every name, whether invented by human custom or handed down by the Scriptures, is indicative of our conceptions of the divine nature, but does not signify what that nature is in itself” (18). This principle — that of the ineffability or incomprehensibility of the divine Nature — was a principal pillar of the orthodox argument against radical Arianism; and what it expresses is not merely the idea of the infinity of the divine essence, but also God’s exemption from the categories and contrarieties of the finite world. As a first principle of the Christian understanding of God, it applies a fortiori to all epithets which express or imply sexual symbolism, whether masculine or feminine. Male or female imagery(l9) may — and indeed, in practice, must—be employed to characterize God’s ways of relating himself to humanity in creation and redemption (as, for that matter, may “neuter” imagery). But to ascribe sexual character to the divine Nature is to subject the Infinite in its own being to the limitations of the created world, and thus implicitly to substitute an idol for God — to domesticate the Almighty by allowing a tradition of “iconography” to function as a rule for God’s Being.(20)
In the light of these considerations, it must be said that as from a strictly christological, so from a theological, perspective the fact of Jesus’ maleness is not, for the classical tradition, a constitutive factor in the meaning of “God-with-us.” It is definitive neither of what is meant by “us” in that expression, nor of what is meant by “God.” So we are left roughly where we were at the end of the last section. Maleness is not constitutive of Jesus as the Christ. On the contrary, Christology envisages him as the representative human being — a category which presumably includes female human beings. The question then arises: Why is maleness significant among the conditions which qualify a person to “represent” the Christ in the ministry of Word and Sacrament?
6.
In the last resort, what this question asks is very simple. Is the relation of a female to Jesus as the Christ essentially different from the relation of a male to Jesus as the Christ? This is the form — and, in principle, the only form — which the question of “equality of the sexes” takes in the context of Christian existence (i.e., of existence “in Christ”); and it is the same, in the last resort, as the question, already discussed, of the denotation of “us” in the expression “God-with-us.”
Now where this question—as distinct from the formally christological question — is concerned, the tradition has a great deal to say of a fairly direct sort, if not by way of extended theological reflection, then at any rate by way of practice. Most important in this connexion is the simple and obvious fact that females are baptized; and that this sacramental action establishes them in a certain relation to God in Christ. What is this relation, then, and what are its implications for understanding the role of women in the Church?
The primary point which must be made here concerns the nature of the relationship to Christ which Baptism seals. That relation is not merely one in which the faithful person receives from Christ a “gift” which is distinct from and external to the giver. It may be said — and properly said — that Baptism confers forgiveness of sins or the grace of justification. It is apparent, however, in the light of New Testament understandings of Baptism, that such gifts belong to the baptized person in virtue of the fact that he or she is “joined” to Christ, “puts on” Christ, becomes a “member” of Christ, is “buried with” Christ, and so on. To be baptized is to be so associated with Christ in the power of the Spirit that one shares in his relationship to the Father. “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father”(2l). Hence a later writer like Cyril of Jerusalem can with perfect justification observe that the meaning of Baptism is simply a sharing in the sonship of Christ, as well as in his death, his resurrection, and his power to conquer evil.(22)
It is obvious from these considerations that the custom of baptizing women has at least indirect implications for the problem under consideration here. That custom does not merely imply a belief that women may be “saved,” i.e., that their sins are forgiven or that they are proper recipients of sanctifying grace. It entails also the belief that women can and in fact do share the identity of Jesus as the Christ: that they are incorporated in him, the representative of the human race, and that in consequence Christ lives in them. (23) So it must be said that Baptism establishes women, as it does men, in the role of representatives of Christ — persons in whom the reality of the Christ-life, of at-one-ment with God, is proleptically manifested.
As far as the meaning of Baptism is concerned, then, women have the same relation to God-in-Christ as men. Moreover, this relationship constitutes them not merely as beneficiaries of salvation, but as sharers in the identity of Christ — which means his sonship, and therefore his servanthood, his priesthood, and his prophetic and royal offices vis a vis the world. That they do not and cannot share the maleness of Jesus is, apparently, no obstacle to this relationship or to the ministry which it involves-and for good reason, as we have seen, since it is Christ’s humanity, and not his maleness, in virtue of which he is God-with-us. Baptismal practice and christological doctrine here reinforce each other.
7.
But what does all this have to do with ordination? For ordination is not Baptism. It is “another” sacrament altogether; and presumably therefore the fact that women are baptized says nothing in itself about whether or not they may be ordained.
It is true, of course, that ordination is “another” sacrament; and that it establishes a person not as a forgiven and justified member of Christ, but as one who stands in a certain relation to the Church — a relation which constitutes the minister a sacramental person signifying the presence of the divine Word by which the Church lives. Nevertheless, it must be asked what, apart from ordination itself, is required in order that a person may truly fulfill this sacramental role in relation to the Church. Furthermore, in asking this question one must keep in mind that, while there are indeed more sacraments than one, they differ among themselves not in what they ultimately signify, but in the manner in which and the purpose for which they signify it. The grace and truth which are in the Word Incarnate are one.
One requisite for ordination is, and always has been, Baptism. Moreover, the reason for this is fairly plain. It is not primarily a legal requirement of membership in the institutional Church. Rather it is a recognition that the primary precondition of the exercise of ordained ministry is not a “natural” endowment of any sort, but membership by grace in the New Creation which the Church itself “signifies” for the world. Only the person who is “in Christ” can fulfill a sacramental ministerial role; for such a role strictly presupposes his or her involvement in that grace which is the gift of identity in Christ, himself the New Creature. This grace, then, is a necessary condition of ordination.
But is maleness also a necessary condition for ordination? It is at this point that the relevance of a discussion of Baptism to the question of the ordination of women becomes apparent. The facts that women are baptized; that baptized women are “in Christ” and share his identity; that in virtue of this identity they exercise a lay ministry which involves the “imaging” and “representation” of Christ in and for the world — these facts create a presumption that they are also capable of “representing” Christ in the role of an ordained person. The presumption is further strengthened when it is recognized that the identity in which Christ is represented to world and Church as their salvation is not that of a male, but that of humanity as bearer of the divine Word. The New Creature is not, as we have frequently enough said, constituted by maleness; and there is therefore no reason to suppose that maleness is required for its “imaging.”
Thus in the last resort the question boils down to this: whether it is the Christ of the baptismal mystery whom the ordained person represents, or a Christ who is in fact otherwise understood and qualified. The Christ of the baptismal mystery — the Christ in whom the new order of creation is embodied and effected — is one in whom male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free, share a single identity. Furthermore, it is this Christ, and not another, whom the christological tradition clearly sets forth, by its insistence on the integral and inclusive humanity of the Word. To insist, then, that ecclesial priesthood must be male if it is to represent Christ, is to argue that ecclesial priesthood represents a different Christ from the one which the other sacraments of the Church body put forth and proclaim.
8.
On these grounds, it must be concluded not merely that the objection to the ordination of women considered here fails as an argument, but that the premises which apparently ground it imply a false and dangerous understanding of the mystery of redemption — one which, if carried to its logical conclusion, would effectively deny the reality of Christ as the one in whom all things are “summed up”(24). Once this is recognized, moreover, it is possible to see that the ordination of women would constitute a ministry more fully expressive of the Christ it represents than the exclusively male ministry which has hitherto been maintained by the Church.
Footnotes
1. “Represent,” for example, may obviously mean things as widely different as “witnesses to,” “acts as agent for,” or even “symbolizes.” Similarly, a person may be thought of as an eikon of Christ either morally, naturally, or functionally; and these different modes of imaging do not necessarily imply or include one another. Thus this genre of language as generally employed conceals some ambiguities of thought.
2. See, for example S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. D . Swenson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968) , pp. 86ff. ; and idem, Philosophical Fragments, tr.D . Swenson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1936), pp. 44ff.
3. For some brief discussions of this general line of thought, see A. Richardson, History Sacred and Profane (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964) , pp. 125-127; R . R . Niebuhr, Resurrection and Historical Reason (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), pp. 23-28; R . Niebuhr, Faith and History (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), pp.105ff. See also K. Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1 (Edinburgh: 19: T.& T. Clark, 1955), p. 189: “…the Word of God meets us in a form to be distinguished from its content… the form as such signifies a ‘riddle’, veiling of the Word of God.”
4. John 1: 14.
5. Phil . 2: 7.
6. Heb. 2: 9.
7. Ignatius, Ephesians 7: 2; cf. Trallians 9: 1-2.
8. Justin, First Apology 13.
9 . Ibid. ,21
10. Heb. 2: 17.
11. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses III.18.7.
12. See, e.g., Athanasius, Contra Arianos III.30 (in J. P. Migne, Patrologia Fraeca XXVI, 387C). Migne’s collection is hereafter cited simply as MPG.
13. Gregory Nazianzen, Epist . CI Ad Cledonium (MPT XXXVII, 181C).
14. Athanasius, De incarnatione 54 (MPG XXV, 192B).
15. Ambrose, De fide III.62 (in J.P. Migne, Patrologia Latina XVI, 627C).
16. Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio XXIX.16 (MPG XXXVI, 93C-96B).
17. Idem, Oratio XXVII.17 (MPG XXXVI, 4 8 C) .
18. Gregory Nyssen, Ad Ablabium, quod non sint tres Dii (MPG XLV, 121 A). The translation cited here is that of C. C. Richardson in The Christology of the Later Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), p. 259.
19. On the subject of Biblical imagery for God, see the useful article of P. Trible , “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation, in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion X LI (March, 1973) , pp. 30ff.
20. This stricture, it should be said, must apply as emphatically to attempt to speak of the Divine as “androgynous” in its nature, as it does to characterizations of the divine nature as male or female.
21. Gal . 4: 6
22. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Oration III, passim.
23. Gal. 2: 20.
24. Ephes . 1: 10 .
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