Do our Souls have a Gender?

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Aren’t you both saying the same thing? @Sarcelle @tafan2. As I read Sarcelle’s latest opinion.
 
No, unfortunately I have to disagree. Notice our Kreeft is not discussing our gender, he is discussing our sex. Being male or femal is more than a biological attribute. God created us man and woman.
 
Yes, I thought it was just semantics until his last post. For humans, being male or female is not purely biological. That’s the whole point I am trying to make.
 
How will that play out in Heaven?

We no longer need to reproduce so what is the use of being male and female in Heaven?

I agree with Kreeft here.

Masculinity and femininity go beyond mere biological sex.
 
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Sarcelle said:
no longer need to reproduce so what is th
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We no longer will need to eat, will our whole digestive tract disappear. Admittedly that is not the best of analogies. So lets do this:

Lets hold off the argument about heaven for a bit. Instead we need to look at ourselves in the here and now. Are our souls male and female? Again, note this is more in line with the wording that Kreeft uses. If we just talk about gender, even ignoring how that term has become so confused in the present day and age, it is not clear at all. Instead of saying “masculinity and femininity go beyond biological sex” it is better to say that “being male or female, ie our sex,
beyond biological sex”. Our souls are male or female, not just masculine or feminine.

That is the point Kreeft makes before he ever addresses the sex in heaven part. We don’t change in what we are when we are in heaven, what we are is perfected.
 
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tafan2 said:
Lets hold off the argument about heaven for a bit. Instead we need to look at ourselves in the here and now. Are our souls male and female?
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Our souls are masculine or feminine.

Male and female and masculine and feminine aren’t interchangeable with each other. As C. S. Lewis said in his book Pelandra

Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? . . . Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the organic adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless.

Notice that C. S Lewis did not conflate male with masculine or female with feminine. Feminine and Masculine go beyond merely male and female.
 
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Sarcelle said:
Male and female and masculine and feminine aren’t interchangeable with each other. As C. S. Lewis said in his book Pelandra
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I will go back and review Pelandra, its a great book BTW.

But in my mind, the words are interchangeable, excepting the obvious that the first pari are nouns and the second pair are adjectives.
I am a male because I am masculine. I am masculine because I am a male.
 
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Having more of a mathematical mind than a verbal mind, I would say male or female is a subset of masculinity and femininity.
 
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tafan2 said:
Lets hold off the argument about heaven for a bit. Instead we need to look at ourselves in the here and now. Are our souls male and female?
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1The soul is the form of the body. Without a soul, the body would be a formless blob of matter. It is the soul that makes the body male or female, so perhaps it is reasonable to say the soul is male or female.

2 Traditionally the soul is known as the anima. This is female, so perhaps every soul is female.

3 Jungian psychology posits that both masculine and feminine traits reside in every person, so perhaps every soul is both male and female.

I could go on. Perspective will determine if you see male or female in the soul. What is our soul? Is it fully expressed, or only partially? How could we possibly determine if it is female?
 
  1. I agree with. Its what I am saying
  2. The conclusion I disagree with strongly. Find a traditional argument that states every soul is female, regardless of the gender of the noun. I suspect you will be looking a long time.
  3. Kreeft addresses this specifically. There are both feminine and masculine traits in the body and the soul. That does not make us both male and female in the body, therefore it does not in the soul. So the conclusion is without merit.
 
Mary888 said:
But aren’t those writings pre-Christian? Are you referring to anima and animus?
Considering that our soul is what we leave with from this world, to stand in front of God, and God created man and woman, probably our souls are also masculine for men and feminine for women.
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St John of the Cross and Mary of Agreda both used that phrasing.
 
I lost it when he said that God The Father and God the Son had a sexual relationship to conceive the Holy Spirit.

(Why would God reveal Himself to us as a Father, a Son, and the Holy Spirit, if, as Kreeft puts it with this, he could have revealed Himself as a father, a mother and a son? The son being the Holy Spirit).

And when he said that Heaven would be like an orgy of Saints.

The text has other problems, namely:
  1. Kreeft says that materialism and pantheism is wrong, but in the next section he says that we are a microcosmos directly connected to the macrocosmos.
  2. Kreeft says that the psychosomatic (hylemorphism in other words) view of the human proves that souls have sex, because every cell has sex and, as the soul is connected to the body (which includes cells), the soul must have sex.
    However, one doesn’t have to be a materialist to argue against this. The body is material, it has weight, volume, etc. but the soul doesn’t have this things, it’s material, so it would suffice me to say that sex is material to prove that souls don’t have sex.
    Now, I would have to prove that sex is material. I cannot do that, but I can make a guess, seeing as the Angels (spirits, not equal but similar to souls) don’t have sex, and as I said in the first paragraph, I don’t think God has a sex outside of the Incarnation (and God can create things that are not Him). Therefore, it would seem that beings outside of the material realm don’t have sexes.
  1. Of course we will have a sex in our Glorified Bodies (just not in a soul). But I don’t agree with Kreeft when he extrapolates spiritual intercourse from the Garden of Eden narrative. Not everything that was in the Garden will be restored with the Second Coming. The quotes he provides themselves prove it. In Genesis, God says:
Be Fruitful and Multiply
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But in the New Eden/New Jerusalem/Final Heaven we won’t reproduce, so it’s easy to see that not all things and elements from before the Fall will be restored. In every case, when God says:
It is not good for the man to be alone
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when applied to Heaven/New Jerusalem, would simply mean that male and female Saints (with their Glorified Bodies) will live together and complement each other in the work of Glorifying God.

In the end, I think that when Kreeft talks about “spiritual intercourse”, he is simply talking about the old concept of Agape, selfless Love, distinct from eros and therefore not sexual in nature.
 
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the soul is immaterial so no.
the body is a reflection of the soul so yes.
one needs body soul and spirit to be human

but it’s my understanding from a theological perspective the answer is no
 
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@Mary888

I like your username. You have it bc 888 is the number of Christ, no?

I am 50/50 on whether to make my next license plate 88813 (numbers of Jesus and Mary) when I go into the dmv next month. I don’t want to appear as a fanatic to my non xtian family… lol.
 
dbranch said:
I like your username. You have it bc 888 is the number of Christ, no?
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Yes it is because I read it has a good meaning so I stuck with it. It also has been reoccurring in my life as a grade (top gradr being 10) which I am not sure it is something to brag about 😁. 13 has also been a good omen to me despite its reputation. But I think it more of a Matias number, the 13th Apostle, or St.Paul’s than Mary’s.
I don’t believe God has a number, or the Enemy for that matter. Everything is written in our heart and soul. This is where Heaven or Hell begins to enter.
Numbers are just numbers. Everyone would prefer 0 sin right? But no one would prefer 0 mercy from God right? So what is 0 😁? A good or a bad number?
 
Regarding numbers, I know this to be true…

The step from 0 to 1 is God’s alone.
 
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